Moskhion and Aristeidas solemnly dipped their heads. Sostratos wondered if that meant his chances were pretty good, or simply that all three sailors were misreading the signs the same way.
I’m going to find out, he thought. I have to find out. The game seemed worth the risk. All of a sudden, he understood Menedemos much better than he’d ever wanted to. How can I rail at him when I know why he does it? he wondered unhappily.
He did his best to tell himself that, unlike his cousin, he wasn’t risking anything or anyone by trying to learn whether Zilpah would go to bed with him. But, also unlike Menedemos, he’d been to the Lykeion. He’d learned how to root out self-deception. He knew perfectly well that he was telling himself lies. They were soothing lies, pleasant lies, but lies nonetheless.
What if, for instance, Zilpah had gone to Ithran and told him Sostratos had tried to seduce her? What would the innkeeper do when the Rhodian showed up at his door again? Wouldn’t he be likely to try to smash in Sostratos’ skull with a jar of wine or perhaps to stab him or spear him with whatever weapons he kept around the inn? Suppose things were reversed. Suppose Ithran, in Rhodes, had paid undue attention to Sostratos’ wife {assuming I had a wife, Sostratos thought). What would I have done if he fell into my hands after that? Something he would remember to the end of his days, whether that was near at hand or far away.
And yet, knowing what Ithran might do on setting eyes on him, Sostratos led the sailors from the Aphrodite back toward the inn they’d quitted only a few days before. This is madness, he told himself, picking his way through the narrow, winding, rocky streets of Jerusalem. Every so often, he had to spend a few tiny silver coins on a passerby to get steered in the right direction. No one grabbed him by the front of the tunic and exclaimed, “Don’t go back there! You must be the woman-mad Ionian Ithran swore he’d kill!” Sostratos chose to take that as a good sign, though he recognized he might be deceiving himself again.
“This is the street,” Aristeidas said when they turned on to it. “We just passed the brothel-and there’s Ithran’s inn up ahead.”
“So it is,” Sostratos said in a hollow voice. Now that he was here, his heart pounded and his bowels felt loose. He was sure he’d made a dreadful mistake in returning. He started to say they ought to go somewhere else after all.
Too late for that-Ithran himself came out the front door of the inn with a basket full of rubbish, which he dumped in the street not far from the entrance. He started to go back inside, but then he caught sight of the four Rhodians heading his way. Sostratos tensed. He wondered if he should reach for Menedemos’ bow, not that he could have strung it, let alone shot, before Ithran charged.
But then the innkeeper… waved. “Hail, friends,” he called in his bad Greek. “You does good by Lake of Asphalt?”
“Pretty well, thanks,” Sostratos answered, breathing a silent sigh of relief. Whatever else had happened, Zilpah hadn’t said anything.
“You to stay a few day?” Ithran asked hopefully. “I have my old rooms back.” Sostratos realized he was trying to say, You have your old rooms back. “Thank you,” he said, and nodded, as people did in this part of the world. Switching from Greek to Aramaic, he added, “I thank you very much indeed, my master.”
“I am your slave,” Ithran said, also in Aramaic. “Name any boon, and it shall be yours.” Aramaic was made for flowery promises no one would or intended to keep.
I wonder what would happen if I said, “Give me your wife to keep my bed warm till I go back to Sidon,” Sostratos thought, and then, No, I don’t wonder. That would show the differences between polite promises and real ones, and show it in a hurry.
While such musings filled the Rhodian’s head, Ithran turned and shouted into the inn: “Zilpah! Pour wine! The Ionians have returned from the Lake of Asphalt.”
“Have they?” The Ioudaian woman’s voice, a mellow contralto, floated out into the street. “They are very welcome, then.”
“Yes.” Ithran nodded vigorously. He returned to Greek so all the men from the Aphrodite could understand: “You is all very welcome. Go in, drink wine. Slave will see to your beasts.”
Teleutas, Aristeidas, and Moskhion looked eager to do just what he’d said. In a dry voice, Sostratos told the sailors, “Get the goods off the donkey before we start drinking. We’ve come a long way to get what we’ve got. If we let somebody steal it, we might as well have stayed in Rhodes.”
