From time to time he had stolen glances at the structure, expecting to see some gorgeous woman in the glittering raiment of timeless Egypt come forth. But nothing happened; the cabin gave no sign of life. When Zopyros saw that his curious glances brought a suspicious scowl from Captain Ethbaal, he resolutely turned his gaze in other directions.
As the day wore on, they sailed through the channel in the southeast horn of the Bay of Neapolis, between the Promontory of Athena and the isle of Capreae. The passengers unwrapped the simple lunches they had brought aboard—mostly bread, cheese, grapes, and olives—and fell to eating. Zopyros, about to toss aside an olive pit, looked up to sec Ethbaal glowering down at his passengers.
"Throw your garbage overboard, please!" growled the captain. "My ship is not a pigsty."
As they passed a cluster of rocky islets south of the promontory, Korinna came to the rail. She said to Zopyros, also leaning on the rail and staring at the water:
"On the ship from Messana, they told me those were the Siren Isles, past which Odysseus sailed with plugs in his ears."
"Perhaps. Others locate the Sirens on the Brettian coast, near your own city."
"Oh." She sounded a little put out.
"Don't be vexed, Mistress Korinna. I don't doubt that Odysseus did indeed explore these waters. But half the towns of the Inner Sea have decided that it would fetch travelers and trade if they could point out a place as the site of one of his adventures. So they've gone over the epic poets like a boy picking fleas from his clog, looking for some place that could, by a stretch of the imagination, be identified with their own city." He turned to Asto, who had just come up. "Where shall we stop the night?"
"With this good wind, the skipper is headed for Poseidonia. Usually we stop the first day at Salernum, or at best the Sanctuary of the Argive Hera. But this time the gods have been good to us."
Korinna went back to her place on deck and talked of feminine matters with the mother of the twelve-year-old boy. Zopyros asked Asto: "Why didn't we stop at Neapolis? It's a much bigger port than Cumae."
"We did, on the way north, and loaded cargo. To have stopped again would have cost us a day to small profit. Usually Neapolis is the end of our run. But Ethbaal," Asto chuckled, "can smell a cargo as a hound scents a beefsteak half a league upwind. He heard that some goods had piled up at Cumae, awaiting the first voyages of the season; and zzip!" Asto made a darting motion with his hand. "Off we went for Cumae, like a flying fish with a tuna on its tail!"
Poseidonia lay on a stretch of pine-forested plain beneath a purple sky. Beyond the forest, black in the fading light, rose the snow-flecked ridges of the Alburnus. As the Muttumalein anchored in the reedy mouth of the little Salsos River, the sunset reddened the snowy stucco of the temples, whose tops were visible over the trees. The sailors thrust the long boarding ladder over the side and into the mud as far from the ship as they could reach with it. Passengers and crew climbed down the ladder and splashed ashore. Zopyros said to the captain:
"Aren't you coming ashore, Master Ethbaal?"
"And leave my ship and my wife unguarded, in a land infested with lecherous, light-fingered Greeks? Do you think me mad?"
Zopyros turned away from this crosspatch with a shrug, to climb down the ladder. Korinna followed him, and he carried her ashore. The contact made his heart race.
There were a few Poseidonians at the landing place: some fishermen, and a couple of boys with an ass to rent. Zopyros hired the ass for Korinna. It was a good twelve furlongs to the city.
Poseidonia, Zopyros learned, had but one small inn. This was even dirtier than most and, furthermore, had no private room in which he could lodge Korinna. For her to sleep in the common dormitory with the men would be unthinkable. Fortunately, the city had a] Messanian proxenos. The consul found lodging in a decent home for both Korinna and the mother of the twelve-year-old.
In the inn that evening, Zopyros listened to tavern talk. The natives were restless, it was said. The Lucanian tribes were stirring. They had long looked enviously at the gleaming Greek city in their midst, and now ...
"We should arm to the teeth," said one, "and drill daily, as the Spartans did in their great days."
"Then how should we earn our livings?" said another. "The Lucanians can always put ten men in the battle line to one of ours. If our so-called government were really clever, they'd stir up dissension among the barbarians, so they'd fight each other instead of us."
Another: "They've been doing that; but the foreigners seem to have caught on. Now our best hope is to be quiet and polite, avoid provocation, and hope they won't notice us."
"They've already noticed us," said another. "It's too late for that. Besides, that's cowardly advice. We ought to hire some good stout mercenaries, like our Gaulish friend there. Oh, Celt! Would you fight for us for pay?"
"I might that," said Segovax, to whom wine had given back his ruddy color, "if the wage was right. But not this year; I'm after seeing the wise woman at Cumae, and she told me to carry a spear for Dionysios. Next year, maybe."
"You see!" said another speaker. "It's hopeless. The omens are against us. We should hire some ships and quietly sail away, as the Phokaians did when menaced by Cyrus' armies."
"But whither? All the other shores of the Inner Sea swarm with bloodthirsty, envious barbarians. No! By the God, this is our land, won by the spear, and we should defend it with our good right arms. Union gives strength. What we need is a firm alliance with the Neapolitans, the Velians, and the other Hellenes of the coast—"
"Death take those dirty foreigners! Those haughty, cowardly, treacherous, temple-robbing braggarts would want supreme command. 'they'd put our men in the most exposed position and, if they saw things going badly, run away and leave us to be slaughtered. What we really need ..."
And so it went, until Zopyros sought the bug-ridden dormitory for a night of troubled slumber. In his dreams, Korinna and the Sibyl and Etruscan omens and Herakles' mighty bow were all jumbled up.
Next morning, Zopyros paused on his way back to the ship to examine an old temple. "Not," he told Korinna, "that the religious aspects concern me overmuch. But look at those obsolete methods of construction! Mud brick instead of marble or even the rough limestone they use in the West; wooden columns instead of stone ... It's a wonder to me the old thing hasn't fallen down long since. And see all those little terra cottas around the entablature! That's Etruscan influence ..."
Sophron stood silently nearby, scratching a fleabite and leaning on his spear with an air of patient resignation. The bodyguard seemed devoted to his task of guarding Korinna but had about as blank a mind as Zopyros had met. When they boarded the ship, they found themselves the last arrivals and the captain in a fouler mood than usual.
"By Tanith's teats!" roared Ethbaal. "We've waited an Egyptian hour for you! Next time we'll sail off and leave you in the lurch!"
Velia lay another clay's sail down the coast, around the Poseidion Promontory. When they left Poseidonia, a brisk offshore breeze carried them far out to sea, until the coast faded to a mottled olivebrown streak along the horizon. The crew swung the Muttumalein so that she headed shoreward at an acute angle, her yellow sail clewed around as near as it would go to the fore-and-aft position. Still the northeast wind drove her farther and farther from land. With the wind abeam, the deck heeled over at a constant slope; but the ship was otherwise steadier than before. Zopyros found Asto alone and asked in Punic: