The Sacred Land

9

As Sostratos and the sailors from the Aphrodite left Jerusalem, Teleutas heaved a sigh. “That wasn’t such a bad town, even if I couldn’t speak the language,” he said. “The wine was pretty good-”

“And plenty strong,” Moskhion broke in. “Drinking it unmixed isn’t so bad, once you get used to it.”

“No, not half bad,” Teleutas agreed. “The girls were friendly, too, or they acted friendly enough once you gave ‘em silver.” He eyed Sostratos. “You ever get yourself laid while we were there, young sir?”

“Yes, once or twice,” Sostratos answered truthfully. “The girls in the brothel I went to were just girls in a brothel, as far as I’m concerned. They didn’t seem special one way or another.”

He couldn’t say the same about Zilpah, but he didn’t care to talk about the innkeeper’s wife with his escorts. For one thing, he hadn’t actually done anything with her. For another, even if he had… He tossed his head. Menedemos bragged about his adulteries. Sostratos sometimes thought his cousin committed them not least so he could brag about them. If I ever seduce another man’s wife, I hope I’ll have the sense to keep my mouth shut about it.

Aristeidas asked, “How long before we get to this Engedi place?”

“Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days,” Sostratos answered. “It’s supposed to lie by the edge of what they call the Lake of Asphalt, or something like that. They say all sorts of funny things about that lake. They say it holds so much salt, nothing can live in it. And they say that if you walk out into it, you can’t even sink-it’s so salty, you just float in it, the way an egg will float in water if you put enough salt into it.”

“People say all sorts of silly things,” Aristeidas observed. “Do you believe any of that nonsense?”

“Right now, I don’t know whether to believe or disbelieve,” Sostratos said. “Some strange things turn out to be true: look at peafowl. And look at the gryphon’s skull we had last year. Who would have thought gryphons were anything but legendary beasts till we came across that? But I’m not going to worry about it now, not when I’ll see for myself in a day or two.”

“All right. I guess that’s fair,” Aristeidas said. “This place we’re going to, though-it can’t be as big as Jerusalem, can it?”

Sostratos tossed his head. “I wouldn’t think so, anyhow. By the way the Ioudaioi talk, Jerusalem is the biggest city in their land.”

“It’s not much,” Teleutas said.

He spoke slightingly as a matter of course. Even if things did impress him, he didn’t let on. Here, though, Sostratos had to agree with him. Next to Athens or Rhodes or Syracuse, Jerusalem wasn’t much. Sidon, with its tall buildings, outdid this little local center, too. One day before too long, he supposed, people would forget all about it. Even the temple of the Ioudaioi would probably lose its importance as people hereabouts took on more and more Hellenic ways.

Eventually, he thought, they’ll sacrifice a pig on that altar and no one will care. The world belongs to us Hellenes nowadays.

The road from Jerusalem toward Engedi first ran south through the hilly country in which the main town of the Ioudaioi sat and then east toward the Lake of Asphalt. Sostratos had asked several different people in Jerusalem how far Engedi was and had got several different answers. No one had ever properly measured distances in this country, as Alexander ’s surveyors had done during his campaigns of conquest. Eventually, too, Sostratos supposed, whichever of Antigonos or Ptolemaios held on to Ioudaia would do the job. Till then, each man’s opinion seemed as good as that of the next-and was certainly maintained with every bit as much passion. Though the precise distance remained loudly in doubt, Sostratos did think Engedi lay about two days’ journey from Jerusalem, as he’d told Aristeidas.

He and his men paused to rest in the heat of the day at the little town of Bethlehem. They bought wine from a tavernkeeper and used it to wash down the loaves they’d brought from Jerusalem. The taverner’s daughter, who was about ten, stared and stared at them as she carried the wine to their table. Sostratos would have bet she’d never seen a Hellene before.

“Peace be unto you,” he said in Aramaic.

She blinked. “And to you also peace,” she answered. If it hadn’t been a set phrase, she might have been too startled to bring it out. Her dark eyes were enormous in a skinny, none too clean face that still promised considerable beauty as she got older.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Maryam,” she whispered. Then, obviously gathering her courage, she asked, “What’s yours?”

“I’m Sostratos son of Lysistratos,” he answered. The funny-sounding foreign syllables made her giggle. She skipped away. Sostratos asked the taverner, “Why did you give her a name that means ‘bitter’? She seems a happy child.”

“Yes, so she does now,” the man answered, “but bearing her almost killed my wife. For weeks, I thought it would. That’s why, stranger.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Sostratos said, curiosity satisfied. And then, remembering his manners, he added, “I am glad your wife did not die.”

“Thank you again.” But the taverner’s face did not lighten. “She lived another three years, then perished of-” The word was meaningless to Sostratos. He spread his hands to show as much. The Ioudaian arched his back, threw back his head, and clenched his jaw. He was a good mime, good enough to make Sostratos shiver.

“Oh. Tetanus, we call that in Greek,” the Rhodian said. “I am very sorry, my friend. That is a hard way to die. I have seen it, too.”

With a shrug, the tavernkeeper said, “Our god willed it so, and so it came to pass. Magnified and sanctified be the name of our god throughout the world he created according to his will.” The way he rattled off the words, they had the sound of a prayer he knew by heart. Sostratos would have liked to ask him about that, too, but Moskhion distracted him by asking what he was talking about, so he didn’t.

He didn’t even think of it again till he and the sailors had already left Bethlehem. When he did, he muttered to himself in annoyance. Then he rode the mule to the top of a little hill and, peering east, got a good look at the Lake of Asphalt.

What first struck him was how far down the water looked. These hills weren’t very high, but the lake seemed far below him. Teleutas looked in that direction, too. “In the name of the gods,” he said, “that’s some of the ugliest-looking country I’ve seen in all my days.”

Though Teleutas liked to disparage everything he saw, that didn’t mean he was always wrong. He wasn’t wrong here; Sostratos thought it far and away the ugliest-looking country he’d seen in his life, too. The hills through which he and his fellow Rhodians were traveling descended to the Lake of Asphalt through a series of cliffs of reddish flint on which hardly anything grew. Below those cliffs were bluffs of buff limestone, every bit as barren.

The plains between the high ground and the lake were dazzlingly white. “You know what that reminds me of?” Moskhion said. “When they set out pans full of seawater to dry up, and they do, and there’s all the salt left in the bottom, to the crows with me if that’s not what it looks like.”

“You’re right,” Sostratos said. But salt pans weren’t very big. These salt flats, if that was what they were, went on for stadion after stadion. “Looks as though half the salt in the world is down there.”

“Too bad it’s not worth bringing a donkeyload back with us,” Aristeidas said. “It’s just lying there waiting for somebody to scoop it up. You wouldn’t have to bother with pans.”

“If so many Hellenic poleis didn’t lie by the sea, we might make a profit on it,” Sostratos said. “As things are-” He tossed his head.

Under the sun, the Lake of Asphalt itself shone golden. Beyond it, to the east, lay more hills, these of a harsh, purplish stone. Sostratos had hardly noticed them in the morning, when he’d set out from Jerusalem, but they grew ever more visible as the day wore along and the angle of the sunshine falling on them changed. He saw no trees or even bushes on them, either. The Lake of Asphalt and almost everything surrounding it might as well have been dead.

Pointing east across the lake to the rugged purple hills, Aristeidas asked, “Are those still a part of Ioudaia, too, or do they belong to some other country full of different barbarians?”

