The Rhodian found his chiton by the door and slipped it on. He opened the door. “I hope we find more chances,” he whispered as he stepped out.
“So do I,” Xenokleia called after him. He shut the door. She barred it after him. As he tiptoed downstairs—again skipping the creaky one—he thought, Good. At least I kept her sweet. She won’t tell tales to her husband. Her being pregnant will help keep her quiet, too. She won’t want him wondering whether the baby’s his.
He looked out across the courtyard from the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. All quiet. Quick as a lizard, he scurried to his room and closed the door behind him. A long sigh of relief. No Sostratos here now. No Protomakhos lying in wait, either. I got away with it again.
He lay down on the bed. He hadn’t fallen asleep before someone— no, not someone; Protomakhos—pounded on the front door. “Let me in! Let me in!” he shouted-—no, sang. How drunk was he? Drunk enough, evidently. How lucky am I? Menedemos wondered. Lucky enough, evidently. And Xenokleia had been right—a second round would have been a disaster. It would have been fun anyhow, Menedemos thought as a slave padded across the courtyard to open the door for Protomakhos. In came the proxenos, still singing loudly, if not very well. Despite the racket, Menedemos yawned, twisted, stretched . . . slept.
A cloth merchant tossed his head. “Sorry, friend,” he said, and his regret seemed genuine. “That’s very pretty work you’ve got there, and very fine work, too. I don’t say anything different, so don’t you get me wrong. But to the crows with me if I know who would want it, and I don’t care to buy what I’m not sure I can sell. I don’t want to get stuck with it. I’d have thrown my silver away.”
“Thank you for looking at it,” Sostratos said, carefully refolding the embroidered linen he’d bought on his way to Jerusalem. He’d heard the same response from several other cloth dealers. He’d bought the linen because the embroidery work—a hunting scene with hares crouching beneath thornbushes and red-tongued hounds trying to get them out—was astonishingly vivid and colorful, far better than anything of the sort he’d seen in Hellas. The Phoenician who’d sold it to him told him it came from the east, from Mesopotamia. Because it was so beautiful, he hadn’t imagined he would have any trouble selling It. But it was also unusual, which made some people leery of it. Sostratos asked, “Do you know of someone in your business who might be more inclined to take a chance?”
“Sorry,” the cloth merchant repeated, and tossed his head again. “You know what I would do if I were you, though?”
“Tell me.”
“I’d try to sell it to some rich man who likes hunting. He’d have the money to buy it, and he might figure out something to do with it— hang it on the wall of his andron, maybe, so his friends could admire it at his symposia.”
That was a good idea—or it would have been a good idea for an Athenian merchant. A local man would have dealt here for years. He would have customers in mind when he saw something like the cloth.
Sostratos didn’t. He was a stranger here, and the Athenians were strangers to him. “Strangers . . .” he murmured.
“What’s that?” the cloth merchant asked.
“Nothing, O best one, nothing really,” Sostratos answered. “But I thank you very much for your suggestion.”
“I hope you can unload that. It’s very pretty, no doubt about it,” the Athenian said. “But it wouldn’t come cheap for me, and I don’t want to spend my owls on something where T might not get ‘em back.”
“All right. Hail.” Sostratos walked out of the fellow’s shop and into the brilliant sunlight of the very first days of summer. It would have been even hotter in Rhodes, but it was plenty warm enough here. Sostratos’ shadow was a black puddle around his feet. Down in Egypt, he’d heard, shadows got shorter still at solstice time, till they all but disappeared. If you measured the difference in the angle of a noontime shadow on the same day here and at Alexandria, and if you knew exactly how far it was from here to there, you could use geometry to figure out how big the world is.
You could, . . if you knew. But no one did, not with the needed precision. Sostratos sighed. So many things we don’t know.
One of the things he still didn’t know was where he would sell the embroidered cloth. But now, thanks to the dealer, he had an idea. He was glad he’d put on his petasos before visiting this fellow. Otherwise, he would have wanted to double back to Protomakhos’ house to get one. If he walked down to the seaside with his head uncovered, his brains might cook before he got there. He hadn’t cared to go to Peiraieus in the rain, squelching through mud. He didn’t much care for a long walk in baking heat, either.
