The Sacred Land

He kept hoping Andronikos would ask him to stop or call him back as he started out of the chamber. Andronikos didn’t. He stood silent as a stone. Menedemos slammed the door on the way out, hard enough to rattle it on the pivoting pegs set into the floor and the lintel. That made him feel better for a moment, but it did nothing to bring back the business he’d hoped to have.

Lapheides was not a man he would have called particularly clever. The sailor did have the sense to wait till they’d left the barracks before asking, “What do we do now, skipper?”

It was a good question. It was, in fact, an excellent question. Menedemos wished he had an excellent answer for it, or even a good one. Being without either, he shrugged and said, “We go back to the Aphrodite and see what happens next. Whatever it is, I don’t see how it can be much worse than this.”

After a couple of heartbeats of thought, Lapheides dipped his head. “Neither do I,” he said. Menedemos would sooner have had consolation. Since he could find none himself, though, he didn’t see how he could blame Lapheides for also being unable to come up with any.

Sheep grazed and bleated around the little village nestled between hills and flatlands. Dogs barked at Sostratos and his sailors as they walked into the place. As often happened, some of the bigger, fiercer dogs made rushes at them. Teleutas scooped up an egg-sized stone and flung it. It caught the biggest, meanest dog right in the nose. The beast’s snarls turned to yips of pain. It turned tail and ran. The rest of the dogs suddenly seemed to have second thoughts.

“Euge!” Sostratos said. “Now we won’t have to beat them back with our spearshaft and swords. I hope we won’t, anyhow. People don’t like it when they see us laying into their animals.”

“They don’t care when they see the gods-detested dogs trying to bite us, though,” Teleutas said. “They think that’s fu

Aside from the dogs-some of which still barked and growled from a safe distance, which argued they’d had more than a few rocks thrown at them before-the hamlet was quiet. No sooner had that crossed Sostratos’ mind than he tossed his head. It didn’t just seem quiet. It seemed more nearly dead.

But a dead village wouldn’t have had flocks grazing around it. Its buildings wouldn’t have been in such good repair. Smoke wouldn’t have risen from the vent holes in several roofs.

On the other hand, when strangers came to most villages, the locals came tumbling out of their houses to stare and point and exclaim. Up till now, that had seemed as much a truth in these parts as it would have back in Hellas. Not here. Everything stayed quiet except for the dogs.

Just before Sostratos and the sailors got to the center of the hamlet, an old man who wore a head scarf in place of a hat came out of one of the bigger houses and looked them over. “May the gods bless you and keep you, my master,” Sostratos said in his best Aramaic. “Please tell us the name of this place.”

The old man stared back without a word for an u

Excitement tingled through Sostratos. “The one god, you say?” he asked, and the old man nodded. Sostratos went on, “Then I have come to the land of Ioudaia?”

“Yes, this is the land of Ioudaia,” the old man said. “Who are you, stranger, that you need to ask such a thing?”

Bowing, Sostratos answered, “Peace be unto you, my master. I am Sostratos son of Lysistratos, of Rhodes. I have come to trade in this land.”

“And to you also peace. Sostratos son of Lysistratos.” The local tasted the unfamiliar syllables. After another long pause, he said, “You would be one of those Ionians, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Sostratos said, resigned to being an Ionian in these parts despite his Doric roots. “What is your name, my master, if your slave may ask?”

“I am Ezer son of Shobal,” the old man replied.

“Is all well here?” Sostratos asked. “No pestilence, nothing like that?”

Ezer had formidable gray eyebrows and a beaky nose. When he frowned, he looked like a bird of prey. “No, there is no pestilence. May the one god forbid it. Why do you ask?”

“Everything is very quiet here.” Sostratos waved his arms to help show what he meant. “No one works.”

“Works?” Ezer son of Shobal frowned again, even more fiercely than before. He shook his head. “Of course no one works today. Today is the sabbath.”

“Your slave prays pardon, but he does not know that word,” Sostratos said.

“You did not learn this tongue from a man of Ioudaia, then,” Ezer said.

Once more, Sostratos had to remember to nod instead of dipping his head. “No, I did not. I learned from a Phoenician. Truly you are very wise.” Yes, flattery seemed built into Aramaic.

“A Phoenician? I might have known.” By the way Ezer said it, he had as much scorn for Phoenicians as Himilkon had for Ioudaioi. “The one god commands us to rest one day in seven. That is the sabbath. Today is the seventh day, and so… we rest.”

“I see.” What Sostratos saw was why these Ioudaioi had never amounted to anything in the wider world, and why they never would. If they wasted one day in seven, how could they keep up with their neighbors? He marveled that they hadn’t already been altogether swept away. “Where can my men and I buy food?” he asked. “We have come a long way today. We too are tired.”

Ezer son of Shobal shook his head again. “You do not see, Ionian. Sostratos.” He carefully sounded out the name. “I told you, this is the sabbath. The one god decrees we may not work on this day. Selling food is work. Until the sun sets, we may not do it. I am sorry.” He sounded not the least bit sorry. He sounded proud.

Himilkon had warned that the Ioudaioi had set ideas about their religion. Sostratos saw he’d known what he was talking about. “Will someone draw water from the well for us?” he asked. “You have a well, I hope?”

“We have a well. No one will draw water for you, though, not till after sunset. That is also work.”

“May we draw water ourselves?”

Now Ezer nodded. “Yes, you may do that. You are no part of us.”

No, and I wouldn’t want to be any part of you, either, Sostratos thought. He wondered how he would live in a land where religious law so closely hemmed in everything these people did. His first thought was that he would simply go mad.

But then he wondered about that. If he’d been raised from childhood to find that law right and proper and necessary, wouldn’t he come to believe it was? Even in Hellas, thoughtless people blindly believed in the gods. Here in Ioudaia, it seemed, everyone believed in their strange, invisible deity. If I’d been born a loudaian, I suppose I would, too.

The more Sostratos thought about that, the more it frightened him. He bowed to Ezer. “Thank you for your kindness, my master.”

“You are welcome,” the old man replied. “You ca

He means that, Sostratos realized in astonishment. Ezer son of Shobal was as proud to belong to his narrow little backwoods tribe as Sostratos was to be a Hellene. It would have been fu

“What are you and this big-nosed old geezer going on about?” Teleutas asked.

Ezer didn’t change expression. No, of course he doesn’t speak Greek, Sostratos told himself. All the same… “You want to be careful how you talk about people here. You never can tell when one of them may understand some of our tongue.”