Sacred Land

by H. N. Turteltaub

One after another, the grain ships glided past the Aphrodite, The men aboard them no doubt thought them majestic. To Menedemos, wallowing seemed a better word. They sailed well enough with the wind right behind them, as it was now. Trying to tack against it, though, they were so slow as to be nearly helpless.

  A sailor on the Aphrodite shouted, “I hope real pirates get you, you fig-suckers!”

  That went too far. “By the dog, Teleutas, keep quiet!” Menedemos hissed. “They aren’t our enemies.”

  “No, but they’re acting like a bunch of wide-arsed little pricks,” Teleutas answered. Menedemos snorted out an exasperated breath. He’d had Teleutas aboard for three sailing seasons in a row now, and he kept wondering why. The man did as little as he could to get by. He wasn’t particularly brave. He wasn’t even an entertaining sort, to make up for his other lacks. If he keeps on like this, I’d do better to leave him behind next year, Menedemos thought. Let him drive some other captain crazy-

  He’d certainly hit a nerve aboard Ptolemaios’ transports. Mention of pirates did, with honest sailors. The sailors who heard him screamed abuse at the Aphrodite. They made obscene gestures. They shook their fists. One of them even threw something at the merchant galley. Whatever it was, it splashed into the Inner Sea far short of its goal. Teleutas laughed a mocking laugh, which only inflamed the men from Alexandria more.

  “They know who we are,” Sostratos said unhappily. “They won’t forget. They’ll blacken our name in every port Ptolemaios holds—and he holds a lot of them.”

  “I know,” Menedemos said. “What can I do about it now, except maybe pitch Teleutas over the side?”

  “Nothing.” His cousin scuffed a bare foot across the planks of the poop deck. “I’m the one who took him on a couple of years ago, there right before we sailed. I’ve been sorry at least half a dozen times since.”

  “I had the same thought,” Menedemos answered. “He doesn’t really pull his weight, and he does get into trouble—and get us into trouble. But he’s never made me quite angry enough at him to sail off without him . . . and I did bark at the Alexandrians before he did, curse it. I guess I’m likely not the first captain he’s aggravated, that’s all,”

  “Well, there goes the last grain ship,” Sostratos said. “Many goodbyes to them—but I wouldn’t wish pirates on anybody.”

  “No, neither would I,” Menedemos said, and then, “Well, hardly anybody.”

  He couldn’t tell by the coastline where Lykia stopped and Pamphylia began—the difference lay in the people, not the landscape. But Olbia, a strong fortress on the far side of the Kataraktes River, unquestionably belonged to Pamphylia. The Kataraktes lived up to its name, rushing down from the mountains in back of Olbia toward the sea and booming over the rocks as it came.

  Menedemos, used to the little Rhodian streams that dried up in the summertime, eyed the river with no small wonder. Sostratos smiled at him and asked, “If you think this is such a marvel, what will you make of the Nile if we go to Alexandria one day? “

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, my dear,” Menedemos replied. “But the Nile, I’m sure, doesn’t make such a racket as it flows into the Inner Sea.”

  “No, indeed. You’re right about that,” his cousin agreed. “The cataracts of the Nile are thousands of stadia up the stream. Herodotos talks about them.”

  “Herodotos talks about everything, doesn’t he?”

  “He was curious. He traveled all over the known world to find out what really happened, and how it happened, and, most important of all, why it happened. If it weren’t for him, there might not be any such thing as history today.”

  “And would we be any worse off if there weren’t?” Menedemos murmured. That horrified Sostratos no less than Teleutas had horrified Ptolemaios’ sailors. Menedemos had hoped it would.

  But then Sostratos gave him a sour smile. “You’re trying to poke me again. I’m sorry, best one, but I don’t feel like being poked.”

  “No, eh?” Menedemos used a finger to poke his cousin in the ribs. Sostratos yelped. Then he snapped at the finger as if he were a dog. Menedemos jerked it back in a hurry. They both laughed. Menedemos said, “If you think I look tasty, you haven’t been taking enough opson with your sitos. You need to eat better.”