“I don’t know, though I’m sure a Ioudaian would,” Sostratos answered. “By the look of them, though, I’d say they aren’t likely to be full of anything, except maybe scorpions.”

“The scorpions here are bigger and nastier than anything we’ve got back in Hellas,” Teleutas said. “Back in Jerusalem a couple of days ago, I smashed one this big.” He stuck up his thumb and shuddered. “Almost makes me wish I’d got into the habit of wearing shoes.”

For the next quarter of an hour, he and Moskhion and Aristeidas were skittish on the road, shying away from rocks that might hide scorpions and from shadows or sticks they feared were the stinging vermin.

Even Sostratos, who was on muleback and whose feet didn’t touch the ground, kept looking around nervously. Then a scorpion did skitter across the dirt, and it vanished into a crevice in the rocks before anyone could kill it. Teleutas’ curses should have been plenty to do it in all by themselves.

After a while, the track leading down to the salt flats got so steep, Sostratos dismounted and walked beside the mule. The animal placed each foot with the greatest of care. So did the pack donkey, which Aristeidas led. Slowly, the Rhodians and their beasts descended from the hills.

Not quite halfway down, Teleutas stopped and pointed southeast. “Look there. Furies take me if that isn’t green, down there right by the edge of the Lake of Asphalt. I thought this whole place was just- nothing.”

“It can’t all be nothing, or nobody would live there,” Sostratos said. “That must be Engedi.”

“How do they make things grow, if the lake is salty and if there’s all this salt around?” Teleutas demanded.

“I don’t know yet. Finding out will be interesting, I think,” Sostratos said. “Maybe they have freshwater springs. We’ll see.” Teleutas still looked dissatisfied, but he held his peace.

Down on the salt flat, the sun beat down on Sostratos with a force he’d never known before. He had to squint to escape the dazzle of Helios’ rays off the salt. The very air felt uncommonly thick and heavy. It had the salt tang he associated with the sea and hadn’t expected to smell so far inland. Here, in fact, that salt tang was stronger than he’d ever known it before.

A raven flew past overhead. Moskhion said, “In this part of the world, I bet even the birds have to carry water bottles.”

Sostratos laughed, but not for long. A traveler who ran out of things to drink in these parts wouldn’t last long. Sun and salt might do as good a job of embalming him as natron did for the corpses Egyptian undertakers treated. Heading on toward Engedi, Sostratos wished he hadn’t had that thought.

MENEDEMOS TOOK the bolt of the eastern silk he’d got from Zakerbaal son of Tenes out of the oiled-leather sack where it was stowed and held it up to the sun. Diokles dipped his head in approval. “That’s mighty pretty stuff, skipper,” he said. “We’ll get a good price for it, too, when we go back to Hellas.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Menedemos answered. “But I’m not just thinking about the silver. Look at the cloth! Look how thin it is! The finest Koan silk might as well be wool next to this.”

“Wonder how they do it,” the keleustes said.

“So do I.” Menedemos dipped his head. “And I wonder who they are. People beyond India, Zakerbaal said.”

“Not even Alexander found out what’s beyond India,” Diokles said.

“ Alexander decided there wasn’t anything beyond India,” Menedemos agreed. “That way, he could head back toward Hellas saying he’d conquered the whole world.” He looked at the silk again. “He was wrong. He was a godlike man-even a hero, a demigod, if you like-but he was wrong.”

“I wonder if any more of this stuff will ever come out of the east,” Diokles said.

Menedemos shrugged. “Who can guess? I’d bet we never see another gryphon’s skull, because nobody in his right mind would pay anything for one. But this? This is different. It’s beautiful. Anybody who sees it would pay for it, and pay plenty. So maybe more’ll come from wherever it comes from, but who knows when? Next year? Ten years from now? Fifty? A hundred? Who can say?”

He imagined strange barbarians sitting at their looms, turning out bolt after bolt of this wonderful silk. What would they be like? Beyond India, they might look like anything at all. The folk of India itself were said to be black, like Ethiopians. Did that mean everyone beyond India was black, too?

This is only imagination, Menedemos told himself, and tossed his head. I can make these distant barbarians any color I please. Why, I can make them yellow if I want to. He laughed at that.

“What’s funny, skipper?” the oarmaster asked. When Menedemos told him, he laughed, too. “That’s pretty good. It sure is. You think they’d have yellow hair, too, the way the Kelts do?”

“Who knows?” Menedemos said. “In my mind, they had black hair, but you can make them look however you want. What I want to imagine now is selling this silk and the dye as we go back to Rhodes.”

“It’ll do even better in the Aegean,” Diokles remarked. “The farther from Phoenicia we go, the better the prices we’ll get.”

“That’s probably true,” Menedemos said. “Maybe we can make for Athens next sailing season.” He laughed again. “That would break my cousin’s heart, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, he’d be ever so disappointed.” Diokles snorted. Finding the snort not strong enough, he laughed out loud.

“I wouldn’t mind getting up there myself,” Menedemos allowed. “You can have a good time all kinds of different ways in Athens. If we make port early in the season, we can go to the theater for the tragedies and comedies they put on during the Greater Dionysia. Nothing tops theater in Athens.”

“Yes, theater’s a nice way to pass a day every so often,” the keleustes agreed. “And they’ve got all kinds of wineshops there, and pretty girls in the brothels-pretty boys, too, if you’d rather do that for a change. It’s a good town.”

“A boy’s all right every once in a while,” Menedemos said. “I’ve never been one to chase every youth in bloom through the streets, though.”

“No-you chase wives instead.” But Diokles said it indulgently. He didn’t sound reproving, as Sostratos always did.

“I think wives are more fun-most wives, anyway.” Menedemos made a sour face. “The innkeeper’s wife is chasing me. I don’t intend to let her catch me, either. Sour old crone.”

“No wonder you don’t stay there much.”

“No wonder at all. If it weren’t for the bed…” Menedemos sighed. “I didn’t feel like sleeping on planks all the time we were here.”

“Never bothered me,” Diokles said.

“I know. But then, you’re comfortable sleeping sitting up. I couldn’t do that if my life depended on it.”

The oarmaster shrugged. “All what you’re used to. That’s what I got in the habit of doing when I pulled an oar-lean up against the gunwale, close my eyes, and doze off. After you do it for a while, it seems as natural as stretching out flat.”

“Maybe to you.” Menedemos glanced down toward the base of the pier. “If that’s not a Hellene coming this way, I’m a yellow barbarian myself.” He raised his voice: “Hail, friend! How are you today?”

“Not bad,” the other man answered, his Doric drawl not much different from the one that Menedemos spoke. “How’s yourself?”

“I’ve been worse,” Menedemos allowed. “What can I do for you?”

“Are you the fellow who was selling books at the barracks a while ago?”

Menedemos dipped his head. “That’s me, O best one. I haven’t got many left. Why didn’t you decide to buy sooner?”

“I couldn’t, that’s why,” the stranger said. “I’m a horseman, and I just got back in from a sweep through the hills after bandits.” He had a horseman’s scars, sure enough-on his legs and on his left arm. A hoplite’s large round shield protected that arm, but a horseman couldn’t bear anything so big and heavy.

“I hope the sweep went well,” Menedemos said. “You won’t find a merchant with a good thing to say about bandits.”

“We smoked out a couple of nests,” the other Hellene said. “But it’s more a matter of keeping them down and making them cautious than it is of getting rid of them. Those hills will spawn robber bands for the next thousand years. Too many hiding places for ‘em to use, too many towns and roads close to ‘em. Can’t be helped.” He changed the subject back toward what interested him: “Have you still got any books left?”

