Owls to Athens sam-4

by Harry Turtledove

  He reached into the sack and pulled out a jar. “Fine perfume from Rhodes!” he called. Selling this, his Doric drawl wouldn’t hurt him. “Sweet-smelling rose perfume from Rhodes, the island of roses!”

  A woman with the rough hands and bent back of a laundress said, “Can I have a sniff?” He yanked out the stopper. Sniff she did, and then smiled. She asked, “How much do you want for a tiny little jar like that?” She knew how to haggle-the first thing she did was disparage Menedemos’ goods.

  He told her.

  Her jaw dropped. After that moment of astonishment, she got angry. “You’re having me on!” she said, and shook a fist in his face. He wouldn’t have wanted to brawl with her; she looked formidable. “I don’t make that much money in a month!”

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but that is the price,” Menedemos said.

  “Then you’re a polluted thief!” she exclaimed.

  He tossed his head. He didn’t want her saying that. “No, indeed,” he told her, “for this jar”-he balanced it on the palm of his hand- “holds a lot of labor. The roses have to be grown and picked, the sweet-smelling petals plucked, the lot of them boiled down into an essence and mixed with fine oil-I don’t know all the details, for the perfumers keep them secret. But I do know that everyone who does that labor has to be paid, too, and that’s what you see in the price I charge.”

  She didn’t call him a liar. She did say, “It’s a cursed shame when honest folk can’t afford something nice, I’ll tell you that. Who’s going to buy at your price? Those bastards who run the polis and suck our blood, that’s who, them and brothelkeepers and fancy whores. Furies take the lot of ‘em, and you, too.” She flounced off without giving Menedemos a chance to answer.

  He didn’t know what he could have said to her. The people she’d named were the ones who could afford what he was selling. Hetairai weren’t exactly whores-they entertained the men they chose, not the men who chose them-but their entertainment involved, or could involve, going to bed with their clients, so they weren’t exactly not whores, either.

  Oh, rich merchants could buy perfume, too. On the one hand, though, how likely were they to be honest? And, on the other, they were more likely to buy it for hetairai than for their wives. Wives would always be there. A man had to work to make a hetaira want to stay with him. He had to work, and he had to spend silver.

  “Perfume!” Menedemos called again. As the sun lit up the market square, more and more people came in. “Fine perfume from Rhodes, the island of roses! Sweet perfume no sweet woman should be without!”

  Another woman who’d plainly lived a hardscrabble life-and, after all, what other sort would be out shopping for herself?-asked him what he wanted for his wares. He gave her the same answer he’d given the laundress. She squalled louder than if he’d hiked up his chiton and waggled his private parts in her face. There were men who did that sort of thing to amuse themselves. Menedemos thought it was in poor taste, but what could you do?

  Yet another woman came up to him, this one dressed in a long tunic of fine white wool. “Hail,” she said. “May I smell your perfume?” Her Greek held a faint accent.

  “Of course,” he answered politely. She looked and sounded like the slave of someone prosperous-exactly the sort of person he was looking for. He pulled out the stopper and held the jar out to her.

  She leaned forward. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “That is very fine. What price do you ask?” When he told her, she didn’t flinch. “Let me speak to my owner. She may well buy. Stay here. I will return.”

  “Who is your owner, sweetheart?” Menedemos asked.

  “Her name is Potheine, Rhodian,” the slave woman said. “If you came from Athens, you would know the rich and famous men who have had her as their companion.” Companion was what hetaira had first meant; the masculine form of the word, hetairos, still did mean that and nothing more. In the feminine, there were companions… and then there were companions.

  Menedemos asked, “And who are you?” Showing he cared about a slave might make her urge his case more strongly to her mistress.

  “Me?” She seemed surprised at the question. “They call me Threitta here.” That was Attic for Thracian. She wasn’t redheaded like the slave in Sostratos’ household, but, with light brown hair and hazel eyes, she was fairer than most Hellenes.

  “Well, Threitta, I hope you hurry to your famous mistress for me,” Menedemos said. To make sure she did hurry, he gave her three oboloi. He asked for nothing in return-not a kiss, not a promise that the girl would urge the hetaira to buy the perfume. He’d found a free gift usually worked better than one where the dangling strings were obvious.