A little sulkily, the men obeyed. It was only a few minutes before they did sit down in the taproom to drink the wine Zilpah had poured. The room was dark and shadowed, light sneaking in only through the doorway and a couple of narrow windows. That gloom and the inn’s thick walls of mud brick left the taproom much cooler than the bake-oven air outside.
“Is Hekataios still here?” Sostratos asked Zilpah when she refilled his cup.
She shook her head. “No. He left the day after you did, bound for his home in Egypt.” Her shrug was dismissive. “He is a clever man, but not so clever as he thinks he is.”
“I think you are right,” Sostratos said. He wondered if she would say the same thing about him after he left for Sidon. He hoped not, anyhow. Because the sailors from the akatos had learned so little Aramaic, he could speak to her as freely as if they weren’t there. He took advantage of that, adding, “I think you are beautiful.”
“I think you should not say these things,” Zilpah answered quietly. Out in the courtyard, Ithran started hammering away at something-perhaps at a door for one of the rooms. A burst of guttural curses in Aramaic proclaimed that he might have hammered his own thumb, too.
Aristeidas gulped down his wine. “What do you say we pay a visit to the girls down the street?” he said in Greek. Moskhion and Teleutas both dipped their heads. All three men hurried out of the inn.
“Where are they going?” Zilpah asked.
“To the brothel,” Sostratos said. Ithran kept pounding in the courtyard. As long as he did that, no one could have any doubts of where he was. Sostratos went on, “I was sorry to go. I am glad to be back.”
“And soon you will go again,” Zilpah said.
Sostratos shrugged and nodded; the gesture was almost starting to feel natural to him. “Yes, that is so. I wish it were different, but it is so.” He reached out and touched her hand, just for a moment. “We have little time. Should we not use it?”
She turned away from him. “You should not say such things to me. You make me think things I am not supposed to think.”
“Do you think that I think you are beautiful? Do you think that I think you are sweet?” Sostratos said. “Do you think that I want to love you? You should think that, because it is true.”
Still not looking at him, Zilpah spoke in a very small voice: “These are things I should not hear from you. I have never heard these things before.” She laughed. “I have heard from men who want to sleep with me. What innkeeper’s wife has not? But you… you mean what you say. You are not telling lies to get me to lie down with you.”
“Yes, I mean them. No, I am not lying,” Sostratos said.
“People who mean these things should not say them,” Zilpah insisted. “I have never heard things like these from someone who means them.”
“Never?” Sostratos raised an eyebrow. “You spoke of this before. These are things your husband”-who kept on hammering out in the courtyard-”should say.”
“Ithran is a good man,” Zilpah said, as if the Rhodian had denied it.
Sostratos said nothing at all. He let her words hang in the air, let her listen to them again and again in her own mind. She brought her hands up to her face. Her shoulders shook. Sostratos knew a moment of raw fear. If she started crying loud enough for Ithran to notice, what would the Ioudaian do to him? He didn’t know, not in detail. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t likely to be pretty.
“I think,” Zilpah said, “I think you had better go to your room now.”
“I would rather sit here and drink wine and talk with you and look at you so I can see how beautiful you are,” Sostratos said.
The Ioudaian woman swung back toward him. Her black eyes flashed.
“I said, I think you had better go to your room,” she snapped. “Do you understand me when I tell you something?”
“I understand what you say. I do not understand why you say it,” Sostratos replied. Once again, a why question seemed all-important.
Here, though, it got no answer. “Go!” Zilpah said, and he could hardly tell her no, not when this was her inn, this was her city, this was her country-and that was her husband out there in the courtyard. He gulped his wine and hurried out of the taproom. Ithran waved to him as he hurried back toward his room. He waved back. The innkeeper might have suspected something if he hadn’t. Part of him felt ashamed at treating the Ioudaian in a friendly way when he wanted to make love to the man’s wife. The rest of him, though… When he saw a good-sized stone in the courtyard, that other part of him wanted to pick it up and bash in Ithran’s head.
