Bees buzzed. At first, Sostratos hardly noticed. When he did, he grinned: he took them as a sign he’d come to the right place. He also wondered what nectar they found to sip in this sun-blasted summer, when most of the fields and meadows were yellow and dry. Something, he supposed, or the bees wouldn’t have been out at all.
Another shabby little farm, this one with only a tumbledown ruin of a barn. Just a couple of stadia to go to Erasinides’ place-if I’m on the right track. I think I am. Zeus, I hope I am. And then Sostratos forgot about bees, about honey, about Erasinides-about everything except the hound baying like a wolf as it loped toward him. It wasn’t much smaller than a wolf, either, and no tamer.
The donkey let out a squealing bray that Sostratos forgave. It jerked the lead rope out of his hand and started to run. The dog, though, paid no attention to it. The dog wanted Sostratos. Maybe it thought he was coming to rob the farm. Or maybe it simply craved the taste of human flesh. He wouldn’t have been surprised, not with those great yellow teeth and that wide, red, slavering mouth.
If he ran like the donkey, the hound would pull him down from behind. Only his certainty of that kept him from turning and fleeing. Instead, he set himself, hefting the stick he’d picked up to beat the donkey. One chance, he told himself. That’s all I get.
Baying, the dog sprang at him. He swung with all his might-and caught it right on the end of the nose. Those fearsome, deep-throated howls changed as if by magic to yips of agony.
“Here, you polluted monster!” Sostratos shouted. “See how you like it!” He walloped the hound again, this time in the ribs.
Now yelping, the dog ran from Sostratos faster than it had run toward him. Now furious, he ran after it. When he saw he wasn’t going to catch it, he bent down, picked up a rock, and threw it. It caught the dog in the rump and brought forth another shrill howl of pain.
“Here now! What do you think you’re doing?” A farmer came out of the house, brandishing a staff.
“Driving away your gods-detested hound.” Sostratos picked up his stick again. He was angry enough to be ready for a fight if the other man wanted one. “That’s what you get for letting the monster run loose. If it comes at me again on my way back to Athens, I’ll kill it.”
Plenty of men were fiercer than he. But he was larger than most, and only half the age of the farmer, whose scraggly hair and beard were white. The man shook a fist at him, but then retreated into his dwelling. The dog peered out from the ruins of the barn. It didn’t seem to want to have anything more to do with the Rhodian, That suited him down to the ground.
He went back after the donkey, which had moved faster without his guidance than it ever had with it. It didn’t seem to think him a hero for driving off the dog. Instead, it might have blamed him for bringing it near the hound in the first place. On he went, up the western slope of Mount Hymettos,
“Is this the farm of Erasinides son of Hippomakhos?” he called to a man chopping weeds with a mattock.
The farmer jerked his thumb up the road. “Next farm uphill, stranger, on the left-hand side of the track.”
“Thanks.” Sostratos plodded on. So, unhappily, did the donkey. Erasinides’ farm was noticeably greener than the ones he’d been passing. He soon saw why; a spring bubbled out of a cleft in the rocks a few cubits from the farmhouse. Channels led the water here and there.
Sostratos knelt by the stream to wash his head and hands, take a drink, and water the donkey. As he got to his feet, drops dripping from his beard, a stocky, middle-aged man came out of the barn and said, “Hail, friend. Do something for you?”
“Are you Erasinides?” Sostratos asked. The farmer dipped his head. Sostratos gave his own name and said, “The physician Iphikrates tells me he buys his honey from you. I’d like to do the same.”
“Iphikrates is a good man. He doesn’t think he knows it all, the way some physicians do,” Erasinides said. “Where are you from, friend, to speak such an… interesting Greek? Sounds like the Doric bits you hear in tragedy.”
“I’m from Rhodes,” Sostratos answered. He knew his accent had been heavily influenced by Attic. He wondered what Erasinides would make of the way Menedemos spoke. “Do you have honey for sale?”
“Oh, yes.” But the Athenian seemed in no hurry to haggle. “Nine ships from Rhodes, under Tlepolemos,” he murmured: not quite quoting the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, but showing he knew it. “Did Rhodians speak oddly then, too, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know, best one,” Sostratos answered. Erasinides, plainly, wanted to chat before getting down to business. Rustics often did. “We think our accent the usual one, you know, and everybody else’s strange.”
“Is that a fact?” Erasinides’ laugh showed that, if it was a fact, it was an amusing one. “Must come of being a long ways off from Athens, I expect.”
With Athens’ present prominence, he had a point. But he was the sort who would have said the same thing had he lived up in Thessalia, which had its own backwoods way of speech. Sostratos said, “Custom is king of all”-Pindaros’ poetic truth quoted by Herodotos. Bees buzzed around a patch of clover next to Erasinides’ barn. Pointing that way, Sostratos asked, “Do you gather your honey from wild bees, or do you keep your own hives?”
“Oh, I have my own,” Erasinides replied. “Collecting wild honey’s like trying to build a house out of driftwood-you’ll come up with some, but never enough to suit you.”
“Do you get stung when you take the honeycombs?” Sostratos asked.
The farmer dipped his head. “Now and again. I wear a petasos with the thinnest veiling I can get, to keep ‘em off my face. Past that”-he shrugged-”I pick the stings out, and I go about my business. They don’t much bother me. Some folk aren’t so lucky. I had a neighbor, a fellow named Ameinokles, who’d wheeze and gasp and have trouble breathing whenever he got stung.”
“You had a neighbor?” Sostratos said.
“That’s right.” Erasinides dipped his head again. “It happened once too often, poor fellow. His throat closed up and he… strangled to death, you might say.”
Sostratos wondered what Iphikrates could have done about that. Nothing, all too likely. As Erasinides had said, the physician didn’t try to hide his own ignorance. Sostratos said, “Do you put the honey in jars all the same size?”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t used to, but it’s better for business when I do. I buy lekythoi from a potter I know. I can get em cheap-he makes lots of oil flasks, because people always need ‘em, either to hold olive oil at home or-the fancy glazed ones-for funeral offerings. I don’t buy those, on account of they cost more.”
“How much for a jar?” Sostratos asked.
“Twelve drakhmai.”
That wasn’t far from what the Rhodian had expected. Over an hour or so, pausing for politics and women and bees and wine and mean dogs and whatever else came to mind, he haggled Erasinides down to eight drakhmai the lekythos. He paid in shiny Athenian owls; the farmer made it plain he had no use for perfume or balsam or anything else the Aphrodite had brought to Athens. Erasinides helped him pack the lekythoi into the baskets on the donkey’s back, and gave him straw to stuff between them to keep them from breaking.
“Thank you kindly,” the farmer said as he left. “You Rhodians seem a goodly folk, even if you do talk funny.”
On the way past the farm with the fearsome hound, Sostratos gripped his stick tightly. The dog didn’t bother him. He kept going, down off the mountain and back toward the whirl that was Athens.