played this game with merchants before. He'd probably got away with it with a few of them, too. Another small-town, small-time chiseler, Sostratos thought. Aloud, he said, 'Good day to you, sir, as my cousin said. And to the crows with you, too.' He didn't have to waste politeness on a cheat. The Kallipolitan's eyes widened again, this time with a different sort of astonishment. 'But . . . But . . .,' he floundered. 'You have to sell the stuff, and - ' Sostratos had enjoyed bedding some girls less than he enjoyed laughing in the local's face. 'We don't have do do a cursed thing, O marvelous one.' Not for the first time, he stole Sokrates' sardonic salutation. 'We just ran the Carthaginians' blockade to get grain into Syracuse. We have more silver than we know what to do with, friend. If you don't want the Ariousian - and if you don't want to pay our price for it - we'll give the jar to our sailors to drink.' 'I've never had a merchant speak to me that way in all my life,' the Kallipolitan said. Sostratos believed it. All he did was shrug. Menedemos matched him. The Kallipolitan spluttered wordlessly, then caught his stride. 'Oh, very well. If you insist on being unreasonable, I suppose I can go to thirty drakhmai.' Normally, that would have been the start of a dicker. A dicker had started before Alexidamos interrupted things. Now, Sostratos just tossed his head. He said, 'No,' and not another word. 'Thirty-five, then.' The local turned red. Anger or embarrassment? Embarrassment, Sostratos judged. 'My cousin told you sixty,' he said. 'Sixty it will be.' He had, for once, the freedom of not caring whether or not he sold the wine. It felt exhilarating, as if he'd had a couple of quick nips from the amphora himself. 'You're not being reasonable,' the Kallipolitan protested. 'Here, now - I'll give you forty drakhmai. That's more than your precious Khian is worth.' 'No,' Sostratos said again. 'Our price is sixty. If you want the wine, you'll pay it.' And the man from Kallipolis did pay it. He took a while to talk himself into it, and tried to get the two Rhodians to agree to forty-five, fifty, and fifty-five drakhmai first. Sostratos yawned in his face. Menedemos, who could be the most engaging of men when he wanted to, turned his back. The Kallipolitan stomped away. When he returned, a slave behind him, he threw a leather sack full of drakhmai at Sostratos almost as hard as Sostratos had thrown the stone at Alexidamos. Sostratos carefully counted the coins before dipping his head to his cousin. As the local had the slave carry the amphora back toward his house, Sostratos sighed and said, 'Thus we bid farewell to our brief layover in Kallipolis, a small polis where nothing interesting ever happens.' Menedemos stared at him, then started to laugh. 'If only it were so,' he said. 'Now we just have to hope Alexidamos doesn't go after any of our tavern-crawling sailors tonight,' Sostratos said. 'No.' His cousin tossed his head. 'If that gods-detested mercenary is in any shape to go after our boys tonight after what you did to his beak, he's tougher than Talos, the man made all of bronze.'
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