The Sacred Land

Menedemos started to tell him not to be a fool. Considering how many times Sostratos had told him the same thing, he looked forward to getting some of his own back. But before the words could pass the barrier of his teeth, a sailor called out a warning from the bow: “Skipper, a soldier’s coming up the pier to look us over.”

“Thanks, Damagetos,” Menedemos answered with a sigh. Kition might have been a Phoenician town, but, like the rest of Cyprus, it lay under Ptolemaios’ rule these days. The garrison here had to prove itself alert. The Aphrodite wasn’t likely to be part of an invasion fleet ordered out by Antigonos, but at first glance she easily might have seemed a pirate. Scorching Sostratos would have to wait.

“What ship are you?” The inevitable question floated through the air as soon as the officer got within hailing distance.

“We’re the Aphrodite , out of Rhodes,” Menedemos answered, resisting the impulse to yell back, Whose man are you? He’d asked it before and discovered what he should have known anyhow: cracking wise with a fellow who could cause you trouble wasn’t a good idea. Even so, the temptation remained.

“Where have you been, and what’s your cargo?” Ptolemaios’ officer asked.

“Sidon, and lately Salamis,” Menedemos answered. “We’ve got Byblian wine, crimson dye, balsam of Engedi, and a few jars of Rhodian perfume and olive oil.”

“Olive oil?” the soldier said. “You must have been daft, to carry olive oil in a scrawny little ship like that.”

Everyone who heard about that part of the cargo said the same thing. For a long time, hearing it had made Menedemos grind his teeth. Now he could smile. “You might think so, best one, but we unloaded almost all of it,” he said. “Would you care to try one of the jars we have left?”

“No, thanks,” the officer replied with a laugh. “But you’re traders, all right. Welcome to Kition.” He turned and walked back into the city.

A sharp, metallic clicking in the sky made Menedemos and a good many others look up. He stared. “What in the world are those?” he said.

“Bats,” Sostratos answered calmly.

“But I’ve seen bats before-everybody has,” Menedemos protested. “They’re little things, like dormice with wings. These aren’t little. They’ve got bodies like puppies and wings like a crow’s.”

“They’re still bats,” Sostratos said. “They’ve got noses, not beaks. They’ve got ears. They’ve got bare wings and fur, not feathers. What else would they be?”

“They’re too big to be bats,” Menedemos insisted. “If they were any bigger, they’d be like vultures, by the gods.”

“So you say big bats are impossible?” Sostratos asked. “Fine. Have it your way, my dear. They’re big birds that happen to look exactly like bats.”

Menedemos’ ears burned. To make matters worse, Sostratos spoke in Aramaic to a Phoenician longshoreman. The fellow answered volubly, pointing back into the long, rolling hills behind Kition. Sostratos bowed his thanks, exactly as a Phoenician might have done.

He turned back to Menedemos. “They are bats,” he said. “They live in caves, and they eat fruit. That’s what the fellow said, anyhow. I always thought bats ate bugs. I wish we could stay and learn more about them. May we?”

“No,” Menedemos said. “You would be the one to care more for learning about bats than for learning about women, wouldn’t you?”

Sostratos winced. “I didn’t say that.”

And so he hadn’t, but Menedemos, having been embarrassed over the bats, was delighted to take a little revenge. If he ruffled his cousin’s feathers (or, seeing that those creatures were bats, his fur), too bad.

The trouble with being angry at someone aboard an akatos, as Sostratos had long since discovered, was that you couldn’t get away from him. The ship wasn’t big enough. And so, even though he thought the crack Menedemos had made was grossly unfair, he couldn’t go off by himself and sulk. The only possible place for him to go off by himself was up on the tiny foredeck, but he didn’t have the luxury of sulking there. If he stood on the foredeck, he had to do lookout duty.

That he did, staring out at the water of the I

More big bats flew overhead the next evening, as the Aphrodite neared the town of Kourion. Sostratos pretended not to notice them. Menedemos didn’t say anything about them, either: a strange sort of truce, but a truce even so.

Menedemos even made an effort to be friendly, asking, “What do you know about Kourion? You know something about almost every place where we stop.”

“Not much about this one, I’m afraid,” Sostratos answered. “ King Stasanor of Kourion went over to the Persians during the Cypriot rebellion almost two hundred years ago. Thanks to his treachery, the Persians won the battle on the plains near Salamis, and the rebellion failed.”

“Sounds like something a town’d rather not be remembered for,” Menedemos remarked. “What else do you know?”

Sostratos frowned, trying to flog more bits from his memory. “Kourion is a colony sent out from Argos,” he said, “and they worship an odd Apollo here.”

Diokles dipped his head. “That’s right, young sir: Apollo Hylates.”

“Apollo of the Wood-yes! Thanks,” Sostratos said. “I couldn’t recall the details. You know more than I do here, Diokles. Go on, if you would.”

“I don’t know much more,” the oarmaster said, suddenly shy. “I’ve only been here a couple of times myself. But I do know the god has strange rites, and anyone who dares touch his altar gets thrown off those cliffs yonder.” He pointed to bluffs west of the town. As cliffs went, they weren’t very impressive; Sostratos had seen far higher and steeper ones in Lykia and in Ioudaia. Still, a man flung from the top was bound to die when he hit the bottom, which made them high enough to punish sacrilege.

Menedemos asked what struck Sostratos as a couple of eminently reasonable questions: “Why would anybody want to touch that altar, if people know what happens to those who do? And how often is anybody going to be mad enough to do it?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you, skipper,” Diokles replied. “All I know is what I remember-or what I think I remember-from when I did put in here. That was years ago now, so I may have it wrong.”

No war galleys patrolled outside Kourion, or none Sostratos saw. He hadn’t spied any around Kition, either. Ptolemaios seemed to be keeping his whole fleet at Salamis, that being the port closest to the Phoenician coastline from which Antigonos might launch an attack against Cyprus. And if the ruler of Egypt had garrisoned Kourion, as Sostratos assumed he had, the local commander was most incurious. No one asked any questions of the Aphrodite ’s crew except the longshoremen who moored the merchant galley to a quay.

“Whence come ye?” a naked man inquired in the old-fashioned Cypriot dialect as he made a line fast. “Whither be ye bound?”

As usual, Menedemos told him, “We’re the Aphrodite , out of Rhodes. We’re heading home from Sidon.” The Doric drawl Sostratos’ cousin spoke seemed all the stronger after the longshoreman’s archaic speech.

“ Rhodes, say you, good sir? And Sidon? In sooth, you’ve traveled far, and seen many things passing strange. What think you the most curious amongst ‘em?”

“I’ll answer that, if I may,” Sostratos said, and Menedemos waved for him to go on. He did: “In loudaia, inland from the Phoenician coast, there’s a lake full of water so salty, a man can’t drown in it. He’ll float on the surface with head and shoulders and feet sticking out into the air.”