“Maryam,” she whispered. Then, obviously gathering her courage, she asked, “What’s yours?”
“I’m Sostratos son of Lysistratos,” he answered. The funny-sounding foreign syllables made her giggle. She skipped away. Sostratos asked the taverner, “Why did you give her a name that means ‘bitter’? She seems a happy child.”
“Yes, so she does now,” the man answered, “but bearing her almost killed my wife. For weeks, I thought it would. That’s why, stranger.”
“Oh. Thank you,” Sostratos said, curiosity satisfied. And then, remembering his manners, he added, “I am glad your wife did not die.”
“Thank you again.” But the taverner’s face did not lighten. “She lived another three years, then perished of-” The word was meaningless to Sostratos. He spread his hands to show as much. The Ioudaian arched his back, threw back his head, and clenched his jaw. He was a good mime, good enough to make Sostratos shiver.
“Oh. Tetanus, we call that in Greek,” the Rhodian said. “I am very sorry, my friend. That is a hard way to die. I have seen it, too.”
With a shrug, the tavernkeeper said, “Our god willed it so, and so it came to pass. Magnified and sanctified be the name of our god throughout the world he created according to his will.” The way he rattled off the words, they had the sound of a prayer he knew by heart. Sostratos would have liked to ask him about that, too, but Moskhion distracted him by asking what he was talking about, so he didn’t.
He didn’t even think of it again till he and the sailors had already left Bethlehem. When he did, he muttered to himself in annoyance. Then he rode the mule to the top of a little hill and, peering east, got a good look at the Lake of Asphalt.
What first struck him was how far down the water looked. These hills weren’t very high, but the lake seemed far below him. Teleutas looked in that direction, too. “In the name of the gods,” he said, “that’s some of the ugliest-looking country I’ve seen in all my days.”
Though Teleutas liked to disparage everything he saw, that didn’t mean he was always wrong. He wasn’t wrong here; Sostratos thought it far and away the ugliest-looking country he’d seen in his life, too. The hills through which he and his fellow Rhodians were traveling descended to the Lake of Asphalt through a series of cliffs of reddish flint on which hardly anything grew. Below those cliffs were bluffs of buff limestone, every bit as barren.
The plains between the high ground and the lake were dazzlingly white. “You know what that reminds me of?” Moskhion said. “When they set out pans full of seawater to dry up, and they do, and there’s all the salt left in the bottom, to the crows with me if that’s not what it looks like.”
“You’re right,” Sostratos said. But salt pans weren’t very big. These salt flats, if that was what they were, went on for stadion after stadion. “Looks as though half the salt in the world is down there.”
“Too bad it’s not worth bringing a donkeyload back with us,” Aristeidas said. “It’s just lying there waiting for somebody to scoop it up. You wouldn’t have to bother with pans.”
“If so many Hellenic poleis didn’t lie by the sea, we might make a profit on it,” Sostratos said. “As things are-” He tossed his head.
Under the sun, the Lake of Asphalt itself shone golden. Beyond it, to the east, lay more hills, these of a harsh, purplish stone. Sostratos had hardly noticed them in the morning, when he’d set out from Jerusalem, but they grew ever more visible as the day wore along and the angle of the sunshine falling on them changed. He saw no trees or even bushes on them, either. The Lake of Asphalt and almost everything surrounding it might as well have been dead.
Pointing east across the lake to the rugged purple hills, Aristeidas asked, “Are those still a part of Ioudaia, too, or do they belong to some other country full of different barbarians?”
“I don’t know, though I’m sure a Ioudaian would,” Sostratos answered. “By the look of them, though, I’d say they aren’t likely to be full of anything, except maybe scorpions.”
“The scorpions here are bigger and nastier than anything we’ve got back in Hellas,” Teleutas said. “Back in Jerusalem a couple of days ago, I smashed one this big.” He stuck up his thumb and shuddered. “Almost makes me wish I’d got into the habit of wearing shoes.”
For the next quarter of an hour, he and Moskhion and Aristeidas were skittish on the road, shying away from rocks that might hide scorpions and from shadows or sticks they feared were the stinging vermin.
Even Sostratos, who was on muleback and whose feet didn’t touch the ground, kept looking around nervously. Then a scorpion did skitter across the dirt, and it vanished into a crevice in the rocks before anyone could kill it. Teleutas’ curses should have been plenty to do it in all by themselves.
After a while, the track leading down to the salt flats got so steep, Sostratos dismounted and walked beside the mule. The animal placed each foot with the greatest of care. So did the pack donkey, which Aristeidas led. Slowly, the Rhodians and their beasts descended from the hills.
Not quite halfway down, Teleutas stopped and pointed southeast. “Look there. Furies take me if that isn’t green, down there right by the edge of the Lake of Asphalt. I thought this whole place was just- nothing.”
“It can’t all be nothing, or nobody would live there,” Sostratos said. “That must be Engedi.”
“How do they make things grow, if the lake is salty and if there’s all this salt around?” Teleutas demanded.
“I don’t know yet. Finding out will be interesting, I think,” Sostratos said. “Maybe they have freshwater springs. We’ll see.” Teleutas still looked dissatisfied, but he held his peace.
Down on the salt flat, the sun beat down on Sostratos with a force he’d never known before. He had to squint to escape the dazzle of Helios’ rays off the salt. The very air felt uncommonly thick and heavy. It had the salt tang he associated with the sea and hadn’t expected to smell so far inland. Here, in fact, that salt tang was stronger than he’d ever known it before.
A raven flew past overhead. Moskhion said, “In this part of the world, I bet even the birds have to carry water bottles.”
Sostratos laughed, but not for long. A traveler who ran out of things to drink in these parts wouldn’t last long. Sun and salt might do as good a job of embalming him as natron did for the corpses Egyptian undertakers treated. Heading on toward Engedi, Sostratos wished he hadn’t had that thought.
MENEDEMOS TOOK the bolt of the eastern silk he’d got from Zakerbaal son of Tenes out of the oiled-leather sack where it was stowed and held it up to the sun. Diokles dipped his head in approval. “That’s mighty pretty stuff, skipper,” he said. “We’ll get a good price for it, too, when we go back to Hellas.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” Menedemos answered. “But I’m not just thinking about the silver. Look at the cloth! Look how thin it is! The finest Koan silk might as well be wool next to this.”
“Wonder how they do it,” the keleustes said.
“So do I.” Menedemos dipped his head. “And I wonder who they are. People beyond India, Zakerbaal said.”
“Not even Alexander found out what’s beyond India,” Diokles said.
“ Alexander decided there wasn’t anything beyond India,” Menedemos agreed. “That way, he could head back toward Hellas saying he’d conquered the whole world.” He looked at the silk again. “He was wrong. He was a godlike man-even a hero, a demigod, if you like-but he was wrong.”
“I wonder if any more of this stuff will ever come out of the east,” Diokles said.
Menedemos shrugged. “Who can guess? I’d bet we never see another gryphon’s skull, because nobody in his right mind would pay anything for one. But this? This is different. It’s beautiful. Anybody who sees it would pay for it, and pay plenty. So maybe more’ll come from wherever it comes from, but who knows when? Next year? Ten years from now? Fifty? A hundred? Who can say?”