“A couple,” Menedemos answered. “One’s the book of the Iliad where godlike Akhilleus and glorious Hektor fight it out; the other’s from the Odyssey, the book where resourceful Odysseus meets Polyphemos the Cyclops.”

“I’d like ‘em both,” the cavalryman said wistfully. “Nothing like a book to make the time pass by. But you’re going to put some great whacking price on ‘em, because where else can I buy if I don’t get ‘em from you?”

“You can’t make me feel guilty, most noble one,” Menedemos said. “I’m not in business to lose money any more than soldiers are in business to lose battles. You can have ‘em both for thirty-five drakhmai. No haggling, no cheating-that’s the same price the garrison soldiers were paying.”

“Papai!” the cavalryman said. “That’s a lot of money, just the same.” Menedemos didn’t answer. He just stood and waited. The other Hellene frowned. Menedemos thought he knew the expression: that of a man who was talking himself into something. And, sure enough, the fellow said, “All right. All right! I’ll take ‘em. You count two drakhmai for one Sidonian siglos?”

“Yes,” Menedemos answered. That gave the other man a very slight break on the rate of exchange. Maybe Sostratos would have worked it out to the last obolos, but Menedemos didn’t feel like bothering. He took the silver, got the last two books in his store out of their sack, and gave them to the horseman.

“Thanks,” the man said. “I’ll carry these till they fall to pieces. I’d pay even more for the books from Herodotos where the Persians and Hellenes go at it. You don’t happen to have those, do you?”

“Sorry, no.” Menedemos hoped he hid his bemusement. Not even Sostratos had thought he could sell history books in Phoenicia. Customers never failed to be surprising. This one went on down the pier. Menedemos called after him: “Lykian ham? Fine oil?”

“No, thanks,” the soldier answered. “I’ve spent all the silver I’m going to. Some men would rather eat fancy. Me, I’d rather read.” He kept on walking.

To Diokles, Menedemos said, “A pity Sostratos is off in the back of beyond. He would have made himself a friend for life.”

“That’s the truth,” the keleustes agreed. “I know my alpha-beta, but I’ve never had much cause to use it. Most of the time, you can find out whatever you need to know just by talking with people.”

“I enjoy Homer, and I think I do like him better because I can read him for myself,” Menedemos said. “Same with Aristophanes -maybe even more so, because you don’t hear him read in the agora all the time, the way you do Homer. But I don’t dive into a roll of papyrus headfirst like Sostratos.”

“He knows all sorts of funny things, I will say,” Diokles remarked. “And what’s really strange is, every once in a while they come in handy.”

“I know.” Menedemos drummed the fingers of his right hand on the outside of his thigh. “It happens just often enough to keep me from teasing him too hard about everything he reads.” His fingers went up and down, up and down. “Too bad.”

Before he went back to Sedek-yathon’s inn that evening, Menedemos bought a sausage half a cubit long; the gut-wrapped length of chopped meat smelled strongly of garlic and cumin. He also got himself a small loaf with olives baked into it: sitos to go with his opson. He chuckled when that thought crossed his mind. Could Sostratos have known of it, he would have chided Menedemos for a self-confessed opsophagos: a man who put the relish ahead of the staple. The sausage was supposed to go with the bread, not the other way round.

Sedek-yathon’s wife dropped the sausage into hot oil for Menedemos. The oil was the same cheap stuff the innkeeper always used. Not only that, but it had done a lot of cooking before that sausage went into it. The smell filled the taproom at the front of the inn. It wasn’t precisely unpleasant, but it was strong.

Emashtart fished the sausage out of the oil with a pair of wooden tongs. She set it on a plate and carried it over to Menedemos. Putting it on the table in front of him, she smirked and said, “Phallos.”

“That’s not how you say ‘sausage’ in Greek,” Menedemos answered. The word for sausage, physke, was close enough that she might have used the other one in honest error. She might have. Menedemos hoped she had.

The way her smirk got wider-and, to his eyes, less lovely-argued she hadn’t. “Phallos,” she repeated, and then went on in her horrible Greek: “You to have biggerest phallos already, eh?” Her eyes went to Menedemos’ crotch.

His went to the formidable length of grayish-brown meat on the table in front of him. “By the gods, I hope not!” he exclaimed. “What do you take me for, a donkey?” He thought Emashtart a perfect donkey, but for different reasons.

She shook her head. “No, just man.” She put a slavering emphasis on the word. Her gaze still hadn’t risen to Menedemos’ face.

A couple of other men were eating in the taproom. They were Phoenicians, though, and gave no sign of understanding Greek. Emashtart could be shameless in front of them without their knowing. Hoping to quell her, Menedemos asked, “Where’s your husband?”

She gave him a scornful look. He’d seen that expression on the faces of more than a few women who’d been interested in him and hadn’t cared about their husbands at all. It was the last one he wanted to see on Emashtart’s. She said, “He drinking.” She mimed lifting a cup with both hands, bringing it to her mouth, and then staggering around, as if with too much wine. Menedemos chuckled. It was involuntary, but he couldn’t help himself; she made a fine mimic. She added, “Not to coming home at alls.”

“Oh,” Menedemos said tonelessly. “How nice.” He drank some of his own wine, then yawned. “I’m going to go to bed early tonight, I am. I’m very, very tired.” He yawned again, theatrically.

Emashtart watched him. She didn’t say a word. Menedemos didn’t like that. He wanted her to believe him. That way, she wouldn’t come scratching at his door sometime in the middle of the night. He’d been glad to have women scratch at his door before. He expected he would be again, once he could forget about this annoying oath he’d sworn to Sostratos. He couldn’t imagine being glad if Emashtart did, not even if she stood in the courtyard naked-maybe especially not if she stood in the courtyard naked.

Finally, despite looking back over her shoulder as she went, she left him alone. He had to eat in a hurry, yawning every so often, so she wouldn’t think he’d been lying about how tired he was-which he had. The sausage, though not quite like any he’d eaten back in Hellas, proved tasty. As he brought it up to his mouth, Emashtart ran her tongue over her lips in a silent obscenity that struck him as far grosser and more disgusting than anything the cheerfully bawdy Aristophanes had ever come up with.

As soon as Menedemos finished eating, he hurried out of the taproom and into the cramped, stuffy little chamber where he’d sleep tonight. He didn’t even bother lighting the lamp. He just took off his chiton, made sure the door was barred from the inside, and lay down naked on the narrow bed. To his surprise, he quickly fell asleep.

Not very much to his surprise, he was awakened some unknown stretch of time later by someone softly tapping on the door. Maybe she’ll go away if I lie here quietly and pretend to stay asleep, he thought.

He tried it. Emashtart didn’t go away. She kept right on tapping, louder and louder. At last, he doubted whether a dead man could have ignored her. Muttering to himself, he got out of bed and went to the door. “Who is it?” he asked, there being one chance in a myriad it was somebody besides the innkeeper’s wife.

But she answered, “I are it.”

“What do you want?” Menedemos asked. “And what hour is it, anyway? “

“Not knowing hours,” Emashtart said. “Want hinein”

Menedemos coughed. He gave back a pace. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised she knew the nastiest, lewdest verb in the Greek language, but he was. The word had implications of taking by force that usually made it implausible when used by a woman to a man; with her speaking, though, it somehow seemed anything but.

“In the name of the gods, go away,” he said. “I’m too tired.”

