The Sacred Land sam-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Zilpah got up and filled a pitcher with wine. She stood beside Sostratos to pour more into his cup. People use wine as an excuse for doing things they would never dream of doing sober, Sostratos thought again. Before he could tell it not to, his right arm slipped around Zilpah’s waist.

  She could have screamed. She could have broken the pitcher over his head. She could have done any number of things that would have led to quick irrevocable catastrophe for him. She didn’t. She didn’t even try to twist free or to knock his hand away. She just shook her head a little and murmured, “Wine.”

  “Wine,” Sostratos agreed. “Wine, and you. You are lovely. I would make you happy, if I could. If you let me.”

  “Foolishness,” Zilpah said. But was she talking to him or to herself? Sostratos couldn’t tell, not till she set the pitcher on the table and sat down on his lap.

  His arms went round her in glad surprise. He lifted his face as she lowered hers. Their lips met. Her mouth tasted of wine and of her own sweetness. She sighed, back deep in his throat.

  The kiss went on and on. Sostratos had thought the wine was making him drunk. This… Next to this, the wine was as nothing. He slipped one hand under her robes. It slid up past her knee, up the smooth flesh of her inner thigh, toward the joining of her legs.

  But that hand, hurrying toward her secret place, must have reminded her just what game they’d started playing. With a little, frightened moan, she jerked away and sprang to her feet again. “No,” she said. “I told you, I would not take you to my bed.”

  Had she been a slave, he might have pulled her down to the floor and had her by force. Such things even happened to free Hellenic women of good family every now and again, as when they were coming back at night from a religious procession. Comic poets wrote plays about the complications that rose from mischances like that. But Sostratos had never been one to think of force first. And using it on a foreign woman in a town full of barbarians… He tossed his head.

  He couldn’t help letting out a long, angry breath. “If you did not mean to finish, I wish you had not started,” he said. The throbbing in his own crotch told him how much he wished that.

  “I am sorry,” Zilpah replied. “I wanted a little sweetness-not too much, but a little. I didn’t think you…” She let that trail away. “I didn’t think.”

  “No. You did not. Neither did I.” Sostratos sighed. He gulped down the rest of the wine in the cup. “Maybe I should go down the block after all.”

  “Maybe you should,” Zilpah said. “But now, Ionian, now what am I supposed to do?” And for that, no matter how much Sostratos prided himself on his cleverness, he had no answer at all.

  Menedemos had taken his time going over to the dyeworks on the outskirts of Sidon. He kept finding excuses for staying away. The real reason was simple: the dyeworks that made the Phoenician cities famous stank too badly for him to want to get close to them.

  That stench came into the city when the wind blew the wrong way. But Sidon, like any town around the Inner Sea, had plenty of other foul odors to dilute that one. Out by the dyeworks, the smell of rotting shellfish was both overpowering and unalloyed.

  How did anyone ever find out that murexes, once crushed, yielded a liquor which, after it was properly treated, became the marvelous Phoenician crimson dye? he wondered. Some inventions seemed natural to him. Anyone could see that sticks floated, and all sorts of things caught the wind and were pushed along by it. From there to rafts and boats could only be a small step. But purple dye? Menedemos tossed his head. It struck him as very unlikely.

  He wished he had Sostratos along. Seeing a Phoenician smashing shells with a mallet, he called out, “Hail! Do you speak Greek?”

  The fellow shook his head. But he knew what Menedemos was trying to ask, for he said something in Aramaic in which the Rhodian caught the word Ionian. The Phoenician pointed to a shack not far away. He gave forth with another sentence full of coughing and hissing noises. Again, Menedemos heard the local word for a Hellene. Maybe that meant someone who spoke his language was in there. He hoped so, anyhow.

  “Thanks,” he said. The Phoenician waved and went back to smashing seashells. After a moment, he paused, picked up a morsel of meat, and popped it into his mouth. Can’t get your op son any fresher than that, Menedemos thought.

  When he opened the door to the shack, a couple of Phoenicians, one stout, the other lean, looked up at him. The stout one began to speak before he could say a word: “You must be the Rhodian. Wondered when you were going to show up around here.” His Greek was fluent, colloquial, and sounded as if he’d learned it from someone right on the edge of the law.

  “Yes, that’s right. I’m Menedemos son of Philodemos,” Menedemos said. “Hail. And you gentlemen are…?”

  “I’m Tenashtart son of Metena,” the stout Phoenician answered. “This is my brother, Ithobaal. Miserable son of a whore doesn’t speak any Greek. Pleased to meet you. You want to buy some dye, right?”

  “Yes,” Menedemos said. “Uh-where did you learn Greek so… well?”

  “Here and there, pal, here and there,” Tenashtart answered. “I’ve done some knocking around in my time, you bet I have. There are towns in Hellas… But you didn’t come here to listen to me bang my gums.”

  “It’s all right,” Menedemos told him, more fascinated than anything else. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” Tenashtart said expansively. “Go right ahead.”

  “In the name of the gods, O best one, how do you stand the stink?” Menedemos blurted.

  Before answering, Tenashtart said something in Aramaic to Ithobaal. Both brothers laughed. Tenashtart went back to Greek: “Everybody asks us that. Doesn’t matter who: Phoenicians, Hellenes-even Persians, back when I was a kid. They all say the same thing.”

