“Let’s haul up the pail,” Sostratos said.
The men got to work, taking turns at it. Teleutas groaned and grumbled as he hauled on the line; he might almost have been sentenced to torture. From everything Sostratos had seen, Teleutas reckoned work the equivalent of torture. Then again, hauling up a large, full bucket wasn’t easy. Sostratos wondered if there were some easier way to raise a bucket of water than yanking it up one pull at a time. If so, it didn’t occur to him.
“Here we are,” Aristeidas said at last. Moskhion reached out and grabbed the dripping wooden pail. He raised it to his lips; took a long, blissful pull; and then poured some over his head. Sostratos said not a word when Teleutas and Aristeidas took their turns before passing him the pail. By bringing it up from the bottom of the deep well, they’d earned the right.
“Water seems good enough,” Aristeidas said. “It’s nice and cool, and it tastes sweet. I hope it’s all right.”
“It should be.” Sostratos drank. “Ahh!” As his men had, he poured water over his head, too. “Ahh!” he said again. It felt wonderful running down his face and dripping from his nose and the end of his beard.
Every now and then, he spied a face staring from the windows of the stone and mud-brick houses. No one but Ezer son of Shobal came out, though. In fact, Sostratos waved the first time he saw one of those curious faces. All that did was make it disappear in a hurry.
Aristeidas noticed the same thing. “These people are funny,” he said. “If we came into a village full of Hellenes, they’d be all over us. They’d want to know who we were and where we were from and where we were going next and what news we’d heard lately. The rich ones would want to trade with us, and the poor ones would want to beg from us. They wouldn’t just leave us alone.”
“I should say not,” Teleutas agreed. “They’d try to steal anything we hadn’t nailed down, too, and they’d try to pry up the nails.”
Sostratos raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t that Teleutas was wrong. The sailor was, without a doubt, right-Hellenes would act like that. But the notion of thievery seemed to occur to him very quickly. Not for the first time, Sostratos wondered what that meant.
He could have pushed on from Hadid, but he did want to buy food, and Ezer had made it very plain he couldn’t do that till after sunset. He and the sailors rested by the well. After a while, they refilled the bucket and hauled it up again. They drank deep and poured the rest over themselves.
As he might have done in Hellas, Teleutas started to pull off his tunic and go naked. Sostratos held up a hand. “I already told you once, don’t do that.”
“It’d be cooler,” Teleutas said.
“People here don’t like showing off their bodies.”
“So what?”
“So what? I’ll tell you so what, O marvelous one.” Sostratos waved a hand. “There probably aren’t any other Hellenes closer to this place than a day’s journey. If we get people here up in arms against us, what can we do? If they start throwing rocks, say, what can we do? I don’t think we can do anything. Do you?”
“No, I guess not,” Teleutas said sulkily. He left the chiton on.
After the sun went down, the locals emerged from their houses. Sostratos bought wine and cheese and olives and bread and oil (he tried not to think about all the oil Damonax had made him carry on the Aphrodite, and he hoped Menedemos was having some luck getting rid of it). Some people did ask questions about who he was, where he was from, and what he was doing in Ioudaia. He answered as best he could in his halting Aramaic. As twilight deepened, mosquitoes began to whine through the air. He slapped a couple of times, but still got bitten.
A few of his questioners were women. Though they robed themselves from head to foot like the local men, they didn’t wear veils, as respectable Hellenes would have. Sostratos had noticed that back in Sidon, too. To him, seeing a woman’s naked face in public came close to being as indecent as seeing his-or Teleutas’-naked body would have been for the Ioudaioi.
He wished he could ask them more about their customs and beliefs. It wasn’t so much that his Aramaic wasn’t up to the job. But, as he hadn’t wanted Teleutas to offend them, he didn’t want to do so himself. He sighed and wondered how long it would be till his curiosity got the better of his common sense.
7
“How you is?” the innkeeper asked when Menedemos came out of his room one morning. His name, the Rhodian had learned, was Sedek-yathon.
“Good,” Menedemos answered in Greek. Then he said the same thing in Aramaic, of which he’d picked up a few words.
Sedek-yathon grunted. His wife, who was called Emashtart, smiled at Menedemos. “How clevers you am,” she said in her dreadful Greek. She rattled off a couple of sentences of Aramaic much too fast for him to follow.
“What?” Menedemos said.
Emashtart tried to explain it in Greek, but she lacked the vocabulary. She turned to her husband. Sedek-yathon was busy putting a new leg on a stool. He showed no interest in translating. His Greek was bad, too; odds were he couldn’t have done it if he’d wanted to. When he refused even to try, Emashtart started screeching at him.
“Hail,” Menedemos said, and left the inn in a hurry. He spent as little time there as he could. The innkeeper’s wife kept making unsubtle advances at him. His oath to Sostratos had nothing to do with anything. He didn’t want the woman, whom he found repulsive, and he didn’t want Sedek-yathon thinking he did want her and trying to kill him as a result.
Though the sun hadn’t been up long, the day promised brutal heat. The breeze came, not from the Inner Sea, but from the hills east of Sidon. When it swept down off them, Menedemos had learned, the heat got worse than anything he’d ever known in Hellas.
He stopped at a baker’s and bought a small loaf of bread. With a cup of wine from the first fellow he saw carrying a jug, it made a good enough breakfast. The cup, fortunately, was small; unlike Hellenes, Phoenicians didn’t believe in watering their wine and always drank it neat. A big mug of unmixed wine first thing in the morning would have set Menedemos’ head spinning.
Sidon was already bustling as he made his way through its narrow, winding streets toward the harbor and the Aphrodite. On days like this, the locals often tried to pack as much business as they could into the early morning and the late afternoon. When the heat was at its worst, they would close their shops and sleep, or at least rest, for a couple of hours. Menedemos wasn’t used to doing that, but he couldn’t deny it made a certain amount of sense.
Diokles waved to him when he came up the wharf. “Hail,” the oarmaster called. “How are you?”
“Glad to be here,” Menedemos answered. “Yourself?”
“I’m fine,” Diokles said. “Polykharmos came back to the ship last night shy a front tooth, though. Tavern brawl.” He shrugged. “Nobody pulled a knife, so it wasn’t a bad one. He was pretty drunk, but he kept going on about what he did to the other fellow.”
“Oh?” Menedemos raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t anybody ever tell him he shouldn’t lead with his face?”
The keleustes chuckled. “I guess not. Hasn’t been too bad here-I have to say that. Nobody’s been stabbed; nobody’s been badly hurt any other way. As often as not, you lose a man or two on a trading run.”
“I know.” Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic to turn aside the evil omen. Diokles did the same. “Gods prevent it,” Menedemos added.
“Here’s hoping,” Diokles agreed. “What are you going to do about Damonax’s olive oil and the rest of the food now, skipper?”
“To the crows with me if I know.” Menedemos melodramatically threw his hands in the air. “I thought I had a bargain with that whipworthy rogue of an Andronikos, but the abandoned catamite wouldn’t give me a decent price.”
“Quartermasters are cheese-parers,” Diokles said. “They always have been, and I expect they always will be. They don’t care if they serve their soldiers slop. If giving the men something better means costing them an extra obolos, they won’t do it. They figure you can fight as well on stale, moldy bread as on fresh-maybe better, because bad food makes you mean.”