“Want binein,” she said again. “Want binein!” She was almost shouting, careless of what the other luckless lodgers at the inn might think. Had she spent all this time pouring down wine and thinking of assaulting Menedemos?

“No,” he said. “Not now. Go away.”

“To let in,” the Phoenician woman said. “Want binein! To be happies.”

Was this what women felt when some obnoxious man wouldn’t leave them alone? Menedemos had had some idea of what that was like; as a youth in Rhodes, he’d had plenty of suitors sniffing after him. But what he’d known then was chiefly scorn for the silly men who chased him. Now he felt real annoyance-and fear, too, for, in a city of her own people, Emashtart might be able to cause him a lot of trouble. He didn’t dare let her in now, lest she claim he’d tried to rape her instead of the other way round.

She started to say something else. Before she could, a man in a nearby room yelled in Aramaic. Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it, but he would have bet the other man was telling her to shut up and let him get some sleep. In the other fellow’s place, that was what Menedemos would have said.

Emashtart shouted back, anger in her voice. The man in the other room gave as good as he got. He and the innkeeper’s wife went back and forth at the top of their lungs. Menedemos couldn’t follow their argument, but it sounded spectacular. Aramaic, with its gutturals and hisses, was made for quarreling.

The racket Emashtart and the first man made disturbed others at the inn. Before long, six or eight people were shouting at one another. They all sounded furious. For the next quarter of an hour, Menedemos hadn’t the slightest hope of sleeping, but he was entertained.

At last, the bickering died away. Menedemos wondered whether Emashtart would start scratching at his door again. To his vast relief, she didn’t. He twisted and turned on the narrow, lumpy bed, and finally went back to sleep.

When he came out the next morning, he found Sedek-yathon sitting on a stool in the taproom drinking a cup of wine. The innkeeper looked somewhat the worse for wear. Menedemos wondered how much he’d drunk the night before. But that didn’t matter. Sedek-yathon spoke more Greek than his wife. That did. Menedemos said, “I’m sorry, best one, but I have to move back to my ship today.”

“You say you stay till new moon,” the innkeeper said. “You already pay to stay to new moon. Not get silver back.”

Normally, that would have infuriated the Rhodian. Here, he only shrugged. “Fine,” he said. He would have paid more than a few drakhmai to escape the inn. He gathered up his belongings and headed back to the Aphrodite . In some ways, he wouldn’t be so comfortable. In others… In others, he couldn’t wait to return to the merchant galley.

Growing up in Rhodes, Sostratos had never seen snow fall till he went to Athens to study at the Lykeion. Even in Athens, snow had been rare. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about heat. Engedi, on the shore of the Lake of Asphalt, proved he hadn’t known so much as he thought.

Whenever he went out of doors, the sun beat down on him with almost physical force. He wore his broad-brimmed hat every moment of the day and imagined he felt the weight of the sunlight pressing it down onto his head. Even the air seemed heavy and thick and suffused with sunshine.

And yet, despite that suffocating heat, despite the poisonously salty lake and the wasteland all around, Engedi lay in the midst of a patch of some of the most fertile soil he’d ever seen. As he’d guessed, springs bubbling up from underground let life not only survive but flourish here.

Outside the walls of Engedi, persimmon trees and henna plants grew among other crops. Sostratos knew the balsam-makers turned their sap into the medicinal, sweet-smelling product for which the town was famous. Just how they did it, he didn’t know. No one outside of Engedi did. He tossed his head. Since coming to Ioudaia, he’d learned that wasn’t quite true. One other place, a town called Jericho, also produced the balsam.

He shrugged. The stuff was always called balsam of Engedi. If he bought it here, he could truthfully say he had the authentic product.

More persimmon trees grew in front of the house of Eliphaz son of Gatam, the leading balsam-maker in Engedi. In the savage weather the land here by the Lake of Asphalt knew, their shade was doubly welcome.

A skinny, black-bearded slave opened the door when Sostratos knocked. “Peace be unto you, my master,” he said in Aramaic with an accent slightly different from that which the Ioudaioi used.

“And to you also peace, Mesha,” Sostratos replied. Mesha was a Moabite, one of the nomads who, Sostratos had learned since coming to Engedi, dwelt in the desert east of the Lake of Asphalt. Sostratos didn’t know by what misfortune he’d ended up a slave. Getting captured on a raid struck the Rhodian as likely; Mesha had the look of a man who would rob for the sport of it.

“May Khemosh favor you, Ionian,” Mesha said. Khemosh was a Moabite god. Sostratos would have liked to find out more about him, but Mesha named him only furtively; Eliphaz didn’t approve of anyone’s calling on any god in his house save the invisible one the Ioudaioi worshiped. In a lower voice yet, the Moabite added, “May you swindle the beard off my master’s chin.” He might be a slave, but he wasn’t resigned to serving the balsam-maker.

Another persimmon tree and a pale-barked fig spread shade over Eliphaz’s courtyard. The Ioudaian waited in that shade. He was tall and solidly made, and within a few years of forty: Sostratos could see the first few white threads in his dark beard. Inclining his head to Sostratos, he said, “Peace be unto you, Ionian.”

“And to you also peace, my master,” Sostratos said politely.

“My thanks.” Eliphaz son of Gatam clapped his hands. “Fetch us wine, Mesha.” Nodding, the slave hurried away. Eliphaz muttered something under his breath. It sounded like lizard-eating savage. Maybe he had no more love for Mesha than the Moabite did for him.

The wine was good enough without being anything special. Sostratos, unaccustomed to wine without water, drank carefully. After polite chitchat, he said, “Here is a jar of the fine Rhodian perfume I mentioned when we met yesterday.” With use, his own Aramaic got more fluent by the day.

“Let me smell of it,” Eliphaz said gravely. Sostratos handed him the small jar. He pulled out the stopper, sniffed, touched the rim of the jar, and rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “It is made with grease, I see. What is the grease?”

“ Olive oil, my master, nothing else,” Sostratos replied.

“Ah.” A smile appeared on the balsam-maker’s face. “We may freely use olive oil, you understand. If it were animal fat-especially if it were pig fat-I could not think of trading for it no matter how sweet it smells.”

“I understand that it is so, yes,” Sostratos said. “I do not understand why it is so. If you could make this plain, I would be in your debt.”

“It is so because the one god commands us to shun the pig and all other beasts that do not chew their cud and divide their hooves,” Eliphaz said.

Even that was more than Sostratos had known before. But it was not enough more to satisfy him. “Why does your one god command you so?” he asked.

“Why?” Now Eliphaz son of Gatam stared at him in amazement. “Who are we, to ask why the one god orders this or forbids that? It is his will. We can only obey, and obey we do.” He sounded proud of such obedience.

That struck Sostratos as very strange. It was as if a man declared he was proud to be a slave and had no desire for freedom. Since he saw no diplomatic way to say that to the balsam-maker, he let it go. He did say, “You can travel all over the world, my master, and you will find no sweeter, no stronger, no longer-lasting perfume than what we make on the island of Rhodes.”

“It could be. It is good perfume,” Eliphaz said. “But you, Ionian, you will find no finer balsam than what we make here by the Dead Sea.”

“Is that what you name the water?” Sostratos said. Eliphaz nodded. Sostratos said, “I have also heard it called the Lake of Asphalt.”

“Call it whatever you please,” the Ioudaian said. “But we trade our balsam for silver, weight for weight. How do we make the scales balance with perfume?”

