As soon as Menedemos finished eating, he hurried out of the taproom and into the cramped, stuffy little chamber where he’d sleep tonight. He didn’t even bother lighting the lamp. He just took off his chiton, made sure the door was barred from the inside, and lay down naked on the narrow bed. To his surprise, he quickly fell asleep.
Not very much to his surprise, he was awakened some unknown stretch of time later by someone softly tapping on the door. Maybe she’ll go away if I lie here quietly and pretend to stay asleep, he thought.
He tried it. Emashtart didn’t go away. She kept right on tapping, louder and louder. At last, he doubted whether a dead man could have ignored her. Muttering to himself, he got out of bed and went to the door. “Who is it?” he asked, there being one chance in a myriad it was somebody besides the innkeeper’s wife.
But she answered, “I are it.”
“What do you want?” Menedemos asked. “And what hour is it, anyway? “
“Not knowing hours,” Emashtart said. “Want hinein”
Menedemos coughed. He gave back a pace. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised she knew the nastiest, lewdest verb in the Greek language, but he was. The word had implications of taking by force that usually made it implausible when used by a woman to a man; with her speaking, though, it somehow seemed anything but.
“In the name of the gods, go away,” he said. “I’m too tired.”
“Want binein,” she said again. “Want binein!” She was almost shouting, careless of what the other luckless lodgers at the inn might think. Had she spent all this time pouring down wine and thinking of assaulting Menedemos?
“No,” he said. “Not now. Go away.”
“To let in,” the Phoenician woman said. “Want binein! To be happies.”
Was this what women felt when some obnoxious man wouldn’t leave them alone? Menedemos had had some idea of what that was like; as a youth in Rhodes, he’d had plenty of suitors sniffing after him. But what he’d known then was chiefly scorn for the silly men who chased him. Now he felt real annoyance—and fear, too, for, in a city of her own people, Emashtart might be able to cause him a lot of trouble. He didn’t dare let her in now, lest she claim he’d tried to rape her instead of the other way round.
She started to say something else. Before she could, a man in a nearby room yelled in Aramaic. Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it, but he would have bet the other man was telling her to shut up and let him get some sleep. In the other fellow’s place, that was what Menedemos would have said.
Emashtart shouted back, anger in her voice. The man in the other room gave as good as he got. He and the innkeeper’s wife went back and forth at the top of their lungs. Menedemos couldn’t follow their argument, but it sounded spectacular. Aramaic, with its gutturals and hisses, was made for quarreling.
The racket Emashtart and the first man made disturbed others at the inn. Before long, six or eight people were shouting at one another. They all sounded furious. For the next quarter of an hour, Menedemos hadn’t the slightest hope of sleeping, but he was entertained.
At last, the bickering died away. Menedemos wondered whether Emashtart would start scratching at his door again. To his vast relief, she didn’t. He twisted and turned on the narrow, lumpy bed, and finally went back to sleep.
When he came out the next morning, he found Sedek-yathon sitting on a stool in the taproom drinking a cup of wine. The innkeeper looked somewhat the worse for wear. Menedemos wondered how much he’d drunk the night before. But that didn’t matter. Sedek-yathon spoke more Greek than his wife. That did. Menedemos said, “I’m sorry, best one, but I have to move back to my ship today.”
“You say you stay till new moon,” the innkeeper said. “You already pay to stay to new moon. Not get silver back.”
Normally, that would have infuriated the Rhodian. Here, he only shrugged. “Fine,” he said. He would have paid more than a few drakhmai to escape the inn. He gathered up his belongings and headed back to the Aphrodite. In some ways, he wouldn’t be so comfortable. In others ... In others, he couldn’t wait to return to the merchant galley.
Growing up in Rhodes, Sostratos had never seen snow fall till he went to Athens to study at the Lykeion. Even in Athens, snow had been rare. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about heat. Engedi, on the shore of the Lake of Asphalt, proved he hadn’t known so much as he thought.
Whenever he went out of doors, the sun beat down on him with almost physical force. He wore his broad-brimmed hat every moment of the day and imagined he felt the weight of the sunlight pressing it down onto his head. Even the air seemed heavy and thick and suffused with sunshine.
