“Every word you say is true, but there’s more to it than that,” Menedemos answered. “A lot of the time, every obolos a quartermaster doesn’t spend on his soldiers is an obolos he gets to keep for himself.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.” The oarmaster dipped his head. “Still, though, if I were in Antigonos’ army, I’d be careful about playing games like that. If old One-Eye caught me at ‘em, I’d end up on a cross like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“May Antigonos catch Andronikos, then. May he-” Menedemos broke off. Someone was coming up the pier toward the Aphrodite: a Hellene, surely, for no Phoenician would have worn a tunic that bared his arms to the shoulders and his legs to above the knee. Menedemos raised his voice: “Hail, friend! Do something for you?”
“You’re the fellow who brought that good olive oil to the barracks the other day, aren’t you?” the newcomer said. Before the Rhodian could answer, the man dipped his head and answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are.”
“That’s right.” Menedemos didn’t bother hiding his bitterness. “Your polluted quartermaster doesn’t want anything to do with it, though.”
“Andronikos can take it up the arse like a slave in a boy brothel for all of me,” the Hellene replied. “I know what he gives us, and I was one of the people who tasted what you’ve got. He may not want to buy any, but I do. How much do you want for a jar?”
“Thirty-five drakhmai,” Menedemos answered, as he had at the beginning of the failed dicker with Andronikos.
He waited to see what counteroffer the Hellene would make. Hippokles, that’s what his name is, Menedemos remembered. He’d liked the oil a lot when he tried it. And now he didn’t make any counteroffer. He just dipped his head and said, “I’ll take two amphorai, then. That’d be thirty-five sigloi, near enough, right?”
“Right,” Menedemos said, doing his best to hide his surprise.
“Good.” Hippokles turned on his heel. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back. I’ve got to get the money and a couple of slaves to haul the jars.” Away he went.
“Well, well,” Menedemos said. “That’s better than nothing.” He laughed. “Of course, I would’ve sold Andronikos a lot more than two jars.”
Less than an hour later, Hippokles returned with two scrawny men in tow. He gave Menedemos a jingling handful of Sidonian coins. “Here you are, pal. Now I’ll put these lazy wretches to work.”
Menedemos counted the sigloi. Hippokles hadn’t tried to cheat him. Some of the coins bore inscriptions in the angular Aramaic script. The letters meant nothing to Menedemos. That Hippokles had plenty of silver did. “Would you like to buy some smoked eels from Phaselis, too?” he asked. “Two sigloi each.”
That was four times what Sostratos had paid for them in the Lykian town. And Hippokles, after tasting a tiny sample, dipped his head and bought three. He took care of them himself. The slaves, grunting, picked up the jars of oil and carried them back down the quay after him into Sidon.
“Not bad,” Diokles said.
“No. I got premium prices there, no doubt about it.” Menedemos ducked under the poop deck and stowed his fat handful of silver in an oiled-leather sack. He’d just made about a day’s wages for the crew of the merchant galley. Of course, not all of it was profit; the olive oil and eels hadn’t come on board for nothing. Even so, it was the best he’d done since putting in at Sidon.
And Hippokles turned out not to be the only soldier who, after trying Damonax’s olive oil, wanted some for himself. The mercenary hadn’t been gone long before another officer came up the pier to the Aphrodite. This fellow didn’t need to go back and fetch a slave to take away his purchase; he’d brought a man along. Like Hippokles, he had only Sidonian coins on him. “I’ve been here three years, ever since we took this place back from Ptolemaios,” he told Menedemos. “Whatever drakhmai I had once upon a time are long since spent.”
“Don’t you worry, best one,” Menedemos said smoothly. “I’ll figure out how many sigloi make thirty-five drakhmai, never fear.” Sostratos would have done it in his head. Menedemos had to flick beads on a counting board. With the board, he got the answer about as quickly as his cousin would have: “Seventeen and a half.”
“Sounds about right.” The other Hellene counted out sigloi one by one and gave them to Menedemos. “… sixteen… seventeen.” He handed the Rhodian a smaller coin. “And here’s the half-siglos to make it square.”
“Thanks very much,” Menedemos said. “I’ve got hams from Patara, too, if you’d be interested in one of those…”
“Let me try a bit,” the officer said. Menedemos did. The officer grinned. “Oh, by the gods, yes-that pig died happy.” He made Menedemos happy, too, with the price he paid. Turning to his slave, the fellow added, “Come on, Syros. Sling that ham over your shoulder-may I scrounge a bit of rope from you, Rhodian?-grab that amphora, and get moving.”
“Yes, boss,” the slave replied in halting, Aramaic-accented Greek. Sweat poured from him as he followed his master off the ship. He was shorter and much skinnier than the Hellene, but it would have gone against his master’s dignity to stoop to manual labor himself when he had a slave to do it for him.
Menedemos and Diokles watched the two men go. “How about that?” the oarmaster said. “If one soldier had come here, I’d’ve said it was a nice happenstance and forgotten about it the next day. But if two do it of a morning…”
“Yes.” Menedemos dipped his head. He looked down at his new handful of silver. “I wonder how many more we’ll get.” Something else occurred to him. “And I wonder if the other oil Andronikos had in that room was some of the best he serves out, not the everyday stuff. Wouldn’t surprise me. Even if it was, it wasn’t good enough.”
“He’s the only one who knows for sure,” Diokles answered. “One thing, though: at least now we know the olive oil we’ve got really is as good as we’ve been saying.”
“Yes. The same thing occurred to me.” Menedemos sighed. “All the trouble we’ve had getting rid of it, I was worrying about that myself. Harder to make sure you get top quality from in-laws, but you’d better. Otherwise, who’s going to trust you when you come back to a place in a year or two?”
Diokles laughed. “It might not matter here, skipper. If we come back to this place in a couple of years, we’re liable to find Ptolemaios’ garrison here, not Antigonos’.”
“Well, I can’t tell you you’re wrong, and I won’t even try,” Menedemos answered. “Or, of course, we might find that Ptolemaios’ men had been here, and Antigonos’ had run them out again.”
“That, too,” the oarmaster agreed. “It’s like the pankration with those two-they’ll keep pounding away till one of them can’t pound any more.”
“And with Lysimakhos, and with Kassandros,” Menedemos added. “And if one of them does go down, somebody else will probably rise up to take his place-that Seleukos, maybe, out in the east. Somebody. I don’t think anyone can fill Alexander ’s shoes, but nobody’s willing to leave them empty, either.”
“The marshals don’t care what they step on while they’re fighting,” Diokles said. “They’ll step on Rhodes if they get the chance.”
“Don’t I know it,” Menedemos said. “We really are a free and autonomous polis, and even Ptolemaios, who’s the best friend we’ve got among the Macedonians, even he thinks it’s funny we want to stay that way. He’ll humor us-we’re the middlemen for his grain trade, after all- but he thinks it’s funny. I saw that in Kos last year.”