“And soon you will go again,” Zilpah said.
Sostratos shrugged and nodded; the gesture was almost starting to feel natural to him. “Yes, that is so. I wish it were different, but it is so.” He reached out and touched her hand, just for a moment. “We have little time. Should we not use it?”
She turned away from him. “You should not say such things to me. You make me think things I am not supposed to think.”
“Do you think that I think you are beautiful? Do you think that I think you are sweet?” Sostratos said. “Do you think that I want to love you? You should think that, because it is true.”
Still not looking at him, Zilpah spoke in a very small voice: “These are things I should not hear from you. I have never heard these things before.” She laughed. “I have heard from men who want to sleep with me. What innkeeper’s wife has not? But you… you mean what you say. You are not telling lies to get me to lie down with you.”
“Yes, I mean them. No, I am not lying,” Sostratos said.
“People who mean these things should not say them,” Zilpah insisted. “I have never heard things like these from someone who means them.”
“Never?” Sostratos raised an eyebrow. “You spoke of this before. These are things your husband”-who kept on hammering out in the courtyard-”should say.”
“Ithran is a good man,” Zilpah said, as if the Rhodian had denied it.
Sostratos said nothing at all. He let her words hang in the air, let her listen to them again and again in her own mind. She brought her hands up to her face. Her shoulders shook. Sostratos knew a moment of raw fear. If she started crying loud enough for Ithran to notice, what would the Ioudaian do to him? He didn’t know, not in detail. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t likely to be pretty.
“I think,” Zilpah said, “I think you had better go to your room now.”
“I would rather sit here and drink wine and talk with you and look at you so I can see how beautiful you are,” Sostratos said.
The Ioudaian woman swung back toward him. Her black eyes flashed.
“I said, I think you had better go to your room,” she snapped. “Do you understand me when I tell you something?”
“I understand what you say. I do not understand why you say it,” Sostratos replied. Once again, a why question seemed all-important.
Here, though, it got no answer. “Go!” Zilpah said, and he could hardly tell her no, not when this was her inn, this was her city, this was her country-and that was her husband out there in the courtyard. He gulped his wine and hurried out of the taproom. Ithran waved to him as he hurried back toward his room. He waved back. The innkeeper might have suspected something if he hadn’t. Part of him felt ashamed at treating the Ioudaian in a friendly way when he wanted to make love to the man’s wife. The rest of him, though… When he saw a good-sized stone in the courtyard, that other part of him wanted to pick it up and bash in Ithran’s head.
Still seething, he went into his room and closed the door behind him. It didn’t drown out the noise of Ithran’s hammering. He paced back and forth in the cramped little chamber, feeling trapped. What could he do in here? Nothing except lie down and go to sleep, which he didn’t want to do, or pace and brood. He didn’t want to do that, either, but did it even so.
After what seemed forever, the hammering stopped. Sostratos kept right on pacing. He wished he’d gone to the brothel with the sailors. But if he went there now, they’d know he’d failed with Zilpah. He didn’t feel like humiliating himself right this minute. Later would do.
Someone tapped at the door. When Sostratos noticed the tapping, he had the feeling it had been going on for some little while. He wondered what the sailors were doing back from the brothel so soon. But when he opened the door, no sated Hellenes stood there. Instead, it was Zilpah.
“Oh,” Sostratos said foolishly. “You.”
“Yes, me.” She ducked inside, past Sostratos, who stood frozen, as if seeing a Gorgon had turned him to stone. “Are you daft?” she said. “Shut the door. Quick, now.”
“Oh,” he said again. “Yes.” He did as she said. He found he could move after all, if only jerkily.
“Ithran is gone for a while. The slave is gone for a while. And so…” Zilpah didn’t go on for a moment. In the gloom inside the little chamber, her eyes were enormous. With a gesture that seemed more angry than anything else, she threw off her mantling robe and then the shift she wore under it. “Tell me you love me,” she said. “Tell me you think I’m beautiful. Make me believe you, at least for a little while.” Her laugh was harsh and rough as dry branches breaking. “It shouldn’t be hard. No one else is going to tell me anything like that.”
“No?” Sostratos said. Zilpah shook her head. He sighed. “You spoke of that before. It is too bad, for someone misses a perfect chance. You are very beautiful, and I will love you as best I know how.”
“Talk to me, too,” she said. “Tell me these things. I need to hear them.”
Most women wanted Sostratos to keep quiet while he was making love to them. Talk before or after might be all right. During? Never before had anyone asked him to talk during. He only wished he could do it in Greek. In Aramaic, he couldn’t say a tenth part of what he wanted to tell her.
But he did his best. In between kisses and caresses, he assured her that she was the loveliest and the sweetest woman he’d ever met, and that anyone who’d missed the chance to tell her the same thing was surely an ass, an idiot, a blockhead. While he said it, he believed it. That his tongue teased her earlobe, the side of her neck, the dark tips of her breasts, that his fingers stroked between her legs and that she arched her back and breathed hard while they did-that might have had something to do with his belief.
She hissed when he went into her. He’d never known a sound like that from a woman. She took her pleasure almost at once and twisted her head so that his pillow muffled most of her moan of joy. He kept on, and kept on, and she heated again, and the second time she gasped and wailed she forgot all about trying to keep quiet. He might have warned her, but his own ecstasy burst over him then, irresistible as an avalanche.
“I love you,” he said again, as soon as pleasure didn’t quite blind him.
Zilpah started to cry. She pushed him away from her. “I have sinned,” she said. “I have sinned, and I am a fool.” She dressed as fast as she could. As she did, she went on, “You will leave tomorrow. If you don’t leave tomorrow, I will tell Ithran what we have done. I have sinned. Oh, how I have sinned.”
“I don’t understand,” Sostratos said.
“What do you need to understand?” Zilpah said. “I was angry at my husband for not speaking sweetly to me, and I made a mistake. I sinned, so the one god will punish me for it.”
Sostratos had heard Ioudaioi talk of sin before. It was something like religious pollution among Hellenes, but stronger. He got the feeling Zilpah thought her bad-tempered god was angry at her. “I will do as you say,” he told her with a sigh.
“You had better.” She hurried out the door. She didn’t slam it, but only, he judged, so she wouldn’t make a scene. He sighed again. He’d had her, and pleased her, and she still wasn’t happy. Am I? he wondered. Part of him was, anyhow. The rest? He wasn’t at all sure about the rest.
10
“I know people say Phoenicians burn their babies when things are going badly for them,” Menedemos told a soldier with whom he was drinking wine. “But is that really true? Do they really offer them to their gods that way? “
“Yea, verily,” the mercenary answered. His name was Apollodoros; he came from Paphos, on Cyprus, and used the old-fashioned island dialect. “In sooth, Rhodian, they do nothing less, reckoning it an act of devotion; any who’d refuse or hide his babes’d be torn in pieces, did word of’s iniquity seep forth.”