And yet, despite that suffocating heat, despite the poisonously salty lake and the wasteland all around, Engedi lay in the midst of a patch of some of the most fertile soil he’d ever seen. As he’d guessed, springs bubbling up from underground let life not only survive but flourish here.
Outside the walls of Engedi, persimmon trees and henna plants grew among other crops. Sostratos knew the balsam-makers turned their sap into the medicinal, sweet-smelling product for which the town was famous. Just how they did it, he didn’t know. No one outside of Engedi did. He tossed his head. Since coming to Ioudaia, he’d learned that wasn’t quite true. One other place, a town called Jericho, also produced the balsam.
He shrugged. The stuff was always called balsam of Engedi. If he bought it here, he could truthfully say he had the authentic product.
More persimmon trees grew in front of the house of Eliphaz son of Gatam, the leading balsam-maker in Engedi. In the savage weather the land here by the Lake of Asphalt knew, their shade was doubly welcome.
A skinny, black-bearded slave opened the door when Sostratos knocked. “Peace be unto you, my master,” he said in Aramaic with an accent slightly different from that which the Ioudaioi used.
“And to you also peace, Mesha,” Sostratos replied. Mesha was a Moabite, one of the nomads who, Sostratos had learned since coming to Engedi, dwelt in the desert east of the Lake of Asphalt. Sostratos didn’t know by what misfortune he’d ended up a slave. Getting captured on a raid struck the Rhodian as likely; Mesha had the look of a man who would rob for the sport of it.
“May Khemosh favor you, Ionian,” Mesha said. Khemosh was a Moabite god. Sostratos would have liked to find out more about him, but Mesha named him only furtively; Eliphaz didn’t approve of anyone’s calling on any god in his house save the invisible one the Ioudaioi worshiped. In a lower voice yet, the Moabite added, “May you swindle the beard off my master’s chin.” He might be a slave, but he wasn’t resigned to serving the balsam-maker.
Another persimmon tree and a pale-barked fig spread shade over Eliphaz’s courtyard. The Ioudaian waited in that shade. He was tall and solidly made, and within a few years of forty: Sostratos could see the first few white threads in his dark beard. Inclining his head to Sostratos, he said, “Peace be unto you, Ionian.”
“And to you also peace, my master,” Sostratos said politely.
“My thanks.” Eliphaz son of Gatam clapped his hands. “Fetch us wine, Mesha.” Nodding, the slave hurried away. Eliphaz muttered something under his breath. It sounded like lizard-eating savage. Maybe he had no more love for Mesha than the Moabite did for him.
The wine was good enough without being anything special. Sostratos, unaccustomed to wine without water, drank carefully. After polite chitchat, he said, “Here is a jar of the fine Rhodian perfume I mentioned when we met yesterday.” With use, his own Aramaic got more fluent by the day.
“Let me smell of it,” Eliphaz said gravely. Sostratos handed him the small jar. He pulled out the stopper, sniffed, touched the rim of the jar, and rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “It is made with grease, I see. What is the grease?”
“ Olive oil, my master, nothing else,” Sostratos replied.
“Ah.” A smile appeared on the balsam-maker’s face. “We may freely use olive oil, you understand. If it were animal fat-especially if it were pig fat-I could not think of trading for it no matter how sweet it smells.”
“I understand that it is so, yes,” Sostratos said. “I do not understand why it is so. If you could make this plain, I would be in your debt.”
“It is so because the one god commands us to shun the pig and all other beasts that do not chew their cud and divide their hooves,” Eliphaz said.
Even that was more than Sostratos had known before. But it was not enough more to satisfy him. “Why does your one god command you so?” he asked.
“Why?” Now Eliphaz son of Gatam stared at him in amazement. “Who are we, to ask why the one god orders this or forbids that? It is his will. We can only obey, and obey we do.” He sounded proud of such obedience.
That struck Sostratos as very strange. It was as if a man declared he was proud to be a slave and had no desire for freedom. Since he saw no diplomatic way to say that to the balsam-maker, he let it go. He did say, “You can travel all over the world, my master, and you will find no sweeter, no stronger, no longer-lasting perfume than what we make on the island of Rhodes.”
“It could be. It is good perfume,” Eliphaz said. “But you, Ionian, you will find no finer balsam than what we make here by the Dead Sea.”
“Is that what you name the water?” Sostratos said. Eliphaz nodded. Sostratos said, “I have also heard it called the Lake of Asphalt.”
“Call it whatever you please,” the Ioudaian said. “But we trade our balsam for silver, weight for weight. How do we make the scales balance with perfume?”
All around the Inner Sea, Phoenician merchants traded balsam of Engedi for twice its weight in silver. Sostratos wanted some of that profit for himself. He said, “I do not sell perfume by weight, but by the jar. For each jar, I would hope to get twenty Sidonian sigloi.”
Eliphaz laughed. “You might hope to get so much, but how likely is it? If you think I will give you twenty shekels’ weight of balsam for one of those paltry little jars, I must ask you to think again.”
“Perfume jars are small because what they hold is boiled many times to make it stronger,” Sostratos said. “All this takes much labor. So does gathering the roses to make the perfume.”
“Do you think there is no labor in making balsam?” Eliphaz demanded.
“Not only is there labor, there is the secret. No one but we of Engedi knows how to do what needs doing.”
“What of the men of Jericho?” Sostratos asked.
“Frauds! Fakes! Phonies, the lot of them!” Eliphaz said. “Our balsam, the balsam of Engedi, is far finer than theirs.”
“Well, my master, all trades have secrets,” Sostratos said. “You grow roses here. Do you make perfume? I think not.”
“Our secret is harder and more important,” the Ioudaian insisted.
“You would say so, of course,” Sostratos answered politely.
Eliphaz muttered in Aramaic. “You are worse than a Phoenician,” he told Sostratos, who smiled as if what was meant for an insult were a compliment. That smile made Eliphaz mutter some more. He said, “Even if I were to give you ten shekels of balsam for one jar, it would be too much.”
“My master, it grieves me to tell a man so obviously wise that he is wrong,” Sostratos said. “But you must know you are speaking nonsense. If you truly believed a jar of perfume was worth less than ten sigloi”-he still had trouble pronouncing the sh sound that began shekels, a sound Greek didn’t use-”you would throw me out, and that would be the end of our dicker.”
“Not necessarily,” Eliphaz said. “I might simply want something to amuse me. And I tell you straight out, it has been a long time since I heard anything so funny as the idea of paying twenty shekels of balsam for a jar of your perfume. You must think that because you come from far away and I stay in Engedi I have no notion of what anything is worth.”
“Certainly not,” said Sostratos, who had hoped for something exactly like that. “But think, my master. How often does Rhodian perfume come here to your town?”
“None has ever come here before,” Eliphaz told him. “And if the price you want for it is any indication, I can understand why not.”
Patiently, Sostratos said, “But when you have the only fine perfume in these parts, for how much will you sell it? Do not think only of prices. Remember, think also of profit after you buy.”
Eliphaz’s smile bared strong yellowish teeth. “I am not a child, Ionian. I am not a blushing virgin brought to the marriage bed. I know about buying, and I know about selling. And suppose I said, all right, I will give you ten shekels’ weight of balsam for a jar. Yes, suppose I said that. You would only scorn me. You would say, ‘It is not enough. You are a thief.’ “