Slowly, Sostratos said, “I don’t think we’ve seen a single statue since we came into this country. Do any of you boys remember one?”
After some thought, the three sailors tossed their heads. Moskhion said, “I wonder why that is. Pretty strange, you ask me. Of course, everything in this polluted land is pretty strange, you ask me.”
He used such comments to keep his curiosity from getting loose. Sostratos wanted his to run free. When a plump, prosperous-looking Ioudaian came up the street toward him, he spoke in Aramaic: “Excuse me, my master, but may your humble slave ask a question without causing offense?”
“You are a foreigner. Your being here causes offense. I do not wish to speak with you,” the Ioudaian answered, and pushed on past him.
“Well, to the crows with you, friend,” Sostratos muttered. He and the sailors pressed on toward the inn. A couple of blocks later, he asked another man if he could ask.
This fellow also looked at him as if he was less than welcome in Jerusalem, but said, “Ask. If I do not like the question, I will not answer it.”
“Well enough, my master,” Sostratos said. When he tried to ask what he wanted to know, he discovered he had no idea how to say statue in Aramaic. He had to describe what he meant instead of simply naming it.
“Oh,” the Ioudaian said after a little while. “You mean a graven image.”
“Thank you,” Sostratos told him. “Why no graven images here in Jerusalem? Why none in Ioudaia?”
“Because our god commands us not to make them-it’s as simple as that,” the Ioudaian answered.
I might have known, Sostratos thought. But that didn’t tell him all he wanted to know. And so he asked another question: “Why does your god command you not to make graven images? Again, my master, I mean no offense.”
“Our god made mankind in his own image,” the Ioudaian said. Sostratos dipped his head, then remembered to nod instead. Hellenes believed the same thing. The Ioudaian went on, “We are forbidden to make graven images of our god, so how can we make them of ourselves, when we are made in his image?”
His logic was as pure as any a Hellenic philosopher might have used. His opening premise, on the other hand, struck Sostratos as absurd. Even so, the Rhodian said, “My thanks.” The Ioudaian nodded and went on his way. Sostratos scratched his head. The fellow had shown him a flaw in logic he hadn’t thought enough about: if the premise from which it began was flawed, everything springing from that premise would be worthless, too.
It’s a good thing we Hellenes don’t use such foolish premises. Otherwise, we might make mistakes when we reason and never even notice ourselves doing it, he thought. He rode on for another half a block, feeling pleased with himself for noticing the holes in the barbarian’s logic. Then, abruptly, he was much less happy. Suppose some of the premises from which we reason are flawed. How would we know? Our logic would be only as good as that loudaian’s.
He spent some little while chewing on that and found no answer that satisfied him. He might have kept right on chewing on it, too, had Teleutas not asked, “Are we getting close to this miserable inn? I’ve been walking for a long, long time-feels like forever-and I’d like to get off my feet for a while.”
“I’ll ask,” Sostratos said with a sigh.
He didn’t like asking such practical questions of strangers even in Greek. Historical or philosophical queries were a different matter-there his curiosity overcame everything else. But something as mundane as directions? He wished he could get away without them.
Here, though, he obviously couldn’t. Taking a deep breath, he made himself beard another Ioudaian: “I crave pardon, my master, but could you direct your servant to the inn of Ithran son of Akhbor?”
The fellow pointed. The flood of words that followed flowed too swiftly for Sostratos to understand.
“Slow! Slow!” he exclaimed.
More pointing. More quick, guttural Aramaic. Sostratos threw his hands in the air. More than any of his own words, the despairing gesture got through to the Ioudaian. On his third go-round, the man really did slow down, enough so that Sostratos could actually figure out most of what he was saying.
“Four blocks up, two to the right, and then one more up? Is that right?” Sostratos asked.
“Yes, of course. What did you think I said?” the Ioudaian asked.
“I was not sure,” Sostratos answered truthfully. He gave the man one of the tiny silver coins the local governors issued. The loudaian put it in his mouth, as a Hellene might have. It was so small, Sostratos wondered if he would swallow it without noticing.
Ithran’s inn proved to be a large, noisy, ramshackle place. When Sostratos and the sailors from the Aphrodite got there, the innkeeper was patching a crack in a mud-brick wall with what looked and smelled like a mixture of clay and cow dung. He wiped his hands on his robe, but still had second thoughts about clasping hands with Sostratos. Instead, bowing, he said, “How may I serve you, my master?”
“A room for me. A room for my men,” Sostratos replied. “And stalls for the animals.”
Ithran bowed again. “It shall be just as you require, of course,” he said. He was a few years older than Sostratos, tall and lean, handsome in a swarthy way, with a scar on one cheek that vanished into his bushy black beard.
Sostratos snapped his fingers, remembering something. “Is it not true, sir, that another Ionian is here?” When the innkeeper nodded, Sostratos switched to Greek and asked, “Do you speak the tongue of the Hellenes, then?”
“Speak little bit,” Ithran answered in the same language. “Was soldier for Antigonos before wound.” He touched his face to show what he meant. “Learn Greek from soldiers.” Had he not told that to Sostratos, his accent would have. It was one of the strangest the Rhodian had ever met: half guttural Aramaic, half broad Macedonian. If he hadn’t already heard foreigners mangle Greek a lot of different ways, he wouldn’t have been able to make head or tail of it.
“How much for the lodgings?” he asked.
When Ithran told him, he thought he’d misheard. The Ioudaian had replied in Aramaic. Sostratos went over to Greek again, but the answer didn’t change. He did his best not to show how astonished he was. He haggled a little for form’s sake, but he would have been content to take the first price the innkeeper quoted. In Rhodes or Sidon, he would have paid three times as much.
Once he and the sailors from the Aphrodite got to their rooms, he remarked on that. He all but chortled with glee, as a matter of fact. But Teleutas put things in perspective. “Of course rooms are cheap here,” he said. “You go to Sidon or Rhodes, those are places people really want to visit. But who in his right mind would want to come to this miserable sheep turd of a town?”
Sostratos considered what he’d seen walking through Jerusalem’s narrow, winding, smelly streets. He heaved a sigh. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he admitted, “but to the crows with me if I can tell you you’re wrong.”
A Macedonian trooper too far down on the social scale to care about whether he did his own work lugged an amphora of olive oil and a Lykian ham off the Aphrodite, down the pier, and back into Sidon. As soon as he was off the ship, Menedemos stopped paying much attention to him. Instead, the Rhodian merchant looked down at the gleaming silver that filled his hands: a mixture of Sidonian silver and coins from all over Hellas.
“By the dog, I really am almost starting to think that pimp of an Andronikos did us a favor when he wouldn’t buy our whole shipment of oil,” he said. “ Garrison troops just keep coming in and taking it away a jar at a time.”
“And paying a lot more per jar than he would have,” Diokles said.