“Smart, skipper,” Diokles said approvingly. “They’ll like you better for it.”
“They earned it,” Menedemos replied. “They worked like slaves there.”
“We’ve got a good cargo for the trip home, though,” the keleustes said. “That fancy silk you found, the crimson dye, now this good wine-”
“We’re only missing one thing,” Menedemos said.
Diokles frowned. “What’s that? With all we’ve picked up here, I can’t think of anything.”
Menedemos answered in one word: “Sostratos.”
Sostratos peered back at Jerusalem from the ridge to the north from which he’d first got a good look at the chief town of the Ioudaioi. He sighed. Next to him, Teleutas laughed. “Was she as good in bed as all that?” he asked. Aristeidas and Moskhion both chuckled. They also crowded closer to hear Sostratos’ reply.
“I don’t know,” he said after a bit of thought. He didn’t see how he could keep quiet, not when the sailors already knew so much more than he might have wished. “I really don’t know. But it’s… different when you’re not buying it, isn’t it?”
Aristeidas dipped his head. “It’s sweetest when they give it to you for love.”
Menedemos had always felt that way, which was why he liked to chase other men’s wives instead of-or in addition to-going to brothels. Now, after bedding Zilpah, Sostratos understood. He sighed again. He wouldn’t forget her. But he feared she would spend the rest of her days trying to forget him. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but it was how things seemed to have worked out.
Teleutas laughed again, a coarse, altogether masculine laugh. “You ask me, it’s just fine whenever you manage to stick it in there.” The other two sailors laughed, too. Moskhion dipped his head in agreement.
In one sense, Sostratos supposed Teleutas had a point. The pleasure of the act itself wasn’t much different for a man regardless of whether he bedded a whore or his own wife or someone else’s. But what it meant, what he felt about himself and his partner afterwards-those could, and indeed almost had to, vary widely.
Had Menedemos been there, Sostratos would have taken the argument further. With Teleutas, he let it drop. The less he had to talk to the sailor, the better he liked it. He said, “Let’s keep moving, that’s all. The faster we go, the sooner we’ll get back to Sidon and the Aphrodite .”
Aristeidas, Moskhion, and Teleutas all murmured approvingly at that. Moskhion said, “By the gods, it’ll be nice to speak Greek again with more people than just us.”
“That’s right.” Aristeidas dipped his head. “By now, we’re all sick of listening to each other, anyhow.” He glanced over at Sostratos, then hastily added, “Uh, meaning no offense, young sir.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sostratos said. “I know you’re sick of me.”
He didn’t mention the obvious corollary. Aristeidas did it for him: “You’re sick of us, too, eh?”
Once again, Sostratos faced the dilemma of choosing between an unpalatable truth and an obvious lie. In the end, he chose neither. With a wry smile, he asked, “How on earth could you dream of such a thing?” That made the sailors laugh, which was better than offending them or treating them like fools.
They tramped on. After a while, Teleutas said, “I think we ought to look to our weapons. We’ve come this far without any trouble. It’d be a shame if we got robbed when we were so close to getting back to Sidon.”
Sostratos wanted to tell him he was worrying over nothing. He wanted to, but knew he couldn’t. What he did say, regretfully, was, “That’s a good idea.”
He’d never let Menedemos’ bow get far from him while he was on the road. Now he took it out of its case and strung it. The case itself, which also held his arrows, he wore at his left side, slung over his right shoulder with a leather strap. “You look like a Skythian nomad,” Aristeidas said.
“The case looks like a Skythian nomad’s,” Sostratos said, tossing his head, “for we use the same style they do-I suppose we borrowed it from them. But tell me, my dear, when have you ever imagined a Skythian nomad aboard a plodding mule?” That made the sailors laugh again. Sostratos, a thoroughly indifferent rider even on a mule, thought it was pretty funny, too.
Toward noon, half a dozen Ioudaioi came down the road toward the Hellenes. The strangers were all young men, all on the ragged side, and all armed with spears or swords. They gave Sostratos and his companions long, thoughtful looks as the two parties drew near. The Rhodians looked back, not in a way suggesting they wanted a fight, but as if to say they could put up a good one if they had to.
Both little bands got halfway off the road as they edged past each other. Neither seemed to want to give the other any excuse for starting trouble. “Peace be unto you,” Sostratos called to the Ioudaioi in Aramaic.
“And to you also peace,” a man from the other band replied.
One of the other Ioudaioi muttered something else, something Sostratos was even gladder to hear: “More trouble than they’re worth.” A couple of the young man’s friends nodded.
Despite that, Sostratos looked back over his shoulder several times to make sure the Ioudaioi weren’t turning around to come after his companions and him. Once, he saw a Ioudaian looking back over his shoulder at him and the sailors. “We made them respect us,” he told the other Rhodians.
“A good thing, too,” Moskhion said, “for I always respect bastards who outnumber me-you’d best believe I do.”
“If we run into six bandits, or eight, or even ten, we’re probably fine,” Sostratos said, “because a little band like that can see we have teeth. They might beat us, but we’d cost them half their men. One of those fellows called us more trouble than we’re worth. That’s how most bands would feel about us.”
“What about a band with forty or fifty men in it, though?” Aristeidas asked worriedly. “A bandit troop that big could roll right over us and hardly even know we were there.”
“The thing is, there aren’t very many bandit troops with forty or fifty men in them.” Teleutas spoke before Sostratos could answer. “A troop like that is more like an army than your usual pack of robbers. It needs a village of its own, pretty much, on account of keeping that many men fed isn’t easy. And it’s the big bands that soldiers move against, too. Most bandits turn back into farmers when soldiers come sniffing after ‘em. A big troop can’t do that, or not easily, anyhow-too many people know who they are and where they roost. It either splits up into a bunch of little bands or else it stands and fights.”
Aristeidas thought it over, then dipped his head. “Makes sense,” he said.
It did indeed make sense. It made so much sense, Sostratos sent Teleutas a very thoughtful look. How had the sailor acquired such intimate knowledge of the way robber bands worked? Had he been part of one, or more than one, himself? That wouldn’t have surprised Sostratos, not a bit. There were technical treatises on things like cookery and how to build catapults, but he’d never heard of, never imagined, a technical treatise on how to become a successful bandit. Even if such a monster of a book existed, he didn’t think Teleutas could read.
Moskhion must have been thinking along with him. “I got out of sponge diving because pulling an oar was a better job,” he said. “What did you get out of to turn sailor, Teleutas?”
“Oh, this and that,” Teleutas answered, and gave no details.
The Hellenes took a more westerly route up to Sidon than they had on their way down to Jerusalem. They spent the night in a village called Gamzo. The place was so small it didn’t even have an inn. Having got permission from the locals, Sostratos built a fire in the middle of the market square. He bought bread and oil and wine and, feeling extravagant, a duck. He and the other men from the Aphrodite roasted the meat over the fire and feasted.