He laughed at himself. You want it to be sunny but mild all the time. After a moment’s thought, he dipped his head. Yes, that is what I want. Nothing was wrong with wanting it, as long as he understood that wanting it didn’t mean he’d get it.
He wasn’t bound for Peiraieus today, but for Mounykhia, where the great fort housing Kassandros’ men dominated the skyline. “What do you want?” demanded a guard with a long spear. That was what Sostratos thought he said, anyhow; he used Macedonian dialect so broad as to be almost unintelligible to someone who spoke one of the more usual varieties of Greek.
“I want to see Alketas the tetrarkhos, if you please.” Sostratos answered as dearly as he could, and did his best to use Attic—-the guard would be more used to that, and more likely to understand it, than Sostratos’ native Doric.
And the fellow dipped his head to show he did follow. “Who be you?” he asked.
“Sostratos son of Lysistratos, a Rhodian. I’ve sold Alketas wine. I have something else here he might care to see.”
“Wait. No go. No come. Wait.” The Macedonian tapped the ground with the iron-shod butt of his spear to make sure Sostratos got the message. Then he disappeared into the bowels of the fortress. Sostratos waited. Sweat dripped off him. A bee buzzed close. He took off his hat and whacked at it. It flew away. He put the hat back on, first carefully checking to make sure the bee wasn’t inside. Just as he was starting to grow impatient, the sentry returned. “Now you come,” he said.
He led Sostratos past an exercise yard where soldiers were practicing under the watchful eye and iron lungs of an underofficer. “Lower—spears!” the man bellowed. Down they came. They were so long, several ranks of spearheads projected out past the first rank of men—one reason a phalanx was so hard to oppose. How did a foe get through that hedgehog of spears to the soldiers behind it? The Persians never had found an answer, not from Marathon all the way to Alexander’s time. The closest they’d come was hiring Hellenes to fight for them. In the end, that hadn’t worked, either.
The motion had looked smooth enough to Sostratos, but the underofficer flew into a rage, screaming abuse at the men in Greek and then going into Macedonian when he ran out. Sostratos didn’t get all of that, but it certainly sounded inflammatory. The soldiers looked hot and tired and resigned—even amused—about the underofficer’s curses.
“You come,” the guard said again. He lowered his spear from vertical to horizontal so he could take it down a corridor, A slave coming the other way yelped and flattened himself against the mud-brick wall to keep from getting spitted. The Macedonian laughed. The corridor opened out onto another, smaller, yard. The guard pointed. “There.”
In the courtyard, Alketas stood talking with Dionysios—the commander of the fortress—and two other officers. He waved when he saw Sostratos. “Hail, Rhodian!” he boomed.
“Hail,” Sostratos replied. “How are you today?”
“Couldn’t be better,” the Macedonian replied. “What have you got today? Have you come up with more wine from interesting places?”
In a way, Sostratos hated selling fine wine to someone like Alketas. Like as not, he’d pour it down neat, and get his tongue too numb to savor it after the first couple of gulps. A man who drank to get drunk and not to enjoy what he was drinking deserved to swill something one step above vinegar. Selling him Les
bian and Byblian was almost like pouring them straight into a chamber pot. On the other hand, as Sostratos couldn’t ignore, it was much more profitable.
Today, that issue didn’t arise. “Not wine,” Sostratos answered. “I’ve got something to decorate your quarters, if you’re interested.”
“Oh-ho!” Alketas made curving motions with his hands. “Is she a blonde?” The Macedonians with him laughed.
Sostratos gave back a dutiful smile. “Something, I said, O best one, not someone. No, what I have is ... this.” He unfolded the embroidered cloth and spread his arms to display it.
All four Macedonians stared in admiration at the hunting scene. Dionysios said, “That comes out of Mesopotamia, doesn’t it? “ He was the oldest man there, his hair thin on top and more gray than brown.
“Yes, most noble, it does. I got it in Ioudaia, farther west,” Sostratos replied. “How did you know?”
