Tears stung Sostratos’ eyes. “By the gods, I never dreamt I could miss this so much.”
“Neither did I,” Menedemos agreed. “Let’s see what they’ve got, eh?”
“Of course, my dear,” Sostratos said. “You never know what we might find.” They strolled the agora together. Sostratos knew what he hoped to find: another gryphon’s skull. That one was most unlikely to turn up in this out-of-the way little polis bothered him not at all. He had his hopes, and would keep on having them as long as he lived.
He saw no sign of any such wonder in Kourion, though. He saw no sign of any wonders in the market square. The agora was almost staggeringly dull, at least for someone looking for cargo for a merchant galley. A local miller or farmer would surely have found it delightful.
As soon as he realized he wouldn’t see anything much he wanted to buy, he started listening to the talk in the agora. Talk, after all, was the other main reason men came to the market square. Thanks to the Cypriot dialect, he had to listen harder than he would have back in Rhodes. The more he listened, though, the more easily he followed it.
People kept talking about a gamble or a risk. They all knew what it was, and they wisely discussed this fellow’s chance of bringing it off, or that one’s, or someone else’s. They also talked about the price of failure, without saying what that was, either.
Finally, Sostratos’ curiosity got the better of him. He walked up to a local and said, “Excuse me, O best one, but may I ask you a question?”
The man from Kourion dipped his head. “Certes, stranger. Say on.”
“Thank you kindly.” As had happened before on Cyprus, the accent here made Sostratos acutely conscious of his own Doric dialect, which came out more than usual. He persisted even so: “What is this gamble I hear you all talking about?”
“Why, to touch the altar of Apollo Hylates unbeknownst to the priests serving the god, of course,” the man from Kourion replied.
Sostratos stared. “But isn’t it death to touch that altar? Don’t they throw you off the cliffs?” He pointed westward.
“In good sooth, sir, ‘tis indeed. An a man be caught, he suffereth infallibly that very fate. ‘Tis the price of failure,” the local said.
Menedemos said, “In that case, why on earth would anybody be crazy enough to want to do it?”
Shrugging, the man from Kourion replied, “It hath of late become amongst the youth of this our city a passion, a sport, to make their way to yon temple by twos and threes-the odd young men being witness to him who dareth-to lay hold of the altar, and then to get hence with all the haste in ‘em.”
“Why?” Sostratos asked, as Menedemos had before him. Again, the local only shrugged. When he saw the Rhodians had no more questions for him, he politely dipped his head again and went on his way.
Sostratos kept scratching his own head and worrying at the question like a man with a bit of squid tentacle stuck between his teeth. At last, he said, “I think I understand.”
“More than I can say,” Menedemos replied.
“Look at Athens more than a hundred years ago, when Alkibiades and some of his friends profaned the mysteries of Eleusis and mutilated the Herms in front of people’s houses,” Sostratos said. “They probably didn’t mean any real harm. They were drunk and having a good time and playing foolish games. That’s what the young men are doing here, I suppose.”
“It’s not a foolish game if the priests catch you,” Menedemos pointed out.
“I wonder what sort of watch they keep,” Sostratos said. “If it is only a game, they might look the other way most of the time… though Alkibiades came to grief when people who should have kept their mouths shut didn’t.”
“We’ll be out of here tomorrow,” Menedemos said. “We’ll never know.”
“I wish you hadn’t put it like that,” Sostratos said. “Now it will keep on bothering me for the rest of my days.”
“Not if you don’t let it,” Menedemos said. “What bothers me are the goods in this agora. I can’t see a single thing I’d want to take away from here.” He snapped his fingers. “No, I take that back-there was one very pretty boy.”
“Oh, go howl!” Sostratos told him. Boys’ beauty drew his eyes, but in the same way as a fine horse’s beauty might have. He admired without wanting to possess. When he thought about such things, he wondered if that was because he’d been so completely ignored while he was a youth. Maybe the sting of that humiliation remained with him yet.
Menedemos, by contrast, had had his name and the usual epithets- MENEDEMOS IS BEAUTIFUL or MENEDEMOS IS BEST or THE BOY MENEDEMOS IS MOST LOVELY-scrawled on walls all over Rhodes. He knew Sostratos hadn’t-he hardly could help knowing. Most of the time, as now, he was tactfuclass="underline" “Well, my dear, I did happen to notice him. But he’s probably got no honor-just another little wretch with a wide arsehole.”
Perversely, that made Sostratos want to defend the boy. “You don’t know the first thing about him,” he said.
“No, but I know the type,” Menedemos answered. “Some people go through their beauty like that”-he snapped his fingers again-”because they’ve nothing else to spend.”
“Heh,” Sostratos said.
“What? Do you think I’m joking?” Menedemos asked.
“No, my dear, not at all,” Sostratos answered. When they were both youths, when Menedemos was swimming in attention while he had none, Sostratos had told himself his cousin had only beauty to go through and would be worthless by the time he grew up. He’d been wrong, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t consoled himself so.
They walked back to the Aphrodite. One of those enormous bats flew overhead. Menedemos said, “It’s got a pointy nose, just like the pretty boy I saw. Do you suppose bats call one another beautiful?”
Sostratos contemplated that, then tossed his head. “What I suppose is, you’re very peculiar, to come up with a question like that.”
“Why, thank you!” Menedemos said, as if Sostratos had praised him. They both laughed.
Some of the sailors went into Kourion to get drunk. Diokles had no trouble rounding them up, though. “I didn’t figure I would,” he said when the job was done. “Nobody wants to get stuck in a miserable little place like this.”
That perfectly summarized Sostratos’ view of Kourion. He was glad when the merchant galley left the town early the next morning. Of course, she would stop for the night at some other small Cypriot city, perhaps one even less prepossessing than Kourion, but he chose not to dwell on that.
Diokles was clanging out a slow, lazy stroke for the men at the oars- there was no breeze to speak of-when a sailor pointed toward the shore a few plethra away and said, “What are they doing there?”
Sostratos looked in the direction of the bluffs west of Kourion. A procession marched along the heights. No-not everybody marched, for one man, bound, went stiffly and unwillingly, dragged toward the cliff-edge. Ice ran through Sostratos. His voice shook when he called, “Do you see, Menedemos?”
His cousin dipped his head. “I see.” He sounded thoroughly grim, continuing, “Well, now we know how seriously the priests of Apollo Hylates take the game of touching their altar.”
“Yes. Don’t we?” Sostratos watched-couldn’t stop watching, much as he wanted to turn away-the procession reach the place where land gave way to air. The akatos lay far enough out to sea that everything on the shore happened not only in miniature but also in eerie silence. Only the sound of waves slapping against the ship’s hull and the regular splash of oars going into and out of the water came to Sostratos’ ears.
What were they saying, there at the top of the bluffs? Were they cursing the bound man for profaning the god’s altar? Or were they-worse- commiserating with him, saying it was too bad he’d got caught, but now he had to pay the price? As with Thoukydides, who’d written down speeches he hadn’t heard, Sostratos had to decide what was most plausible, most appropriate to the occasion.