  “If I wanted to eat well all the time, I wouldn’t go to sea,” Sostratos answered. “Stale bread, cheese, olives, dried fish . . . Not your opsophagos’ feast. And what you can get in a portside tavern isn’t much better. You can’t catch enough fish from an akatos to make for much in the way of fancy opson, and, even if you could, you couldn’t cook it in any particularly interesting ways.”

  “Nothing wrong with grilling a fish on a brazier,” Menedemos said. “These fancy chefs who want to smother everything in cheese aren’t half so smart as they think they are.”

  “Don’t let your Sikon hear that,” Sostratos warned him. “He’ll throw you out of his kitchen on your ear.”

  “Oh, no.” Menedemos tossed his head. “Sikon’s a good cook, but that doesn’t mean he’s always fancy. He says sometimes cooks use those complicated, spicy sauces because they don’t want you to know they’ve botched the cooking of the fish itself.”

  “I wouldn’t want to argue with him.”

  “Neither would I, by Zeus!” Menedemos said. “Nobody in his right mind would want to pick a quarrel with Sikon. He’s one of those slaves who’ve been there forever and think the place is really theirs. And that’s part of the trouble he’s having with Baukis.”

  “She thinks he has to watch every obolos?”

  “Partly that. And partly she’s my father’s second wife, so she doesn’t think she gets the respect she deserves.” Menedemos laughed. He could talk about, even think about, Baukis as long as he did so impersonally. He went on, “And, of course, Sikon doesn’t give anybody any more respect than he has to, and not as much as he should. That’s why they squabble all the time.”

  “What does your father say?”

  “As little as he can. He doesn’t want to make Baukis angry, but he doesn’t want to make Sikon angry, either.” Menedemos rolled his eyes. “If he were as mild with me as he is with them, we’d get along a lot better.”

  “If he won’t do anything to end the bickering, isn’t ending the bickering your place?” Sostratos asked.

  “Well, it might be, if I weren’t at sea half the year. And I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of the quarrel, either. Sikon’s a jewel. I don’t want him mad at me. And I don’t want to get my stepmother”—he chuckled at that; the idea still struck him as absurd—”upset, either. That might make my father give me an even harder time than he does already.”

  What he wanted to do with Baukis, to Baukis, would make his father give him something worse than a hard time. So far, here as in few other places, his will had ruled his desires. That was what a man was supposed to do. Having desires was one thing, acting on them when they were foolish something else again. In the Iliad, both Agamemnon and Akhilleus had put their individual desires above what was good for the strong-greaved Akhaioi, and both had suffered because of it.

  “You do make sense,” Sostratos said. “You make more sense than usual, as a matter of fact.” He reached out and set a hand on Menedemos’ forehead. “Are you feeling all right, my dear?”

  “I was, till you started bothering me.” Menedemos shook the hand away.

  His cousin laughed. “That sounds more like you. Are you enough like yourself to answer a question?”

  “Depends on what it is,” Menedemos replied. More than once, Sostratos had asked why he seemed quieter and gloomier than usual. He’d given either evasive replies or none. He didn’t intend to tell Sostratos or anyone else what he thought about his father’s second wife, what he wanted to do with her.

  But Sostratos had something else in mind; “From where along the coast do you want to sail for Cyprus?”

  “Ah,” Menedemos beamed at his cousin. That was a completely legitimate question, and one he’d bee
n thinking about himself. “I’d like to go a good deal farther east before I swing the ship south across the Inner Sea. The shortest passage between the mainland and the island, I think, is about four hundred stadia.”

  “Yes, I believe that’s about right,” Sostratos agreed. “My only reservation is, this whole southern coast of Anatolia—Lykia, Pamphylia, Kilikia-—crawls with pirates. I was just wondering if you’d weighed the risk of a longer voyage over the open sea against that of an attack as we make our way east.”

  “Not easy to do,” Menedemos said slowly. “There are always risks when you cross the open sea. You can’t avoid them. That’s why you stay within sight of land whenever you can—unless you’re going somewhere downhill, so to speak, the way Alexandria is from Cyprus, where you can really count on the wind wafting you along during the sailing season. Pirates, now, pirates are different. They might not bother us at all, and there’s no risk to sailing east if they don’t.”