“I saw the like going through that country with the Alexander,” Dionysios said. Greek could show a man’s special status by tacking the article on in front of his name. And who better deserved special status than Alexander?
If he were alive today, he wouldn’t even be fifty. Sostratos thought for a moment, then dipped his head. That was right, even if it seemed unbelievable. He’d been thirty-three when he died, and he was sixteen years dead. This graying general, certainly not a young man but still far from ancient—he was probably younger than Sostratos’ father—had likely been older than the King of Macedonia he’d served. That was a very curious thought.
“What do you want for it?” Dionysios asked now. “Those things don’t come cheap, I know—not unless you steal ‘em. But that’s a fine one, and I wouldn’t mind having it on my own wall.”
“He brought it for me,” Alketas said indignantly. Macedonians stood on very little ceremony among themselves.
“I wouldn’t mind having it, either,” said a third soldier, a fellow with only three fingers on his left hand. And the fourth officer, a foxy-faced, auburn-haired man who looked more Thracian than Macedonian, also dipped his head.
“I’ll give you fifty drakhmai for it,” Dionysios said. “I know you wouldn’t take less.”
In fact, Sostratos would have been glad to get so much. The Phoenician trader had added the cloth to a lump of beeswax to get an extra bottle of Rhodian perfume. But the foxy-faced man waited only a heartbeat before saying, “I’ll give you sixty.”
“Sixty-five, by Zeus!” Alketas exclaimed.
“Seventy!” said the officer with the missing fingers. The Macedonians glared at one another.
Sostratos? Sostratos smiled.
The soldiers kept bidding up the price of the embroidered hunting scene. In between the numbers they shouted, they yelled abuse at each other, first in Greek and then, as their tempers kindled, in the broad Macedonian dialect they’d grown up speaking. As with the underofficer in the other courtyard, Sostratos understood little of that; what he could make out seemed fouler than any insults in common use in Greek.
In due course, the officer with the missing fingers said, “One mina, eighty drakhmai.” He waited. Sostratos waited. The other Macedonians glowered, but none of them bid again. The officer beamed. He made a fist with his good hand and thumped his chest with it. “Mine!” He might have been three years old.
Sullenly, Alketas said, “I don’t care how pretty it is. Nothing’s worth that kind of silver if it doesn’t have a smooth little piggy to screw.” Since his last offer had been only ten drakhmai lower, that struck Sostratos as a case of the fox’s complaining the grapes were sour after he found he couldn’t get them,
“Mine!” repeated the officer with the missing fingers. He reached out to take the cloth from Sostratos.
The Rhodian didn’t give it to him. “Yours when I have my silver,” he said.
“Wait,” the fellow told him, and hurried away. He came back carrying a leather sack, which he thrust at Sostratos. “Here. Go ahead and count them.”
Sostratos blinked. He couldn’t remember the last time a customer gave him that kind of invitation. He hefted the sack. It felt about right. With a shrug, he replied, “Never mind, most noble one. I trust you.” The Macedonian beamed. Sostratos gave him the square of embroidered linen. His smile got wider. He was happy. Sostratos was happy, too. The only unhappy people were the other three Macedonians, the ones the officer had outbid. And they, Sostratos knew, would get over it.
Adrastos the dyer was a fat Phrygian who wore a saffron chiton with a crimson border, as if to show what he could do. His shop was in Peiraieus—-not far from where the Aphrodite was tied up, in fact. When he glowered at Menedemos, his bushy eyebrows came together to form a single black bar across his forehead. “You have crimson dye for sale?” he said suspiciously, his Attic Greek good but flavored by the guttural accent of his Anatolian homeland. “I have never seen anyone but Phoenicians selling it up till now—unless you bought it from them and plan to gouge me to make up for what you paid.”
“Not at all, my good fellow,” Menedemos answered, doing his best not to wrinkle his nose against the stink of stale piss clinging to the dyeshop. They all smelled that way; no one knew a better bleach than urine. Menedemos went on, “I did buy my dye from a Phoenician, as a matter of fact.”
“Ha! I knew it,” Adrastos said.
