Spartan Planet - A. Bertram Chandler [35]
"You can't expect me to drink like that. You'll have to help me."
You wouldn't last five minutes on Sparta, thought Brasidus, not altogether derisively. He turned around in his seat, carefully elevated the wine flagon over Peggy's upturned face. He was suddenly very conscious of her red, parted lips, her white teeth. He tilted, allowing a thin trickle of the pale yellow fluid to emerge. She coughed and spluttered, shook her head violently. Then she gasped, "Haven't the knack of it—although I can manage a Spanish wineskin. Try again."
And now it was Brasidus who had to be careful, very careful. He was acutely aware of her physical proximity, her firm softness. "Ready?" he asked shakily.
"Yes. Fire at will."
This time the attempt was more successful. When at last she held up her hand to signal that she had had enough she must have disposed of at least a third of the flagon. From a pocket in her skirt she pulled a little square of white cloth, wiped her chin and dabbed her lips with it. "That's not a bad drink," she stated. "Sort of dry sherry and ginger . . . but more-ish. No—that's enough. Didn't you ever hear the saying, 'Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker'?"
"What is candy?" asked Brasidus. "And liquor is quicker for what?"
"Sorry, honey. I was forgetting that you have yet to learn the facts of life. Come to that, there're quite a few facts of life that I have to learn about this peculiar fatherland of yours. What is home without a mother?" She laughed. "Of course, you're lucky. You don't know how lucky. A pseudo-Hellenic culture and nary an Oedipus complex among the whole damn boiling of you!"
"Peggy, please speak Greek."
"Speak English, you mean. But I was using words and phrases that have dropped out of your version of our common tongue." She had slipped a little tablet into her mouth from a tube that she had extracted from her pocket. Suddenly her enunciation was less slurred. "Sorry, Brasidus, but this local tipple of yours is rather potent. Just as well that I brought along some soberer-uppers."
"But why do you need them? Surely one of the pleasures of drinking—the pleasure of drinking—is the effect; the . . . the loosening up."
"And the drunken brawl?"
"Yes," he said firmly.
"You mean that you'd like to . . . to brawl with me?"
Brasidus glimpsed a vivid mental picture of such an encounter and, with no hesitation, said, once again, "Yes."
"Drive on," she told him.
Chapter 16
THEY DROVE ON, through and over the foothills, always climbing, the snowcapped peak of Olympus ever ahead, until, at last, Brasidus brought the car to a halt in the single street of a tiny village that clung precariously to the mountainside.
"Kilkis," he announced. "The tavern here could be worse. We halt here for our midday meal."
"Kilkis." The Arcadian repeated the name, gazed around her at the huddle of low but not ungraceful buildings, and then to the boulder-strewn slopes upon which grazed flocks of slow-moving, dun-colored beasts, many of them almost ready to reproduce by fission. "Kilkis," she repeated. "And how do the people here make a living? Do they take in each other's washing?"
"I don't understand, Peggy."
"Sorry, Brasidus. What are those animals?"
"Goats," he explained. "The major source of our meat supply." He went on, happy to be upon more familiar ground, "The only helots allowed to carry arms are the goatherds—see, there's one by that rock. He has a horn to summon assistance, and a sword, and a spear."
"Odd-looking goats. And why the weapons? Against rustlers?"
"Rustlers?"
"Cattle thieves. Or goat thieves."
"No. Goat raiding is classed as a military operation, and, in any case, none of the other city-states would dare to violate our borders. We have the Navy, of course, and firearms and armored chariots. They do not. But there're still the wolves, Peggy, and they're no respecters of frontiers."
"H'm. Then I think that you should allow your goatherds to carry at least a rifle. Is it a hazardous