Sand lay thin over soil. They followed a trail even Sostratos could recognize. A lot of travelers over a lot of years had made their way north from Memphis to see the Pyramids. They’d scarred the land the way a mine slave’s shackle came to scar his ankle.
Big vultures wheeled in the air high overhead. You won’t eat my flesh, Sostratos thought, and then, By the gods, I hope you won’t.
A jackal vanished into a hole: sharp-nosed like a fox, but with a different gait and bigger ears. Sostratos was the kind who classified things, partly because he was who he was and partly because he’d studied under Theophrastos the botanist in Athens. The rowers seemed more inclined to joke than classify. “Between the scavengers in the sky and the ones slinking on the sand, in two days won’t be anything left of us if we keel over here,” Thersandros said.
Pakebkis translated the gibe for his men who knew no Greek. They grinned and laughed. Sostratos smiled; people were people under the skin, whether Hellene or barbarian. An Egyptian looked up at the vultures, then caught the rowers’ eyes and held up one finger, as if to say they’d be supper in only one day if they died here. When the Hellenes understood him, they laughed in turn.
A low rise in front of the Pyramids did a fair job of keeping Sostratos from getting as good a look at them as he would have liked. The sun shone off the white limestone that sheathed their outsides. It also beat down on the men traveling through the desert to view them.
Sweat dripped into Sostratos’ beard. Jars of Egyptian beer were tied to each camel’s saddle. “You gots to drink!” Pakebkis called. “You not wanting vultures eating at you, you gots to drink!” He matched action to word.
Sostratos dutifully imitated him. Used to wine, the Hellene still found beer thin, sour stuff. But he also noticed that this beer was cooler than it would have been had it come from a skin or a metal jug. He’d seen that before; as much as the greater cost of metal, it was a reason Hellenes commonly used pottery jugs for water and wine.
The rowers seemed to fancy beer even less then he did. Sostratos echoed Pakebkis’ order: “Drink it like medicine if you don’t want to drink it for fun,” he said sternly. “The Egyptians know how to live here. Don’t let yourselves cook because you hate beer.”
“I’d sooner drink the muddy old Nile,” Leskhaios said.
“And start shitting your guts out till you bleed from your prokton?” Sostratos said. “Nobody who can get anything else drinks water. It gives you a bloody flux too often. And foreign water’s even worse than what we’ve got back home.”
“Yes, Papa,” the rower replied.
“To the crows with you!” Sostratos snapped. This was the thanks you got for trying to help people? Well, all too often it was.
Then the camels, sure-footed even when the going got rough, made it to the top of the little rise. The rowers stopped teasing Sostratos. Like him, they gaped at the spectacle laid out before them.
Two of the Pyramids were noticeably larger than the third, but even the smallest one dwarfed any construction Sostratos had ever seen before. The Egyptian Sphinx looked nothing like the sphinxes of Greek myth and legend. It looked like a lion with a human head decked out with a headdress Sostratos had already seen on wall carvings of Egyptian pharaohs.
Off to the right, in the direction of the Nile, lay a village or small town. From Herodotos, Sostratos remembered it was called Bousiris. The ramp that ran from the river toward the Pyramids showed how the builders had got their stones where they needed them. If you had enough people and enough time, you could do almost anything.
Sostratos and the rowers weren’t the only sightseers gawking at the grandiose monuments Egyptian kings had raised for themselves in ancient days. Nor was Pakebkis the only guide. Other Egyptians led curious men—and even a handful of women—mounted on camels or donkeys.
And people from Bousiris tried to sell them beer and wine and snacks and tiny terra-cotta Pyramids whitewashed to look as if they were clad in limestone and little painted figurines, also of burnt clay. Those last intrigued Sostratos. “Do you speak Greek?” he asked a man with a tray of them.
“Malista!” the Egyptian answered. “Talk Greek good.”
“Tell me what your small statues are, then,” Sostratos said.
“Them is ousabti figures.” The Egyptian might not have much grammar, but he could make himself understood, all right. “Bury with you bunch of they. Them work in afterlife for you, so you don’t got to nothing.”
That tickled Sostratos’ sense of whimsy enough to make him ask, “How much?”
“Four oboloi eaches,” the ousabti-seller answered. “Maybe you buy one man, one woman, hey? Man, he do work things for you after you dead. You and woman, meantime—” He gestured lewdly.
“Cost too much.” Sostratos kept things simple for the Egyptian. “I’ll give you four oboloi for a man and a woman.”
“You spit in my eye like camel you on!” the fellow exclaimed, clapping a hand to his forehead in badly acted despair. They haggled for a bit, and wound up splitting the difference. Sostratos gave the Egyptian a drakhma and got his ousabti figurines.
Mountebanks climbed all three Pyramids—no easy trick, not with their outer layers of smooth limestone. The acrobats, or whatever the right name for them was, seemed to slide down once they reached the apex of a Pyramid. Sostratos got close enough to one of them to see that he had a leather patch sewn to the seat of his linen kilt, so evidently the sliding was real enough.
The Sphinx intrigued him even more than the Pyramids. No matter how enormous they were, they struck him as exercises in geometry. He imagined Pythagoras pacing along next to one, pointing with a stick and deducing theorems as he went. The Sphinx, now, the Sphinx had a touch of humanity to it.
As he came up close to it, he discovered he wasn’t the only one who’d thought so down through the years. Graffiti marred its arms, some written on the stone, others scratched or carved into it. Some were in Greek, others in Aramaic or the hieratic script Egyptians used when they wrote hieroglyphics quickly.
One Greek scratching made him smile. I, Xenopheles son of Xenon, wrote this, read the first line. Below that, either Xenopheles or someone else had added, So did I, Knife son of Nobody.
Off at the edge of the desert, a couple of long-legged, long-necked birds at least as tall as a man stood watching for a little while, then ran away at least as fast as a galloping horse. Pointing at them, Sostratos asked Pakebkis, “What do you call those?”
“Them is ostriches,” the Egyptian answered. “For you Hellenes, I hear you say strouthos for one.”
“Do you?” Sostratos said drily. Strouthos was the Greek word for sparrow. Either Pakebkis had got it wrong, a Hellene was playing a joke on him, or someone was trying not to show how much a bird that size impressed him.
“Them hard to hunt, but good if you catch,” Pakebkis said.
“Do they taste like chicken or duck?” Sostratos asked.
“No.” The guide shook his head. “Red meat. Taste like cow. Maybe more better.”
“Now I know something I never knew before,” Sostratos said.
“Sometimes, some butchers in Memphis, they got,” Pakebkis said. “Khamouas, he know where, when, I bet. He tell me the Ptolemaios like it.”
Ptolemaios had hunted lions and tigers in the crumbling wreckage of the Persian Empire and in India. He’d fought against elephants by the Indos River, and weren’t there more elephants down in southernmost Egypt, or maybe beyond its southern border? And he’d eaten ostriches, too? What sort of marvels hadn’t he known?