Menedemos held up a hand. “Please, O best one—you didn’t let me finish. I bought it from a Phoenician dyemaker in Sidon when I took my akatos east last year. Because of that, I can charge what the Phoenicians usually do—no middleman’s markup, as you feared.”
“From Sidon, eh?” The dyer still sounded suspicious. “What dye-maker did you deal with there?”
“Tenashtart son of Metena,” Menedemos answered. “Do you know him?”
“I have never met him. I have not traveled to Phoenicia, and I do not think he has ever come to Athens, though I’ve heard he’s traveled to Hellas,” Adrastos said. “But I know of him, and of his firm.” He tugged at his curly black beard. “If you had not dealt with him, I do not think you would know of him.”
“Here is a jar of dye I bought from him.” The Rhodian set it on the counter between them. “I can sell you about as much as you want, at prices as good as you’ll get from any man of Sidon or Byblos.”
The Phrygian picked up the jar, holding it on one plump palm and slowly turning it with his other hand. “Truly, this is the very style of jar Tenashtart uses.” He yanked out the stopper and sniffed. The dye had a nasty reek from the shellfish of which it was made, though Menedemos marveled that Adrastos could smell anything through the pungent odor of urine permeating his shop. The dyer nodded, and then, as if to show he really had learned Hellenic customs, dipped his head, too. Menedemos hid a smile; he’d seen other barbarians do the same. Adrastos said, “It does appear to be the true crimson dye. May I test it with a scrap of cloth?”
“Please do, most noble one,” Menedemos told him. “That’s why I brought it.”
Adrastos poked the corner of a rag into the jar, then pulled it out. He studied the deep red color. “Yes, that’s Sidonian crimson, sure enough. It’s not as good as what Tyre used to make before Alexander sacked the town. Tyrian crimson was brighter, and wouldn’t fade no matter what. Such a color! I was just a youth getting started in my father’s business—you would have been a little boy then. You don’t see the like any more. The men who knew how to make it are dead, or else they’re slaves doing something that’s got nothing to do with dye. This isn’t bad for what you can get nowadays, but it doesn’t come up to Tyrian.” He sighed.
Menedemos would have thought he was trying to beat the price down, but other men who knew about the dyes the Phoenicians made had told him the same thing. “Is it good enough for you to want it?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Adrastos said. “As long as I can get a decent price, that is.” He named one.
“That’s not decent. That’s indecent!” Menedemos yelped. “You want me to give it away.” He named his own
, considerably higher, price.
Adrastos howled like a wolf. “Any Phoenician tried to charge me that, I’d fling him into a vat of piss.” He sent Menedemos a speculative look, as if wondering how the Rhodian would look all wet and dripping.
“Some people,” Menedemos remarked, “think they’re the only ones who work a trade. In a polis the size of Athens, I can always sell to someone else.”
“Sell, certainly. Steal from honest folk with your prices? Not likely!” Adrastos said.
They traded more insults. The Phrygian came up a little. Menedemos went down a little. They both knew ahead of time about where they would end up. As they drew closer to that point, they haggled harder. Finally, Menedemos said, “Have we got a bargain?”
“Yes, .Rhodian. I think we do.” The dyer stuck out his hand, which was stained with crimson and saffron and woad and other dyes. Menedemos clasped it. Adrastos asked, “And how soon can I have the dye?”
“My ship is tied up here in Peiraieus,” Menedemos said. “Let me walk over, and I’ll get it for you. You’ll have the silver waiting?”
“Oh, yes. The world would squeak to a stop if not for silver,” Adrastos answered, “I pay what I say I’ll pay. You don’t need to worry about that.”
When some men told Menedemos he didn’t need to worry, he worried harder than ever. The Phrygian didn’t strike him as being one of that sort, though. Yes, Adrastos dressed gaudily, but how else was a dyer supposed to show off his skill? The man’s shop was neat and clean. He couldn’t help the way it smelled, not in the business he was in. And the owls he gave Menedemos wouldn’t stink. With a smile at that conceit, Menedemos said, “All right, O best one. I’ll be back in a little while with the dye, then.”
Owl to Athens Page 26