All around the Inner Sea, Phoenician merchants traded balsam of Engedi for twice its weight in silver. Sostratos wanted some of that profit for himself. He said, “I do not sell perfume by weight, but by the jar. For each jar, I would hope to get twenty Sidonian sigloi.”

Eliphaz laughed. “You might hope to get so much, but how likely is it? If you think I will give you twenty shekels’ weight of balsam for one of those paltry little jars, I must ask you to think again.”

“Perfume jars are small because what they hold is boiled many times to make it stronger,” Sostratos said. “All this takes much labor. So does gathering the roses to make the perfume.”

“Do you think there is no labor in making balsam?” Eliphaz demanded.

“Not only is there labor, there is the secret. No one but we of Engedi knows how to do what needs doing.”

“What of the men of Jericho?” Sostratos asked.

“Frauds! Fakes! Phonies, the lot of them!” Eliphaz said. “Our balsam, the balsam of Engedi, is far finer than theirs.”

“Well, my master, all trades have secrets,” Sostratos said. “You grow roses here. Do you make perfume? I think not.”

“Our secret is harder and more important,” the Ioudaian insisted.

“You would say so, of course,” Sostratos answered politely.

Eliphaz muttered in Aramaic. “You are worse than a Phoenician,” he told Sostratos, who smiled as if what was meant for an insult were a compliment. That smile made Eliphaz mutter some more. He said, “Even if I were to give you ten shekels of balsam for one jar, it would be too much.”

“My master, it grieves me to tell a man so obviously wise that he is wrong,” Sostratos said. “But you must know you are speaking nonsense. If you truly believed a jar of perfume was worth less than ten sigloi”-he still had trouble pronouncing the sh sound that began shekels, a sound Greek didn’t use-”you would throw me out, and that would be the end of our dicker.”

“Not necessarily,” Eliphaz said. “I might simply want something to amuse me. And I tell you straight out, it has been a long time since I heard anything so funny as the idea of paying twenty shekels of balsam for a jar of your perfume. You must think that because you come from far away and I stay in Engedi I have no notion of what anything is worth.”

“Certainly not,” said Sostratos, who had hoped for something exactly like that. “But think, my master. How often does Rhodian perfume come here to your town?”

“None has ever come here before,” Eliphaz told him. “And if the price you want for it is any indication, I can understand why not.”

Patiently, Sostratos said, “But when you have the only fine perfume in these parts, for how much will you sell it? Do not think only of prices. Remember, think also of profit after you buy.”

Eliphaz’s smile bared strong yellowish teeth. “I am not a child, Ionian. I am not a blushing virgin brought to the marriage bed. I know about buying, and I know about selling. And suppose I said, all right, I will give you ten shekels’ weight of balsam for a jar. Yes, suppose I said that. You would only scorn me. You would say, ‘It is not enough. You are a thief.’ “

Sostratos smiled, too. He thought he recognized an opening gambit there. “Ten sigloi are not enough,” he agreed, and he let the smile get broader. “You are a thief, my master.”

In Greek, he would have been sure he sounded like a man playacting. In Aramaic, he only hoped he did. When Eliphaz son of Gatam laughed out loud, he grinned with relief: he’d done it right. “You are a dangerous man, Sostratos son of Lysistratos,” the Ioudaian said.

“I do not want to be dangerous,” Sostratos said. “I only want to trade.”

“Ha! So you say. So you say.” Eliphaz shook his head. “Even if I said ten shekels and a half for one of those nasty little jars, still would you laugh. You would not come down at all, not even by one of those tiny coins the governors issue.”

That was an opening gambit. Sostratos realized he would have to move, that he would lose any chance of a deal if he didn’t. “I will come as far as you have come. If you pay me nineteen and a half sigloi of balsam the jar, the perfume is yours.”

“Mesha!” Eliphaz shouted. When the Moabite slave came up, the balsam-maker said, “Fetch more wine. Fetch it at once. We have work to do here, and wine will grease the way.”

Muttering, the slave went off to get the wine. He was still muttering when he came back with it. When he was a free man, had he had Ioudaioi serving him? Raids across a long-established border could produce ironies like that.

Eliphaz haggled as if he had all the time in the world. Plainly, dickering was among his favorite sports. Sostratos knew Hellenes who took the same pleasure in the act of making the deal. He wasn’t among them, though he wanted the best price he could get.

The best price he could get turned out to be fourteen and a half sigloi of balsam per jar of perfume. Eliphaz son of Gatam stubbornly refused to go to fifteen. “I do not need perfume so badly as that,” the Ioudaian said. “It is too much. I will not pay it.”

That left Sostratos muttering to himself. He knew what he could get for the balsam once he took it back to Hellas, and he knew what he could get for the perfume in ports around the Inner Sea. He would make more for the balsam, yes. Would he make enough more to justify this long, dangerous trip to Engedi? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe not.

But, having come so far, could he justify turning around and going back to Sidon without balsam? He doubted he’d get a better price from any of the other balsam-makers; like any other group of artisans, they would talk among themselves. And he was sure he wouldn’t get a much better price.

Did you think this would be easy? he asked himself. Did you think Eliphaz would say, “Oh, twenty sigloi of balsam the jar isn‘t enough-let me give you thirty”? He knew perfectly well he’d thought nothing of the sort. Whether he had or not, though, it would have been nice.

“Fourteen and a half shekels,” Eliphaz said again. “Is it yes, my master, or is it no? If yes, we have a bargain. If no, I am pleased to have met you. Some Ionian soldiers have come here before, but never till now a trader.”

“Fourteen and a half,” Sostratos agreed unhappily, far from sure he was doing the right thing. “It is a bargain.”

“Whew!” the Ioudaian said. If that wasn’t a sigh of relief, it certainly sounded like one. “You are a formidable foe. I am glad most of your people stay far from Engedi. I’d much sooner dicker with Phoenicians.”

Was that true? Or was he just saying it to make Sostratos feel better? It did the job, no doubt of that. “You are a hard bargainer yourself,” Sostratos said, and meant every word of it. He held out his hand.

Eliphaz took it. His grip was hard and firm. “A good bargain,” he declared. “Neither one of us is happy-it must be a good bargain.”

“Yes,” Sostratos said, and then, “A different question: may I bathe in the Lake of Asphalt? Does it hold up a bather so he cannot sink?”

“It does,” Eliphaz answered. “And of course you may. It is there.” He pointed east, toward the water. “How could anyone stop you?”

“May I bathe naked?” Sostratos persisted. “This is the custom of my people, but you Ioudaioi have different rules.”

“You may bathe naked,” Eliphaz said. “You would be polite to bathe well away from women and to dress as soon as you come out of the water. And do not get any of it in your eyes or in your mouth. It burns. It burns very much.”

“Thank you. I will do as you say,” Sostratos told him.

He got Aristeidas to come with him to make sure no light-fingered Ioudaian lifted his tunic after he doffed it. When he walked into the water, he exclaimed in astonishment; it was as warm as blood, as if it were a heated bath. The oceanic smell overwhelmed him. He walked out till the water covered his privates, to satisfy Ioudaian notions of modesty. Then he lifted his feet and leaned back to float.

He exclaimed all over again. Eliphaz had been right, and more than right. He could keep his head and shoulders and feet out of the supremely salty water with the greatest of ease. Indeed, when he tried to force more of his torso down into the Lake of Asphalt, other parts of him rose out of it. So long as that included only more of his long legs, he didn’t worry about it. When his groin bobbed up out of the water, though, he set a hand over it, lest he offend any Ioudaioi who happened to be keeping an eye on what a foreigner did.

