“I know cloth, too-well, I thought I knew cloth,” the Phoenician answered. He eyed the blue silk with as much wonder as Menedemos showed, and he’d seen it before. “Your Koan fabric comes here now and again. When I first saw-that-I thought it more of the same. Then I got a better look, and I knew I had to have it.” He might have been a rich Hellene speaking of a beautiful hetaira.
And Menedemos could only dip his head in agreement. “Where does it come from?” he asked again. “The Koans would kill to be able to make cloth like this. They never imagined anything so fine, and neither did I.” As a trader, he should have stayed blasй, uninterested. He knew that. Here, in the presence of what might as well have been a miracle, he couldn’t make himself do it.
Zakerbaal’s slow smile said he understood. It even said he might not take advantage, which surely proved how miraculous that silk was. “It comes from out of the east,” he said.
“Where?” Menedemos asked for the third time. “The east, you say? India?”
“No, not India.” The cloth merchant shook his head. “Somewhere beyond India-maybe farther east, maybe farther north, maybe both. The man from whom I bought it could tell me no more than that. He did not know himself. He had not brought it all the way, you understand-he had bought it from another trader who had got it from another, with who knows how many more since it left the land where it was made?”
Menedemos stroked the astonishing silk once more. As his fingers slid across its amazing smoothness, the gryphon’s skull came to mind again. It too had entered the world Hellenes knew from out of the trackless east. Alexander had conquered so much, people-especially people who still dwelt by the Inner Sea-often thought he’d taken all there was to take. Things like this were a reminder that the world was larger and stranger than even Alexander had imagined.
Like a man slowly emerging from a trance, Menedemos looked up from the silk to Zakerbaal. “How much of this do you have?” the Rhodian asked. “What price do you want?”
Zakerbaal sighed, as if he too didn’t much care to return to the mundane world of commerce. “I have twelve bolts in all, each much like this in size, some in different colors,” he answered. “I would have bought more, but that was all the trader had. Price?” He smiled a sad smile. “I would say it is worth its weight in gold. And now I have made you want to flee, I doubt not.”
“No, best one.” Menedemos tossed his head. “If I’d heard about this without seeing it, I would have laughed in your face. Now… Now I understand why you say what you say.” He did laugh then. “Telling you something like that makes me a terrible trader, one who deserves to be overcharged. But here, for this, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.”
“You respect the cloth,” Zakerbaal said seriously. “I respect you because of it. With stuffs like this, we throw out the ordinary rules.” He mimed tossing the contents of a chamber pot out the window and into the street below.
“Worth its weight in gold, you say?” Menedemos asked, and the Phoenician nodded. Menedemos didn’t even try to argue with him. Considering how far the silk had come, considering how fine it was, that seemed fair. But he didn’t want to give up gold or silver for the silk, not directly. “What would you say if I offered you half again its weight in my Koan silk here? “
“I would say, that is not enough,” Zakerbaal replied at once. “Koan silk is all very well. I mean no insult, Rhodian, but I say this is far better. I say it is so much better, if ever it comes here often and in large quantities, the Koans will go out of business, for they cannot compete with it.”
Half an hour before, Menedemos would have laughed at him. With the silk from the distant east in his lap, under his fingers, he suspected Zakerbaal might be right. Even so, he said, “All right. Koan silk is not so splendid. How can I deny it? But Koan silk is still very fine cloth. Koan silk is still no common thing itself in Phoenicia. So-one and a half times the weight is not enough, you say. What would be enough?”
The Phoenician looked up toward the sky. His lips moved silently. Sostratos got the same faraway expression when he was calculating. At last, Zakerbaal said, “Three and a half times.”
“No. That’s too much.” Menedemos tossed his head once more. Zakerbaal had indeed dealt with a good many Hellenes, for he showed he understood the gesture by a small nod of his own. Menedemos, for his part, knew that nod wasn’t one of agreement, only of acknowledgment. He went on, “Here in Sidon, you’ll be able to get just about as much for Koan silk as you will for this cloth from out of the east, because they’re both foreign and exotic in Phoenicia.”
“There is, perhaps, some truth in what you say, best one, but only some,” the cloth merchant replied. “What I have is better than what you are trying to trade for it, though.”
“And I’m offering you more Koan silk than the eastern silk I’d get in return,” Menedemos said. In Hellas, Koan silk wasn’t exotic, but it was expensive. Just how much he might get for twelve bolts of these new stuffs… He didn’t know just how much, but he was ever so eager to find out. “Three and a half times by weight leaves me no profit.” He doubted even that, but Zakerbaal didn’t need to know his doubts.
“Three times, then,” the Phoenician said. “Bolt for bolt, Koan silk is heavier than the fabric I have, because yours is so much coarser and thicker.”
They haggled for the next hour, each calling the other a liar and a thief. Menedemos sometimes enjoyed taking on a skilled opponent, even if that meant ending up with a little less than he would have otherwise. By Zakerbaal’s small smile, he felt the same. The closer they came to a bargain, the harder they dickered over tiny fractions. At last, they settled on Koan silk for two and seventeen thirty-seconds the weight of the eastern silk.
“My master, you should have been born a Phoenician, for you are wasted as a Hellene,” Zakerbaal said when they clasped hands.
“You’re a formidable fellow yourself, most noble one,” Menedemos replied truthfully. He resolved to make sure that Zakerbaal weighed both kinds of silk on the same pan of his scales. So skillful a bargainer would surely find a way to make everything possible work for him. But the cloth merchant didn’t even try setting one kind in one pan and the other in the other. Maybe that was a compliment to Menedemos. Maybe it meant Zakerbaal had some other way to cheat. If so, Menedemos didn’t spot it.
The Rhodian’s burden on the way back to the Aphrodite was lighter than what he’d taken from the ship, but he didn’t mind. In fact, he felt like kicking up his heels. No, he didn’t mind at all.
I shouldn’t be doing this, Sostratos told himself. It’s wrong. If Menedemos knew, how he would laugh…
Then he laughed at himself. He was enjoying himself too much to care whether his cousin would mock him.
“Keep going,” he said, panting a little. “Don’t stop there.”
“I don’t intend to, my dear,” Hekataios of Abdera answered. “I was only getting a pebble out of my sandal. The temple of the Ioudaioi is just around this next corner here.”
Ishould be in the market square, selling whatever I can, Sostratos thought. But Menedemos does know I aimed to learn about the loudaioi, too. Of one thing he was certain: his cousin wouldn’t have minded if he’d stayed away from the market square to bed the innkeeper’s pretty wife. That was how Menedemos would have entertained himself in Jerusalem. If I find my amusement in different places, Menedemos will just have to make the best of it.
Along with Hekataios, Sostratos rounded that last corner. Having done so, he stopped in his tracks and pointed. “That’s a temple?” he said, unable to hide his disappointment.
“I’m afraid so,” Hekataios told him. “Not very impressive, is it?”
“In a word, no,” Sostratos said. He was used to the colonnades, the entablatures, and carved and painted friezes that marked out a sacred place throughout the Hellenic world. Where poleis were rich, the shrines would be built of gleaming marble. Where they were not so rich, or where no more suitable stone was close by, limestone would serve. He’d even heard of temples where tree trunks did duty for columns.