The Sacred Land sam-3

by Harry Turtledove

  The Rhodian did find a rational question to ask: “My master, where is the well? We are hot and thirsty.”

  “Go past this house here”-Ezer pointed-”and you will see it.”

  “Thank you.” Sostratos bowed. Ezer returned the gesture. However mad he might be in matters pertaining to his god, he was polite enough when dealing man to man. Sostratos went back to Greek to tell the sailors with him where the well was.

  “I’d sooner have wine,” Teleutas said.

  That wasn’t quite pure complaint, or it might not have been pure complaint, anyhow. Aristeidas dipped his head, saying, “So would I. Drinking water in foreign parts can give you a flux of the bowels.”

  He was right, of course, but Sostratos said, “Sometimes it can’t be helped. We are in foreign parts, and we have to drink water by itself now and again. The country isn’t swampy or marshy. That makes the water likelier to be good.”

  “I don’t care how good it is. I don’t care if it’s water from the Khoaspes, the river the Persian kings used to drink from,” Teleutas said. “I’d still sooner have wine.” He hadn’t cared about his health, then-only about his palate and the way wine would make him feel. Why am I not surprised? Sostratos thought.

  As Hellenes often did, the Ioudaioi had circled the well with rocks to the height of a cubit or so, to keep animals and children from falling in. They’d also put a wooden cover over the top of the well. When the sailors took it off, they found a stout branch lying across the opening, with a rope attached to it.

  “Let’s haul up the pail,” Sostratos said.

  The men got to work, taking turns at it. Teleutas groaned and grumbled as he hauled on the line; he might almost have been sentenced to torture. From everything Sostratos had seen, Teleutas reckoned work the equivalent of torture. Then again, hauling up a large, full bucket wasn’t easy. Sostratos wondered if there were some easier way to raise a bucket of water than yanking it up one pull at a time. If so, it didn’t occur to him.

  “Here we are,” Aristeidas said at last. Moskhion reached out and grabbed the dripping wooden pail. He raised it to his lips; took a long, blissful pull; and then poured some over his head. Sostratos said not a word when Teleutas and Aristeidas took their turns before passing him the pail. By bringing it up from the bottom of the deep well, they’d earned the right.

  “Water seems good enough,” Aristeidas said. “It’s nice and cool, and it tastes sweet. I hope it’s all right.”

  “It should be.” Sostratos drank. “Ahh!” As his men had, he poured water over his head, too. “Ahh!” he said again. It felt wonderful running down his face and dripping from his nose and the end of his beard.

  Every now and then, he spied a face staring from the windows of the stone and mud-brick houses. No one but Ezer son of Shobal came out, though. In fact, Sostratos waved the first time he saw one of those curious faces. All that did was make it disappear in a hurry.

  Aristeidas noticed the same thing. “These people are funny,” he said. “If we came into a village full of Hellenes, they’d be all over us. They’d want to know who we were and where we were from and where we were going next and what news we’d heard lately. The rich ones would want to trade with us, and the poor ones would want to beg from us. They wouldn’t just leave us alone.”

  “I should say not,” Teleutas agreed. “They’d try to steal anything we hadn’t nailed down, too, and they’d try to pry up the nails.”

  Sostratos raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t that Teleutas was wrong. The sailor was, without a doubt, right-Hellenes would act like that. But the notion of thievery seemed to occur to him very quickly. Not for the first time, Sostratos wondered what that meant.

  He could have pushed on from Hadid, but he did want to buy food, and Ezer had made it very plain he couldn’t do that till after sunset. He and the sailors rested by the well. After a while, they refilled the bucket and hauled it up again. They drank deep and poured the rest over themselves.

  As he might have done in Hellas, Teleutas started to pull off his tunic and go naked. Sostratos held up a hand. “I already told you once, don’t do that.”

  “It’d be cooler,” Teleutas said.

  “People here don’t like showing off their bodies.”

  “So what?”

  “So what? I’ll tell you so what, O marvelous one.” Sostratos waved a hand. “There probably aren’t any other Hellenes closer to this place than a day’s journey. If we get people here up in arms against us, what can we do? If they start throwing rocks, say, what can we do? I don’t think we can do anything. Do you?”