  “Of course there’s a risk,” Sostratos said. “They might attack. That’s what makes a. risk. If we knew they would attack, it wouldn’t be a risk any more. It would be a certainty.”

  “Have it your way, then. I think we’re saying the same thing in different words. But I don’t know how to weigh the one risk against the other. Since it’s easier to gauge the risk of sailing across the open sea, that’s the one I want to cut out as far as I can.”

  “All right,” Sostratos said. “I’m not sure I agree with you, but I’m not sure I don’t, either. You’re the captain.”

  “Would k make you happier if I talk to Diokles before I finally make up my mind?” Menedemos asked.

  Sostratos dipped his head. “I’m always happy when you talk to Diokles. He’s forgotten more in the way of seamanship than most people ever learn.”

  “I’m not interested in what he’s forgotten, I’m interested in what he remembers.”

  But the oarmaster proved less helpful than Menedemos had hoped. He scratched his chin as he thought it over. At last, he said, “I’ve seen skippers do both, matter of fact. Six oboloi to the drakhma either way.”

  “Well, in that case, I’m going to keep sailing along the coast here, as I’d planned,” Menedemos said. “Even if a pirate does look us over, we aren’t likely to have to fight him. Most of them want easy pickings—a round ship with only a few sailors aboard that’s too slow to run away and too weak to fight back. They can see that we’d give ‘em a good battle even if they did manage to catch us.”

  “Most of them can,” Diokles agreed. “Of course, there’s always the odd bastard you can’t count on, like that fellow in the strait between Andros and Euboia last season.”

  Menedemos relayed most of Diokles’ opinion to Sostratos. He didn’t mention the pirate who’d attacked them the previous sailing season. He knew what his cousin would do on hearing about that pirate and his crew: he would start cursing them for stealing the gryphon’s skull. Menedemos had heard those curses too many times to want to listen to them again.

  Sostratos said, “It’s your choice to make, I hope it turns out well,”

  “You’re not going to make doleful comments like that till we get to Cyprus, are you?” Menedemos asked. “They don’t make the crew very happy, you know.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll keep my mouth shut. I do know the difference between what I can say to you and what I can say when the sailors are listening, believe me.”

  “I hope so.” But Menedemos didn’t press it. His cousin had always been good about keeping his opinions to himself when they might damage morale. To change the subject, Menedemos asked, “Shall we find the market square here? You never can tell what they might have.”

  “Yes, we might as well, because you never can.” By Sostratos’ expression, he hoped for another gryphon s skull. But he also remembered the practical side a merchant needed, for he went on, “And I’ll bring some perfume along. You never can tell what we might sell, either.”

  “No, indeed,” Menedemos said. “If we sold a book in Phaselis, by the gods, we can sell anything anywhere.”

  But Olbia’s agora, close by the harbor, proved a disappointment. It wasn’t that the market square had nothing for sale, only that it had nothing to warm the heart of an akatos’ captain. The Olbians bought and sold grain and olives and local wine and dried and fresh fish and plain pots— all useful stuff, but none of it worth Menedemos’ while. There was also a separate timber market next to the main agora, but that didn’t interest him, either.

  “Round ships would do splendid business here,” he said. “As for us ...” He put a hand in front of his mouth, as if hiding a yawn.

  “I know.” Sostratos sounded gloomy, too, “You couldn’t imagine a more ordinary place if you tried for a year,” He raised his voice nevertheless: “Perfume! Fine perfume from Rhodian roses!”

  People walked by without even looking. “I wonder if they have noses here,” Menedemos grumbled. “By the way some of them smell, I doubt it.”

  “Fine Rhodian perfume!” Sostratos called again, before going on in a lower voice, “You never can tell. That hetaira in Miletos last summer—”

  “Oh, you lucky dog!” Menedemos said. “That she wanted silk was one thing. That she wanted you, too ...” Such things happened to him now and again. He hadn’t expected them to happen to his staid cousin.

  Thinking along with him, Sostratos answered, “You can’t have all the luck all the time, you know. Some of it has to stick to other people, too.”

  “Oh? Why?” Menedemos asked.