“What’s it like?” Aristeidas called to him.

“I think it may be the strangest thing I’ve ever felt,” Sostratos answered. “It’s like reclining on a couch at a supper or a symposion, only there is no couch, and it doesn’t resist me if I lean back more. And it’s wonderfully warm, too. Do you want to try after I come out?”

“Maybe I will,” the sailor said. “I wasn’t going to, but coming all this way and then not going in would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it?”

“I certainly think so,” Sostratos said. “Others may think otherwise.”

After perhaps a quarter of an hour, Sostratos emerged from the Lake of Asphalt. He put on his chiton as fast as he could, to keep from scandalizing the locals. Half a plethron down the shore, a Ioudaian dawdled much more than he did over re-donning clothes. He found that amusing.

The Ioudaian, he saw before the fellow dressed, was circumcised. He wished the man had been closer; he would have liked a better look at the mutilation. Why anyone would subject himself to anything so painful and ugly was beyond him. The Ioudaian himself would probably say it was at the command of his god; that seemed to be the locals’ explanation for everything. But why would a god want such a mark on his people? It was a puzzlement.

Aristeidas did strip off his tunic and walk out into the Lake of Asphalt. As Sostratos had, he exclaimed in surprise at the way the water bore him up. “You can push yourself around with one finger!” he said. “You won’t ever drown, either.”

“No, but you might turn into a salt fish if you stay in there too long,” Sostratos answered. The fierce sun had quickly dried the water on his arms and legs. But a crust of salt crystals remained. His skin itched, far more than it would have after bathing in the Inner Sea. When he scratched, the salt stung. He said, “We’ll have to rinse off with fresh water

when we get back to the inn.”

“No doubt you’re right,” Aristeidas said. “Then what?”

“Then we go back to Jerusalem,” Sostratos said. “And from there, we

go back to Sidon. And from there-”

He and Aristeidas both said the same word at the same time: “ Rhodes.”

For the first time in his travels, Menedemos found himself bored. He’d done everything he’d set out to do in Sidon. Most summers, that would mean the Aphrodite could go on to some other port and give him something new to do. Not here, though, not now. He couldn’t very well leave before Sostratos and his escorts got back.

And he couldn’t do what he would have done in most ports to hold off boredom: he’d given his cousin his oath not to go looking for a love affair with some other man’s wife this sailing season. He’d known nothing but dismay when Emashtart came looking for a love affair with him.

A visit to a brothel proved not to be the answer he was looking for. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good time; he did. But he’d spent some silver and he’d spent some time, and he had nothing but the memory to show for them. Considering how often he’d done the same thing, and in how many cities all around the Inner Sea, he doubted whether in a few years- or even in a few days-that memory would mean much to him.

It was harder to amuse himself in Sidon than it would have been in a polis full of Hellenes. The Phoenician town boasted no theater. He couldn’t even go to the market square to pass the time, as he would have in a polis. Among Hellenes, everyone went to the agora. People met and gossiped and hashed out things of more consequence than mere gossip. He couldn’t imagine a Hellenic town without its agora.

Things weren’t the same in Sidon. He’d seen that shortly after arriving here. The market square among Phoenicians was a place of business, nothing more. Even if it hadn’t been, his ignorance of Aramaic would have shut him out of city life here.

And, of course, he couldn’t exercise in the gymnasion, for Sidon had no more gymnasion than theater. Sostratos had been right about that. A gymnasion was a place to exercise naked-and how else would a man exercise? But Phoenicians didn’t go naked. As far as Menedemos could tell, they didn’t exercise, either, not for the sake of having bodies worth admiring. The ones who did physical labor seemed fit enough. More prosperous, more sedentary men ran to fat. Menedemos supposed they would have been even less attractive if they hadn’t covered themselves from neck to ankles.

Eventually, Menedemos found the taverns where Antigonos’ Macedonians and Hellenes drank. There, at least, he could speak-and, as important, hear-his own language. That did help, but only so much.

“They’re funny people,” he said to Diokles one morning back at the Aphrodite . “I never realized how funny they were till I spent so much time listening to them talk.”

“What, soldiers?” The oarmaster snorted. “I could’ve told you that, skipper.”

“I suppose it’s just shoptalk when one of them explains how to twist the sword after you’ve thrust it into somebody’s belly, so you make sure the wound kills,” Menedemos said. “Killing the enemy is part of your job. But when they start going on about how best to torture a prisoner so he tells you where his silver is…” He shivered in spite of the building heat.

“That’s part of their job, too,” Diokles observed. “Half the time, their pay is in arrears. Only reason they get paid at all, sometimes, is that they’d desert if they didn’t, and their officers know it.”

“I understand that,” Menedemos said. “It was just the way they talked about it that gave me the horrors. They might have been potters talking about the best way to join handles to the body of a cup.”

“They’re bastards,” Diokles said flatly. “Who’d want to be a soldier to begin with if he wasn’t a bastard?”

He wasn’t wrong. He was seldom wrong; he had good sense and was far from stupid. Nevertheless, Menedemos thought, By the gods, I miss Sostratos. He couldn’t talk things over with Diokles the way he could with his cousin.

Even though the soldiers made him wish they were barbarians (not that Macedonians didn’t come close), he kept going back to the taverns they frequented. The chance to speak Greek was too tempting to let him stay away.

Once, he happened to walk in right behind Antigonos’ quartermaster. “Oh, hail, Rhodian,” Andronikos said coolly. “Did you ever unload that ridiculously overpriced olive oil of yours?”

“Yes, by Zeus,” Menedemos answered with a savage grin. “Almost all of it, as a matter of fact. And I got a better price than you were willing to pay. Some people do care about what they eat.”

Andronikos only sneered. “My job is to keep the soldiers well fed for as little silver as I can. I have to do both parts of it.”

“You certainly do it for as little silver as you can, O marvelous one,” Menedemos replied. “But if you kept the men well fed, they wouldn’t need to buy from me, would they? I’ve sold all my hams and smoked eels, too.”

A soldier said, “ Ham? Smoked eels? We wouldn’t see those from Andronikos, not if we waited the next hundred years.”

The quartermaster was unmoved. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “They’re needless luxuries. If a soldier wants them, he can spend his own money to get them. Barley and salt fish and oil are what he needs to stay in fighting trim.”

“No wonder we’re losing soldiers to desertion,” somebody said: probably an officer, by his educated Attic accent. “If we give them only what they need and Ptolemaios gives them what they want, which would they rather have? Which would any man with an obolos’ weight of brains in his head rather have?”

“A soldier who has to have luxuries to fight isn’t a soldier worth keeping,” Andronikos insisted.

“What soldier doesn’t want a little comfort now and then?” the other officer returned.

“Antigonos doesn’t care to see his money thrown away,” the quartermaster said. From everything Menedemos had heard, that was true.

‘“Antigonos doesn’t care to see his men tempted to desertion, either,” the other officer answered. “A soldier who’s unhappy isn’t a soldier who’ll fight well.”

Menedemos finished his wine and waved to the man behind the bar for another cup. Another soldier, this one plainly a Macedonian by his speech, started laying into Andronikos, and then another, and then another. Before long, half the men in the tavern were shouting at the quartermaster.

Andronikos got angrier and angrier. “You people don’t know what you’re talking about!” he shouted. His pinched features turned red.

