The Sacred Land

7

“How you is?” the i

“Good,” Menedemos answered in Greek. Then he said the same thing in Aramaic, of which he’d picked up a few words.

Sedek-yathon grunted. His wife, who was called Emashtart, smiled at Menedemos. “How clevers you am,” she said in her dreadful Greek. She rattled off a couple of sentences of Aramaic much too fast for him to follow.

“What?” Menedemos said.

Emashtart tried to explain it in Greek, but she lacked the vocabulary. She turned to her husband. Sedek-yathon was busy putting a new leg on a stool. He showed no interest in translating. His Greek was bad, too; odds were he couldn’t have done it if he’d wanted to. When he refused even to try, Emashtart started screeching at him.

“Hail,” Menedemos said, and left the i

Though the sun hadn’t been up long, the day promised brutal heat. The breeze came, not from the I

He stopped at a baker’s and bought a small loaf of bread. With a cup of wine from the first fellow he saw carrying a jug, it made a good enough breakfast. The cup, fortunately, was small; unlike Hellenes, Phoenicians didn’t believe in watering their wine and always drank it neat. A big mug of unmixed wine first thing in the morning would have set Menedemos’ head spi

Sidon was already bustling as he made his way through its narrow, winding streets toward the harbor and the Aphrodite . On days like this, the locals often tried to pack as much business as they could into the early morning and the late afternoon. When the heat was at its worst, they would close their shops and sleep, or at least rest, for a couple of hours. Menedemos wasn’t used to doing that, but he couldn’t deny it made a certain amount of sense.

Diokles waved to him when he came up the wharf. “Hail,” the oarmaster called. “How are you?”

“Glad to be here,” Menedemos answered. “Yourself?”

“I’m fine,” Diokles said. “Polykharmos came back to the ship last night shy a front tooth, though. Tavern brawl.” He shrugged. “Nobody pulled a knife, so it wasn’t a bad one. He was pretty drunk, but he kept going on about what he did to the other fellow.”

“Oh?” Menedemos raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t anybody ever tell him he shouldn’t lead with his face?”

The keleustes chuckled. “I guess not. Hasn’t been too bad here-I have to say that. Nobody’s been stabbed; nobody’s been badly hurt any other way. As often as not, you lose a man or two on a trading run.”

“I know.” Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic to turn aside the evil omen. Diokles did the same. “Gods prevent it,” Menedemos added.

“Here’s hoping,” Diokles agreed. “What are you going to do about Damonax’s olive oil and the rest of the food now, skipper?”

“To the crows with me if I know.” Menedemos melodramatically threw his hands in the air. “I thought I had a bargain with that whipworthy rogue of an Andronikos, but the abandoned catamite wouldn’t give me a decent price.”

“Quartermasters are cheese-parers,” Diokles said. “They always have been, and I expect they always will be. They don’t care if they serve their soldiers slop. If giving the men something better means costing them an extra obolos, they won’t do it. They figure you can fight as well on stale, moldy bread as on fresh-maybe better, because bad food makes you mean.”

“Every word you say is true, but there’s more to it than that,” Menedemos answered. “A lot of the time, every obolos a quartermaster doesn’t spend on his soldiers is an obolos he gets to keep for himself.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.” The oarmaster dipped his head. “Still, though, if I were in Antigonos’ army, I’d be careful about playing games like that. If old One-Eye caught me at ‘em, I’d end up on a cross like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“May Antigonos catch Andronikos, then. May he-” Menedemos broke off. Someone was coming up the pier toward the Aphrodite : a Hellene, surely, for no Phoenician would have worn a tunic that bared his arms to the shoulders and his legs to above the knee. Menedemos raised his voice: “Hail, friend! Do something for you?”

“You’re the fellow who brought that good olive oil to the barracks the other day, aren’t you?” the newcomer said. Before the Rhodian could answer, the man dipped his head and answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are.”

“That’s right.” Menedemos didn’t bother hiding his bitterness. “Your polluted quartermaster doesn’t want anything to do with it, though.”

“Andronikos can take it up the arse like a slave in a boy brothel for all of me,” the Hellene replied. “I know what he gives us, and I was one of the people who tasted what you’ve got. He may not want to buy any, but I do. How much do you want for a jar?”

“Thirty-five drakhmai,” Menedemos answered, as he had at the begi

He waited to see what counteroffer the Hellene would make. Hippokles, that’s what his name is, Menedemos remembered. He’d liked the oil a lot when he tried it. And now he didn’t make any counteroffer. He just dipped his head and said, “I’ll take two amphorai, then. That’d be thirty-five sigloi, near enough, right?”

“Right,” Menedemos said, doing his best to hide his surprise.

“Good.” Hippokles turned on his heel. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back. I’ve got to get the money and a couple of slaves to haul the jars.” Away he went.

“Well, well,” Menedemos said. “That’s better than nothing.” He laughed. “Of course, I would’ve sold Andronikos a lot more than two jars.”

Less than an hour later, Hippokles returned with two scrawny men in tow. He gave Menedemos a jingling handful of Sidonian coins. “Here you are, pal. Now I’ll put these lazy wretches to work.”

Menedemos counted the sigloi. Hippokles hadn’t tried to cheat him. Some of the coins bore inscriptions in the angular Aramaic script. The letters meant nothing to Menedemos. That Hippokles had plenty of silver did. “Would you like to buy some smoked eels from Phaselis, too?” he asked. “Two sigloi each.”

That was four times what Sostratos had paid for them in the Lykian town. And Hippokles, after tasting a tiny sample, dipped his head and bought three. He took care of them himself. The slaves, grunting, picked up the jars of oil and carried them back down the quay after him into Sidon.

“Not bad,” Diokles said.

“No. I got premium prices there, no doubt about it.” Menedemos ducked under the poop deck and stowed his fat handful of silver in an oiled-leather sack. He’d just made about a day’s wages for the crew of the merchant galley. Of course, not all of it was profit; the olive oil and eels hadn’t come on board for nothing. Even so, it was the best he’d done since putting in at Sidon.

And Hippokles turned out not to be the only soldier who, after trying Damonax’s olive oil, wanted some for himself. The mercenary hadn’t been gone long before another officer came up the pier to the Aphrodite . This fellow didn’t need to go back and fetch a slave to take away his purchase; he’d brought a man along. Like Hippokles, he had only Sidonian coins on him. “I’ve been here three years, ever since we took this place back from Ptolemaios,” he told Menedemos. “Whatever drakhmai I had once upon a time are long since spent.”