The Sacred Land sam-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “That reminds me-when we get to Phoenicia, we’ll make people upset if we take off our clothes whenever we happen to feel like it,” Sostratos said.

  “Catering to the foolish prejudices of barbarians goes against my grain,” Menedemos said.

  “Does making a profit go against your grain?” Sostratos asked. “If we offend our customers, will they want to trade with us?”

  Menedemos grunted. That made more sense than he wanted to admit. Himilkon always wore long, flowing robes, no matter how hot the weather got. The same held true for other Phoenician merchants he’d seen in Hellenic poleis. “Very well,” he said, “As long as I don’t have to put on shoes.”

  “Himilkon didn’t say anything about bare feet,” Sostratos told him. “I don’t want to wear shoes, either.” Sailors always went barefoot aboard ship, and they kept up the habit on land, too.

  Peering south, Menedemos clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That squall line’s already out of sight. It could have been a lot worse for us. A ship that isn’t quick or lucky could go to the bottom,”

  “Let’s hope a couple of pirates did,” Sostratos said.

  “Yes!” Menedemos dipped his head, “If navies don’t care about keeping pirates down, maybe the gods will take care of it for us.”

  “Maybe.” But Sostratos didn’t sound convinced. “I wish the gods had done a better job up till now.”

  “Oh, go howl,” Menedemos said. “You always have reasons not to believe in anything.”

  “That’s not true, and it’s not fair, either,” his cousin answered. “I’m trying to find the truth and to live by it. If you want to follow the first story you happen to hear, go right ahead. I can’t stop you.”

  They glared at each other. Their own squall seemed as bad as the one that had blown out to sea. For the next couple of hours, they said not a word to each other. Sostratos watched birds and flying fish and leaping dolphins. Menedemos steered the Aphrodite toward Myra, where he’d been heading before the storm hit.

  There were plenty of other places to anchor if he didn’t make Myra by nightfall. The Lykian coastline might have had fewer long, projecting fingers of land than did that of Karia, but it was full of little inlets and harbors and coastal villages. The only trouble with them was, Menedemos wanted nothing to do with them. Every other village kept a pirate ship or two ready to sally forth against any quarry that looked catchable. Menedemos was usually sad and sorry when fishing boats fled from the akatos. In these waters, he was just as well pleased the Aphrodite so closely resembled a pirate ship herself.

  When Myra came into sight, Diokles let out a sigh of relief. “This place is big enough for Ptolemaios’ men to garrison, same as Patara was,” he said. “They wouldn’t bother with all those little hamlets in between Patara and here. The Lykians in them have got to be as wild as they were in Sarpedon’s day.”

  “Sarpedon was the son of Zeus, or that’s what the Iliad says,” Menedemos answered. “If you ask me, the Lykians nowadays are mostly sons of whores.”

  The oarmaster laughed. “If you think I’m going to quarrel with you, skipper, you’d better think again.”

  Myra itself lay about twenty stadia inland--far enough, Menedemos thought uneasily, to make an attack from the sea harder than it would be if the place were right there by the shore. A couple of war galleys flying Ptolemaios’ eagle and several round ships lay at anchor in the bay in front of the town. They all hailed the Aphrodite when she came into the harbor. Her sleek lines once more created some alarm, but Menedemos did manage to convince the officers aboard the triremes he was a Rhodian, not a pirate with more nerve than was good for him.

  He was eating barley rolls for sitos with an uninspiring opson of salt fish when a coughing roar came from the mainland. Even though his ship bobbed a couple of plethra offshore, his hand froze halfway to his mouth. The hair at the back of his neck tried to stand up. “What’s that?” he said, his voice high and shrill. He felt foolish as soon as he spoke; he knew what that was, all right.

  “A lion,” Sostratos answered. “It is an awe-inspiring noise, isn’t it?”

  “I should say so!” Only then did Menedemos remember he’d quarreled with his cousin. He shrugged. How could a mere quarrel survive in the face of… that?

  Sostratos might have been thinking along with him. “Well, my dear,” he said, “we aren’t eaten yet, by lions or by sea jackals.”

  “No, not yet,” Menedemos agreed. “Do you suppose Myra has anything worth buying, or shall we press on?”

