Sacred Land

by H. N. Turteltaub

  “No point to bringing more than a drakhma or so along,” Menedemos said pointedly. Sostratos got the hint and dipped his head. They both took leather pouches from their belts and stowed them on the Aphrodite. The brothelkeeper watched attentively. Menedemos wanted him to; this way, he wouldn’t decide robbery made good business.

  The brothel lay only a few blocks from the harbor and the agora. Menedemos thought he could have found his way back on his own. Still, though, a torchbearer who knew Olbia would be welcome. Navigating in a strange town by moon- and starlight wasn’t something Menedemos wanted to try unless he had to, and that would be all the light there was if he and Sostratos came back by themselves. No one wasted torches or lamp oil to light the streets after sunset.

  Inside the brothel, some of the dozen or so women were spinning wool into thread, which made the brothelkeeper money even when they weren’t lying with men. Three or four others played dice for khalkoi or oboloi. A couple of others ate bread and olive oil and drank watered wine. They weren’t naked—they hadn’t been expecting business. But none of them veiled her face, as a respectable woman or even (perhaps, or especially) a high-class hetaira would have done. As far as Menedemos was concerned, that was exciting enough by itself.

  “Take your pick, friends,” the brothelkeeper told the Rhodians. He held up the perfume jars to the women. “I got this essence of roses for you from these fellows. I want whichever of you they pick to give ‘em a good time.”

  Menedemos pointed to one of the women playing knucklebones. “Come on, sweetheart. Yes, you.”

  “All right. I come,” she answered resignedly in accented Greek. She was about his age, swarthy, with a prominent nose and hair so black it was almost blue. She wasn’t beautiful—as well hope to find a ruby the size of a man’s thumb as a beautiful girl in a harborside whorehouse—but she wasn’t ugly, either. As she got to her feet, Sostratos picked a woman, too: one of those who’d been spinning. Menedemos hadn’t given her a second glance and had other things on his mind now.

  The whore he’d chosen took him to a little room that held a bed, a stool, and not much else. As Menedemos shut the door behind them, he asked, “What do I call you?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Most men do not bother to ask. You can call me Armene. It is not my name, but Hellenes cannot say my name.”

  “That means you’re from Armenia, doesn’t it?” he said. He had a vague idea where the place was: somewhere in eastern Anatolia or the Caucasus. He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone from that land before.

  Armene nodded, which by itself would have proved her no Hellene. “Yes. My valley had no rain two years in a row. My father sold me to a slave trader to keep me alive and let him and my mother buy food so they could live, too. The slave trader sold me to Kritias here, and so. . . .” She shrugged once, and then, shrugging again, pulled her long chiton off over her head.

  Her body was stocky but still curved, her breasts large and heavy and tipped with dark nipples. Though a barbarian, she’d taken up the Hellenic custom of singeing away the hair between her legs. Menedemos took off his tunic, too, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “I am a gift for you, yes?” Armene said. “Tell me what you want, then.” She couldn’t keep a certain apprehension from her voice. He’d heard that in other brothels. The women had no choice and knew it too well.

  Menedemos stretched out on the bed. “Come here. Lie down beside me.” She did. The bed was narrow for two side by side. Her breasts brushed his chest; her legs bumped his.

  She gave him a worried look. “I am sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” He squeezed her breasts, then lowered his head to them. Surprisingly often, even a slave in a brothel would take pleasure if a man worked a little to give it to her. Menedemos caressed her. He stroked her between her legs, as a Rhodian hetaira had taught him to do a long time before.

  After a while, though, Armene set her hand on his. “You are a kind man,” she said, “but I do not kindle. I do this, but I do not enjoy it.”

  “All right. I thought I’d try,” he said, and she nodded again. He rolled onto his back. “Why don’t you ride me like a racehorse?” If the brothel-keeper—Kritias, Armene had called him—was going to give him a present, he’d take the most expensive one he could get. If he were paying for it, having the girl climb on top would have cost him more than bending her forward or bending her back.

  She nodded as she swung herself over him. “I thought you would ask this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am doing the work,” she answered. She took him in hand and guided him into her, then slowly began to move. Her breasts hung just above his face, like sweet, ripe fruit. He leaned up a little and teased her nipples with his tongue. She kept methodically moving up and down, up and down.