  The slave girl took the little silver coins and hesitated, waiting for him to tell her what he wanted. When he said nothing more, she stuck the coins in her mouth. “You have an interesting way of doing business,” she remarked.

  “Thank you,” Menedemos said, though he wasn’t sure that was praise. Threitta nodded-which would have proved she wasn’t a Hellene born, had he had any doubts-and vanished into the still-swelling crowd in the agora. Menedemos tried to keep track of her, but it was like trying to keep track of one raindrop in a storm. He blinked, and then he couldn’t find her any more.

  He went back to calling about the perfume and its virtues. Threitta might not be-probably wasn’t-the only hetaira’s slave in the market square this morning. Menedemos didn’t much care to whom he sold perfume. He cared only about selling it and getting his price.

  By the time Threitta came back, he had sold a jar to a plump man who insisted so loudly that he was buying it for his wife, he convinced Menedemos he was lying through his teeth. Some people never did figure out that the best way to lie was not to trumpet the untruth all over the landscape but to pass it off lightly or, indeed, to keep quiet about it. Why should I care who gets the perfume? Menedemos thought. It’s not my business, or it wouldn’t have been unless that fool made it so.

  When Threitta returned to the agora, Menedemos didn’t notice her till she’d got within a few paces of him. He had an excuse: her companion drew all eyes his way. The blond, long-mustached Kelt was taller than Sostratos, handsome, wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted: he looked like a pankratiast, or perhaps more like a demigod. His eyes were the color of Egyptian emeralds. He stared through Menedemos as if the Rhodian didn’t exist.

  “Hail,” Menedemos said to Threitta. “Who’s your… friend?”

  “Bolgios is Potheine’s body-servant,” she answered.

  I’ll bet he is. That’s quite a body. Menedemos didn’t say it, though it quivered on the tip of his tongue. “I see,” was all that came out.

  Threitta went on, “He has the money for you. My mistress wants five jars of perfume.”

  Sure enough, Bolgios thrust out a fat leather sack that clinked when Menedemos took it. The Kelt’s hand, the back of it thatched with little hairs like wires of finest gold, was as enormous as every other part of him. It could have swallowed Menedemos’, as a father’s swallows that of his toddler son when they go walking together. No one would have dreamt of robbing such a brute.

  “Let me count the silver,” Menedemos said. The bag felt as if it held about the right amount of silver-just under two minai.

  Bolgios’ eyes flashed green fire. “Are you after calling my mistress a cheat, now?” he asked: a musically accented snarl.

  Menedemos quailed before few men. If he said yes to that, though, he knew the barbarian would tear him limb from limb. “By no means,” he answered, as politely as he could. “But anyone can make a mistake. There might even be an owl or two too many in here. I don’t want anything that shouldn’t be mine, but I do want everything that should.”

  Bolgios stood there, considering. At last, grudgingly, he nodded. Yes, he’d wanted to wreak a little havoc. Now he had to accept the idea that he wouldn’t get the chance. “You speak as a proper man might,” he allowed. “Count the silver.”

  Menedemos did, ma
king piles of coins, ten drakhmai to the pile. “It is as it should be,” he said at last, and hoped he didn’t sound too relieved.

  “He gets nothing above what he should?” Bolgios asked Threitta. Maybe the Kelt didn’t know how much Potheine was supposed to pay. Maybe he just had trouble counting.

  “No.” The Thracian woman shook her head. “All’s well.” Bolgios grunted. That all was well plainly disappointed him.

  “Here is the perfume.” Menedemos handed Threitta the little jars. “I hope your mistress has pleasure from them.” He smiled his most charming smile. “If I could, I would like to meet her and thank her for her business.”

  “She is not looking for clients now,” Threitta said. “She has all she needs.”

  And she had Bolgios. When Menedemos made his request, the barbarian stiffened. Menedemos could almost see the hair rise at the back of his neck, as it might have on a dog just before the beast bit. Was Bolgios sleeping with Potheine? Menedemos couldn’t tell. Was he jealous of any other man who did? Of that the Rhodian had not the slightest doubt. He didn’t try to sweeten Threitta and get her to change her mind, as he might have done if she’d come back to the agora by herself.

