To his surprise-indeed, to his amazement-his cousin coughed and shuffled his feet and generally acted flustered. “How did you know?” Sostratos asked. “Were you talking with Moskhion or Teleutas? Did they blab?”
“They never said a word, my dear, and I never thought to ask them about that,” Menedemos answered. “But now I’m asking you. Who was she? Was she pretty? You wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t thought she was pretty, would you?”
“Her husband ran the inn where we stayed in Jerusalem,” Sostratos said slowly. “Her name was Zilpah.” He bared his teeth in what wasn’t quite, or wasn’t just, a smile. “While I was going after her, I thought she was the most wonderful thing in the world.”
Menedemos laughed out loud. “Oh, yes. I know all about that. I kept trying to tell you, but you didn’t want to listen.”
“I understand better now.” By the way Sostratos said it, he wished he didn’t.
Laughing still, Menedemos said, “So you finally got her, did you?”
“Yes, on the way back from Engedi.” Sostratos didn’t sound particularly proud of himself. “If she hadn’t been angry at her husband, I never would have.”
“They all say that,” Menedemos told him. “Maybe they even believe it. It gives them an excuse for doing what they want to do anyhow. Well? How was it?”
“Better than with a whore, certainly-you’re right about that,” Sostratos admitted.
“Told you so,” Menedemos said.
“You tell me all sorts of things,” Sostratos said. “Some of them turn out to be true, and some of them don’t. She started crying afterwards, though, and wished she’d never done it. Everything was fine-better than fine-up till then. As soon as we’d finished, though…” He tossed his head.
“Oh. One of those. Just your luck to run into one like that the first time you play the game,” Menedemos said sympathetically, and put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “It happens, I’m afraid.”
“Obviously, since it happened to me,” Sostratos said. “And it did feel like a game. I didn’t like that.”
“Why not? What else is it?” Menedemos asked in honest puzzlement. “Best game in the world, if you ask me, but still, only a game.”
Sostratos groped for an answer: “It shouldn’t be only a game. It’s too important to be only a game. For a little while there, I was… in love, I suppose. I don’t know what else to call it.”
“That can happen,” Menedemos agreed. Sostratos hadn’t sounded happy about it. Menedemos didn’t blame him. Love was as dangerous a passion as the gods had inflicted on mankind. Menedemos went on, “I don’t suppose you can do anything halfway, can you?”
“Doesn’t seem that way, does it?” Sostratos spread his hands. “There’s my story, such as it is. I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t done before.”
“That’s not the point. The point is, it’s something you haven’t done before.”
“I know.” No, Menedemos’ cousin didn’t seem happy at all. “Now I understand the fascination of your game. I wish I didn’t.”
“Why?” Menedemos asked. “Because now you have a harder time looking down your nose at me?”
Relentlessly honest, Sostratos dipped his head. “Yes, that’s the main reason why, and I won’t tell you any different. And because I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep from doing something like that again one of these days. I hope so, but how can I know for certain?”
“Don’t worry about it so much,” Menedemos told him. “You got away. You’ll never see the woman or her husband again. Nobody got hurt. Why are you in such an uproar? You don’t need to be.”
Sostratos was relentlessly precise as well as relentlessly honest. “I wouldn’t say nobody got hurt. If you’d seen Zilpah afterwards…” His mouth tightened. He was looking back on a memory that didn’t please him at all.
But Menedemos repeated, “Don’t worry about it. Women get funny sometimes, that’s all. The day after you left the inn, she’d probably forgotten all about you.”
“I don’t think so,” Sostratos said. “I think she thought she loved me, the same way I thought I loved her. Then we lay with each other, and that made her decide her husband was really the important one. I think she- how do I put it?-blamed me for not being who, or maybe what, she thought I was.” He sighed.
“Well, what if she did?” Menedemos asked. “How is that your fault? It isn’t, my dear, and that’s all there is to it.”
“ ‘That’s all there is to it,’“ Sostratos echoed in a hollow voice. “Easy enough for you to say, O best one. Not so easy for me to persuade myself.”
Menedemos started to tell him not to be a fool. Considering how many times Sostratos had told him the same thing, he looked forward to getting some of his own back. But before the words could pass the barrier of his teeth, a sailor called out a warning from the bow: “Skipper, a soldier’s coming up the pier to look us over.”
“Thanks, Damagetos,” Menedemos answered with a sigh. Kition might have been a Phoenician town, but, like the rest of Cyprus, it lay under Ptolemaios’ rule these days. The garrison here had to prove itself alert. The Aphrodite wasn’t likely to be part of an invasion fleet ordered out by Antigonos, but at first glance she easily might have seemed a pirate. Scorching Sostratos would have to wait.
“What ship are you?” The inevitable question floated through the air as soon as the officer got within hailing distance.
“We’re the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes,” Menedemos answered, resisting the impulse to yell back, Whose man are you? He’d asked it before and discovered what he should have known anyhow: cracking wise with a fellow who could cause you trouble wasn’t a good idea. Even so, the temptation remained.
“Where have you been, and what’s your cargo?” Ptolemaios’ officer asked.
“Sidon, and lately Salamis,” Menedemos answered. “We’ve got Byblian wine, crimson dye, balsam of Engedi, and a few jars of Rhodian perfume and olive oil.”
“Olive oil?” the soldier said. “You must have been daft, to carry olive oil in a scrawny little ship like that.”
Everyone who heard about that part of the cargo said the same thing. For a long time, hearing it had made Menedemos grind his teeth. Now he could smile. “You might think so, best one, but we unloaded almost all of it,” he said. “Would you care to try one of the jars we have left?”
“No, thanks,” the officer replied with a laugh. “But you’re traders, all right. Welcome to Kition.” He turned and walked back into the city.
A sharp, metallic clicking in the sky made Menedemos and a good many others look up. He stared. “What in the world are those?” he said.
“Bats,” Sostratos answered calmly.
“But I’ve seen bats before-everybody has,” Menedemos protested. “They’re little things, like dormice with wings. These aren’t little. They’ve got bodies like puppies and wings like a crow’s.”
“They’re still bats,” Sostratos said. “They’ve got noses, not beaks. They’ve got ears. They’ve got bare wings and fur, not feathers. What else would they be?”
“They’re too big to be bats,” Menedemos insisted. “If they were any bigger, they’d be like vultures, by the gods.”
“So you say big bats are impossible?” Sostratos asked. “Fine. Have it your way, my dear. They’re big birds that happen to look exactly like bats.”
Menedemos’ ears burned. To make matters worse, Sostratos spoke in Aramaic to a Phoenician longshoreman. The fellow answered volubly, pointing back into the long, rolling hills behind Kition. Sostratos bowed his thanks, exactly as a Phoenician might have done.
He turned back to Menedemos. “They are bats,” he said. “They live in caves, and they eat fruit. That’s what the fellow said, anyhow. I always thought bats ate bugs. I wish we could stay and learn more about them. May we?”