By the time they finished, their hands were battered and scraped and bloody. Sostratos hardly noticed, let alone cared. He stood by the makeshift grave and murmured, “Sleep well, Aristeidas. I’m sorry we leave you on foreign soil. May your shade find peace.”
Moskhion let a couple of oboloi fall through the gaps between the stones toward the corpse. “There’s the ferryman’s fee, to pay your way over the Styx,” he said.
“Good.” Sostratos looked west. The sun stood only a little way above the horizon. “Let’s get moving, and keep moving till it gets too dark to travel or till we find a campsite that’s easy to defend. And then… tomorrow we’ll push on toward Sidon.”
Menedemos busied himself about the Aphrodite , fussing over where the jars of crimson dye he’d bought from Tenashtart were stowed. He moved them farther aft, then farther forward. He knew they wouldn’t affect the akatos’ trim very much, but he fussed over them anyhow.
The amphorai of Byblian wine posed a more interesting problem. He had fewer of them, but each was far heavier than a jar of dye. And he couldn’t properly test the merchant galley’s trim till he got out onto the open sea any which way.
Diokles said, “Seems to me, skipper, you’ve got too much time on your hands. You’re looking around for things to do.”
“Well, what if I am?” Menedemos said, admitting what he could hardly deny. “I don’t feel like going out and getting drunk today. As long as I’m messing around here, I may get something useful done.” Or I may change things again tomorrow, he thought. If he did, it wouldn’t be the first time.
The oarmaster tactfully didn’t point that out. Maybe Diokles assumed Menedemos could see it for himself. He did say, “Time kind of wears when you stay in one port all summer long.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Menedemos dipped his head. “I had the same thought not so long ago.”
One of the sailors pointed toward the base of the pier. “Look! Isn’t that-?”
“By the dog of Egypt, it is!” Menedemos exclaimed. “There’s Sostratos, and Moskhion and Teleutas with him. Papai! Where’s Aristeidas, though?”
“Don’t care for the look of that,” Diokles said.
“Neither do I.” Menedemos ran along the gangplank from the Aphrodite to the quay, then down the planks to his cousin and the sailors. “Hail, O best one! Wonderful to see you again at last, after you’ve tramped the wilds of loudaia. But where s Aristeidas?”
“Dead,” Sostratos said shortly. He’d lost weight on his travels. His skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. He looked older, harder, than he had before setting out for Engedi. “Robbers. Day before yesterday. Spear in the belly. I had to put him out of his pain.” He slashed a thumb across his throat.
“Oh, by the gods!” Menedemos said, thinking, No wonder he looks older. He put an arm around his cousin’s shoulder. “That’s a hard thing to do, my dear, none harder. I’m very sorry. Aristeidas was a good man.”
“Yes. It would have been hard with anyone.” Sostratos’ eye slid toward Teleutas, who fortunately didn’t notice. “With the lookout, it was doubly so. But with the wound he had, all I did was save him hours of pain.”
“See what would have happened if you’d gone alone?” Menedemos said.
“Who knows?” Sostratos answered wearily. “Maybe I would have taken a different road back to Sidon traveling alone. Maybe I would have been earlier or later on the same road and not run into the bandits at all. There’s no way to tell, not for certain. Why don’t you just let that be?”
He sounded older, too, as impatient with Menedemos as a grown man might be with a child who’d asked him to pull the moon down from the sky. “All right. Excuse me for breathing,” Menedemos said, stung. “How did the business go? Did you get to Engedi? Have you got the balsam?”
“Yes, and some other things besides,” Sostratos said. “Beeswax, embroidered cloth… I’ll show you everything, if you’ll let us get on down to the ship. Your inn will have a stable for the mule and donkey, won’t it?”
“I’m not staying there anymore,” Menedemos said. “The innkeeper’s wife tried to seduce me, so I came back to the ship.” He held up a hand to forestall Sostratos. “The oath had nothing to do with that, though I’ve kept it. I wouldn’t want her on a bet.”
“We’ll find somewhere else to put the beasts, then,” Sostratos said. “It doesn’t matter. After everything I’ve been through the past couple of days, I have trouble seeing what does matter, aside from getting home safe. To the crows with everything else.”
Menedemos started to ask him about profit. He started to, but then checked himself. Here, for once, he saw no point in making Sostratos say something he would regret later. That was all very well for a joke, but not just after a good man died. Regardless of whether Sostratos did, Aristeidas’ shade deserved more respect than that.
His cousin said, “When we got back here, I was going to surprise you: I was going to quote from the Odyssey.”
“Were you?” Menedemos said. “What, the bit where Odysseus has slain the suitors and made love to Penelope who’s stayed home all those years, and then he tells her of his adventures in about thirty lines?”
“Yes, that’s the very passage I had in mind, as a matter of fact,” Sostratos answered. “I don’t suppose I ought to be surprised you could guess.”
“I hope you shouldn’t, my dear,” Menedemos said. “And I don’t thank you for putting me in the woman’s role. I wasn’t idle here in Sidon, you know.”
“I never said you were-not that Penelope was idle in Odysseus’ palace.” Sostratos scowled. “After what happened to poor Aristeidas, though, I haven’t the heart for any sort of playfulness.”
Moskhion said, “Skipper, he’s a host in himself, your cousin is. Eight thieving Ioudaioi set upon us-eight! Sostratos shot two of ‘em dead before they could close, he wounded a third, and he went and drove off another one with rocks. If he didn’t show himself a second Teukros there, we all would’ve died amongst those boulders.”
“That’s the truth,” Teleutas agreed.
“Euge!” Menedemos stared at Sostratos as if he’d never seen him before. He’d known his cousin could shoot pretty well, but to hear him described in such terms was… startling. Sostratos was among the mildest and most inoffensive of men. Or, at least, he was most of the time. With his freedom and his life in the balance, that might be a different story. That evidently was a different story.
“I wish I’d done better,” he said now. “If I’d shot the bastard who speared Aristeidas, he’d still be with us now.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” Menedemos said.
“We’ve been telling him the same thing,” Teleutas said. “He doesn’t want to listen.”
“Well, he should.” Menedemos looked straight at Sostratos. “You should. For four to drive off eight-that’s no mean feat, my dear, all by itself. You can’t expect everything to have gone perfectly.”
“Everything had, near enough, till we ran into those polluted robbers on the way back here,” Sostratos said. “Were another couple of days of luck too much to ask of the gods?”
“You can’t ask such things of me-I’ll tell you that,” Menedemos said. “Let’s get the goods off your donkey and onto the akatos. Balsam and beeswax and what all else did you tell me?”
“Embroidered cloth,” Sostratos answered. Business seemed to recall him to himself. “How did you do here?”
“Could have been worse. Could have been a lot worse, in fact,” Menedemos said. “I got rid of almost all your brother-in-law’s olive oil, and at a good price, too.”
Worn and sorrowful as Sostratos was, he sat up and took notice of that. “Did you? And what escaped madman came along to buy it?”