  “No, I guess not,” Teleutas said sulkily. He left the chiton on.

  After the sun went down, the locals emerged from their houses. Sostratos bought wine and cheese and olives and bread and oil (he tried not to think about all the oil Damonax had made him carry on the Aphrodite, and he hoped Menedemos was having some luck getting rid of it). Some people did ask questions about who he was, where he was from, and what he was doing in Ioudaia. He answered as best he could in his halting Aramaic. As twilight deepened, mosquitoes began to whine through the air. He slapped a couple of times, but still got bitten.

  A few of his questioners were women. Though they robed themselves from head to foot like the local men, they didn’t wear veils, as respectable Hellenes would have. Sostratos had noticed that back in Sidon, too. To him, seeing a woman’s naked face in public came close to being as indecent as seeing his-or Teleutas’-naked body would have been for the Ioudaioi.

  He wished he could ask them more about their customs and beliefs. It wasn’t so much that his Aramaic wasn’t up to the job. But, as he hadn’t wanted Teleutas to offend them, he didn’t want to do so himself. He sighed and wondered how long it would be till his curiosity got the better of his common sense.

  7

  “How you is?” the innkeeper asked when Menedemos came out of his room one morning. His name, the Rhodian had learned, was Sedek-yathon.

  “Good,” Menedemos answered in Greek. Then he said the same thing in Aramaic, of which he’d picked up a few words.

  Sedek-yathon grunted. His wife, who was called Emashtart, smiled at Menedemos. “How clevers you am,” she said in her dreadful Greek. She rattled off a couple of sentences of Aramaic much too fast for him to follow.

  “What?” Menedemos said.

  Emashtart tried to explain it in Greek, but she lacked the vocabulary. She turned to her husband. Sedek-yathon was busy putting a new leg on a stool. He showed no interest in translating. His Greek was bad, too; odds were he couldn’t have done it if he’d wanted to. When he refused even to try, Emashtart started screeching at him.

  “Hail,” Menedemos said, and left the inn in a hurry. He spent as little time there as he could. The innkeeper’s wife kept making unsubtle advances at him. His oath to Sostratos had nothing to do with anything. He didn’t want the woman, whom he found repulsive, and he didn’t want Sedek-yathon thinking he did want her and trying to kill him as a result.

  Though the sun hadn’t been up long, the day promised brutal heat. The breeze came, not from the Inner Sea, but from the hills east of Sidon. When it swept down off them, Menedemos had learned, the heat got worse than anything he’d ever known in Hellas.

  He stopped at a baker’s and bought a small loaf of bread. With a cup of wine from the first fellow he saw carrying a jug, it made a good enough breakfast. The cup, fortunately, was small; unlike Hellenes, Phoenicians didn’t believe in watering their wine and always drank it neat. A big mug of unmixed wine first thing in the morning would have set Menedemos’ head spinning.

  Sidon was already bustling as he made his way through its narrow, winding streets toward the harbor and the Aphrodite . On days like this, the locals often tried to pack as much business as they could into the early morning and the late afternoon. When the heat was at its worst, they would close their shops and sleep, or at least rest, for a couple of hours. Menedemos wasn’t used to doing that, but he couldn’t deny it made a
certain amount of sense.

  Diokles waved to him when he came up the wharf. “Hail,” the oarmaster called. “How are you?”

  “Glad to be here,” Menedemos answered. “Yourself?”

  “I’m fine,” Diokles said. “Polykharmos came back to the ship last night shy a front tooth, though. Tavern brawl.” He shrugged. “Nobody pulled a knife, so it wasn’t a bad one. He was pretty drunk, but he kept going on about what he did to the other fellow.”

  “Oh?” Menedemos raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t anybody ever tell him he shouldn’t lead with his face?”

  The keleustes chuckled. “I guess not. Hasn’t been too bad here-I have to say that. Nobody’s been stabbed; nobody’s been badly hurt any other way. As often as not, you lose a man or two on a trading run.”

  “I know.” Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic to turn aside the evil omen. Diokles did the same. “Gods prevent it,” Menedemos added.