  She and the enormous Kelt went off side by side. Thanks to Bolgios’ height and bright blond head, Menedemos had no trouble tracking them as they wandered through the market square. Again, he wasn’t the only one following Bolgios with his eyes. An elephant parading through the agora might have drawn more attention. Then again, it might not.

  Gathering himself, Menedemos took up his call again: “Fine perfume from Rhodes, the island of roses! Perfume fit for Athens’ finest hetairai!” He didn’t know Potheine was one of those, but anybody who’d been able to buy Bolgios couldn’t be poor. He sold several more jars before the day was done. Maybe that extra line he’d tacked on to the pitch helped.

  7

  Sostratos had been to a fair number of symposia in his day. Nothing, though, prepared him for this one down in Mounykhia. He’d heard things about the kinds of parties Macedonians threw. Now he was seeing them at first hand. If he wanted to sell wine to the men from the north who held Athens for Kassandros, he’d discovered, he also had to drink wine with them. If, once he got back to Protomakhos’ house, he remembered a quarter of what was going on around him, he would have stories to dine out on for years to come.

  If I get back to Protomakhos’ house, he thought muzzily. If I don’t pass out here, or maybe fall over dead here. Not least because Macedonians were so powerful, everyone accepted that they really were Hellenes, even if a proper Hellene could make out only about one word in three of their dialect. Like the barbarians Demosthenes had accused them of being a generation before, though, they drank their wine neat. And so, perforce, did the people who drank with them.

  The symposion wasn’t in a proper andron, but in a big chamber in one of the Macedonians’ barracks halls inside their fortress at Mounykhia. Sostratos’ couchmate was a tetrarkhos-a man who commanded a quarter of a phalanx: an important officer-named Alketas. A black-bearded rowdy of about forty, he was the fellow who’d been interested in buying Byblian.

  He gave Sostratos a shot in the ribs with his elbow. “Not a bad bash, eh?” he bawled-he could speak perfectly good Greek when he felt like it (and when he wasn’t too drunk to remember how).

  “Well…” Sostratos said, and said no more. He couldn’t even tell Alketas he’d never seen anything like it, because this wasn’t the first Macedonian carouse in the occupiers’ seaside fortress he’d had to attend.

  Alketas looked at his cup. “But, my dear, you’re not drinking!” he exclaimed. He shouted for a slave. How the poor slave heard anything through the din filling the room baffled Sostratos, but he did. Alketas pointed to the enormous mixing bowl in the middle of the floor. Why the Macedonians bothered with a mixing bowl was also beyond Sostratos, since they didn’t mix their wine with water. The slave plied the dipper and filled the Rhodian’s cup, then brought it back to him.

  Even the bouquet of neat wine seemed plenty to make his head spin. And, under Alketas’ watchful gaze, he had to take a long pull at the cup. The neat wine (not anything he’d sold the tetrarkhos) was almost thick enough to chew, and sweet as honey. He could feel it snarl when it crashed down into his stomach. He didn’t want to get too drunk, but around Macedonians there often seemed little choice.

  Two couches over, an officer between Sostratos’ age and Alketas’ had already drunk himself unconscious. He sprawled on his back, his arm, like a corpse’s, dangling down to the floor. His cup sat forgotten on his belly. The fellow who shared the couch with him grabbed for it but missed-he only knocked it over. Wine red as blood soaked the blind-drunk man’s tunic as if he were dreadfully wounded. He never stirred. He’ll feel wounded come morning, Sostratos thought.

  Off in a corner, a frightened-looking flute-girl played. She seemed to hope no one noticed her. Considering some of the things that might happen if the Macedonians did, Sostratos couldn’t blame her. A scarred veteran who’d surely marched with Alexander, his skin burnt almost Ethiop black by years of sun, was drumming with bare palms on the table by his couch. His pounding rhythm had nothing to do with the love song the flute-girl was playing.

  Another percussive rhythm came from a few couches past the veteran. Two younger Macedonians were sitting face-to-face, taking turns slapping each other. Whap! One’s head would jerk to the side as he was struck. Then he would slap the other fellow. Whap! Every once in a while, they would pause for a bit and, laughing uproariously, drink more wine. Then they would start again. Whap!… Whap!

