He whirled to help his comrades. Moskhion and Teleutas were both fighting hard. Sostratos didn’t see Aristeidas among the rocks and didn’t have time to look for him. “Eleleu! Eleleu!” he shouted, dashing toward the pair of Ioudaioi besetting Teleutas.
Either the war cry or the sound of running feet was enough to discourage them. They ran like their companion. “I never thought we’d pay so dear,” one of them cried as he fled.
“We must have angered the one god,” his friend said.
Robbing travelers who’ve caused you no harm might do that, Sostratos thought. He and Teleutas turned on the pair Moskhion was holding off with his pike. Suddenly, Hellenes outnumbered Ioudaioi. The last robbers ran off, too. One of them also loudly wondered why their god had forsaken them. Sostratos understood him, but knowing Aramaic hadn’t mattered at all in the fight.
As quickly as that, it was over. “Aristei—” Sostratos began.
He heard the groan before he finished the sailor’s name. Most likely, Aristeidas had been moaning behind a boulder a few cubits away ever since he went down, but in the heat of the fight Sostratos hadn’t paid any attention. Now, with his own life not immediately in danger, he gave more heed to things around him.
So did the other Rhodians. “That doesn’t sound good,” Teleutas said. He was bleeding from a cut on one arm and a scraped knee but didn’t seem to notice his hurts.
“No,” Sostratos said, and scrambled over the rocks till he came upon the Aphrodite’s lookout. His breath hissed from him in dismay. “Oh, by the gods,” he whispered.
Aristeidas lay on his side, still clutching with both hands the shaft of the spear that pierced his belly. His blood ran down the smooth wood and pooled on the stony ground under him. It also poured from his mouth and from his nose. Every breath brought another groan. He was dying, but not fast enough.
From behind Sostratos, Teleutas said, “Pull out the spear, and that’ll be the end of it. Either that or cut his throat. One way or the other, get it over with.”
“But—” Sostratos gulped. Killing enemies from a distance with a bow was one thing. Ending the life of a shipmate, the bright, sharp-eyed sailor who’d been on the way toward turning into a friend, was something else again.
“He can’t live,” Teleutas said patiently. “If you haven’t got the stomach for it, young sir, move aside, and I’ll take care of it. It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”
Though Teleutas was obviously right, Sostratos might have argued further. But Aristeidas, through his pain, managed to bring out a recognizable word: “Please.”
“Do you want to do it, or shall I?” Teleutas asked again.
“I will,” Sostratos said. “It’s my fault he came here. I’ll tend to it.” Despite his words, he gulped again. He knelt by Aristeidas and tried to get the dying sailor’s hands away from the spear that had drunk his life. But Aristeidas wouldn’t let go. Sostratos realized a death grip was something real, not a cliché of bad tragedy.
“Pull it out,” Teleutas urged again. “He can’t last more than another couple of minutes after you do.”
“No.” Sostratos tossed his head. He knelt beside Aristeidas, lifted the sailor’s chin with his left hand, and cut his throat with the knife in his right. Some of the blood that spurted from the wound splashed his fingers. It was hot and wet and sticky. Sostratos jerked his hand away with a moan of disgust.
Aristeidas thrashed for a little while, but not long. His hands fell away from the spear. He lay still. Sostratos turned away and threw up on the dirt.
“No blood-guilt to you, young sir,” Moskhion said. “You were only putting him out of his torment. He asked you to do it. Teleutas and I both heard him along with you.”
“That’s right,” Teleutas said. “That’s just right. You did what you had to do, and you did it proper. You put paid to three of the robbers, too, all by yourself, and I guess you drove the fourth bastard away. That’s pretty good work for somebody who’s not supposed to be much of a fighter.”
“Sure is,” Moskhion agreed. “You’ll never have trouble from me anymore.”
Sostratos hardly heard him. He spat again and again, trying to get the nasty taste out of his mouth. He knew he would, before too long. Whether he ever got the blackness out of his spirit—that was a different question. He looked at Aristeidas’ body, then quickly looked away. His guts wanted to heave up again.
But he wasn’t done, and he knew it. “We can’t bring him back to Sidon,” he said, “and we can’t get enough wood for a proper pyre. We’ll have to bury him here.”
“Cover him with stones, you mean,” Teleutas said. “I wouldn’t want to try digging in this miserable, rocky dirt, especially without the proper tools.”