“We know we get the leavings that nobody else would want to eat,” a soldier said. “How much money do you salt away buying us cheap garbage and sending out receipts that say we eat better than we really do?”

“Not a hemiobolos, by Zeus! That’s a lie!” Andronikos said.

“Furies take me if it is,” the soldier answered. “Who ever heard of a quartermaster who didn’t feather his own nest every chance he got?”

“How much silver would Andronikos cough up if we held him upside down and shook him?” somebody else said. “Plenty, I bet.”

“Don’t you try that!” Antigonos’ quartermaster said shrilly. “Don’t you dare try that! If you fool with me, I’ll have you crucified upside down, by the gods! Do you think I won’t? Do you think I can’t? You’d better not think anything like that, or it’s the worst mistake you’ll ever make in all your days.”

Menedemos raised his cup to his mouth. He quickly drained it. Then he slid off his stool and slipped out of the wineshop. He knew a brewing fight when he saw one. Sostratos might consider him imperfectly civilized, but at least he’d never made tavern brawling one of his favorite amusements, as so many sailors from the Aphrodite did.

He hadn’t got ten paces from the door before a crescendo of shouts, the thuds of breaking furniture, and the higher crashes of shattering pottery announced the start of the brawl. Whistling gleefully at his narrow escape, he strolled back to the harbor and the merchant galley. He did hope Andronikos got everything that was coming to him, and a little more besides.

This time, Sostratos and his traveling companions approached Jerusalem from the south. “Are we going back to Ithran’s inn, young sir?” Moskhion asked.

“I’d intended to stay there for a day or two, yes,” Sostratos answered. “Having an innkeeper who speaks some Greek is very handy, for me and especially for you men, since you haven’t learned any Aramaic.”

“Who hasn’t?” Moskhion said, and let loose with a guttural obscenity that sounded much fouler than anything a man might say in Greek.

Sostratos winced. “If that’s all you can say in the local language, you’d do better to keep your mouth shut,” he said. Moskhion guffawed at the effect he’d had.

“I can ask for bread. I can ask for wine. I can ask for a woman,” Aristeidas said. “Past that, what more do I need?” His attitude was practical if limited. He’d learned a few phrases that came in handy and didn’t worry about anything more.

“How about you, Teleutas?” Sostratos asked. “Have you picked up any Aramaic at all?”

“Not me. I’m not going to sound like I’m choking to death,” Teleutas said. Then he asked a question of his own: “When we get back to old Ithran’s inn, you going to try laying Zilpah again? Think you’ll get it in this time?”

Sostratos tried to stand on his dignity, saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He hoped he wasn’t turning red, or, if he was, that his beard would hide his flush. How had the sailors known?

Teleutas’ laugh was so raucous, so lewd, as to make Moskhion’s Aramaic obscenity seem clean beside it. “No offense, but sure you don’t. You think we didn’t see you mooning over her? Come on! I think you’ll do it this time, too. She likes you plenty, you bet. Sometimes they’re shy, that’s all. You’ve just got to push a little-and then you’ll push all you want.” He rocked his hips forward and back.

Moskhion and Aristeidas solemnly dipped their heads. Sostratos wondered if that meant his chances were pretty good, or simply that all three sailors were misreading the signs the same way.

I’m going to find out, he thought. I have to find out. The game seemed worth the risk. All of a sudden, he understood Menedemos much better than he’d ever wanted to. How can I rail at him when I know why he does it? he wondered unhappily.

He did his best to tell himself that, unlike his cousin, he wasn’t risking anything or anyone by trying to learn whether Zilpah would go to bed with him. But, also unlike Menedemos, he’d been to the Lykeion. He’d learned how to root out self-deception. He knew perfectly well that he was telling himself lies. They were soothing lies, pleasant lies, but lies nonetheless.

What if, for instance, Zilpah had gone to Ithran and told him Sostratos had tried to seduce her? What would the innkeeper do when the Rhodian showed up at his door again? Wouldn’t he be likely to try to smash in Sostratos’ skull with a jar of wine or perhaps to stab him or spear him with whatever weapons he kept around the inn? Suppose things were reversed. Suppose Ithran, in Rhodes, had paid undue attention to Sostratos’ wife {assuming I had a wife, Sostratos thought). What would I have done if he fell into my hands after that? Something he would remember to the end of his days, whether that was near at hand or far away.

And yet, knowing what Ithran might do on setting eyes on him, Sostratos led the sailors from the Aphrodite back toward the inn they’d quitted only a few days before. This is madness, he told himself, picking his way through the narrow, winding, rocky streets of Jerusalem. Every so often, he had to spend a few tiny silver coins on a passerby to get steered in the right direction. No one grabbed him by the front of the tunic and exclaimed, “Don’t go back there! You must be the woman-mad Ionian Ithran swore he’d kill!” Sostratos chose to take that as a good sign, though he recognized he might be deceiving himself again.

“This is the street,” Aristeidas said when they turned on to it. “We just passed the brothel-and there’s Ithran’s inn up ahead.”

“So it is,” Sostratos said in a hollow voice. Now that he was here, his heart pounded and his bowels felt loose. He was sure he’d made a dreadful mistake in returning. He started to say they ought to go somewhere else after all.

Too late for that-Ithran himself came out the front door of the inn with a basket full of rubbish, which he dumped in the street not far from the entrance. He started to go back inside, but then he caught sight of the four Rhodians heading his way. Sostratos tensed. He wondered if he should reach for Menedemos’ bow, not that he could have strung it, let alone shot, before Ithran charged.

But then the innkeeper… waved. “Hail, friends,” he called in his bad Greek. “You does good by Lake of Asphalt?”

“Pretty well, thanks,” Sostratos answered, breathing a silent sigh of relief. Whatever else had happened, Zilpah hadn’t said anything.

“You to stay a few day?” Ithran asked hopefully. “I have my old rooms back.” Sostratos realized he was trying to say, You have your old rooms back. “Thank you,” he said, and nodded, as people did in this part of the world. Switching from Greek to Aramaic, he added, “I thank you very much indeed, my master.”

“I am your slave,” Ithran said, also in Aramaic. “Name any boon, and it shall be yours.” Aramaic was made for flowery promises no one would or intended to keep.

I wonder what would happen if I said, “Give me your wife to keep my bed warm till I go back to Sidon,” Sostratos thought, and then, No, I don’t wonder. That would show the differences between polite promises and real ones, and show it in a hurry.

While such musings filled the Rhodian’s head, Ithran turned and shouted into the inn: “Zilpah! Pour wine! The Ionians have returned from the Lake of Asphalt.”

“Have they?” The Ioudaian woman’s voice, a mellow contralto, floated out into the street. “They are very welcome, then.”

“Yes.” Ithran nodded vigorously. He returned to Greek so all the men from the Aphrodite could understand: “You is all very welcome. Go in, drink wine. Slave will see to your beasts.”

Teleutas, Aristeidas, and Moskhion looked eager to do just what he’d said. In a dry voice, Sostratos told the sailors, “Get the goods off the donkey before we start drinking. We’ve come a long way to get what we’ve got. If we let somebody steal it, we might as well have stayed in Rhodes.”

A little sulkily, the men obeyed. It was only a few minutes before they did sit down in the taproom to drink the wine Zilpah had poured. The room was dark and shadowed, light sneaking in only through the doorway and a couple of narrow windows. That gloom and the inn’s thick walls of mud brick left the taproom much cooler than the bake-oven air outside.

“Is Hekataios still here?” Sostratos asked Zilpah when she refilled his cup.

