Over the Wine Dark Sea

  'Our men must have thought their hopes were eclipsed,' the taverner said. People hadn't stopped talking about the uncanny events of the day after the grain fleet's arrival.   But the man with news tossed his head. 'My uncle's cousin said Antandros asked about that. The way Agathokles read the omen, he found out, was by saying it foretold ill for the enemy because it happened after our fleet sailed. He said it would have been bad if it had happened before.'   Menedemos wondered what a priest of Phoibos Apollo would have had to say about that. He was sure a ready-for-aught like Agathokles wouldn't have asked a priest, but would have put forward the interpretation that served him best. And the local still hadn't answered the question. Menedemos asked it again: 'What happened to Agathokles' ships?'   'Well, we outshot the Carthaginians, because we had so many soldiers aboard our ships. That, I gather, was how we beached, with the barbarians staying out of bowshot. Agathokles held an assembly once we were ashore.'   'Just like Agamemnon, under the walls of Troy,' someone murmured.   'He said he'd prayed to Demeter and Persephone, the goddesses who watch over Sicily, when the lookouts first spied the Carthaginians,' the local went on. 'He said he'd promised them the fleet as a burnt offering if they let it come ashore safely. And they had, so he burned his own flagship, and all the other captains set fire to their ships with torches. The trumpeters sounded the call to battle, the men raised a cheer, and they all prayed for more good fortune.'   And they can't come back to Sicily again, or not easily, Menedemos thought. If they don't win, they all die, as slowly and horribly as the Carthaginians can make them. Burning the fleet has to remind them of that, too. Sure enough, Agathokles knows how to make his men do what he wants of them.   A man with a short gray beard asked, 'How did Agathokles' messenger get here, if he burned all his ships?' That was a question the precise Sostratos might have found.   'In a captured fishing boat,' the man with news replied. He had all the answers. Whether they were true or not, Menedemos couldn't have said. But they were plausible.   It soon became clear that the Syracusans were much more interested in Agathokles' doings than in those of the generals in the east. The latter might have been exciting to hear about, but didn't affect them personally. No one from out of the east had come to Sicily with conquest on his mind since the Athenians a century before. But war with Carthage was a matter of freedom or slavery, life or death. A Carthaginian army remained outside the walls. If it ever broke into Syracuse . . . Menedemos wasn't sorry he'd be sailing soon.   He grabbed a couple of olives from a red earthenware bowl on the counter in front of the tavernkeeper. The fellow didn't charge for them, and he quickly discovered why: they were perhaps the saltiest he'd ever tasted. The extra wine the taverner sold on account of them was bound to make up, and more than make up, for the few khalkoi they cost.   Fortunately, his own cup was half full. He gulped it down to water the new desert in his throat, then left the tavern for the harbor not far away. As he got back to the Aphrodite, he saw her boat making the short pull from Ortygia. The rowers' strokes were so perfectly smooth and regular, they might have been serving one of the Athenian processional galleys, not an akatos' boat.   Sostratos sat near the stern of the boat. 'I've got news,' he called when he saw Menedemos.