He was right, as he had been with putting Aristeidas out of his pain. Before beginning the work, Sostratos cut off a lock of his hair and tossed it down on the sailor’s corpse as a token of mourning. Moskhion and Teleutas did the same. Teleutas yanked the spear out of Aristeidas’ belly and flung it far away. Then the three surviving Rhodians piled boulders and smaller stones on the body, covering it well enough to keep dogs and foxes and carrion birds from feasting on it.
By the time they finished, their hands were battered and scraped and bloody. Sostratos hardly noticed, let alone cared. He stood by the makeshift grave and murmured, “Sleep well, Aristeidas. I’m sorry we leave you on foreign soil. May your shade find peace.”
Moskhion let a couple of oboloi fall through the gaps between the stones toward the corpse. “There’s the ferryman’s fee, to pay your way over the Styx,” he said.
“Good.” Sostratos looked west. The sun stood only a little way above the horizon. “Let’s get moving, and keep moving till it gets too dark to travel or till we find a campsite that’s easy to defend. And then . . . tomorrow we’ll push on toward Sidon.”
Menedemos busied himself about the Aphrodite, fussing over where the jars of crimson dye he’d bought from Tenashtart were stowed. He moved them farther aft, then farther forward. He knew they wouldn’t affect the akatos’ trim very much, but he fussed over them anyhow.
The amphorai of Byblian wine posed a more interesting problem. He had fewer of them, but each was far heavier than a jar of dye. And he couldn’t properly test the merchant galley’s trim till he got out onto the open sea any which way.
Diokles said, “Seems to me, skipper, you’ve got too much time on your hands. You’re looking around for things to do.”
“Well, what if I am?” Menedemos said, admitting what he could hardly deny. “I don’t feel like going out and getting drunk today. As long as I’m messing around here, I may get something useful done.” Or I may change things again tomorrow, he thought. If he did, it wouldn’t be the first time.
The oarmaster tactfully didn’t point that out. Maybe Diokles assumed Menedemos could see it for himself. He did say, “Time kind of wears when you stay in one port all summer long.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Menedemos dipped his head. “I had the same thought not so long ago.”
One of the sailors pointed toward the base of the pier. “Look! Isn’t that—?”
“By the dog of Egypt, it is!” Menedemos exclaimed. “There’s Sostratos, and Moskhion and Teleutas with him. Papai! Where’s Aristeidas, though?”
“Don’t care for the look of that,” Diokles said.
“Neither do I.” Menedemos ran along the gangplank from the Aphrodite to the quay, then down the planks to his cousin and the sailors. “Hail, O best one! Wonderful to see you again at last, after you’ve tramped the wilds of loudaia. But where s Aristeidas?”
“Dead,” Sostratos said shortly. He’d lost weight on his travels. His skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. He looked older, harder, than he had before setting out for Engedi. “Robbers. Day before yesterday. Spear in the belly. I had to put him out of his pain.” He slashed a thumb across his throat.
“Oh, by the gods!” Menedemos said, thinking, No wonder he looks older
. He put an arm around his cousin’s shoulder. “That’s a hard thing to do, my dear, none harder. I’m very sorry. Aristeidas was a good man.”
“Yes. It would have been hard with anyone.” Sostratos’ eye slid toward Teleutas, who fortunately didn’t notice. “With the lookout, it was doubly so. But with the wound he had, all I did was save him hours of pain.”
“See what would have happened if you’d gone alone?” Menedemos said.
“Who knows?” Sostratos answered wearily. “Maybe I would have taken a different road back to Sidon traveling alone. Maybe I would have been earlier or later on the same road and not run into the bandits at all. There’s no way to tell, not for certain. Why don’t you just let that be?”
He sounded older, too, as impatient with Menedemos as a grown man might be with a child who’d asked him to pull the moon down from the sky. “All right. Excuse me for breathing,” Menedemos said, stung. “How did the business go? Did you get to Engedi? Have you got the balsam?”
“Yes, and some other things besides,” Sostratos said. “Beeswax, embroidered cloth . . . I’ll show you everything, if you’ll let us get on down to the ship. Your inn will have a stable for the mule and donkey, won’t it?”
“I’m not staying there anymore,” Menedemos said. “The innkeeper’s wife tried to seduce me, so I came back to the ship.” He held up a hand to forestall Sostratos. “The oath had nothing to do with that, though I’ve kept it. I wouldn’t want her on a bet.”