  “Here’s hoping,” Diokles agreed. “What are you going to do about Damonax’s olive oil and the rest of the food now, skipper?”

  “To the crows with me if I know.” Menedemos melodramatically threw his hands in the air. “I thought I had a bargain with that whipworthy rogue of an Andronikos, but the abandoned catamite wouldn’t give me a decent price.”

  “Quartermasters are cheese-parers,” Diokles said. “They always have been, and I expect they always will be. They don’t care if they serve their soldiers slop. If giving the men something better means costing them an extra obolos, they won’t do it. They figure you can fight as well on stale, moldy bread as on fresh-maybe better, because bad food makes you mean.”

  “Every word you say is true, but there’s more to it than that,” Menedemos answered. “A lot of the time, every obolos a quartermaster doesn’t spend on his soldiers is an obolos he gets to keep for himself.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.” The oarmaster dipped his head. “Still, though, if I were in Antigonos’ army, I’d be careful about playing games like that. If old One-Eye caught me at ‘em, I’d end up on a cross like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “May Antigonos catch Andronikos, then. May he-” Menedemos broke off. Someone was coming up the pier toward the Aphrodite : a Hellene, surely, for no Phoenician would have worn a tunic that bared his arms to the shoulders and his legs to above the knee. Menedemos raised his voice: “Hail, friend! Do something for you?”

  “You’re the fellow who brought that good olive oil to the barracks the other day, aren’t you?” the newcomer said. Before the Rhodian could answer, the man dipped his head and answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are.”

  “That’s right.” Menedemos didn’t bother hiding his bitterness. “Your polluted quartermaster doesn’t want anything to do with it, though.”

  “Andronikos can take it up the arse like a slave in a boy brothel for all of me,” the Hellene replied. “I know what he gives us, and I was one of the people who tasted what you’ve got. He may not want to buy any, but I do. How much do you want for a jar?”

  “Thirty-five drakhmai,” Menedemos answered, as he had at the beginning of the failed dicker with Andronikos.

  He waited to see what counteroffer the Hellene would make. Hippokles, that’s what his name is, Menedemos remembered. He’d liked the oil a lot when he tried it. And now he didn’t make any counteroffer. He just dipped his head and said, “I’ll take two amphorai, then. That’d be thirty-five sigloi, near enough, right?”

  “Right,” Menedemos said, doing his best to hide his surprise.

  “Good.” Hippokles turned on his heel. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back. I’ve got to get the money and a couple of slaves to haul the jars.” Away he went.

  “Well, well,” Menedemos said. “That’s better than nothing.” He laughed. “Of course, I would’ve sold Andronikos a lot more than two jars.”

  Less than an hour later, Hippokles returned with two scrawny men in tow. He gave Menedemos a jingling handful of Sidonian coins. “Here you are, pal. Now I’ll put these lazy wretches to work.”

  Menedemos counted the sigloi. Hippokles hadn’t tried to cheat him. Some of the coins bore inscriptions in the angular Aramaic script. The letters meant nothing to Menedemos. That Hippokles had plenty of silver did. “Would you like to buy some smoked eels from Phaselis, too?” he asked. “Two sigloi each.”

  That was four times what Sostratos had paid for them in the Lykian town. And Hippokles, after tasting a tiny sample, dipped his head and bought three. He took care of them himself. The slaves, grunting, picked up the jars of oil and carried them back down the quay after him into Sidon.

  “Not bad,” Diokles said.

  “No. I got premium prices there, no doubt about it.” Menedemos ducked under the poop deck and stowed his fat handful of silver in an oiled-leather sack. He’d just made about a day’s wages for the crew of the merchant galley. Of course, not all of it was profit; the olive oil and eels hadn’t come on board for nothing. Even so, it was the best he’d done since putting in at Sidon.

  And Hippokles turned out not to be the only soldier who, after trying Damonax’s olive oil, wanted some for himself. The mercenary hadn’t been gone long before another officer came up the pier to the Aphrodite . This fellow didn’t need to go back and fetch a slave to take away his purchase; he’d brought a man along. Like Hippokles, he had only Sidonian coins on him. “I’ve been here three years, ever since we took this place back from Ptolemaios,” he told Menedemos. “Whatever drakhmai I had once upon a time are long since spent.”