Still seething, he went into his room and closed the door behind him. It didn’t drown out the noise of Ithran’s hammering. He paced back and forth in the cramped little chamber, feeling trapped. What could he do in here? Nothing except lie down and go to sleep, which he didn’t want to do, or pace and brood. He didn’t want to do that, either, but did it even so.
After what seemed forever, the hammering stopped. Sostratos kept right on pacing. He wished he’d gone to the brothel with the sailors. But if he went there now, they’d know he’d failed with Zilpah. He didn’t feel like humiliating himself right this minute. Later would do.
Someone tapped at the door. When Sostratos noticed the tapping, he had the feeling it had been going on for some little while. He wondered what the sailors were doing back from the brothel so soon. But when he opened the door, no sated Hellenes stood there. Instead, it was Zilpah.
“Oh,” Sostratos said foolishly. “You.”
“Yes, me.” She ducked inside, past Sostratos, who stood frozen, as if seeing a Gorgon had turned him to stone. “Are you daft?” she said. “Shut the door. Quick, now.”
“Oh,” he said again. “Yes.” He did as she said. He found he could move after all, if only jerkily.
“Ithran is gone for a while. The slave is gone for a while. And so…” Zilpah didn’t go on for a moment. In the gloom inside the little chamber, her eyes were enormous. With a gesture that seemed more angry than anything else, she threw off her mantling robe and then the shift she wore under it. “Tell me you love me,” she said. “Tell me you think I’m beautiful. Make me believe you, at least for a little while.” Her laugh was harsh and rough as dry branches breaking. “It shouldn’t be hard. No one else is going to tell me anything like that.”
“No?” Sostratos said. Zilpah shook her head. He sighed. “You spoke of that before. It is too bad, for someone misses a perfect chance. You are very beautiful, and I will love you as best I know how.”
“Talk to me, too,” she said. “Tell me these things. I need to hear them.”
Most women wanted Sostratos to keep quiet while he was making love to them. Talk before or after might be all right. During? Never before had anyone asked him to talk during. He only wished he could do it in Greek. In Aramaic, he couldn’t say a tenth part of what he wanted to tell her.
But he did his best. In between kisses and caresses, he assured her that she was the loveliest and the sweetest woman he’d ever met, and that anyone who’d missed the chance to tell her the same thing was surely an ass, an idiot, a blockhead. While he said it, he believed it. That his tongue teased her earlobe, the side of her neck, the dark tips of her breasts, that his fingers stroked between her legs and that she arched her back and breathed hard while they did-that might have had something to do with his belief.
She hissed when he went into her. He’d never known a sound like that from a woman. She took her pleasure almost at once and twisted her head so that his pillow muffled most of her moan of joy. He kept on, and kept on, and she heated again, and the second time she gasped and wailed she forgot all about trying to keep quiet. He might have warned her, but his own ecstasy burst over him then, irresistible as an avalanche.
“I love you,” he said again, as soon as pleasure didn’t quite blind him.
Zilpah started to cry. She pushed him away from her. “I have sinned,” she said. “I have sinned, and I am a fool.” She dressed as fast as she could. As she did, she went on, “You will leave tomorrow. If you don’t leave tomorrow, I will tell Ithran what we have done. I have sinned. Oh, how I have sinned.”
“I don’t understand,” Sostratos said.
“What do you need to understand?” Zilpah said. “I was angry at my husband for not speaking sweetly to me, and I made a mistake. I sinned, so the one god will punish me for it.”
Sostratos had heard Ioudaioi talk of sin before. It was something like religious pollution among Hellenes, but stronger. He got the feeling Zilpah thought her bad-tempered god was angry at her. “I will do as you say,” he told her with a sigh.
“You had better.” She hurried out the door. She didn’t slam it, but only, he judged, so she wouldn’t make a scene. He sighed again. He’d had her, and pleased her, and she still wasn’t happy. Am I? he wondered. Part of him was, anyhow. The rest? He wasn’t at all sure about the rest.