And yet, despite that suffocating heat, despite the poisonously salty lake and the wasteland all around, Engedi lay in the midst of a patch of some of the most fertile soil he’d ever seen. As he’d guessed, springs bubbling up from underground let life not only survive but flourish here.
Outside the walls of Engedi, persimmon trees and henna plants grew among other crops. Sostratos knew the balsam-makers turned their sap into the medicinal, sweet-smelling product for which the town was famous. Just how they did it, he didn’t know. No one outside of Engedi did. He tossed his head. Since coming to Ioudaia, he’d learned that wasn’t quite true. One other place, a town called Jericho, also produced the balsam.
He shrugged. The stuff was always called balsam of Engedi. If he bought it here, he could truthfully say he had the authentic product.
More persimmon trees grew in front of the house of Eliphaz son of Gatam, the leading balsam-maker in Engedi. In the savage weather the land here by the Lake of Asphalt knew, their shade was doubly welcome.
A skinny, black-bearded slave opened the door when Sostratos knocked. “Peace be unto you, my master,” he said in Aramaic with an accent slightly different from that which the Ioudaioi used.
“And to you also peace, Mesha,” Sostratos replied. Mesha was a Moabite, one of the nomads who, Sostratos had learned since coming to Engedi, dwelt in the desert east of the Lake of Asphalt. Sostratos didn’t know by what misfortune he’d ended up a slave. Getting captured on a raid struck the Rhodian as likely; Mesha had the look of a man who would rob for the sport of it.
“May Khemosh favor you, Ionian,” Mesha said. Khemosh was a Moabite god. Sostratos would have liked to find out more about him, but Mesha named him only furtively; Eliphaz didn’t approve of anyone’s calling on any god in his house save the invisible one the Ioudaioi worshiped. In a lower voice yet, the Moabite added, “May you swindle the beard off my master’s chin.” He might be a slave, but he wasn’t resigned to serving the balsam-maker.
Another persimmon tree and a pale-barked fig spread shade over Eliphaz’s courtyard. The Ioudaian waited in that shade. He was tall and solidly made, and within a few years of forty: Sostratos could see the first few white threads in his dark beard. Inclining his head to Sostratos, he said, “Peace be unto you, Ionian.”
“And to you also peace, my master,” Sostratos said politely.
“My thanks.” Eliphaz son of Gatam clapped his hands. “Fetch us wine, Mesha.” Nodding, the slave hurried away. Eliphaz muttered something under his breath. It sounded like lizard-eating savage. Maybe he had no more love for Mesha than the Moabite did for him.
The wine was good enough without being anything special. Sostratos, unaccustomed to wine without water, drank carefully. After polite chitchat, he said, “Here is a jar of the fine Rhodian perfume I mentioned when we met yesterday.” With use, his own Aramaic got more fluent by the day.
“Let me smell of it,” Eliphaz said gravely. Sostratos handed him the small jar. He pulled out the stopper, sniffed, touched the rim of the jar, and rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “It is made with grease, I see. What is the grease?”
“Olive oil, my master, nothing else,” Sostratos replied.
“Ah.” A smile appeared on the balsam-maker’s face. “We may freely use olive oil, you understand. If it were animal
fat—especially if it were pig fat—I could not think of trading for it no matter how sweet it smells.”
“I understand that it is so, yes,” Sostratos said. “I do not understand why it is so. If you could make this plain, I would be in your debt.”
“It is so because the one god commands us to shun the pig and all other beasts that do not chew their cud and divide their hooves,” Eliphaz said.
Even that was more than Sostratos had known before. But it was not enough more to satisfy him. “Why does your one god command you so?” he asked.
“Why?” Now Eliphaz son of Gatam stared at him in amazement. “Who are we, to ask why the one god orders this or forbids that? It is his will. We can only obey, and obey we do.” He sounded proud of such obedience.
That struck Sostratos as very strange. It was as if a man declared he was proud to be a slave and had no desire for freedom. Since he saw no diplomatic way to say that to the balsam-maker, he let it go. He did say, “You can travel all over the world, my master, and you will find no sweeter, no stronger, no longer-lasting perfume than what we make on the island of Rhodes.”