  “Don’t you worry, best one,” Menedemos said smoothly. “I’ll figure out how many sigloi make thirty-five drakhmai, never fear.” Sostratos would have done it in his head. Menedemos had to flick beads on a counting board. With the board, he got the answer about as quickly as his cousin would have: “Seventeen and a half.”

  “Sounds about right.” The other Hellene counted out sigloi one by one and gave them to Menedemos. “… sixteen… seventeen.” He handed the Rhodian a smaller coin. “And here’s the half-siglos to make it square.”

  “Thanks very much,” Menedemos said. “I’ve got hams from Patara, too, if you’d be interested in one of those…”

  “Let me try a bit,” the officer said. Menedemos did. The officer grinned. “Oh, by the gods, yes-that pig died happy.” He made Menedemos happy, too, with the price he paid. Turning to his slave, the fellow added, “Come on, Syros. Sling that ham over your shoulder-may I scrounge a bit of rope from you, Rhodian?-grab that amphora, and get moving.”

  “Yes, boss,” the slave replied in halting, Aramaic-accented Greek. Sweat poured from him as he followed his master off the ship. He was shorter and much skinnier than the Hellene, but it would have gone against his master’s dignity to stoop to manual labor himself when he had a slave to do it for him.

  Menedemos and Diokles watched the two men go. “How about that?” the oarmaster said. “If one soldier had come here, I’d’ve said it was a nice happenstance and forgotten about it the next day. But if two do it of a morning…”

  “Yes.” Menedemos dipped his head. He looked down at his new handful of silver. “I wonder how many more we’ll get.” Something else occurred to him. “And I wonder if the other oil Andronikos had in that room was some of the best he serves out, not the everyday stuff. Wouldn’t surprise me. Even if it was, it wasn’t good enough.”

  “He’s the only one who knows for sure,” Diokles answered. “One thing, though: at least now we know the olive oil we’ve got really is as good as we’ve been saying.”

  “Yes. The same thing occurred to me.” Menedemos sighed. “All the trouble we’ve had getting rid of it, I was worrying about that myself. Harder to make sure you get top quality from in-laws, but you’d better. Otherwise, who’s going to trust you when you come back to a place in a year or two?”

  Diokles laughed. “It might not matter here, skipper. If we come back to this place in a couple of years, we’re liable to find Ptolemaios’ garriso
n here, not Antigonos’.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you you’re wrong, and I won’t even try,” Menedemos answered. “Or, of course, we might find that Ptolemaios’ men had been here, and Antigonos’ had run them out again.”

  “That, too,” the oarmaster agreed. “It’s like the pankration with those two-they’ll keep pounding away till one of them can’t pound any more.”

  “And with Lysimakhos, and with Kassandros,” Menedemos added. “And if one of them does go down, somebody else will probably rise up to take his place-that Seleukos, maybe, out in the east. Somebody. I don’t think anyone can fill Alexander ’s shoes, but nobody’s willing to leave them empty, either.”

  “The marshals don’t care what they step on while they’re fighting,” Diokles said. “They’ll step on Rhodes if they get the chance.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Menedemos said. “We really are a free and autonomous polis, and even Ptolemaios, who’s the best friend we’ve got among the Macedonians, even he thinks it’s funny we want to stay that way. He’ll humor us-we’re the middlemen for his grain trade, after all- but he thinks it’s funny. I saw that in Kos last year.”

  Instead of taking the political talk further, Diokles pointed down to the base of the quay. “Furies take me if those don’t look like more soldiers looking around for the Aphrodite .”

  “You’re right,” Menedemos murmured. “Maybe that session at the barracks is going to pay off pretty well after all, even if that abandoned rascal of an Andronikos didn’t do any buying himself.”

  Up the pier came the Hellenes. They remained tentative till Menedemos waved and called to them. Then they sped up. One of them said, “You’re the trader with the good oil?”

  “That’s me, sure enough.” Menedemos looked from one man to the next. “How do you know about it? I’ve got a good memory for faces, and I don’t think any of you were at the quartermaster’s taste test.”