  Before long, Menedemos was moving, too, driving his spear home with every thrust. His hands clutched her meaty buttocks. The bed squeaked under the two of them. As his delight peaked, he went into her as deeply as he could, holding her against him till the spasm of pleasure passed.

  Then, laughing, he said, “You see? You didn’t do all the work.”

  “No, not all,” Armene agreed as she slid off him. Some of his seed dribbled down onto his hipbone. “Good,” she said. “The more out, the less in to make a baby.” That wasn’t Menedemos’ worry. He rubbed the stuff off of him and onto the mattress cover while Armene squatted over a chamber pot she pulled out from under the bed. He’d seen more than a few women, whores and bored wives alike, assume that position after making love. He’d heard more than a few of them say the same thing, too.

  He and Armene both dressed. With a conspiratorial grin, he gave her a couple of oboloi, whispering, “Don’t tell Kritias,” She popped the little silver coins into her mouth. She and Menedemos went out into the waiting room.

  Sostratos and the woman he’d chosen emerged from her chamber a few minutes later, Menedemos still thought her plain. By the way she smiled now, though, Sostratos had made her enjoy their time together. Menedemos laughed to himself. He tried to please women because, when they took pleasure, it added to his own, Sostratos, he suspected, did it for its own sake. He hadn’t asked his cousin about that, but Sostratos also looked pretty contented now.

  The whores had lit lamps in the waiting room. “Boy!” Kritias the brothelkeeper shouted. No one appeared. Kritias muttered to himself. “Boy!” he shouted again. “Get your lazy, worthless carcass in here, before I sell you to a silver miner I know!”

  That brought the slave—a scrawny youth of about fourteen—on the run. Maybe Kritias was joking. The boy didn’t care to take the chance. Slaves sent to the mines seldom lasted long. “What you need, boss?” he asked.

  “Light a torch and take these fellows back to the harbor. Then hurry back here. I know how long you need to get there and back. If you don’t hurry, I’ll make you sorry.”

  “I’ll hurry. I’ll hurry.” Under his breath, the slave added something that wasn’t Greek. The torch hissed and popped and crackled as it caught from a lamp. The boy nodded to Menedemos and Sostratos. “Let’s go.”

  “Have a good time?” Diokles asked when they got back to the Aphrodite.

  “Hard to have a bad time with a woman, wouldn’t you say?” Sostratos answered. He handed the slave an obolos. The youth stuck the coin in his cheek and went back into Olbia. Sostratos continued, “She said her mother sold her into slavery to keep them both from starving.”

  “Did she?” Menedemos said. “The girl I was with said her father sold her for the same reason.” He shrugged. “They both might have been telling the truth.”

  “Yes, but they both might have been lying to make us feel sorry for them and give them a little something,” Sostratos said. “You have to be foolish to believe much of what you hear from a whore in a brothel, I suppose, but from now on I’ll believe even less.”

  Menedemos took off his chiton, crumpled it into a ball, and laid it on the poop deck. He wrapped
himself in his mantle and lay down for the night. Sostratos imitated him. The timbers were hard, but Menedemos didn’t mind. He slept aboard the merchant galley often enough during the sailing season to be used to the way they felt. He yawned, twisted a couple of times, said, “Good night,” to his cousin, and slept.

  The Aphrodite crawled east along the southern coast of Anatolia from Pamphylia into Kilikia. Every so often, when she went farther from shore than usual, Sostratos got glimpses of Cyprus, lying low on the southern horizon. He’d never come so far east, but the island didn’t excite him as it would have had it been the merchant galley’s destination. As things were, he looked forward to visiting it for a little while and then pressing on toward Phoenicia.

  “Some of the towns on Cyprus are Phoenician, you know,” Menedemos reminded him. “They planted colonies there at the same time we Hellenes did.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Sostratos said impatiently—everyone knew that. “But we probably won’t stop at any of them before we go farther east, will we?”

  Menedemos tossed his head. “I hadn’t planned to, no. I was going to round that eastern peninsula the island has and then sail down to Salamis, and that’s a Hellenic city. From Salamis, you go straight across the Inner Sea to Phoenicia.”

