“But you’re not where you come from, are you?” Menedemos said, still smoothly. “I had to get these books copied in Rhodes, then dodge pirates all the way from there to here to bring them to Sidon. If you want a book here, I don’t think you’ll go to a Phoenician scribe to get one written out. The Phoenicians’ letters don’t even run the same way ours do; they read from right to left.” If his cousin hadn’t complained about that, he never would have known it, but he happily used it as part of his argument. “Besides,” he added, “what else would you rather spend your silver on?”
“Wine,” said the mercenary from Athens. “Pussy.”
“You drink wine, and an hour later you piss it out. You lay a woman, and a day later your spear stands stiff again,” Menedemos said. “But a book’s different. A book is a possession for all time.” He’d heard that phrase from Sostratos, too; he supposed Sostratos had got it from one of the historians he liked so much.
A couple of the men who’d listened to him looked thoughtful. The Athenian said, “That’s still an awful lot of money.”
Dickering started there. Not even the Athenian had the gall to offer only five drakhmai. The soldiers started at ten. Menedemos tossed his head-not derisively, but with the air of a man who didn’t intend to sell for that price. One of them went up to twelve with no more prodding than that. Menedemos had to fight to keep a smile off his face. It wasn’t supposed to be so easy. He didn’t have to come down very far at alclass="underline" only to seventeen drakhmai, three oboloi for each book.
“You’ll sell for that?” the Athenian asked, to nail it down. With the air of a man making a great concession, Menedemos dipped his head. Eight or nine soldiers hurried into the barracks. Even before they came back, Philippos son of Iolaos handed Menedemos a drakhma. “Well, Rhodian, you taught me a lesson,” he said.
“Oh? What lesson is that?” Menedemos asked. “My cousin collects them.”
“Don’t bet against a man who knows his own business. Especially don’t push the bet yourself, like a gods-detested fool.”
“Ah.” Menedemos considered. “I think Sostratos already knows that one. I hope he does, anyhow.”
Sostratos had never wanted to be a leader of men. In the generation following Alexander the Great, when every fisherman dreamt of becoming an admiral and every dekarkhos imagined he would use the ten men he commanded to conquer a kingdom full of barbarians and set a crown on his head, that made the Rhodian something of a prodigy. Of course, hardly any of the men with big dreams would fulfill them. Sostratos, with no ambitions along those lines, found himself in a role he didn’t want to play.
“Trust me to get too much of what I don’t want,” he muttered from atop his mule. He didn’t like the animal, either.
“What’s that?” Aristeidas asked.
“Nothing,” Sostratos said, embarrassed at being overheard. He liked Aristeidas and got on fine with him aboard the Aphrodite, not least because he hardly ever had to give him orders there. Here on dry land, though, almost everything he said took on the nature of a command.
The mule’s and donkey’s hooves and the feet of the sailors accompanying him raised dust from the road. The sun blazed down, the weather warmer than it would have been in Hellas at the same season of the year. Sostratos was glad for the broad-brimmed traveler’s hat he wore in place of his helmet. Without it, he thought his brains might have cooked.
Apart from the heat, though, the countryside could easily have been inhabited by Hellenes. The grain fields lay quiet. They would be planted in the fall, when the rains came, for harvesting at the beginning of spring. Olive groves, with their silver-green leaves and gnarled, twisted tree trunks, looked much the same as they would have on Rhodes or in Attica. So did the vineyards. Even the sharp silhouettes of mountains on the horizon could have come straight from a land where Hellenes dwelt.
But the farmers tending the olive trees and grapevines stared at the men from the Aphrodite. Like the Sidonians, the men in the interior wore robes that reached down to their ankles. Most of them just draped a cloth over their heads to hold the sun at bay. The Hellenes’ tunics, which left their arms bare and didn’t reach their knees, marked them as strangers. Even Sostratos’ hat seemed out of place.
Teleutas didn’t want to bother with his chiton. “Why can’t I shed it and go naked?” he said. “This weather’s too stinking hot for clothes.”
“These people pitch fits if you run around bare, and it’s their country,” Sostratos said. “So no.”
“It’s not their country-it’s Antigonos’ country now,” Teleutas said. “Do you think old One-Eye cares a fart whether I wear my chiton or not?”
Sostratos wondered why he’d let Teleutas talk his way into coming along on this journey. Here they were, only a day out of Sidon, and the sailor was already starting to whine and fuss. Sostratos said, “What I think is, Antigonos is back in Anatolia, keeping an eye on Ptolemaios. The Phoenicians, though, the Phoenicians are here. They don’t like people going naked. I don’t want them throwing rocks at us or whatever else they decide to do.”
“How do you know they’d do that?” Teleutas demanded. “How do you-
“I don’t know they’d do that,” Sostratos said. “What I do know, O marvelous one, is that you’re about a digit’s breadth away from going back to Sidon and explaining to my cousin that I couldn’t use you here after all. If you’re going to come along, you’ll do what I tell you, the same as you do what Menedemos tells you when we’re at sea. Have you got that?” He was breathing hard by the time he finished. He didn’t like launching into a tirade like that. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to. And maybe I wouldn‘t, he thought resentfully, if I’d picked somebody besides Teleutas.
But he had picked Teleutas, and so he was stuck with him. The sailor looked resentful, too. He plainly had not the faintest notion why Sostratos had come down on him so hard. Had he understood such things, he wouldn’t have annoyed Sostratos in the first place. Now, glaring, he said what he had to say: “All right. All right. I’ll keep my chiton on. Are you happy?”
“Delighted,” Sostratos answered. Aristeidas snickered. Even Moskhion smiled, and he was hardly a man to notice subtleties. But Teleutas just went on glaring. Either he couldn’t recognize sarcasm when he heard it or he was more comprehensively armored against it than anyone Sostratos had ever met.
Aristeidas pointed and asked, “What’s that up ahead?”
As usual, he’d seen something before anyone else did. After riding on for a little way, Sostratos said, “I think it’s a little roadside shrine, like a Herm at a crossroads back in Hellas.”
The sandstone stele stood about half as tall as a man. It had the image of a god, now much weathered, carved in low relief on each of its four sides. There had been letters beneath the god’s images, but they were too worn to make out, at least for someone as little familiar with Phoenician writing as Sostratos.
A couple of bundles of dried flowers and a loaf of bread, now half eaten by animals, lay by the base of the stele. “Let’s leave some bread of our own,” Moskhion said. “We ought to get the gods here on our side, if we can.”
Sostratos doubted an offering would do anything of the sort, but he didn’t suppose it could hurt. If it made Moskhion and the other sailors feel better, it might even do some good. “Go ahead,” he told the former sponge diver.
Moskhion took a barley roll from a leather sack on the pack donkey’s back. He set it by the old loaf. “I don’t know what prayers you’re used to,” he told the god whose image adorned the stele, “but I hope you’ll look kindly on the Hellenes passing through your land.” He bobbed his head up and down. “Uh, thank you.”