Instead of taking the political talk further, Diokles pointed down to the base of the quay. “Furies take me if those don’t look like more soldiers looking around for the Aphrodite.”
“You’re right,” Menedemos murmured. “Maybe that session at the barracks is going to pay off pretty well after all, even if that abandoned rascal of an Andronikos didn’t do any buying himself.”
Up the pier came the Hellenes. They remained tentative till Menedemos waved and called to them. Then they sped up. One of them said, “You’re the trader with the good oil?”
“That’s me, sure enough.” Menedemos looked from one man to the next. “How do you know about it? I’ve got a good memory for faces, and I don’t think any of you were at the quartermaster’s taste test.”
“No, but we heard about it, and we know what he feeds us,” replied the soldier who’d spoken before. He made a face to show what he thought of it. “We figured we’d club together, buy an amphora of the good stuff, and share it amongst us. Isn’t that right, boys?” The other mercenaries dipped their heads to show it was.
“Fine with me,” Menedemos said. Then he told them what a jar cost.
“Papai!” their spokesman said as the others flinched in dismay. “Can’t you give us a break on that? It’s pretty steep for ordinary mortals.”
“I’ve already sold three jars for that price this morning,” Menedemos answered. “If I sell it to you for less, your pals will come by and say, ‘Oh, you gave it to good old What’s-his-name for twenty drakhmai, so let us have it for twenty, too.’ There goes my profit-you see what I mean?” He spread his hands to show he was sorry, but he held firm.
The soldiers put their heads together. Menedemos ostentatiously didn’t listen to their low-voiced argument. At last, they separated again. The fellow who did the talking for them said, “All right, thirty-five drakhmai it is.
This is supposed to be good stuff, so we’ll pay for it this once.”
“And I do thank you very much, most noble ones,” Menedemos said. “Come aboard, then, and choose the amphora you want.” They were as near identical as one ear of barley to another, but he’d seen before that giving-or rather, seeming to give-customers such choices made them happier. As they picked their jar, he added, “Would you like to buy some ham or some smoked eels?”
Antigonos’ men put their heads together again and then spent some more money on eels. Menedemos ended up happy when they paid him, too. Some of the coins they used were Sidonian sigloi, which he accepted as equaling two Rhodian drakhmai. But others were drakhmai and didrakhms and tetradrakhms from all over Hellas. Athenian owls and turtles from Aigina were considerably heavier than Rhodian coins. To the soldiers, one drakhma was as good as another. Menedemos knew better- and also knew better than to say anything about the extra profit he was making.
Before long, another party of soldiers came up the pier toward the Aphrodite. “You may end up thanking that quartermaster for turning you down, not cursing him,” Diokles remarked.
Menedemos thought about how very many amphorai of olive oil remained aboard the akatos. But then he thought about how large Antigonos’ garrison in Sidon was. If Damonax’s oil became a fad… “By the dog of Egypt,” he said slowly, “so I may.”
As Sostratos traveled father into Ioudaia, he began to see why Hellenes knew so little about the land and its folk. The people stuck together, clinging to their own kind and having as little to do with outsiders as they could. And the land worked with them. It was broken and hilly and hot and poor. As far as he could see, the Ioudaioi were welcome to it. Who in his right mind would want to take it away from them?
He knew he couldn’t have been so very many stadia from the Inner Sea. There it lay, off to the west, the broad highway that could swiftly waft him back to Rhodes. But the Ioudaioi turned their backs on it. They had their flocks of sheep and cattle, their olive trees and their vineyards, and they seemed content with those-and with their strange god, whose face no one ever saw.
In every village and town through which he passed, Sostratos had looked for a temple to this mysterious god. He never found one. At last, he’d asked a Ioudaian who’d proved friendly enough over a couple of cups of wine in a tavern. The fellow had shaken his head and looked amused at the question: amused and pitying, as if Sostratos couldn’t be expected to know any better.
“Our god has only one temple, where the priests offer prayer and sacrifice,” he’d said. “That is in Jerusalem, our great city.”
Everywhere in Ioudaia, people spoke of Jerusalem as Hellenes spoke of Athens or Alexandria. Every other town, they said, was as nothing beside it. And they spoke of their temple as Athenians might have spoken of the Parthenon-as the most perfect and beautiful building in the world.
They were only barbarians, and provincial barbarians at that, so Sostratos did discount a fair amount of what he heard. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for his first sight of Jerusalem, which he got from a rocky ridge a couple of hours’ travel north and west of the city.
He pointed ahead. “That’s it,” he said. “That has to be it. But is that all there is? That’s what all the Ioudaioi we’ve met were swooning over?”
“Doesn’t look like so very much, does it?” Aristeidas said.
“Now that you mention it, no,” Sostratos answered. The allegedly great city of the Ioudaioi straggled along a rise between a sizable valley to the east and a smaller, narrower ravine to the west. It might have been half a dozen stadia long; it was nowhere near half a dozen stadia wide. Some more homes-suburbs, though they hardly deserved the name-dotted the rise west of the narrow ravine. Smoke hung above everything: the unfailing mark of human habitation. Giving the place the benefit of the doubt, Sostratos said, “There are poleis that are smaller.”
“I can’t think of any that’re uglier,” Teleutas said.
Sostratos didn’t find that quite fair. The walls around Jerusalem and the bigger buildings he could see were built from the local stone, which had a golden color his eye found pleasing. He couldn’t make out any details, not at this range, and doubted even lynx-eyed Aristeidas would be able to. “One of those big buildings will probably be the temple the Ioudaioi talk about.”
“I don’t see anything that looks like a proper temple, with columns and all,” Aristeidas said, leaning forward to peer at the distant city on the hill.
“They’re barbarians, and peculiar barbarians at that,” Moskhion said. “Who knows if their temples look the way temples are supposed to?”
“And they worship this silly god nobody can see,” Teleutas added slyly. “Maybe they’ve got a temple nobody can see, too.”
“It could be,” Sostratos said. “The Kelts worship their gods in groves of trees, I’ve heard.” He looked around. “I admit there are bound to be more trees in the land of the Kelts than there are here.” After a little more thought, he went on, “I take it back. I do think one of those buildings is the temple, for the Ioudaioi wouldn’t have talked about the place the way they have if it were only a sacred grove-or, for that matter, if it weren’t there at all.”
He stopped, pleased by his logic. But when he looked from one of his escorts to another to find out if it had impressed them, too, he caught Teleutas muttering to Aristeidas: “By the dog, I can’t even make a joke without getting a lecture back.”
Sostratos’ ears burned. Well, you wanted to find out what they thought, he told himself. Now you know. He hadn’t intended to lecture. He’d just been making a point. Or so he’d thought, anyhow. He sighed. Ihave to watch that. I really do need to be careful. If I’m not, I’ll end up boring people. That’s the last thing a merchant can afford to do, because-
He broke off. He did some muttering of his own, some fairly pungent muttering. He’d started lecturing himself about not lecturing. “Let’s go,” he said aloud. That was brief enough and enough to the point that not even Teleutas could try to improve it.