  “I’d go on,” Sostratos said. “How many lion skins can we carry?”

  Menedemos thought it over, then dipped his head.

  3

  Myra had struck Sostratos as nothing out of the ordinary. Phaselis, on the other hand-the last Lykian city to the east- impressed him a good deal more. It was large enough to boast three harbors. The locals fished not only on the sea but also in a nearby lake. The population was a mixture of Lykians and Hellenes.

  As the Aphrodite tied up at a quay, Menedemos said, “I wish we had a letter or a friendship token from that Euxenides we carried last year. He was about the best carpenter I’ve ever seen-and if he still has kin here in Phaselis, they’d probably feast us for taking him out of danger.”

  “Well, they might,” Sostratos answered. “But even if they did, would we want them to? Euxenides was one of Antigonos’ officers, remember, and Ptolemaios is lord of Phaselis-for the time being, anyhow.”

  His cousin grunted. “I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right, no doubt about it. If Euxenides’ relatives are all for old One-Eye, Ptolemaios’ men won’t be very happy about them… or about us for dealing with them.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Sostratos said. “This whole business of trading is hard enough without getting soldiers angry at you. And speaking of trading, what do they sell here? Hides, I suppose, and timber, which we’ve got no real use for.”

  Menedemos’ smile was almost a leer. It said, I know something you don’t know. Sostratos hated being on the receiving end of a smile like that. He hated having other people know things he didn’t, too. Menedemos, who knew him as well as anyone, undoubtedly also knew that. “You were studying Phoenicia and Aramaic so hard, you forgot to pay attention to how we would get there.”

  Sostratos said something in Aramaic. Not only was it splendidly vulgar in its own right, it sounded like a man ripping a thick piece of cloth in half. Best of all, Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it. Returning to Greek, Sostratos said, “What do they have here, then?”

  “Why, smoked fish,” Menedemos answered. The fearsome noises Sostratos had just made kept him from rubbing it in. “This place is supposed to have some of the best smoked fish in the world.”

  “Papai!” Sostratos said.

  “What’s the matter?” his cousin asked.

  “I actually knew that, but it had gone clean out of my head.”

  “I’m not surprised, my dear. You’ve got so many useless facts jostling and crowding each other in there, it’s no wonder some of them fall out now and again.”

  “But they shouldn’t.” Sostratos hated forgetting things. A man who prided himself on his wits naturally worried about any failure. He changed the subject, as much for his own sake as for Menedemos’. “If it’s good enough, we can carry smoked fish to Phoenicia.”

  “Better than the dried and salted stuff that usually travels.” The horrible face Menedemos made showed his opinion of that, though the Aphrodite carried some to feed its crew. “We ought to be able to charge enough to make it profitable, too. That’s your job, of course.”

  “Of course,” Sostratos agreed. It wasn’t that his cousin was wrong- Menedemos was right. But if they couldn’t make a profit on smoked fish, Menedemos wouldn’t get the blame, Sostratos would. That was what being toikharkhos meant. With a small sigh, Sostratos said, “Let’s go into town and see what they’ve got.”

  One thing Phaselis had-as Patara had had, and Myra, too-
was plenty of soldiers. Some were Hellenes and swaggering Macedonians: Ptolemaios’ garrison troops. Others were Lykians, who sounded as if they were sneezing whenever they opened their mouths.

  “Looks like Ptolemaios thinks his men are on this coast to stay,” Sostratos remarked. “He’s training up plenty of local barbarians to give them a hand.”

  “If he does, he’s liable to be an optimist,” Menedemos answered. “Antigonos is going to have more than a little to say about who rules Lykia.”

  “I know. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just telling you what it looks like to me,” Sostratos said.

  They walked past a statue whose base had an inscription written in Greek letters that spelled out nonsense words. “Must be Lykian, like that stele in Patara,” Menedemos said.

  “No doubt, though it could be anything at all for the sense it makes to me,” Sostratos said. “Karian and Lykian both, even if I did figure out a name on the stele.”

  “If they want anybody to care about what they say, they’d better use Greek,” Menedemos said.

  “Well, yes, of course,” Sostratos agreed.