  “All right.” Sostratos sighed. “I’d have liked a chance to practice my Aramaic before we got there, though.”

  “Well, when you were picking a girl in that brothel in Olbia, you should have asked if any of them could make those funny noises,” Menedemos said.

  Sostratos stared at his cousin in astonishment. “By the dog of Egypt, you’re right. I should have. Slaves come from all over the place. One of them probably did speak it. I never would have thought of that.”

  “To be fair, my dear, you didn’t go there to talk,” Menedemos said.

  Diokles laughed. He sent Menedemos a reproachful look. “Confound it, skipper, you made me mess up the rowers’ stroke.”

  “Too bad,” Menedemos said with a grin.

  “Why didn’t that occur to me, though?” Sostratos asked himself, ignoring both of them. “We could have screwed and talked.”

  “And talked, and talked,” Menedemos said. “If you’d found a woman who spoke Aramaic, you probably wouldn’t have bothered getting her clothes off.”

  “Not likely!” Sostratos said what he had to say, though Menedemos might have been right. Would he have been too interested in talking with a woman to bother bedding her? It wasn’t certain, but he knew it wasn’t impossible, either.

  While Sostratos pondered that, his cousin pulled one of the Aphrodite’s steering-oar tillers in toward him and pushed the other away. The akatos swung toward the south, away from the Kilikian coast and toward the island ahead. The yard had run from the port bow back toward the stern on the starboard side, to take best advantage of the northerly breeze as the Aphrodite sailed east. Now, with the ship running before the wind, the sailors hurried to straighten the yard even before Menedemos gave orders.

  We have a good crew, Sostratos thought. They know their business.

  He looked back past the akatos’ sternpost. The stretch of sea between the ship and the mainland grew wider and wider. In most circumstances, that would have filled him with foreboding. Not here, not when every stadion farther from Kilikia meant a stadion closer to Cyprus.

  The sun shone brightly from a blue sky dotted by only a handful of puffy white clouds. A storm seemed unimaginable. Sostratos resolutely refused to imagine one and tried not to remember the squall off the Lykian coast. Instead, he turned to Menedemos and said, “We ought to make the island by nightfall tomorrow.”

  “Yes, that seems about right,” his cousin said. “If I’d turned south earlier today, I’d sail on after nightfall tonight, steering by the stars. But we’ll be at sea all night either way, so I don’t see much point to it.”

  “One night at sea shouldn’t be bad.” Sostratos pointed down to the blue, blue water. “Look! Isn’t that a turtle?”

  “I didn’t see it,” Menedemos answered. “But I’ve heard they lay eggs on that eastern promontory. Hardly anybody lives there, though, so I don’t know for sure. Here—take the tillers for a minute, will you? I’ve got to piss.”

  When Sostratos did take hold of the tillers, he felt rather like Herakles taking the weight of the world so Atlas could go after the golden apples of the Hesperides. Menedemos handled the steering oars from dawn till dusk every day. The only difference was, Atlas had intended to walk away from the job for good. Menedemos would take it back in a moment.

  Sostratos felt the Aphrodite’?, motion much more intimately through the tillers than he did with the soles of his feet. The slightest swing of the steering oars made the ship change direction; they were strong enough to control the akatos’ course despite the best efforts of the rowers. She could have got along perfectly well with only one, though the second did make her easier to handle.

  “No rain today,” Sostratos said to Menedemos’ back as his cousin eased himself over the side. “No gods-detested round ships coming out of the rain, either.”

  “There’d better not be,” Menedemos said with a laugh.

  “That wasn’t my fault!” Sostratos exclaimed. He’d been steering a year before when a merchantman loomed out of the rain and struck the Aphrodite a glancing blow, carrying away one steering oar and staving in some portside timbers. She’d had to limp back to Kos and wait for repairs, which took much longer than anyone had expected.

  Menedemos shook himself off and let his chiton fall. “Well, so it wasn’t,” he said. Had he tried to say anything else, Sostratos would have given him all the argument he wanted and then a little more besides.

