anything else Agathokles'd be up to. And he's a son of a whore who's always up to something, if half the stories you hear about him are true.' 'That's the truth,' Sostratos said. 'Look at how he let his enemies leave the polis and then got rid of them.' 'He's ready for anything, sure enough,' Menedemos said. 'Now we've got to get ready to get into Syracuse ourselves.' 'We've got to get ready for more than that,' Sostratos said. 'How do you mean?' his cousin asked. 'We've got to get ready to see if we get paid.' 'Yes, I suppose that does matter,' Menedemos agreed. 'Matter?' Sostratos said. 'Matter? Now that we've come all this way without getting killed or captured, making what we were promised would almost make up for the fear we went through getting here. Almost - though I can't think of anything else that would even come close.' Menedemos grinned at him and said, 'You worry too much.' He pulled back on one steering oar and forward on the other, guiding the Aphrodite toward the waiting, welcoming harbor ahead. 'Yes, of course you'll be paid,' the Syracusan official said - officiously - as slaves carried sacks of grain off the Aphrodite and down the quay into hungry Syracuse. 'Come to the palace on Ortygia tomorrow, and you shall have every obolos owed you. So Agathokles promised, and so shall it be.' He spoke as if the sun wouldn't rise if Agathokles broke a promise. Menedemos wondered how the Syracusan tyrant's political enemies felt about that. A moment later, he stopped wondering: being dead, they doubtless felt nothing at all. No matter how bold a front he'd put up for Sostratos and the akatos' crew, he knew he'd stuck his head in the lion's mouth by sailing down to Syracuse. Now he was going to have to put his head there again. If Agathokles - or rather, Agathokles' brother Antandros, who was in charge of the city while the tyrant led the fleet to Africa - didn't feel like living up to the bargain Onasimos the proxenos had made in Rhegion, what could anyone do about it? Not much, as Menedemos knew too mournfully well. Some of the sweating slaves taking grain off the Aphrodite and the round ships were big, pale, fair-haired Kelts. Some were stocky Italians of one sort or another (Menedemos hoped there were plenty of Romans among them, but couldn't tell by looking). Most, though, had the swarthy, hook-nosed look of Carthaginians. 'Plenty of Hellenes enslaved in Carthage, too,' Sostratos said when Menedemos remarked on that. 'If you get captured instead of doing the capturing, that's what happens to you. We were lucky, you know.' 'Maybe we were.' Menedemos could admit it now that they were tied up in the Little Harbor. 'But Tykhe is a strong goddess.'
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