  Phaselis stood on a long spine of land projecting out into the sea. The market square lay in the center of town, not far from the theater. Pointing to the bowl scooped out of the gray local stone, Menedemos said, ‘‘That looks Hellenic enough,”

  “So it does,” Sostratos said. “There are Hellenes here. There have been for hundreds of years. Lakios of Argos paid Kylabras the shepherd a tribute of smoked fish in exchange for the land on which to build the city, and that was back in the days we know only from myth and legend.”

  “I think I’d heard that once, but I’d forgotten it,” Menedemos said. Unlike Sostratos, he didn’t seem worried about forgetting something. He went on with his own thought: “They’ve been smoking fish here for a long time, too, then,”

  “I’ve heard they still offer it to Kylabras,” Sostratos said. “They reckon him a hero.”

  “If I were a hero, I’d want a fat bullock, or maybe a boar,” Menedemos said. “Fish is for ordinary mortals and their opson,”

  “Custom,” Sostratos said, as he had not long before.

  “Smoked tunny!” shouted a fellow in the agora. Another chimed in with, “Smoked eels! Who wants some fine smoked eels, nice and fat?”

  “Smoked tunny? Smoked eels’?” Menedemos’ ears seemed to prick up like a foxs. “I thought they’d smoke any old thing. But those are some of the best fish there are. I wonder how they taste smoked.”

  “Shall we go find out?” Sostratos said. “If they won’t give us samples, we’ve got no reason to buy, do we?”

  “Not a bit,” Menedemos said. “Not a bit, by Herakles-and he’d have a taste, too, if he were here.” Sostratos dipped his head. If there was food around, food of any sort, Herakles would eat it.

  The fellow crying his eels was a bald Hellene with a freckled scalp and startling green eyes. “Hail, my friends,” he said as Sostratos and Menedemos came up. “You’re new in Phaselis, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Sostratos answered. “We’re from the Aphrodite , an akatos out of Rhodes. Smoked eels, eh?” He gave his name and his cousins.

  “Pleased to meet you both. I’m Epianax son of Kleitomenes. Yes, smoked eels. We give ‘em to the gods, and you can’t say that about fish very often.”

  “We’ve heard stories about that,” Sostratos said. “Your hero’s name is Kylabras, isn’t it?”

  Epianax dipped his head. “That’s right, I wouldn’t have expected a man from as far away as Rhodes to know it, but that’s just right. And what’s good enough for Kylabras is more than good enough for mortal men.”

  Menedemos grinned at him, “I hope you’re going to give us a chance to eat your words, O best one.”

  “Give you a chance to eat my…” Epianax frowned, then laughed when he got it. “Say, you’re a clever fellow, aren’t you? That’s a neat way to put things, to the crows with me if it isn’t. I’ll use it myself, if you don’t mind.”

  “Be my guest,” Menedemos told him. “After all, we’ll only hear it the once.” That made the eel-seller laugh again. Sostratos and Menedemos shared a look. The people in Phaselis’ agora were liable to be hearing the same line thirty years from now, if Epianax lived so long. Menedemos went on, “You will let us try a sample, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Epianax had a formidable knife on his hip: another few digits and it could have been a hoplite’s shortsword. He used it to hack off a couple of lengths of smoked eel, then handed one to each Rhodian. “Here you are, most noble ones. Take a taste, and then we’ll talk.”

  Sostratos popped his piece of eel into his mouth with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand: it wasn’t sitos, which he would have eaten with his left, and it wasn’t fresh fish, for which he would have used two fingers and his thumb, not just one. He chewed, savoring both the smoke and the fatty richness of the eel. He had to work hard not to show how delicious he thought it was.

  “Not bad,” Menedemos said after swallowing. A certain tension in his expression said he was having the same problem as Sostratos. Maybe Epianax, who didn’t know him, wouldn’t notice. His voice sounded casual enough: “What do you want for it? If the price is decent, we might take some along with us-we’re bound for the east, and it could do well there.”

  “You talking about cash, or do you want to trade for it?” Epianax asked. “What are you carrying?”

  “We’ve got prime olive oil, fine Rhodian perfume, Koan silk, hams from Patara, papyrus and ink, and some books,” Sostratos said.