  “And do you give them the same answer?” Menedemos asked. Tenashtart had spent a lot of time among Hellenes; he dipped his head instead of nodding, as almost all barbarians would have done. Menedemos said, “Well, what is the answer?”

  “You want to know the truth?” the dyemaker said. “The truth is, we both spend so much time with the shells, we don’t even notice it any more. Only time I know it’s there is when I’ve been away for a bit. Then I smell it for a while when I get back. But except for that, it’s not even there for me, any more than air is there for me, you know what I mean?”

  “I suppose so,” Menedemos answered. “It seems hard to believe, though.”

  Tenashtart said something else in Aramaic. His brother nodded. Ithobaal pointed out toward the workman crushing murexes, touched his formidable nose, and shrugged. He might have been saying he didn’t notice the reek of rotting shellfish, either.

  Even to Menedemos, it didn’t seem quite so appalling as it had when he first got to the dyeworks. All the same, he remained a long way from not noticing it. He wished he were as oblivious as the two Phoenician brothers.

  Tenashtart said, “You come all this way to talk about nasty smells, or do you want to do some business?”

  “Let’s do business,” Menedemos said agreeably. “What do you charge for a jar of your best dye?” When the Sidonian told him, he let out a yip. “That’s outrageous!”

  Tenashtart spread his hands. “That’s the way it goes, buddy. I’ve got to make a living, same as everybody else.”

  But Menedemos wagged a finger at him. “Oh, no, you don’t, my dear. You’re not going to get away with that, not for a minute you won’t, and I’ll tell you why not. I’ve seen Phoenicians over in Hellas selling crimson dye for the very same price, and that’s after their middleman’s markup. What do they pay you?”

  “You must be talking about men from Byblos or from Arados,” Tenashtart said easily. “They’ve got lower quality dye, so naturally they can charge less.”

  Menedemos tossed his head. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said again. “For one thing, they’d say Byblian or Aradian dye’s as good as Sidonian. W’ith Tyre wrecked, nobody has a sure best a
ny more. And, for another, I’ve seen Sidonians selling for the very same price.”

  Tenashtart’s engagingly ugly grin showed a missing bottom front tooth. “I like you, Rhodian, to the crows with me if I don’t. You’ve got balls. But tell me this-why should I give a Hellene the same rate I give my own people?” He translated his words for Ithobaal, who nodded again.

  “Why?” Menedemos said. “I’ll tell you why. Because silver is silver, that’s why. Now kindly tell your brother that in Aramaic, too.”

  “You’ve got your nerve,” Tenashtart said, but he sounded more admiring than otherwise. He and Ithobaal did go back and forth in their own language, a crackle of sounds strange to Greek ears. When they finished, Tenashtart named another price, this one only a little more than half as high as what he’d suggested before.

  “Well, that’s better,” Menedemos said. “I don’t know that it’s good-I still think you charge your own folk less than that-but it’s better. We’ll talk more later. First, though, do you want silver, or are we working a trade?”

  “You came here in an akatos,” Tenashtart said. “That means you’re bound to have goodies tucked away under the rowers’ benches. What have you got, and what do you want for it?”

  “My cousin took perfume into the country of the Ioudaioi, but I’ve still got plenty left,” Menedemos answered. “A merchant galley can carry a lot more than a pack donkey’s able to.”

  “You talking about the rose essence you Rhodians make?” Tenashtart asked. Menedemos dipped his head. The Sidonian said, “That’s good stuff, and it doesn’t get over here all that often. You sell it in those little tiny jars, though, don’t you?”

  “Yes. It’s concentrated, so a little goes a long way,” Menedemos said.

  “What do you want for one of those jars? No. Wait.” Tenashtart held up a dye-stained hand. “Let’s settle on how many jars of perfume go into one jar of dye. As long as we’re talking about jars, and not sigloi or drakhmai, it seems friendlier, whether it really is or not.”

  It didn’t seem friendly to Menedemos for very long. Tenashtart mocked his initial offer. He scorned Tenashtart’s. Each accused the other of being a brigand descended from a long line of pirates and thieves. Each claimed the other was thinking of his own profit at the expense of the deal as a whole. Each was undoubtedly right.

  Half a digit’s breadth at a time, they got closer together. The closer they got, the more they railed at each other. After a while, Menedemos grinned at Tenashtart and said, “This is fun, isn’t it?”

  Tenashtart got up from his stool and folded Menedemos into a bear hug. “Ah, Hellene, if you’d only stay in Sidon for a year, I’d make a Phoenician out of you, to the crows with me if I wouldn’t.” Then he made an offer hardly more reasonable than his previous one.

  Menedemos didn’t want to be a Phoenician. Coming out and saying so struck him as impolitic. He made another offer of his own. Tenashtart rained curses down on him in Greek and Aramaic. They both started laughing, which didn’t mean they stopped yelling at each other or trying to best each other in the bargain.

  When at last they clasped hands, they were both sweating. “Whew!”

  Menedemos said. “Now we’re both going to say we got cheated, and then we’re both going to make a pile of money on what we just did. But if we see each other again in a couple of years, neither one of us will admit it.”

  “That’s how it goes,” Tenashtart agreed. “You’re pretty good, Hellene, Furies take me if you’re not.”

  “You’re pretty good yourself,” Menedemos replied. I skinned you, he thought. Tenashtart, no doubt, thought the same. It was a good bargain all the way around.

  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 enorm
ous 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.”