He imagined strange barbarians sitting at their looms, turning out bolt after bolt of this wonderful silk. What would they be like? Beyond India, they might look like anything at all. The folk of India itself were said to be black, like Ethiopians. Did that mean everyone beyond India was black, too?
This is only imagination, Menedemos told himself, and tossed his head. I can make these distant barbarians any color I please. Why, I can make them yellow if I want to. He laughed at that.
“What’s funny, skipper?” the oarmaster asked. When Menedemos told him, he laughed, too. “That’s pretty good. It sure is. You think they’d have yellow hair, too, the way the Kelts do?”
“Who knows?” Menedemos said. “In my mind, they had black hair, but you can make them look however you want. What I want to imagine now is selling this silk and the dye as we go back to Rhodes.”
“It’ll do even better in the Aegean,” Diokles remarked. “The farther from Phoenicia we go, the better the prices we’ll get.”
“That’s probably true,” Menedemos said. “Maybe we can make for Athens next sailing season.” He laughed again. “That would break my cousin’s heart, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, he’d be ever so disappointed.” Diokles snorted. Finding the snort not strong enough, he laughed out loud.
“I wouldn’t mind getting up there myself,” Menedemos allowed. “You can have a good time all kinds of different ways in Athens. If we make port early in the season, we can go to the theater for the tragedies and comedies they put on during the Greater Dionysia. Nothing tops theater in Athens.”
“Yes, theater’s a nice way to pass a day every so often,” the keleustes agreed. “And they’ve got all kinds of wineshops there, and pretty girls in the brothels-pretty boys, too, if you’d rather do that for a change. It’s a good town.”
“A boy’s all right every once in a while,” Menedemos said. “I’ve never been one to chase every youth in bloom through the streets, though.”
“No-you chase wives instead.” But Diokles said it indulgently. He didn’t sound reproving, as Sostratos always did.
“I think wives are more fun-most wives, anyway.” Menedemos made a sour face. “The innkeeper’s wife is chasing me. I don’t intend to let her catch me, either. Sour old crone.”
“No wonder you don’t stay there much.”
“No wonder at all. If it weren’t for the bed…” Menedemos sighed. “I didn’t feel like sleeping on planks all the time we were here.”
“Never bothered me,” Diokles said.
“I know. But then, you’re comfortable sleeping sitting up. I couldn’t do that if my life depended on it.”
The oarmaster shrugged. “All what you’re used to. That’s what I got in the habit of doing when I pulled an oar-lean up against the gunwale, close my eyes, and doze off. After you do it for a while, it seems as natural as stretching out flat.”
“Maybe to you.” Menedemos glanced down toward the base of the pier. “If that’s not a Hellene coming this way, I’m a yellow barbarian myself.” He raised his voice: “Hail, friend! How are you today?”
“Not bad,” the other man answered, his Doric drawl not much different from the one that Menedemos spoke. “How’s yourself?”
“I’ve been worse,” Menedemos allowed. “What can I do for you?”
“Are you the fellow who was selling books at the barracks a while ago?”
Menedemos dipped his head. “That’s me, O best one. I haven’t got many left. Why didn’t you decide to buy sooner?”
“I couldn’t, that’s why,” the stranger said. “I’m a horseman, and I just got back in from a sweep through the hills after bandits.” He had a horseman’s scars, sure enough-on his legs and on his left arm. A hoplite’s large round shield protected that arm, but a horseman couldn’t bear anything so big and heavy.
“I hope the sweep went well,” Menedemos said. “You won’t find a merchant with a good thing to say about bandits.”
“We smoked out a couple of nests,” the other Hellene said. “But it’s more a matter of keeping them down and making them cautious than it is of getting rid of them. Those hills will spawn robber bands for the next thousand years. Too many hiding places for ‘em to use, too many towns and roads close to ‘em. Can’t be helped.” He changed the subject back toward what interested him: “Have you still got any books left?”
“A couple,” Menedemos answered. “One’s the book of the Iliad where godlike Akhilleus and glorious Hektor fight it out; the other’s from the Odyssey, the book where resourceful Odysseus meets Polyphemos the Cyclops.”
“I’d like ‘em both,” the cavalryman said wistfully. “Nothing like a book to make the time pass by. But you’re going to put some great whacking price on ‘em, because where else can I buy if I don’t get ‘em from you?”
“You can’t make me feel guilty, most noble one,” Menedemos said. “I’m not in business to lose money any more than soldiers are in business to lose battles. You can have ‘em both for thirty-five drakhmai. No haggling, no cheating-that’s the same price the garrison soldiers were paying.”
“Papai!” the cavalryman said. “That’s a lot of money, just the same.” Menedemos didn’t answer. He just stood and waited. The other Hellene frowned. Menedemos thought he knew the expression: that of a man who was talking himself into something. And, sure enough, the fellow said, “All right. All right! I’ll take ‘em. You count two drakhmai for one Sidonian siglos?”
“Yes,” Menedemos answered. That gave the other man a very slight break on the rate of exchange. Maybe Sostratos would have worked it out to the last obolos, but Menedemos didn’t feel like bothering. He took the silver, got the last two books in his store out of their sack, and gave them to the horseman.
“Thanks,” the man said. “I’ll carry these till they fall to pieces. I’d pay even more for the books from Herodotos where the Persians and Hellenes go at it. You don’t happen to have those, do you?”
“Sorry, no.” Menedemos hoped he hid his bemusement. Not even Sostratos had thought he could sell history books in Phoenicia. Customers never failed to be surprising. This one went on down the pier. Menedemos called after him: “Lykian ham? Fine oil?”
“No, thanks,” the soldier answered. “I’ve spent all the silver I’m going to. Some men would rather eat fancy. Me, I’d rather read.” He kept on walking.
To Diokles, Menedemos said, “A pity Sostratos is off in the back of beyond. He would have made himself a friend for life.”
“That’s the truth,” the keleustes agreed. “I know my alpha-beta, but I’ve never had much cause to use it. Most of the time, you can find out whatever you need to know just by talking with people.”
“I enjoy Homer, and I think I do like him better because I can read him for myself,” Menedemos said. “Same with Aristophanes -maybe even more so, because you don’t hear him read in the agora all the time, the way you do Homer. But I don’t dive into a roll of papyrus headfirst like Sostratos.”
“He knows all sorts of funny things, I will say,” Diokles remarked. “And what’s really strange is, every once in a while they come in handy.”
“I know.” Menedemos drummed the fingers of his right hand on the outside of his thigh. “It happens just often enough to keep me from teasing him too hard about everything he reads.” His fingers went up and down, up and down. “Too bad.”
Before he went back to Sedek-yathon’s inn that evening, Menedemos bought a sausage half a cubit long; the gut-wrapped length of chopped meat smelled strongly of garlic and cumin. He also got himself a small loaf with olives baked into it: sitos to go with his opson. He chuckled when that thought crossed his mind. Could Sostratos have known of it, he would have chided Menedemos for a self-confessed opsophagos: a man who put the relish ahead of the staple. The sausage was supposed to go with the bread, not the other way round.