Sedek-yathon’s wife dropped the sausage into hot oil for Menedemos. The oil was the same cheap stuff the innkeeper always used. Not only that, but it had done a lot of cooking before that sausage went into it. The smell filled the taproom at the front of the inn. It wasn’t precisely unpleasant, but it was strong.
Emashtart fished the sausage out of the oil with a pair of wooden tongs. She set it on a plate and carried it over to Menedemos. Putting it on the table in front of him, she smirked and said, “Phallos.”
“That’s not how you say ‘sausage’ in Greek,” Menedemos answered. The word for sausage, physke, was close enough that she might have used the other one in honest error. She might have. Menedemos hoped she had.
The way her smirk got wider-and, to his eyes, less lovely-argued she hadn’t. “Phallos,” she repeated, and then went on in her horrible Greek: “You to have biggerest phallos already, eh?” Her eyes went to Menedemos’ crotch.
His went to the formidable length of grayish-brown meat on the table in front of him. “By the gods, I hope not!” he exclaimed. “What do you take me for, a donkey?” He thought Emashtart a perfect donkey, but for different reasons.
She shook her head. “No, just man.” She put a slavering emphasis on the word. Her gaze still hadn’t risen to Menedemos’ face.
A couple of other men were eating in the taproom. They were Phoenicians, though, and gave no sign of understanding Greek. Emashtart could be shameless in front of them without their knowing. Hoping to quell her, Menedemos asked, “Where’s your husband?”
She gave him a scornful look. He’d seen that expression on the faces of more than a few women who’d been interested in him and hadn’t cared about their husbands at all. It was the last one he wanted to see on Emashtart’s. She said, “He drinking.” She mimed lifting a cup with both hands, bringing it to her mouth, and then staggering around, as if with too much wine. Menedemos chuckled. It was involuntary, but he couldn’t help himself; she made a fine mimic. She added, “Not to coming home at alls.”
“Oh,” Menedemos said tonelessly. “How nice.” He drank some of his own wine, then yawned. “I’m going to go to bed early tonight, I am. I’m very, very tired.” He yawned again, theatrically.
Emashtart watched him. She didn’t say a word. Menedemos didn’t like that. He wanted her to believe him. That way, she wouldn’t come scratching at his door sometime in the middle of the night. He’d been glad to have women scratch at his door before. He expected he would be again, once he could forget about this annoying oath he’d sworn to Sostratos. He couldn’t imagine being glad if Emashtart did, not even if she stood in the courtyard naked-maybe especially not if she stood in the courtyard naked.
Finally, despite looking back over her shoulder as she went, she left him alone. He had to eat in a hurry, yawning every so often, so she wouldn’t think he’d been lying about how tired he was-which he had. The sausage, though not quite like any he’d eaten back in Hellas, proved tasty. As he brought it up to his mouth, Emashtart ran her tongue over her lips in a silent obscenity that struck him as far grosser and more disgusting than anything the cheerfully bawdy Aristophanes had ever come up with.
As soon as Menedemos finished eating, he hurried out of the taproom and into the cramped, stuffy little chamber where he’d sleep tonight. He didn’t even bother lighting the lamp. He just took off his chiton, made sure the door was barred from the inside, and lay down naked on the narrow bed. To his surprise, he quickly fell asleep.
Not very much to his surprise, he was awakened some unknown stretch of time later by someone softly tapping on the door. Maybe she’ll go away if I lie here quietly and pretend to stay asleep, he thought.
He tried it. Emashtart didn’t go away. She kept right on tapping, louder and louder. At last, he doubted whether a dead man could have ignored her. Muttering to himself, he got out of bed and went to the door. “Who is it?” he asked, there being one chance in a myriad it was somebody besides the innkeeper’s wife.
But she answered, “I are it.”
“What do you want?” Menedemos asked. “And what hour is it, anyway? “
“Not knowing hours,” Emashtart said. “Want hinein”
Menedemos coughed. He gave back a pace. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised she knew the nastiest, lewdest verb in the Greek language, but he was. The word had implications of taking by force that usually made it implausible when used by a woman to a man; with her speaking, though, it somehow seemed anything but.
“In the name of the gods, go away,” he said. “I’m too tired.”
“Want binein,” she said again. “Want binein!” She was almost shouting, careless of what the other luckless lodgers at the inn might think. Had she spent all this time pouring down wine and thinking of assaulting Menedemos?
“No,” he said. “Not now. Go away.”
“To let in,” the Phoenician woman said. “Want binein! To be happies.”
Was this what women felt when some obnoxious man wouldn’t leave them alone? Menedemos had had some idea of what that was like; as a youth in Rhodes, he’d had plenty of suitors sniffing after him. But what he’d known then was chiefly scorn for the silly men who chased him. Now he felt real annoyance-and fear, too, for, in a city of her own people, Emashtart might be able to cause him a lot of trouble. He didn’t dare let her in now, lest she claim he’d tried to rape her instead of the other way round.
She started to say something else. Before she could, a man in a nearby room yelled in Aramaic. Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it, but he would have bet the other man was telling her to shut up and let him get some sleep. In the other fellow’s place, that was what Menedemos would have said.
Emashtart shouted back, anger in her voice. The man in the other room gave as good as he got. He and the innkeeper’s wife went back and forth at the top of their lungs. Menedemos couldn’t follow their argument, but it sounded spectacular. Aramaic, with its gutturals and hisses, was made for quarreling.
The racket Emashtart and the first man made disturbed others at the inn. Before long, six or eight people were shouting at one another. They all sounded furious. For the next quarter of an hour, Menedemos hadn’t the slightest hope of sleeping, but he was entertained.
At last, the bickering died away. Menedemos wondered whether Emashtart would start scratching at his door again. To his vast relief, she didn’t. He twisted and turned on the narrow, lumpy bed, and finally went back to sleep.
When he came out the next morning, he found Sedek-yathon sitting on a stool in the taproom drinking a cup of wine. The innkeeper looked somewhat the worse for wear. Menedemos wondered how much he’d drunk the night before. But that didn’t matter. Sedek-yathon spoke more Greek than his wife. That did. Menedemos said, “I’m sorry, best one, but I have to move back to my ship today.”
“You say you stay till new moon,” the innkeeper said. “You already pay to stay to new moon. Not get silver back.”
Normally, that would have infuriated the Rhodian. Here, he only shrugged. “Fine,” he said. He would have paid more than a few drakhmai to escape the inn. He gathered up his belongings and headed back to the Aphrodite. In some ways, he wouldn’t be so comfortable. In others… In others, he couldn’t wait to return to the merchant galley.
Growing up in Rhodes, Sostratos had never seen snow fall till he went to Athens to study at the Lykeion. Even in Athens, snow had been rare. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about heat. Engedi, on the shore of the Lake of Asphalt, proved he hadn’t known so much as he thought.
Whenever he went out of doors, the sun beat down on him with almost physical force. He wore his broad-brimmed hat every moment of the day and imagined he felt the weight of the sunlight pressing it down onto his head. Even the air seemed heavy and thick and suffused with sunshine.