“So we will.” Philodemos’ chuckle was on the grim side.
“You’ve been asking me questions about Athens and our other stops,” Menedemos said. “What’s been going on here in Rhodes while I was away?”
“Here in Rhodes?” The question seemed to take his father by surprise. Philodemos paused and thought, then said, “Well, I do believe we’ve finally got the last of the damage from the flood repaired. The priests offered a bullock in thanksgiving at the temple of Dionysos near the agora, and I brought home a pretty nice piece of beef.”
“That is good news, Father-that you got some good meat and that things are finally fixed.” Nine years before, Rhodes had suffered through a storm the likes of which not even the oldest citizens recalled. Along with driving rain, hailstones weighing up to a mina pounded the polis. Some people were killed outright when struck by them, others badly hurt. To make things worse, the storm came late in the rainy season. The drains had been neglected, and soon clogged up. That meant the rapidly rising waters couldn’t get out through the city walls.
Rhodes was shaped like a basin, with a good deal of difference between high ground and low. The low ground, by the agora and the temple of Dionysos, went under; even the temple of Asklepios was threatened. People clung to roofs and statues and the tops of shade trees to escape the raging waters.
At last, part of the western wall of the city had given way, allowing the flood to spill out into the sea. Things could have been worse. Had Rhodes been a city largely built of mud brick like Athens, many more houses would have collapsed and many more people on rooftops would have drowned. Even as it was, though, more than five hundred perished.
“Is it really nine years since that happened?” Menedemos asked. “It doesn’t seem so long ago.”
To his surprise, his father laughed. “Well, son, maybe you’re turning into a man after all,” Philodemos said. “That’s one of the signs: when all that’s past starts squeezing together in your memory. You were born half a lifetime ago for me, but there are times when it feels like just a couple of years.” He tossed his head in slow wonder. “By the dog, there are times when it feels like just a couple of months ago.”
“Not to me,” Menedemos said. From his own perspective, his life was very long indeed-what, for a man, could seem longer? If twenty-eight years didn’t equal eternity, what did? And yet somehow, as his father said, the nine years since the great flood had compressed into what felt like not much time at all. As he got older, would twenty-eight years crumple the same way? He didn’t think it was likely, but he wasn’t quite ready to call it impossible, either.
His father took a meditative sip of wine. “Time’s a funny business. Now, if the philosophers wanted to do something useful instead of just standing around listening to each other’s fancy talk, they’d figure out how things like that worked. But don’t hold your breath. It isn’t likely.”
“Sostratos went back to the Lykeion in Athens,” Menedemos remarked.
“Did he?” Philodemos said. “What did he think?”
“His time stretched instead of shrinking-he found he didn’t belong there anymore,” Menedemos answered. “He sold the philosophers papyrus and ink at an outrageous price and made ‘em pay it.”
That made Philodemos grin in approval unalloyed. “Good for him!” he exclaimed. “I can’t think of a surer way to prove you’ve beaten your past.”
Menedemos didn’t know whether his cousin had beaten his past or simply moved away from it. He didn’t think Sostratos was sure, either. Again, though, he saw no point to contradicting his father. He asked, “How are things here inside the house? Are your wife and Sikon still quarreling whenever you turn your back?”
“Things aren’t perfect there,” Philodemos answered. “Baukis will still give the cook a hard time every now and then. And I’m sure Sikon sometimes buys fancy, expensive fish just to spite her. But they do get on better than they did. They aren’t at war all the time, and they don’t fight so hard when they do lock horns.” By the relief in his voice, he was thoroughly glad of that, too.
So was Menedemos, who said, “Good. I always hated getting stuck in the middle when they started shouting at each other. And they’d both get offended when I didn’t take their side.”
“Oh, yes!” Philodemos dipped his head. “That’s happened to me, too. Hasn’t been so bad lately, though, gods be praised.”
“Good,” Menedemos repeated, and meant it. He asked his father no more about Baukis. Even though they lived in the same house, too much curiosity about the older man’s wife would have been unseemly. It might also have roused Philodemos’ suspicions, and that was the last thing Menedemos wanted.
One of the first things he wanted was Baukis. He’d known as much for years. He hadn’t done anything about it, no matter how much he wanted her-in fact, precisely because he wanted her so much. He hadn’t, and hoped he wouldn’t. He’d been fighting this lonely, silent battle ever since the knowledge of his desire first flowered in him. And I’ll win, too.
It would have been easier-it would have been much easier-to be confident of that, and, indeed, to want to win, if he hadn’t begun to realize Baukis wanted him, too. He gulped down his wine, not that wine would help.
Sostratos felt as if he’d been riding this miserable donkey forever. In point of fact, he hadn’t set out from the city of Rhodes more than a couple of hours earlier. He’d left around noon, and the sun wasn’t even halfway down the southwestern sky. His brain was sure of the time. His backside and his inner thighs would have argued differently.
He’d probably come about eighty stadia, heading south and west. He’d passed through Ialysos not long before. Along with Lindos and Kameiros, Ialysos had been one of the three main settlements on the island of Rhodes before they joined together to build the polis of Rhodes. Ialysos never had been a polis, not in the proper sense of the word. It wasn’t a city, but a community of villages with a well-sited fortress on the nearby high ground. All those villages had shrunk in the hundred years since the polis of Rhodes became the most important place in the northern part of the island-indeed, the most important place on the island as a whole. But they persisted, like an old, decrepit olive tree that kept sending out green shoots whenever the life-giving rains came.
Ahead, the ground rose toward steep hills and then, farther southwest, toward Mount Atabyrion, the highest peak on Rhodes. Damonax’s farm and olive groves-about whose products Sostratos knew more than he’d ever wanted to-lay near the lower edge of the steeply rising ground. It was good country for olives: not so near the coast that flies ruined the crop, but not high enough to let cooler weather damage it, either.
Before Sostratos got to Damonax’s farm, he was glad he’d decided to hire the donkey instead of walking. It wasn’t so much that he’d shifted the pain from his feet to his hindquarters. But when a farm dog came rushing up, yapping and growling, the donkey lashed out with a clever hoof and knocked the dog sprawling. When it got up again, it retreated even more rapidly than it had advanced. Its yelps were music to Sostratos’ ears.
“What a good fellow!” he exclaimed, and patted the donkey’s neck. He didn’t think that meant much to the beast. Getting off and letting it crop the lush green grass by the side of a creek counted for more.
A couple of pigs with ridges of hair down their backs nosed through garbage by Damonax’s farmhouse. A nanny goat tied to a tree had nibbled the grass around it down to the ground and had stood on her hind legs to devour all the shoots and tender twigs she could reach. Chickens scratched and clucked between the farmhouse and the barn.
Out of the barn came a middle-aged, sun-browned man in a short chiton and stout sandals. He scratched at his shaggy beard-a beard worn not in defiance of fashion like Sostratos’ but seemingly in ignorance of it-and crushed something between his thumbnails. Only after he’d wiped his hand on his tunic did he call, “If you’ve come to pick olives, you’re still a few days early, and you know you’re supposed to bring your own pole to knock the fruit off the trees.”