  “That’s an argument for another day, my dear,” Sostratos said as he held out a jar of perfume to a passerby. “From Rhodes. The finest. . .”

  The passerby kept walking. Sostratos’ shoulders slumped. “This is the hardest part of the business for me: telling strangers they ought to buy something from me, I mean.”

  “Well, how will they know if you don’t tell them?” Menedemos asked reasonably.

  “I keep telling myself the same thing,” Sostratos said. “It helps, but only so much. Then I remember how it annoys me when I’m walking through the agora at Rhodes to have some loudmouthed, quick-talking fellow from another polis stick something under my nose and tell me I can’t hope to live another day without it, whatever it is.”

  “But you buy every once in a while, don’t you?” Menedemos said. “I know I do.”

  “Yes, but I always feel like a fool afterwards,” Sostratos said.

  “That’s not the point,” Menedemos said. “The point is, every so often somebody will part with his silver. And who cares how he feels afterwards?”

  As if to prove the point, they did make some sales. The first was to a Hellene a few years older than they were, who said, “I just got married a couple of months ago. I think my wife would like this, don’t you?”

  “Would you expect us to say no?” Sostratos asked.

  “Pay no attention to him, best one,” Menedemos told the prospective customer. “He’s too honest for his own good.” He laughed.

  So did the newly wed Hellene. After a moment, halfheartedly, so did Sostratos. The local himself smelled powerfully of fish. Fish scales glinted on his arms and legs and on his chiton. Probably in the dried-fish trade, Menedemos judged. Whatever trade he was in, he made good money at it, for he paid the Rhodians’ price with little haggling.

  Menedemos didn’t doubt the trade of the next fellow who stopped before them. The sword on his belt and the scars on his face and right arm proclaimed him a soldier. So did his Macedonian accent, which was so thick as to be almost unintelligible. Little by little, Menedemos gathered that he wanted the perfume for a hetaira named Gnathaina.

  “Ah, she calls herself after her jaw, eh?” Menedemos had to tap his own jaw—gnatbos in Greek—to get the Macedonian to understand what he meant.

  “Aye, so she do,” the soldier said at last.

  “Well, friend, is she good with that jaw of hers?” Menedemos asked with a wink. The Macedonian didn’t follow that at all. He
did buy the perfume, though, which was what really mattered.

  They made their biggest sale of the day as the sun sank in the direction of Lykia. The fellow who bought several jars was plump and prosperous, as smoothly shaven a man as Menedemos had ever seen. He couldn’t decide if the local was Hellene or Pamphylian; most of the people hereabouts spoke Greek with the same slightly nasal accent. Whatever he was, the Olbian already smelled sweet.

  He also haggled with great enthusiasm and persistence, and he got a better price for his perfume than either the newlywed or the Macedonian. After he’d clasped hands on the bargain, he said, “My girls will be happy to daub this stuff on.”

  “Your girls?” A lamp went on in Menedemos’ head. “You keep a brothel?”

  “That’s right,” the sleek fellow answered. “I’ll do plenty of extra business on account of this, too. Men want their girls smelling good, not all sweaty and nasty.” He hesitated. A moment later, when he asked, “You and your friend here feel like one on the house?” Menedemos understood why: generosity warring with a brothelkeeper’s usual stinginess. For a wonder, generosity won.

  “What do you think?” Menedemos asked, expecting his cousin to toss his head.

  But Sostratos said, “Why not? Been awhile since I had a little fun.” He turned to the brothelkeeper. “The sun will probably have set by the time we have to go back to the harbor. Will you give us a torchbearer to light the way?”

  “Certainly, best one,” the man said. “You’ll be a paying customer if you come for another go tomorrow, or I may want to buy something else from you. Either way, I can’t afford to have you knocked over the head.”

  He sounded perfectly serious, as if he wouldn’t have cared what happened to the Rhodians if it weren’t for the off chance he might do business with them again one day. And he probably wouldn’t. Traveling all over the Inner Sea, Menedemos had got to know a fair number of brothelkeepers. Their trade made them hard and remorselessly practical.

  “Well, come on,” the fellow said now. He sounded resigned; he might be regretting his impulse of a moment before but without any good way to go back on it.