  As things were, Sostratos just said, “May I steer a little while longer?” He scanned the sea. “There’s nothing for me to run into—I don’t even see any dolphins right now.”

  “All right, go ahead.” Menedemos made as if to bow. “I’ll stand around being useless.”

  “If you’re saying that’s what I do when I’m not steering, I’ll have something to say to you, too,” Sostratos replied. Menedemos only laughed.

  A tern flew out from the direction of the mainland and perched on the yard. The black-capped bird cocked its head now this way, now that, as it peered down into the sea. Laughing still, Menedemos said, “All right, O best of toikharkhoi—what fare do we charge for taking him to Cyprus?”

  “If he pays us a sprat, we’re ahead of the game,” Sostratos answered. “If he shits in a sailor’s hair, we’re behind, and we tell him we’ll never take him anywhere else.”

  After perhaps a quarter of an hour, the tern took off and plunged headfirst into the water of the Inner Sea. It emerged a moment later with a fish just above sprat size in its beak. Instead of returning to the yard, it flew over the Aphrodite and away. It must have clamped down on the still-wiggling fish, for the last couple of digits’ width of the tail fell at Sostratos’ feet.

  “There, you see?” he told Menedemos. “I wish some of the people we deal with would pay us so promptly.”

  “Well, that’s the truth, and I can’t tell you otherwise,” his cousin said.

  Menedemos let him steer for about an hour, then took back the tillers. As Sostratos stepped away from them, he did feel useless. Most of what you do on a trading run, you do ashore, he reminded himself. He knew that was true, but it made him feel no more useful at this moment. He looked back past the stern again, hack past the ship’s boat that followed the Aphrodite almost as the Great Dog and the Little Dog followed Orion through the night sky of winter.

  Not long after Menedemos took the tillers, Aristeidas spotted a sail off to starboard. Sostratos peered east himself. He might have got a glimpse of a pale sail right at the edge of the horizon, or he might have imagined it. He couldn’t tell. Did he really see it, or did he imagine he saw it because sharp-sighted Aristeidas said it was there? Plenty of men believed things for no better reason than that someone they respected— whether rightly or
wrongly—said it was so. Am I one of the herd? Maybe I am.

  Then the lynx-eyed lookout said, “Gone now—under the horizon. Must have seen us and not wanted to find out what we were.”

  “If we were pirates, they wouldn’t get free of us so easy,” Menedemos said. “We’d be after them like a hound after a hare. And we’d catch them, too. No place to hide on the sea—they couldn’t duck into a hole or under a thorn bush, the way a hare can.”

  Cyprus was visibly closer than the Anatolian mainland when, with the setting of the sun, the Aphrodite’s anchors splashed into the Inner Sea. Sostratos washed down barley rolls, cheese, onions, and briny olives with watered wine. “I should have kept the fish tail the tern dropped,” he said. “It would be the fanciest opson I’ve got.”

  “An opsophagos who goes to sea for the fish is going to be disappointed most of the time,” Menedemos answered. “Yes, he’s right above all those beauties, but how often does he ever see them?”

  “Somebody caught a lovely mullet last year—remember?” Sostratos said.

  “Yes—-one mullet, for one sailor out of the whole crew,” Menedemos said. “Those aren’t good odds, you know.”

  “Too true,” Sostratos agreed. “But I do wonder what sort of interesting fish they catch off Cyprus and Phoenicia.”

  “We found out some of the people thereabouts don’t eat fish at all— and you say your Ioudaioi won’t eat pork, isn’t that right?” Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head. His cousin laughed. “Who can guess why barbarians have the strange customs they do? If they didn’t, they’d be Hellenes.”

  Once more, Sostratos quoted Herodotos quoting Pindaros: “ ‘Custom is king of all,’ That’s true wherever one goes, I’m sure, with Hellenes as well as barbarians.”

  By the next afternoon, he could clearly see the forested hills of Cyprus’ eastern spike of land. Hawks wheeled above the woods. Now and then one would swoop down after prey it could see and Sostratos couldn’t. A gull that was resting contentedly on the masthead took off all at once with a harsh squawk of fear and a mad flapping of wings. The falcon that flew past paid it no heed but went on its way straight and swift as an arrow.