“No.” Sostratos tossed his head. He knelt beside Aristeidas, lifted the sailor’s chin with his left hand, and cut his throat with the knife in his right. Some of the blood that spurted from the wound splashed his fingers. It was hot and wet and sticky. Sostratos jerked his hand away with a moan of disgust.
Aristeidas thrashed for a little while, but not long. His hands fell away from the spear. He lay still. Sostratos turned away and threw up on the dirt.
“No blood-guilt to you, young sir,” Moskhion said. “You were only putting him out of his torment. He asked you to do it. Teleutas and I both heard him along with you.”
“That’s right,” Teleutas said. “That’s just right. You did what you had to do, and you did it proper. You put paid to three of the robbers, too, all by yourself, and I guess you drove the fourth bastard away. That’s pretty good work for somebody who’s not supposed to be much of a fighter.”
“Sure is,” Moskhion agreed. “You’ll never have trouble from me anymore.”
Sostratos hardly heard him. He spat again and again, trying to get the nasty taste out of his mouth. He knew he would, before too long. Whether he ever got the blackness out of his spirit-that was a different question. He looked at Aristeidas’ body, then quickly looked away. His guts wanted to heave up again.
But he wasn’t done, and he knew it. “We can’t bring him back to Sidon,” he said, “and we can’t get enough wood for a proper pyre. We’ll have to bury him here.”
“Cover him with stones, you mean,” Teleutas said. “I wouldn’t want to try digging in this miserable, rocky dirt, especially without the proper tools.”
He was right, as he had been with putting Aristeidas out of his pain. Before beginning the work, Sostratos cut off a lock of his hair and tossed it down on the sailor’s corpse as a token of mourning. Moskhion and Teleutas did the same. Teleutas yanked the spear out of Aristeidas’ belly and flung it far away. Then the three surviving Rhodians piled boulders and smaller stones on the body, covering it well enough to keep dogs and foxes and carrion birds from feasting on it.
By the time they finished, their hands were battered and scraped and bloody. Sostratos hardly noticed, let alone cared. He stood by the makeshift grave and murmured, “Sleep well, Aristeidas. I’m sorry we leave you on foreign soil. May your shade find peace.”
Moskhion let a couple of oboloi fall through the gaps between the stones toward the corpse. “There’s the ferryman’s fee, to pay your way over the Styx,” he said.
“Good.” Sostratos looked west. The sun stood only a little way above the horizon. “Let’s get moving, and keep moving till it gets too dark to travel or till we find a campsite that’s easy to defend. And then… tomorrow we’ll push on toward Sidon.”
Menedemos busied himself about the Aphrodite, fussing over where the jars of crimson dye he’d bought from Tenashtart were stowed. He moved them farther aft, then farther forward. He knew they wouldn’t affect the akatos’ trim very much, but he fussed over them anyhow.
The amphorai of Byblian wine posed a more interesting problem. He had fewer of them, but each was far heavier than a jar of dye. And he couldn’t properly test the merchant galley’s trim till he got out onto the open sea any which way.
Diokles said, “Seems to me, skipper, you’ve got too much time on your hands. You’re looking around for things to do.”
“Well, what if I am?” Menedemos said, admitting what he could hardly deny. “I don’t feel like going out and getting drunk today. As long as I’m messing around here, I may get something useful done.” Or I may change things again tomorrow, he thought. If he did, it wouldn’t be the first time.
The oarmaster tactfully didn’t point that out. Maybe Diokles assumed Menedemos could see it for himself. He did say, “Time kind of wears when you stay in one port all summer long.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Menedemos dipped his head. “I had the same thought not so long ago.”
One of the sailors pointed toward the base of the pier. “Look! Isn’t that-?”
“By the dog of Egypt, it is!” Menedemos exclaimed. “There’s Sostratos, and Moskhion and Teleutas with him. Papai! Where’s Aristeidas, though?”
“Don’t care for the look of that,” Diokles said.
“Neither do I.” Menedemos ran along the gangplank from the Aphrodite to the quay, then down the planks to his cousin and the sailors. “Hail, O best one! Wonderful to see you again at last, after you’ve tramped the wilds of loudaia. But where s Aristeidas?”
“Dead,” Sostratos said shortly. He’d lost weight on his travels. His skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. He looked older, harder, than he had before setting out for Engedi. “Robbers. Day before yesterday. Spear in the belly. I had to put him out of his pain.” He slashed a thumb across his throat.
“Oh, by the gods!” Menedemos said, thinking, No wonder he looks older. He put an arm around his cousin’s shoulder. “That’s a hard thing to do, my dear, none harder. I’m very sorry. Aristeidas was a good man.”
“Yes. It would have been hard with anyone.” Sostratos’ eye slid toward Teleutas, who fortunately didn’t notice. “With the lookout, it was doubly so. But with the wound he had, all I did was save him hours of pain.”
“See what would have happened if you’d gone alone?” Menedemos said.
“Who knows?” Sostratos answered wearily. “Maybe I would have taken a different road back to Sidon traveling alone. Maybe I would have been earlier or later on the same road and not run into the bandits at all. There’s no way to tell, not for certain. Why don’t you just let that be?”
He sounded older, too, as impatient with Menedemos as a grown man might be with a child who’d asked him to pull the moon down from the sky. “All right. Excuse me for breathing,” Menedemos said, stung. “How did the business go? Did you get to Engedi? Have you got the balsam?”
“Yes, and some other things besides,” Sostratos said. “Beeswax, embroidered cloth… I’ll show you everything, if you’ll let us get on down to the ship. Your inn will have a stable for the mule and donkey, won’t it?”
“I’m not staying there anymore,” Menedemos said. “The innkeeper’s wife tried to seduce me, so I came back to the ship.” He held up a hand to forestall Sostratos. “The oath had nothing to do with that, though I’ve kept it. I wouldn’t want her on a bet.”
“We’ll find somewhere else to put the beasts, then,” Sostratos said. “It doesn’t matter. After everything I’ve been through the past couple of days, I have trouble seeing what does matter, aside from getting home safe. To the crows with everything else.”
Menedemos started to ask him about profit. He started to, but then checked himself. Here, for once, he saw no point in making Sostratos say something he would regret later. That was all very well for a joke, but not just after a good man died. Regardless of whether Sostratos did, Aristeidas’ shade deserved more respect than that.
His cousin said, “When we got back here, I was going to surprise you: I was going to quote from the Odyssey.”
“Were you?” Menedemos said. “What, the bit where Odysseus has slain the suitors and made love to Penelope who’s stayed home all those years, and then he tells her of his adventures in about thirty lines?”
“Yes, that’s the very passage I had in mind, as a matter of fact,” Sostratos answered. “I don’t suppose I ought to be surprised you could guess.”
“I hope you shouldn’t, my dear,” Menedemos said. “And I don’t thank you for putting me in the woman’s role. I wasn’t idle here in Sidon, you know.”
“I never said you were-not that Penelope was idle in Odysseus’ palace.” Sostratos scowled. “After what happened to poor Aristeidas, though, I haven’t the heart for any sort of playfulness.”