His cousin laughed andpointed. "Look, Sostratos. It really is getting on toward spring. There'sa gecko on a wall."

Sure enough, agray-brown lizard clung to the gray-brown mud brick of a poor man's house. Itwalked up the wall as easily as a fly might have done, and snapped up a bugbefore the insect knew it was there.

Half a block past thehouse with the gecko, they turned right so as to go north. That was the onlyturn they'd have to make till they got to their homes. Sostratos said,"Gods be praised, Rhodes is laid out on a grid, the way Peiraieus is up in Attica. Anyone can find his way around here or in Athens' harbor. Athens itself?" He tossed his head. "You have to be born there to know whereyou're going, and even the Athenians aren't sure half the time. Hippodamos ofMiletos was a man of godlike wit."

"I never muchthought about it," Menedemos confessed. "But most towns are prettybad, aren't they? You can't get from the harbor to an inn a bowshot awaywithout asking directions three different times, on account of the streets gowherever they please, not where you need 'em to."

"Of course,"Sostratos said musingly, "Peiraieus and Rhodes are new cities; they couldbe planned. It's what, two years shy of a century since Rhodes was founded? Atown that's been there since before the fall of Troy, the streets probablyfollow the way the cows used to wander."

"Homer doesn't sayanything about whether Troy was laid out in a grid," Menedemos said. Hepaused to eye a slave woman carrying a jar of water back to her house."Hello, sweetheart!" he called. The slave kept walking, but shesmiled back at Menedemos.

Sostratos sighed. Ifhe'd done that, the slave woman might have ignored him -  if he was lucky. Ifhe wasn't lucky, she'd have showered him with curses. That had happened to himonce, up in Athens. Like a puppy that once stuck its nose into the fire, hehadn't taken the chance of its happening again.