His cousin quirked an eyebrow. “When somebody tells me no, I want to slide into a crevice in a wall like a mouse getting away from a dog. And … no wonder you get so many women to bend over forward for you.”
“No wonder at all.” Menedemos knew he sounded smug. He didn’t care. “You keep on trying. One yes makes up for a hundred noes.”
“Not to me,” Sostratos said, and then, “Oimoi!”
The Egyptians who’d been arguing with one another over the smashed amphorai went from shouting and wagging fingers under one another’s noses to punching and kicking and wrestling in the dusty street. Other people, both Egyptians and Hellenes, either tried to break up the brawl or joined in.
Menedemos and Sostratos backed away from the melee. Sostratos was a peaceable chap most of the time. Menedemos’ temper had a shorter lead, but he didn’t jump into strangers’ fights for the fun of it, the way some of the rowers might have.
Then someone shouted, “The watch! The watch!” Everyone who knew even a little Greek got out of the ruction and ran. A moment later, a squad of Macedonians rolled over the fighters who were still at it. A lot of the soldiers were older men or men who limped, but they wore linen corselets and bronze helmets and carried stout clubs a couple of cubits long. They left some of the Egyptians limp on the ground and dragged others off to question.
“My, my,” Sostratos murmured. “Athens had Skythians policing it. Ptolemaios puts his old soldiers out to pasture here. I wonder how much those Egyptians’ families will have to pay to get them turned loose.”
Menedemos looked around before answering, then spoke quietly: “As much as they can afford, and then ten drakhmai more. You can bet the Ptolemaios will make sure of that.” Sostratos dipped his head. They’d both seen that Egypt’s lord and master missed no chance to enrich himself.
Sostratos walked west along Alexandria’s main thoroughfare toward the Gate of the Moon. The Gate of the Sun was also on the boulevard, but at the eastern end of the city’s perimeter. Sostratos cared little for the gates themselves, but the canal that led from Alexandria to the Nile ended near the Gate of the Moon. If he was going to hire a riverboat, that seemed the place to do it.
The sun beat down. It rose higher and higher in the sky as day followed day. Sostratos wished for a hat like the one Menedemos had bought, or even a Greek petasos. Wishing failed to provide one.
He sweated as he walked, and hoped he wouldn’t keel over. You should have gone to that Marempsemis’ shop, he told himself. And you should have found out sooner that the fellow who said he wanted to buy your amber had more fancy talk than silver.
He wished a covered colonnade gave shelter from glare and heat, as the Stoa did in Athens. Again, a wish didn’t conjure one out of nothingness. Of course, it would have needed to be a long covered colonnade. This avenue was far longer and straighter than any in Athens. Athens’ streets meandered every which way; back when the polis was a village, they’d probably been sheep tracks and dog runs.
Like Rhodes, Alexandria was built on a grid, but it dwarfed Sostratos’ home polis. The avenue, for instance, had to be twenty stadia long, and at least sixty cubits broad. Four or five of the main streets in Rhodes could have cuddled side by side across this one. The sheer scale of the place could daunt someone used to smaller habitations.
Workmen used a creaking crane to hoist a block of granite onto what would become Ptolemaios’ grand tomb for Alexander. More workmen on the structure waited for the block to arrive. Sostratos paused to watch for a moment. “Careful, you thickskulls!” called one of the men on the half-built tomb. “Don’t squash us!”
“Who’d know the difference?” a man swinging the crane shouted back. They kept cursing each other till the block went safely into place. Then the workmen on the ground started tying up another big cube of stone. Sostratos went on his way.
An Egyptian who spoke enough Greek to get by grabbed his arm and tried to lead him to a brothel. “You try Egyptian girls, you don’t never go back to Hellenes!” he said.
Sostratos shook him off. “Go away!” he said, and then, “Get lost!” The tout suddenly didn’t understand Greek so well. He wouldn’t go away. “To the crows with you, you abandoned rogue!” Sostratos shouted, and made as if to punch him.
Either the words or the gesture got through. The Egyptian skittered back. From a safe distance, he said, “You don’t want no girls. You just want to stick it up some boy’s prokton!” He had plenty of vulgar vocabulary.
The gibe would have made Sostratos angrier had it held even an obolos’ worth of truth. He’d been jealous that Menedemos was so much more admired than he was while they were youths, but not because he wanted to lie down with one of the admirers. He just longed for notice of any kind. Since becoming a man, he hadn’t chased any handsome boys. He got his pleasure from women. He didn’t want to spend money in whatever nasty crib the Egyptian worked for, though.
Before long, he got into the western part of the city. Farther from the palace and from Ptolemaios’ eye, it held more empty lots and more little shacks built from whatever the people who lived in them could steal. He kept his hand on the hilt of his belt knife and wished he’d brought a couple of broad-shouldered rowers with him.
His nostrils twitched. He realized he had to be getting close to the canaclass="underline" among all the other city stinks, the odor of stagnant water became the strongest note. Sure enough, booths and tents ahead sold things that came down the Nile to Alexandria.
Egyptians here assumed all Hellenes were rich. They swarmed toward Sostratos, trying to sell him duck eggs or flattish loaves of barley bread or linen cloth or amulets or whatever they happened to have. It was noisier, more frantic, more desperate commerce than any in a Greek polis.
Sostratos said “No!” and “Go away!” and “Leave me alone!” over and over. Then he said something filthy in Aramaic. Quite a few of the Egyptians got it. Several of them doubled over in laughter, startled that a Hellene should know any foreign language.
Piers jutted out into the canal. Sostratos had seen small boats on small rivers before. The rivercraft tied up here were anything but small. Well, the Nile was no small river, either. Some were made of papyrus like the ones the Aphrodite had met on the Inner Sea but vastly larger. Others—barges—put him in mind of giant floating boxes, though they could mount a mast at need. And workers were unloading more granite blocks, perhaps destined for Alexander’s tomb, from a raft made of palm trunks lashed together. The raft could also raise a mast and sail at need.
A man standing on the pier was spouting a stream of quick orders in Egyptian to a gang hauling sacks of grain or beans out of a barge. Sostratos’ heart beat faster; he still didn’t like bearding strangers. But this was part of business, too. “Excuse me, O best one, but do you speak Greek?” he asked.
“Some,” the man answered without looking at him. “What you want?”
“How much would it cost to hire your … craft … to haul amphorai of olive oil from here to Memphis?” Sostratos tried to speak slowly and clearly.
He got the Egyptian’s attention. The man was close to forty, of about Menedemos’ height but stockier. A scar seamed one cheek. “How many amphorai? When you want to go? When you got to get there? Not fast—we go against current.” He used gestures to eke out his words.
Sostratos knew how much oil he had. The other questions had as much to do with the barge captain’s convenience as with his own. He gathered that the Egyptian would see what other cargo he could pick up in Alexandria for the voyage south, though he made more bringing goods down the Nile to this new, brash boomtown.