When Menedemos took the sack, it felt as if it weighed about three minai. He chuckled under his breath; Hipparinos had heard what his price was, sure enough. Menedemos handed the sack to Sostratos. "Count this quickly - you're good with numbers."
"As you say." His cousin made piles of silver coins on the pitch-smeared planks of the wharf. He did count money faster than Menedemos could. After a very brief time, he looked up and said, "Six drakhmai short. You can see for yourself." Sure enough, the last pile held only two didrakhms.
Hipparinos laughed. "Are you going to quarrel over six little coins?"
Menedemos had met this sort of small-time chiseler more often than he could count. He dipped his head. "As a matter of fact, yes. We agreed on a price. If you want the birds, you have to pay it."
Muttering under his breath, the Krotonite came up with the missing drakhmai. Menedemos was altogether unsurprised to find him able to. Down the pier Hipparinos went, the slave following him with the basket. In a low voice, Sostratos said, "I hope they both turn out to be peahens."
"That would be nice," Menedemos agreed. "Have you got the money back in the sack? The sooner we leave, the happier I'll be."
As the aphrodite came round Cape Herakleion, the southernmost bit of land in Italy, Sostratos exclaimed in astonishment and pointed west. "Is that really Mount Aitne, across all this distance?" he asked.
"Nothing else but," Menedemos answered, as if he were responsible for putting the volcano there and making it visible long before the rest of Sicily came into sight.
"How far from the mountain are we?" Sostratos wondered.
"I don't know." Menedemos sounded impatient. Where Sostratos found such details fascinating, they meant little to him. He made what was obviously a guess: "Five hundred stadia, maybe more."
"Ah," Sostratos said, in lieu of exclaiming again. "If we were coming from the southeast, where no land would block the view till the last moment, we could see it from much farther away, couldn't we?"
"I suppose so," Menedemos answered indifferently. "That would stand to reason, wouldn't it?"
"Of course it would," Sostratos said. "If we knew just how tall the mountain was and from exactly how far away we could see it, we could reckon up the size of the world."
His cousin shrugged. "So what?"
"Don't you care about knowing things for the sake of knowing them?" Sostratos demanded. He and Menedemos had had this argument a good many times before. He knew about how it would go, just as he knew about what Menedemos would try when they wrestled in the gymnasion. In the gymnasion, Menedemos almost always threw him despite that. When they wrestled with ideas, he had a better chance.
Sure enough, Menedemos said, "If knowing something will get me money or get me laid, I care about that. Otherwise . . ." He shrugged again.
Before Sostratos could tear him limb from rhetorical limb, one of the sailors at the bow yelped and made as if to kick the peafowl chick that had just pecked his ankle. "Oimoi!" Sostratos shouted. "Don't do that, Teleutas! You hurt that bird, it'll cost you just about all the wages you make on this cruise."
"Fine the stinking bird for hurting me, then," Teleutas said sulkily. "I'm bleeding."
"You'll live," Sostratos said. "Bind some cloth around it if it's really hurt. I doubt it is. I've had the grown birds get me more times than I care to remember, and the chicks don't peck anywhere near so hard." More sulkily still, Teleutas went back to whatever he'd been doing before he was wounded.
My, I sounded heartless, Sostratos thought, listening in his mind to the brief conversation. As Menedemos had, he shrugged. Rowers were easy to come by and cost a drakhma and a half a day. The peafowl chick, on the other hand, would bring in a mina and a half of silver, maybe even two minai.
It had other uses, too. One of the sailors near Teleutas said, "Look - it just ate a scorpion. That would have hurt you worse than the bird did." Teleutas grunted. But he didn't try to kick the chick again.
Sostratos thought about returning to the argument with Menedemos. In the end, he decided not to bother. He made his way up to the foredeck instead, and peered out past the forepost at Mount Aitne. It was blue with distance and pale near the summit, where snow still clung despite the season. No smoke rose from it; no stones and molten rock belched from it, as had happened many times in the past. Sostratos would not have cared to live in the shadow of a mountain that might let loose catastrophe without so much as a warning.
He made his way back to the poop, where Menedemos was turning the Aphrodite's course from southwest to due west to approach the Strait of Sicily. Instead of resuming the argument the peafowl chick had interrupted, Sostratos asked, "Do you really think Polyphemos the Cyclops lived on the slopes of Aitne?"
