The Sacred Land sam-3

by Harry Turtledove

  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 mi
stake 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 ha
mmering 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.”