“It could be. It is good perfume,” Eliphaz said. “But you, Ionian, you will find no finer balsam than what we make here by the Dead Sea.”
“Is that what you name the water?” Sostratos said. Eliphaz nodded. Sostratos said, “I have also heard it called the Lake of Asphalt.”
“Call it whatever you please,” the Ioudaian said. “But we trade our balsam for silver, weight for weight. How do we make the scales balance with perfume?”
All around the Inner Sea, Phoenician merchants traded balsam of Engedi for twice its weight in silver. Sostratos wanted some of that profit for himself. He said, “I do not sell perfume by weight, but by the jar. For each jar, I would hope to get twenty Sidonian sigloi.”
Eliphaz laughed. “You might hope to get so much, but how likely is it? If you think I will give you twenty shekels’ weight of balsam for one of those paltry little jars, I must ask you to think again.”
“Perfume jars are small because what they hold is boiled many times to make it stronger,” Sostratos said. “All this takes much labor. So does gathering the roses to make the perfume.”
“Do you think there is no labor in making balsam?” Eliphaz demanded.
“Not only is there labor, there is the secret. No one but we of Engedi knows how to do what needs doing.”
“What of the men of Jericho?” Sostratos asked.
“Frauds! Fakes! Phonies, the lot of them!” Eliphaz said. “Our balsam, the balsam of Engedi, is far finer than theirs.”
“Well, my master, all trades have secrets,” Sostratos said. “You grow roses here. Do you make perfume? I think not.”
“Our secret is harder and more important,” the Ioudaian insisted.
“You would say so, of course,” Sostratos answered politely.
Eliphaz muttered in Aramaic. “You are worse than a Phoenician,” he told Sostratos, who smiled as if what was meant for an insult were a compliment. That smile made Eliphaz mutter some more. He said, “Even if I were to give you ten shekels of balsam for one jar, it would be too much.”
“My master, it grieves me to tell a man so obviously wise that he is wrong,” Sostratos said. “But you must know you are speaking nonsense. If you truly believed a jar of perfume was worth less than ten sigloi”—he still had trouble pronouncing the sh sound that began shekels, a sound Greek didn’t use—”you would throw me out, and that would be the end of our dicker.”
“Not necessarily,” Eliphaz said. “I might simply want something to amuse me. And I tell you straight out, it has been a long time since I heard anything so funny as the idea of paying twenty shekels of balsam for a jar of your perfume. You must think that because you come from far away and I stay in Engedi I have no notion of what anything is worth.”
“Certainly not,” said Sostratos, who had hoped for something exactly like that. “But think, my master. How often does Rhodian perfume come here to your town?”
“None has ever come here before,” Eliphaz told him. “And if the price you want for it is any indication, I can understand why not.”
Patiently, Sostratos said, “But when you have the only fine perfume in these parts, for how much will you sell it? Do not think only of prices. Remember, think also of profit after you buy.”
Eliphaz’s smile bared strong yellowish teeth. “I am not a child, Ionian. I am not a blushing virgin brought to the marriage bed. I know about buying, and I know about selling. And suppose I said, all right, I will give you ten shekels’ weight of balsam for a jar. Yes, suppose I said that. You would only scorn me. You would say, ‘It is not enough. You are a thief.’ “
Sostratos smiled, too. He thought he recognized an opening gambit there. “Ten sigloi are not enough,” he agreed, and he let the smile get broader. “You are a thief, my master.”
In Greek, he would have been sure he sounded like a man playacting. In Aramaic, he only hoped he did. When Eliphaz son of Gatam laughed out loud, he grinned with relief: he’d done it right. “You are a dangerous man, Sostratos son of Lysistratos,” the Ioudaian said.
“I do not want to be dangerous,” Sostratos said. “I only want to trade.”
“Ha! So you say. So you say.” Eliphaz shook his head. “Even if I said ten shekels and a half for one of those nasty little jars, still would you laugh. You would not come down at all, not even by one of those tiny coins the governors issue.”