  “Do you Macedonians often play that game?” Sostratos asked Alketas.

  “What?” The officer said. Sostratos pointed at the two men matching slap for slap. Alketas eyed them for a little while, then said, “No, I’ve never seen that before.” He watched a little longer. “Looks like fun, eh? Want to try it?”

  “No, by the dog!” Sostratos exclaimed. He was willing to do a lot of things to sell wine. Getting his brains rattled again and again, though, went too far.

  “Suit yourself,” Alketas said with a broad-shouldered shrug. “I was just trying to liven things up. Pretty dull symposion so far, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not the word I’d use, most noble one,” Sostratos replied. With neat wine buzzing through his veins, he had trouble deciding which word he would use, but dull definitely wasn’t it. A soldier had hiked up another flute-girl’s tunic and bent her forward onto the couch. He stood behind her, thrusting hard. That sort of thing could happen at a lot of symposia. Sostratos wasn’t shocked, though he’d never before heard a man shout out a war cry at the moment he spent himself.

  Four Macedonians began singing a raucous song in their own dialect. One by one, most of the other men in the room joined them. The swarthy veteran gave up his drumming. The two men who were slapping each other didn’t stop, but they did sing between blows. The din was indescribable-and, to Sostratos, incomprehensible.

  Alketas started howling at the top of his lungs. He paused only once, to nudge Sostratos again with his elbow and shout, “Sing!”

  “How can I?” the Rhodian answered. “I don’t know the words. I don’t even understand them.”

  “Sing!” Alketas said again, and gave himself back to the song. It seemed to go on forever. From snatches Sostratos picked up here and there, he gathered it was a battle song that came from a Macedonian civil war several generations earlier. The irony made him want to laugh, but he didn’t. The civil war the Macedonians were fighting now spanned most of the civilized world. The one they were singing about had been some tribal brawl as likely as not to have gone unnoticed by the true Hellenes to the south.

  Of course, it wasn’t as if those true Hellenes hadn’t had plenty of faction fights of their own, both between cities and within them. Sostratos sighed and sipped at his wine; raising the cup gave him an excuse for not singing. Faction fights were the curse of Hellas. All the men, all the groups, all the poleis
were so jealous of their rights and privileges, they refused to acknowledge anyone else’s. He wondered what the answer was, and whether there was an answer. If so, Hellenes had never found it.

  Four more flute-girls swayed into the room. They wore short chitons-chitons that would have been short even on men-of filmy Koan silk. The silk was thin enough to let Sostratos see they’d singed off the hair between their legs. Alketas forgot his Macedonian war song. Sostratos thought his eyes would bug out of his head.

  The flute-girls stayed in the open space in the middle of the room, where none of the symposiasts could grab them without leaping off his couch. A moment later, the din from the Macedonians redoubled, for a troupe of dancing girls followed the musicians, and the dancers wore nothing at all. Their oiled skin gleamed in the light of lamps and torches.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” Alketas whooped. He turned to Sostratos. “Things are finally picking up a little, eh?”

  “Yes,” Sostratos said politely. Yes, if you like getting blind drunk and rumpling slave girls, he added to himself. By all the signs, the Macedonians liked nothing better. One of the dancing girls did a series of flips. An officer jumped up and caught her in midair-not the least impressive show of strength Sostratos had ever seen. As if they’d rehearsed it, she wrapped her legs around his midsection. To the cheers of his comrades, he carried her back to his couch. They went on from there.

  A couple of other Macedonians also grabbed girls for themselves. Dancing was all very well, they seemed to say, but other things were more fun. That deprived the men who would have been content to watch the dancers for a while of some of their enjoyment, but the Macedonians wouldn’t have been what they were if they’d spent much time worrying about other people’s feelings.

  The two men who’d got into the slapping match paid no attention to flute-girls, naked dancing girls, or anything else. Whap!… Whap! Sostratos wondered how long they’d stay at it. Till one gave up? In that case, they might be here a long, long time. Whap!… Whap! If they’d had any brains when they started, they wouldn’t by the time they were through.