Over the Wine Dark Sea

  'I certainly did,' Menedemos answered -  not too loud. 'This one girl -  by the gods, she could suck the pit right out of an olive. But . . .' He grimaced. 'Now I'm paying the price. If my head fell off, it'd do me a favor.'   Sostratos hadn't had the pleasure, but he didn't have the pain, either. As he usually did, he thought that a good bargain. The boat slid up to one of the quays on Ortygia. The fellow standing on the quay looked more like a majordomo than the usual harborside roustabout, but he made the boat fast. As he did so, he asked, 'And you are . . .?'   'I'm Menedemos son of Philodemos, captain of the merchant galley Aphrodite,' Menedemos told him, still speaking softly. He pointed to Sostratos. 'This is my toikharkhos, Sostratos son of Lysistratos.'   'You will be here for payment, I expect?' the Syracusan servitor said.   Menedemos dipped his head, then winced. Carefully not smiling, Sostratos said, 'That's right.'   'Come with me, then,' the servitor said, and walked off toward a small, metal-faced gate in the frowning wall of gray stone that warded the rulers of Syracuse from their enemies. Over the past hundred years, those rulers had had a good many foes from whom they needed protection. Not only had the Athenians and Carthaginians besieged the city, but it had also gone through endless rounds of civil strife. I don't always remember how lucky I am to live in a place like Rhodes, Sostratos thought. Coming to a polis that's seen the worst of what its own people can do to one another ought to remind me.   Inside the grim wall, Ortygia proved surprisingly lush. Fruit trees grew on grassy swards that sheep cropped close. The shade was welcome. So were the perfumes of oleander and arbutus and lavender. Sostratos breathed deeply and sighed with pleasure.   So did Menedemos. 'I'm glad to be here,' he said. 'The light doesn't hurt my eyes nearly so much as it did before.'   'That's because you're in the shade now,' Sostratos said: only tiny patches of sunlight dappled the path along which they were walking.   'No, I don't think so,' Menedemos replied. 'I guess my hangover is going away faster than I thought it would.'   Sostratos scarcely heard him. He was staring at those little sundapples, the places where light slid through gaps in the leaves above. They should have been round. They should have been, but they weren't. They were so many narrow crescents, as if the early moon had broken into hundreds or thousands or myriads of pieces, each shaped like the original.   He looked into the morning sky. It did seem dimmer than it should have, and more so by the moment. Alarm and something greater than alarm, something he belatedly recognized as awe, prickled through him. 'I don't think it's your hangover,' he said in a voice hardly above a whisper. 'I think it's an eclipse.'   The sky kept getting darker, as if dusk were falling. The chatter of wagtails and chaffinches died away. The breeze caressing Sostratos' cheek felt cooler than it had. But his shiver when he peered up toward the sun had nothing to do with that. Like the shadows, it too had been pared to a skinny crescent.