She shook her head. “No. He left the day after you did, bound for his home in Egypt.” Her shrug was dismissive. “He is a clever man, but not so clever as he thinks he is.”

“I think you are right,” Sostratos said. He wondered if she would say the same thing about him after he left for Sidon. He hoped not, anyhow. Because the sailors from the akatos had learned so little Aramaic, he could speak to her as freely as if they weren’t there. He took advantage of that, adding, “I think you are beautiful.”

“I think you should not say these things,” Zilpah answered quietly. Out in the courtyard, Ithran started hammering away at something-perhaps at a door for one of the rooms. A burst of guttural curses in Aramaic proclaimed that he might have hammered his own thumb, too.

Aristeidas gulped down his wine. “What do you say we pay a visit to the girls down the street?” he said in Greek. Moskhion and Teleutas both dipped their heads. All three men hurried out of the inn.

“Where are they going?” Zilpah asked.

“To the brothel,” Sostratos said. Ithran kept pounding in the courtyard. As long as he did that, no one could have any doubts of where he was. Sostratos went on, “I was sorry to go. I am glad to be back.”

“And soon you will go again,” Zilpah said.

Sostratos shrugged and nodded; the gesture was almost starting to feel natural to him. “Yes, that is so. I wish it were different, but it is so.” He reached out and touched her hand, just for a moment. “We have little time. Should we not use it?”

She turned away from him. “You should not say such things to me. You make me think things I am not supposed to think.”

“Do you think that I think you are beautiful? Do you think that I think you are sweet?” Sostratos said. “Do you think that I want to love you? You should think that, because it is true.”

Still not looking at him, Zilpah spoke in a very small voice: “These are things I should not hear from you. I have never heard these things before.” She laughed. “I have heard from men who want to sleep with me. What innkeeper’s wife has not? But you… you mean what you say. You are not telling lies to get me to lie down with you.”

“Yes, I mean them. No, I am not lying,” Sostratos said.

“People who mean these things should not say them,” Zilpah insisted. “I have never heard things like these from someone who means them.”

“Never?” Sostratos raised an eyebrow. “You spoke of this before. These are things your husband”-who kept on hammering out in the courtyard-”should say.”

“Ithran is a good man,” Zilpah said, as if the Rhodian had denied it.

Sostratos said nothing at all. He let her words hang in the air, let her listen to them again and again in her own mind. She brought her hands up to her face. Her shoulders shook. Sostratos knew a moment of raw fear. If she started crying loud enough for Ithran to notice, what would the Ioudaian do to him? He didn’t know, not in detail. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t likely to be pretty.

“I think,” Zilpah said, “I think you had better go to your room now.”

“I would rather sit here and drink wine and talk with you and look at you so I can see how beautiful you are,” Sostratos said.

The Ioudaian woman swung back toward him. Her black eyes flashed.

“I said, I think you had better go to your room,” she snapped. “Do you understand me when I tell you something?”

“I understand what you say. I do not understand why you say it,” Sostratos replied. Once again, a why question seemed all-important.

Here, though, it got no answer. “Go!” Zilpah said, and he could hardly tell her no, not when this was her inn, this was her city, this was her country-and that was her husband out there in the courtyard. He gulped his wine and hurried out of the taproom. Ithran waved to him as he hurried back toward his room. He waved back. The innkeeper might have suspected something if he hadn’t. Part of him felt ashamed at treating the Ioudaian in a friendly way when he wanted to make love to the man’s wife. The rest of him, though… When he saw a good-sized stone in the courtyard, that other part of him wanted to pick it up and bash in Ithran’s head.

Still seething, he went into his room and closed the door behind him. It didn’t drown out the noise of Ithran’s hammering. He paced back and forth in the cramped little chamber, feeling trapped. What could he do in here? Nothing except lie down and go to sleep, which he didn’t want to do, or pace and brood. He didn’t want to do that, either, but did it even so.

After what seemed forever, the hammering stopped. Sostratos kept right on pacing. He wished he’d gone to the brothel with the sailors. But if he went there now, they’d know he’d failed with Zilpah. He didn’t feel like humiliating himself right this minute. Later would do.

Someone tapped at the door. When Sostratos noticed the tapping, he had the feeling it had been going on for some little while. He wondered what the sailors were doing back from the brothel so soon. But when he opened the door, no sated Hellenes stood there. Instead, it was Zilpah.

“Oh,” Sostratos said foolishly. “You.”

“Yes, me.” She ducked inside, past Sostratos, who stood frozen, as if seeing a Gorgon had turned him to stone. “Are you daft?” she said. “Shut the door. Quick, now.”

“Oh,” he said again. “Yes.” He did as she said. He found he could move after all, if only jerkily.

“Ithran is gone for a while. The slave is gone for a while. And so…” Zilpah didn’t go on for a moment. In the gloom inside the little chamber, her eyes were enormous. With a gesture that seemed more angry than anything else, she threw off her mantling robe and then the shift she wore under it. “Tell me you love me,” she said. “Tell me you think I’m beautiful. Make me believe you, at least for a little while.” Her laugh was harsh and rough as dry branches breaking. “It shouldn’t be hard. No one else is going to tell me anything like that.”

“No?” Sostratos said. Zilpah shook her head. He sighed. “You spoke of that before. It is too bad, for someone misses a perfect chance. You are very beautiful, and I will love you as best I know how.”

“Talk to me, too,” she said. “Tell me these things. I need to hear them.”

Most women wanted Sostratos to keep quiet while he was making love to them. Talk before or after might be all right. During? Never before had anyone asked him to talk during. He only wished he could do it in Greek. In Aramaic, he couldn’t say a tenth part of what he wanted to tell her.

But he did his best. In between kisses and caresses, he assured her that she was the loveliest and the sweetest woman he’d ever met, and that anyone who’d missed the chance to tell her the same thing was surely an ass, an idiot, a blockhead. While he said it, he believed it. That his tongue teased her earlobe, the side of her neck, the dark tips of her breasts, that his fingers stroked between her legs and that she arched her back and breathed hard while they did-that might have had something to do with his belief.

She hissed when he went into her. He’d never known a sound like that from a woman. She took her pleasure almost at once and twisted her head so that his pillow muffled most of her moan of joy. He kept on, and kept on, and she heated again, and the second time she gasped and wailed she forgot all about trying to keep quiet. He might have warned her, but his own ecstasy burst over him then, irresistible as an avalanche.

“I love you,” he said again, as soon as pleasure didn’t quite blind him.

Zilpah started to cry. She pushed him away from her. “I have sinned,” she said. “I have sinned, and I am a fool.” She dressed as fast as she could. As she did, she went on, “You will leave tomorrow. If you don’t leave tomorrow, I will tell Ithran what we have done. I have sinned. Oh, how I have sinned.”

“I don’t understand,” Sostratos said.

“What do you need to understand?” Zilpah said. “I was angry at my husband for not speaking sweetly to me, and I made a mistake. I sinned, so the one god will punish me for it.”

Sostratos had heard Ioudaioi talk of sin before. It was something like religious pollution among Hellenes, but stronger. He got the feeling Zilpah thought her bad-tempered god was angry at her. “I will do as you say,” he told her with a sigh.

“You had better.” She hurried out the door. She didn’t slam it, but only, he judged, so she wouldn’t make a scene. He sighed again. He’d had her, and pleased her, and she still wasn’t happy. Am I? he wondered. Part of him was, anyhow. The rest? He wasn’t at all sure about the rest.