  “Didn’t expect you’d have oil,” Epianax remarked. “Most places can make that for themselves.”

  This time, Sostratos didn’t meet Menedemos’ eye. His cousin muttered something he couldn’t make out, which was probably just as well. Damonax, he thought unkindly. He hadn’t imagined that acquiring a brother-in-law would hurt his business, but it had. As loyally as he could, he said, “It’s excellent oil, from the very first of the harvest.”

  “Must be,” Epianax said, and let it go at that. Menedemos’ snicker wasn’t very loud, but a snicker it unquestionably was. Sostratos wished the vulture that tore at Prometheus’ liver would give the Titan a holiday and torment Menedemos for a while. But then Epianax surprised him by asking, “What sort of books have you got?”

  “You know your letters?” Sostratos said, blinking,

  “Wouldn’t be much point to the question if I didn’t, would there?” the eel-seller answered. “Yes, I know ‘em. Don’t have a whole lot of cause to use ‘em, but I can fight my way through Homer, say.”

  “We have some of the most exciting books of the Iliad and the Odyssey with us,” Menedemos said. The look he gave Sostratos added that it was only because of him that they had those books, which wasn’t true at all. Sostratos felt hampered, constricted; he didn’t want to start an argument in front of a stranger.

  To help remind his cousin he’d been the one who actually bought the books from the scribes who’d copied them, he said, “And we also have a, ah, spicy poem from a modern writer, a fellow named Periandros of Knidos.”

  “Spicy, eh?” Epianax’s eyes lit up. He knew what that meant, or hoped he did. “What’s it about?”

  “You know the statue of Aphrodite that Praxiteles put up at Knidos, the one that shows the goddess bare?” Sostratos said.

  “I should hope I do,” Epianax answered. “Everybody knows about that statue.”

  He was right, of course. The image of Aphrodite had roused enormous interest and excitement when it went into her shrine a generation before. Roused and excitement were words literally true, too. Hellas was a land where respectable women veiled themselves on the rare occasions when they appeared in public. Not long after the astonishing, shocking statue went up, a man ejaculated on its marble crotch. For him, Aphrodite proved truly the goddess of love.

  Sostratos said, “It’s about that fellow-you’ll have heard the story about him,” Me
nedemos would have given the details. Sostratos didn’t, and didn’t need to; the eel-seller dipped his head. Sostratos continued, “It’s about what would have happened if the statue turned to flesh and blood just then.”

  “And?” Epianax asked hoarsely.

  “And you’ll have to buy the poem to find out what Periandros has to say about that,” Sostratos told him.

  “Well, what do you want for it?” Epianax demanded.

  How often does anyone sell books in Phaselis? Sostratos wondered. Not very, unless I miss my guess. In which case… “Normally, I’d ask twenty drakhmai, but I’ll make it eighteen for you,” he said, and waited to see if the eel-seller would go right through the cloth roof of his stall.

  When Epianax didn’t, Sostratos knew he would make a good profit. “You mean eighteen drakhmai’s worth of my eels, right?” Epianax asked.

  “Yes, certainly,” Sostratos said. “I suppose you sell them for a drakhma apiece, the same as they do in Rhodes?” Nobody in Rhodes sold smoked eels like these, but Epianax didn’t need to know that, either.

  He dipped his head now. “I’d’ve asked a little more if you didn’t know what you were doing, but a drakhma’s fair. Still and all, I think eighteen drakhmai’s a little on the steep side for a book. What do you say to fourteen?”

  They settled on sixteen after a short haggle that left Sostratos feeling happy at his profit and vaguely guilty at the same time. He and Menedemos chose their eels; Epianax threw in a beat-up leather sack in which they could carry the smoked fish back to the Aphrodite. Sostratos got the book of poetry from the ship and gave it to the eel-seller.

  “Thanks, best one.” Epianax looked as if he could hardly keep from unrolling the scroll and plunging right in. “I’ll read this myself and I’ll read it to my pals in taverns and such-a book’s always better in company.”

  Sostratos didn’t think so, but knew he held a minority opinion. Until only a few generations before, hardly anyone had owned books of his own, and they were always read in public. With a shrug, the Rhodian said, “However you like, of course.”