“Up, up, Gordianus! We are in Tyre and must make the most of our brief stay here.”
“Brief?” I groaned and covered my head with a pillow. “I thought we might stay here for a while … in this nice, quiet room—”
“Ha! Once I achieve my intention, we will leave Tyre at once. So let us play tourist while we can.” He yanked the pillow away and practically kicked me out of bed.
An hour later, with some food in my belly and fresh sea air filling my lungs, I set out with Antipater for a tour of the city. Tyre was not as grand as some of the places we had seen in our travels, but it was one of the oldest cities we had visited and full of history. It was seafarers from Tyre who first sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules (known to them by his Phoenician name, Melkart); it was Queen Dido of Tyre who founded the city of Carthage, which once rivaled Rome. Carthage was no more, but Tyre still stood, though changed forever by the conquest of Alexander the Great.
“Alexander found the city an island, and left it a peninsula,” said Antipater. By winding streets we had arrived at the highest point of the city, from which Antipater pointed to the massive earth-and-stone causeway that connected the erstwhile island on which we stood to the mainland. “Alexander besieged the island fortress not just by sea but also by land, building that mole out to the island so that he could bring up huge battering rams. Seven months it took him to bring Tyre to its knees, but in the end he succeeded, and marked his conquest with a celebration over there, in the ancient Temple of Melkart. Thus did Tyre become part of the Greek-speaking world, and has been so ever since, sometimes under the sway of the Seleucids, sometimes under the Ptolemies of Egypt. But forty years ago, Tyre regained her independence and began to issue her own coinage again—the famous shekel of Tyre. Once more, she is a proud and independent city-state, and may remain so—if she can elude the clutches of Rome.” This was not the first time Antipater had expressed a degree of anti-Roman sentiment.
By winding streets we descended to the city’s waterfront, which teemed with activity. Tyre is blessed with two natural harbors, one to the north and one to the south, and both were filled with ships. The wharves were crowded with busy sailors and merchants overseeing the slaves who loaded and unloaded cargoes. The waterfront taverns were doing a brisk business (including the Murex Shell, which was off the northern harbor). Away from the waterfront, in paved enclosures, dyers went about the work of spreading wet green cloth. According to Antipater, the hot sunlight would turn the purple to green.
“How can that be?” I said. “It sounds like magic.”
“Does it? Yes, I suppose it does. But we shall come back later, and you’ll see that it’s a fact.” He smiled. “One way or another, you shall see some magic done this day!”
I looked at him sidelong. “Teacher, what are you talking about?”
“Last night, after I put you to bed, I went back downstairs and made contact with the fellow I’d been hoping to meet.”
“What fellow?”
“The man who knows the man who currently owns the Books of Secret Wisdom. We are to meet him tonight in the Murex Shell.”
“And then what?”
“You’ll see. Or not see!”
My memory was muddled by wine, but I vaguely recalled Antipater uttering a similar turn of phrase the previous night. What was my old tutor up to?
We continued our tour of the city, which was actually quite small and easily traversed on foot. Having so little land to build on, the Tyrians built up, and in the central part of the island the tightly packed residential tenements were five or six or even seven stories tall. This made Tyre an even taller city than Rome, and many of the narrow, winding streets were quite dark, even at midday. The areas more open to the sun were largely occupied by the dye manufactories, and in those neighborhoods the air was the foulest I had ever smelled in a city. This had something to do with the various solutions and compounds involved in the production of the purple dye, which emitted powerful odors.
To get a bit of sunlight and fresh air, we took a stroll on Alexander’s causeway, but Antipater declined to walk all the way to the mainland. I could see that a considerable town had grown up along the shore, but Antipater assured me there was nothing of interest to see in the drab suburbs of the mainland. Instead we turned back and made our way to the Temple of Melkart. The place was musty and dark and smelled of mildew, but it did contain an eternal flame (not unlike the hearth of Vesta back in Rome), as well as some remarkable statues and paintings of the god I knew as Hercules, who was Tyre’s most venerated deity.
On our way back to the Murex Shell, we stopped at the square where the dyers had earlier spread their cloth, and I was amazed to see that the green had indeed turned to purple as it dried.
“Like magic!” I whispered.
Antipater only smiled and nodded.
* * *
That night at the Murex Shell, in a small private room off the tavern, we dined on a salad of octopus and hearts of palm followed by fish stew, served by the same pretty blonde who had brought our wine the night before. Her name, I learned, was Galatea.
I discovered why Antipater had gone to the expense of paying for the private room when a stranger appeared in the doorway.
The man wore a dark blue tunic cinched by a broad leather belt. From the belt hung a scabbard with a dagger, the hilt of which was inlaid with ivory circled with a band of tiny rubies. The tunic was long enough to cover the man’s knees but left bare his muscular, darkly tanned arms, both of which sported elaborately chased-silver armbands and bracelets. Around his neck gleamed a tangle of silver necklaces hung with pendants of carnelian and lapis, and from his ears hung thick rings of silver so heavy they had stretched his earlobes. His hair was long and unkempt, mostly black but with a few strands of silver, and his jaw was covered with several days’ growth of beard. His creased, darkly weathered features made it hard to determine his age; I could only be sure that he was quite a bit older than I and quite a bit younger than Antipater.
Antipater, who had just finished his stew, looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Are you …?”
“My name is Kerynis. I believe we have an appointment.”
Antipater kept his eyes on the man and pushed the bowl aside, clearing the table before him. “Indeed we do. Have you brought …?”
Slung over his shoulder, the man carried a satchel that bulged with leather cylinders. He removed one of the cylinders, from which he extracted a scroll of raggedy brown papyrus.
“It looks very old,” said Antipater.
“So it is,” said Kerynis. “With a document such as this, older is better. The later the copy, the more likely that errors have crept in, and that can be … dangerous … as I’m sure you can imagine. Get the smallest detail wrong, and—poof!—you’ve turned yourself into a cabbage.”
Antipater laughed, sounding a bit nervous. “Indeed, yes, I can imagine. So old … and so delicate.”
“Handle it with care.”
“I may touch it?” said Antipater.
“You may. But until you’ve purchased it, treat it as the rare and valuable object it is.”
“Of course!” Eagerly but carefully, Antipater took the scroll from Kerynis and unrolled it on the table. It was so worn that it lay flat without being weighted.
I rose from my chair and looked over his shoulder. The Greek letters were in some archaic style I did not recognize and so badly faded that the text was almost impossible for me to read, but Antipater seemed able to make sense of it. I watched him run his finger from line to line, muttering to himself as he read.
“Fantastic! ‘Transformation of male to female’ … ‘How to kill with a gaze’ … ‘Temporary ability to understand the speech of birds’ … ‘How to control the dreams of a sleeper’ … ‘Revivification of the dead’ … Marvelous!”