The Sacred Land

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he sleeps for the next ten days.” Menedemos paused to pull his soaked chiton off over his head and stand naked in the sunshine that had returned. After a moment, Sostratos followed his example. Most ordinary sailors went naked all the time at sea. The few who usually wore loincloths had already shed them.

“That reminds me-when we get to Phoenicia, we’ll make people upset if we take off our clothes whenever we happen to feel like it,” Sostratos said.

“Catering to the foolish prejudices of barbarians goes against my grain,” Menedemos said.

“Does making a profit go against your grain?” Sostratos asked. “If we offend our customers, will they want to trade with us?”

Menedemos grunted. That made more sense than he wanted to admit. Himilkon always wore long, flowing robes, no matter how hot the weather got. The same held true for other Phoenician merchants he’d seen in Hellenic poleis. “Very well,” he said, “As long as I don’t have to put on shoes.”

“Himilkon didn’t say anything about bare feet,” Sostratos told him. “I don’t want to wear shoes, either.” Sailors always went barefoot aboard ship, and they kept up the habit on land, too.

Peering south, Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That squall line’s already out of sight. It could have been a lot worse for us. A ship that isn’t quick or lucky could go to the bottom,”

“Let’s hope a couple of pirates did,” Sostratos said.

“Yes!” Menedemos dipped his head, “If navies don’t care about keeping pirates down, maybe the gods will take care of it for us.”

“Maybe.” But Sostratos didn’t sound convinced. “I wish the gods had done a better job up till now.”

“Oh, go howl,” Menedemos said. “You always have reasons not to believe in anything.”

“That’s not true, and it’s not fair, either,” his cousin answered. “I’m trying to find the truth and to live by it. If you want to follow the first story you happen to hear, go right ahead. I can’t stop you.”

They glared at each other. Their own squall seemed as bad as the one that had blown out to sea. For the next couple of hours, they said not a word to each other. Sostratos watched birds and flying fish and leaping dolphins. Menedemos steered the Aphrodite toward Myra, where he’d been heading before the storm hit.

There were plenty of other places to anchor if he didn’t make Myra by nightfall. The Lykian coastline might have had fewer long, projecting fingers of land than did that of Karia, but it was full of little inlets and harbors and coastal villages. The only trouble with them was, Menedemos wanted nothing to do with them. Every other village kept a pirate ship or two ready to sally forth against any quarry that looked catchable. Menedemos was usually sad and sorry when fishing boats fled from the akatos. In these waters, he was just as well pleased the Aphrodite so closely resembled a pirate ship herself.

When Myra came into sight, Diokles let out a sigh of relief. “This place is big enough for Ptolemaios’ men to garrison, same as Patara was,” he said. “They wouldn’t bother with all those little hamlets in between Patara and here. The Lykians in them have got to be as wild as they were in Sarpedon’s day.”

“Sarpedon was the son of Zeus, or that’s what the Iliad says,” Menedemos answered. “If you ask me, the Lykians nowadays are mostly sons of whores.”

The oarmaster laughed. “If you think I’m going to quarrel with you, skipper, you’d better think again.”

Myra itself lay about twenty stadia inland--far enough, Menedemos thought uneasily, to make an attack from the sea harder than it would be if the place were right there by the shore. A couple of war galleys flying Ptolemaios’ eagle and several round ships lay at anchor in the bay in front of the town. They all hailed the Aphrodite when she came into the harbor. Her sleek lines once more created some alarm, but Menedemos did manage to convince the officers aboard the triremes he was a Rhodian, not a pirate with more nerve than was good for him.

He was eating barley rolls for sitos with an uninspiring opson of salt fish when a coughing roar came from the mainland. Even though his ship bobbed a couple of plethra offshore, his hand froze halfway to his mouth. The hair at the back of his neck tried to stand up. “What’s that?” he said, his voice high and shrill. He felt foolish as soon as he spoke; he knew what that was, all right.

“A lion,” Sostratos answered. “It is an awe-inspiring noise, isn’t it?”

“I should say so!” Only then did Menedemos remember he’d quarreled with his cousin. He shrugged. How could a mere quarrel survive in the face of… that?

Sostratos might have been thinking along with him. “Well, my dear,” he said, “we aren’t eaten yet, by lions or by sea jackals.”

“No, not yet,” Menedemos agreed. “Do you suppose Myra has anything worth buying, or shall we press on?”

“I’d go on,” Sostratos said. “How many lion skins can we carry?”

Menedemos thought it over, then dipped his head.

3

Myra had struck Sostratos as nothing out of the ordinary. Phaselis, on the other hand-the last Lykian city to the east- impressed him a good deal more. It was large enough to boast three harbors. The locals fished not only on the sea but also in a nearby lake. The population was a mixture of Lykians and Hellenes.

As the Aphrodite tied up at a quay, Menedemos said, “I wish we had a letter or a friendship token from that Euxenides we carried last year. He was about the best carpenter I’ve ever seen-and if he still has kin here in Phaselis, they’d probably feast us for taking him out of danger.”

“Well, they might,” Sostratos answered. “But even if they did, would we want them to? Euxenides was one of Antigonos’ officers, remember, and Ptolemaios is lord of Phaselis-for the time being, anyhow.”

His cousin grunted. “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right, no doubt about it. If Euxenides’ relatives are all for old One-Eye, Ptolemaios’ men won’t be very happy about them… or about us for dealing with them.”

“That’s what I meant,” Sostratos said. “This whole business of trading is hard enough without getting soldiers angry at you. And speaking of trading, what do they sell here? Hides, I suppose, and timber, which we’ve got no real use for.”

Menedemos’ smile was almost a leer. It said, I know something you don’t know. Sostratos hated being on the receiving end of a smile like that. He hated having other people know things he didn’t, too. Menedemos, who knew him as well as anyone, undoubtedly also knew that. “You were studying Phoenicia and Aramaic so hard, you forgot to pay attention to how we would get there.”

Sostratos said something in Aramaic. Not only was it splendidly vulgar in its own right, it sounded like a man ripping a thick piece of cloth in half. Best of all, Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it. Returning to Greek, Sostratos said, “What do they have here, then?”

“Why, smoked fish,” Menedemos answered. The fearsome noises Sostratos had just made kept him from rubbing it in. “This place is supposed to have some of the best smoked fish in the world.”

“Papai!” Sostratos said.

“What’s the matter?” his cousin asked.

“I actually knew that, but it had gone clean out of my head.”

“I’m not surprised, my dear. You’ve got so many useless facts jostling and crowding each other in there, it’s no wonder some of them fall out now and again.”

“But they shouldn’t.” Sostratos hated forgetting things. A man who prided himself on his wits naturally worried about any failure. He changed the subject, as much for his own sake as for Menedemos’. “If it’s good enough, we can carry smoked fish to Phoenicia.”

“Better than the dried and salted stuff that usually travels.” The horrible face Menedemos made showed his opinion of that, though the Aphrodite carried some to feed its crew. “We ought to be able to charge enough to make it profitable, too. That’s your job, of course.”