That was an opening gambit. Sostratos realized he would have to move, that he would lose any chance of a deal if he didn’t. “I will come as far as you have come. If you pay me nineteen and a half sigloi of balsam the jar, the perfume is yours.”
“Mesha!” Eliphaz shouted. When the Moabite slave came up, the balsam-maker said, “Fetch more wine. Fetch it at once. We have work to do here, and wine will grease the way.”
Muttering, the slave went off to get the wine. He was still muttering when he came back with it. When he was a free man, had he had Ioudaioi serving him? Raids across a long-established border could produce ironies like that.
Eliphaz haggled as if he had all the time in the world. Plainly, dickering was among his favorite sports. Sostratos knew Hellenes who took the same pleasure in the act of making the deal. He wasn’t among them, though he wanted the best price he could get.
The best price he could get turned out to be fourteen and a half sigloi of balsam per jar of perfume. Eliphaz son of Gatam stubbornly refused to go to fifteen. “I do not need perfume so badly as that,” the Ioudaian said. “It is too much. I will not pay it.”
That left Sostratos muttering to himself. He knew what he could get for the balsam once he took it back to Hellas, and he knew what he could get for the perfume in ports around the Inner Sea. He would make more for the balsam, yes. Would he make enough more to justify this long, dangerous trip to Engedi? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe not.
But, having come so far, could he justify turning around and going back to Sidon without balsam? He doubted he’d get a better price from any of the other balsam-makers; like any other group of artisans, they would talk among themselves. And he was sure he wouldn’t get a much better price.
Did you think this would be easy? he asked himself. Did you think Eliphaz would say, “Oh, twenty sigloi of balsam the jar isn‘t enough—let me give you thirty”? He knew perfectly well he’d thought nothing of the sort. Whether he had or not, though, it would have been nice.
“Fourteen and a half shekels,” Eliphaz said again. “Is it yes, my master, or is it no? If yes, we have a bargain. If no, I am pleased to have met you. Some Ionian soldiers have come here before, but never till now a trader.”
“Fourteen and a half,” Sostratos agreed unhappily, far from sure he was doing the right thing. “It is a bargain.”
“Whew!” the Ioudaian said. If that wasn’t a sigh of relief, it certainly sounded like one. “You are a formidable foe. I am glad most of your people stay far from
Engedi. I’d much sooner dicker with Phoenicians.”
Was that true? Or was he just saying it to make Sostratos feel better? It did the job, no doubt of that. “You are a hard bargainer yourself,” Sostratos said, and meant every word of it. He held out his hand.
Eliphaz took it. His grip was hard and firm. “A good bargain,” he declared. “Neither one of us is happy—it must be a good bargain.”
“Yes,” Sostratos said, and then, “A different question: may I bathe in the Lake of Asphalt? Does it hold up a bather so he cannot sink?”
“It does,” Eliphaz answered. “And of course you may. It is there.” He pointed east, toward the water. “How could anyone stop you?”
“May I bathe naked?” Sostratos persisted. “This is the custom of my people, but you Ioudaioi have different rules.”
“You may bathe naked,” Eliphaz said. “You would be polite to bathe well away from women and to dress as soon as you come out of the water. And do not get any of it in your eyes or in your mouth. It burns. It burns very much.”
“Thank you. I will do as you say,” Sostratos told him.
He got Aristeidas to come with him to make sure no light-fingered Ioudaian lifted his tunic after he doffed it. When he walked into the water, he exclaimed in astonishment; it was as warm as blood, as if it were a heated bath. The oceanic smell overwhelmed him. He walked out till the water covered his privates, to satisfy Ioudaian notions of modesty. Then he lifted his feet and leaned back to float.
He exclaimed all over again. Eliphaz had been right, and more than right. He could keep his head and shoulders and feet out of the supremely salty water with the greatest of ease. Indeed, when he tried to force more of his torso down into the Lake of Asphalt, other parts of him rose out of it. So long as that included only more of his long legs, he didn’t worry about it. When his groin bobbed up out of the water, though, he set a hand over it, lest he offend any Ioudaioi who happened to be keeping an eye on what a foreigner did.
“What’s it like?” Aristeidas called to him.
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