'No doubt you're right, O best one.' Sostratos didn't sit down. 'But he usually knows better than to price himself out of a bargain, and at least we'll have something to show the Italiotes. Come on, cousin.' Menedemos rose, too. They both started for the door, though Sostratos was anything but eager to throw away most of a day's haggling. 'Wait.' That wasn't Xenophanes - it was Pixodaros. He put his head together with his master. Sostratos stayed where he was. Menedemos started to get closer to try to hear what they were saying, but checked himself at Sostratos' small gesture. 'It's robbery, that's what it is!' Xenophanes spoke loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. Pixodaros didn't. The slave - the slave who might be a master himself one day - kept his voice low, but he kept talking, too. At last, Xenophanes threw his hands in the air and dipped his head to Sostratos and Menedemos. 'All right,' he said grudgingly. 'A bargain. The Karian is right - we do need the dye. A hundred jars, for the bolts of silk you proposed last night.' Slaves carried the silk to the Aphrodite and took the dye back to Xenophanes' shop. Watching them go with the last of the jars, Menedemos said, 'Gods be praised, our fathers don't have to worry about passing on what they've spent a lifetime building up to a barbarian slave.' 'And here's hoping we never have to worry about it ourselves,' Sostratos said, at which his cousin gave him a very peculiar look. Menedemos decided not to stop in Halikarnassos, even though it lay close by Kos. For one thing, he wanted to press north to Khios, to get some of the island's famous wine to take west. And, for another, he'd left an outraged husband behind on his last visit to the former capital of Karia, and he didn't care to appear there before things had more of a chance to settle down. Instead, traveling under oars into the breeze, the Aphrodite went up the channel between the mainland and the island of Kalymnos, and beached itself for the night on Leros, the next island farther north. Sostratos quoted a fragment of verse: ' 'The Lerians are wicked - not just one, but every one Except Proklees - and Proklees is a Lerian, too.' ' 'Who said that?' Menedemos asked. 'Phokylides,' his cousin answered. 'Is it true?' 'I hope not,' Menedemos told him. 'Leros and Kalymnos are supposed to be the Kalydian isles Homer speaks of in the Iliad.' 'If they are, they've changed hands since,' Sostratos said, 'for the Lerians nowadays are Ionians, colonists from Miletos on the Asian mainland.' The peacock started screeching. Menedemos winced. 'You don't know how sick I am of that polluted bird,' he said. 'Oh, I think I may,' Sostratos replied. 'I may even be sicker of it than you are, because you get to stay back at the steering oars most of the day, while I have to play peacockherd.'
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