And he couldn’t do what he would have done in most ports to hold off boredom: he’d given his cousin his oath not to go looking for a love affair with some other man’s wife this sailing season. He’d known nothing but dismay when Emashtart came looking for a love affair with him.
A visit to a brothel proved not to be the answer he was looking for. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good time; he did. But he’d spent some silver and he’d spent some time, and he had nothing but the memory to show for them. Considering how often he’d done the same thing, and in how many cities all around the Inner Sea, he doubted whether in a few years- or even in a few days-that memory would mean much to him.
It was harder to amuse himself in Sidon than it would have been in a polis full of Hellenes. The Phoenician town boasted no theater. He couldn’t even go to the market square to pass the time, as he would have in a polis. Among Hellenes, everyone went to the agora. People met and gossiped and hashed out things of more consequence than mere gossip. He couldn’t imagine a Hellenic town without its agora.
Things weren’t the same in Sidon. He’d seen that shortly after arriving here. The market square among Phoenicians was a place of business, nothing more. Even if it hadn’t been, his ignorance of Aramaic would have shut him out of city life here.
And, of course, he couldn’t exercise in the gymnasion, for Sidon had no more gymnasion than theater. Sostratos had been right about that. A gymnasion was a place to exercise naked-and how else would a man exercise? But Phoenicians didn’t go naked. As far as Menedemos could tell, they didn’t exercise, either, not for the sake of having bodies worth admiring. The ones who did physical labor seemed fit enough. More prosperous, more sedentary men ran to fat. Menedemos supposed they would have been even less attractive if they hadn’t covered themselves from neck to ankles.
Eventually, Menedemos found the taverns where Antigonos’ Macedonians and Hellenes drank. There, at least, he could speak-and, as important, hear-his own language. That did help, but only so much.
“They’re funny people,” he said to Diokles one morning back at the Aphrodite. “I never realized how funny they were till I spent so much time listening to them talk.”
“What, soldiers?” The oarmaster snorted. “I could’ve told you that, skipper.”
“I suppose it’s just shoptalk when one of them explains how to twist the sword after you’ve thrust it into somebody’s belly, so you make sure the wound kills,” Menedemos said. “Killing the enemy is part of your job. But when they start going on about how best to torture a prisoner so he tells you where his silver is…” He shivered in spite of the building heat.
“That’s part of their job, too,” Diokles observed. “Half the time, their pay is in arrears. Only reason they get paid at all, sometimes, is that they’d desert if they didn’t, and their officers know it.”
“I understand that,” Menedemos said. “It was just the way they talked about it that gave me the horrors. They might have been potters talking about the best way to join handles to the body of a cup.”
“They’re bastards,” Diokles said flatly. “Who’d want to be a soldier to begin with if he wasn’t a bastard?”
He wasn’t wrong. He was seldom wrong; he had good sense and was far from stupid. Nevertheless, Menedemos thought, By the gods, I miss Sostratos. He couldn’t talk things over with Diokles the way he could with his cousin.
Even though the soldiers made him wish they were barbarians (not that Macedonians didn’t come close), he kept going back to the taverns they frequented. The chance to speak Greek was too tempting to let him stay away.
Once, he happened to walk in right behind Antigonos’ quartermaster. “Oh, hail, Rhodian,” Andronikos said coolly. “Did you ever unload that ridiculously overpriced olive oil of yours?”
“Yes, by Zeus,” Menedemos answered with a savage grin. “Almost all of it, as a matter of fact. And I got a better price than you were willing to pay. Some people do care about what they eat.”
Andronikos only sneered. “My job is to keep the soldiers well fed for as little silver as I can. I have to do both parts of it.”
“You certainly do it for as little silver as you can, O marvelous one,” Menedemos replied. “But if you kept the men well fed, they wouldn’t need to buy from me, would they? I’ve sold all my hams and smoked eels, too.”
A soldier said, “ Ham? Smoked eels? We wouldn’t see those from Andronikos, not if we waited the next hundred years.”
The quartermaster was unmoved. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “They’re needless luxuries. If a soldier wants them, he can spend his own money to get them. Barley and salt fish and oil are what he needs to stay in fighting trim.”
“No wonder we’re losing soldiers to desertion,” somebody said: probably an officer, by his educated Attic accent. “If we give them only what they need and Ptolemaios gives them what they want, which would they rather have? Which would any man with an obolos’ weight of brains in his head rather have?”
“A soldier who has to have luxuries to fight isn’t a soldier worth keeping,” Andronikos insisted.
“What soldier doesn’t want a little comfort now and then?” the other officer returned.
“Antigonos doesn’t care to see his money thrown away,” the quartermaster said. From everything Menedemos had heard, that was true.
‘“Antigonos doesn’t care to see his men tempted to desertion, either,” the other officer answered. “A soldier who’s unhappy isn’t a soldier who’ll fight well.”
Menedemos finished his wine and waved to the man behind the bar for another cup. Another soldier, this one plainly a Macedonian by his speech, started laying into Andronikos, and then another, and then another. Before long, half the men in the tavern were shouting at the quartermaster.
Andronikos got angrier and angrier. “You people don’t know what you’re talking about!” he shouted. His pinched features turned red.
“We know we get the leavings that nobody else would want to eat,” a soldier said. “How much money do you salt away buying us cheap garbage and sending out receipts that say we eat better than we really do?”
“Not a hemiobolos, by Zeus! That’s a lie!” Andronikos said.
“Furies take me if it is,” the soldier answered. “Who ever heard of a quartermaster who didn’t feather his own nest every chance he got?”
“How much silver would Andronikos cough up if we held him upside down and shook him?” somebody else said. “Plenty, I bet.”
“Don’t you try that!” Antigonos’ quartermaster said shrilly. “Don’t you dare try that! If you fool with me, I’ll have you crucified upside down, by the gods! Do you think I won’t? Do you think I can’t? You’d better not think anything like that, or it’s the worst mistake you’ll ever make in all your days.”
Menedemos raised his cup to his mouth. He quickly drained it. Then he slid off his stool and slipped out of the wineshop. He knew a brewing fight when he saw one. Sostratos might consider him imperfectly civilized, but at least he’d never made tavern brawling one of his favorite amusements, as so many sailors from the Aphrodite did.
He hadn’t got ten paces from the door before a crescendo of shouts, the thuds of breaking furniture, and the higher crashes of shattering pottery announced the start of the brawl. Whistling gleefully at his narrow escape, he strolled back to the harbor and the merchant galley. He did hope Andronikos got everything that was coming to him, and a little more besides.
This time, Sostratos and his traveling companions approached Jerusalem from the south. “Are we going back to Ithran’s inn, young sir?” Moskhion asked.