“We’ll find somewhere else to put the beasts, then,” Sostratos said. “It doesn’t matter. After everything I’ve been through the past couple of days, I have trouble seeing what does matter, aside from getting home safe. To the crows with everything else.”
Menedemos started to ask him about profit. He started to, but then checked himself. Here, for once, he saw no point in making Sostratos say something he would regret later. That was all very well for a joke, but not just after a good man died. Regardless of whether Sostratos did, Aristeidas’ shade deserved more respect than that.
His cousin said, “When we got back here, I was going to surprise you: I was going to quote from the Odyssey.”
“Were you?” Menedemos said. “What, the bit where Odysseus has slain the suitors and made love to Penelope who’s stayed home all those years, and then he tells her of his adventures in about thirty lines?”
“Yes, that’s the very passage I had in mind, as a matter of fact,” Sostratos answered. “I don’t suppose I ought to be surprised you could guess.”
“I hope you shouldn’t, my dear,” Menedemos said. “And I don’t thank you for putting me in the woman’s role. I wasn’t idle here in Sidon, you know.”
“I never said you were—not that Penelope was idle in Odysseus’ palace.” Sostratos scowled. “After what happened to poor Aristeidas, though, I haven’t the heart for any sort of playfulness.”
Moskhion said, “Skipper, he’s a host in himself, your cousin is. Eight thieving Ioudaioi set upon us—eight! Sostratos shot two of ‘em dead before they could close, he wounded a third, and he went and drove off another one with rocks. If he didn’t show himself a second Teukros there, we all would’ve died amongst those boulders.”
“That’s the truth,” Teleutas agreed.
“Euge!” Menedemos stared at Sostratos as if he’d never seen him before. He’d known his cousin could shoot pretty well, but to hear him described in such terms was . . . startling. Sostratos was among the mildest and most inoffensive of men. Or, at least, he was most of the time. With his freedom and his life in the balance, that might be a different story. That evidently was a different story.
“I wish I’d done better,” he said now. “If I’d shot the bastard who speared Aristeidas, he’d still be with us now.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” Menedemos said.
“We’ve been telling him the same thing,” Teleutas said. “He doesn’t want to listen.”
“Well, he should.” Menedemos looked straight at Sostratos. “You should. For four to drive off eight—that’s no mean feat, my dear, all by itself. You can’t expect everything to have gone perfectly.”
“Everything had, near enough, till we ran into those polluted robbers on the way back here,” Sostratos said. “Were another couple of days of luck too much to ask of the gods?”
“You can’t ask such things of me—I’ll tell you that,” Menedemos said. “Let’s get the goods off your donkey and onto the akatos. Balsam and beeswax and what all else did you tell me?”
“Embroidered cloth,” Sostratos answered. Business seemed to recall him to himself. “How did you do here?”
“Could have been worse. Could have been a lot worse, in fact,” Menedemos said. “I got rid of almost all your brother-in-law’s olive oil, and at a good price, too.”
Worn and sorrowful as Sostratos was, he sat up and took notice of that. “Did you? And what escaped madman came along to buy it?”
“Some went to the soldiers of Antigonos’ garrison here, after their gods-detested quartermaster wouldn’t pay a decent price,” Menedemos replied. “A Phoenician dealer bought the rest for the luxury trade. The books are all gone—you had a good idea there. And the Koan silk—and I got something better for it.” Just thinking of the silk he’d got from Zaker-baal set excitement bubbling inside him.
“What? More cloth?” Sostratos asked. When Menedemos dipped his head, his cousin looked dismayed. Sostratos, in fact, looked downright disgusted. He said, “What were you drinking, my dear, when the wily Phoenician convinced you of that? There is no finer cloth than Koan silk.”
“We do have some jars of Byblian wine aboard, and crimson dye, too,” Menedemos said. “But you’re wrong about the Koan silk. Before we got here, I would have said you were right, but I know better now.”
“This I have to see for myself,” Sostratos declared.
“Come aboard, then, O best one, and see you shall.” Menedemos steered Sostratos back toward the Aphrodite. He went on, “By what you and the sailors say, you were the best one with the bow. No one could have done better than you did.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” Sostratos said bleakly. “Otherwise, we all would have come back from Engedi.” As always, Sostratos looked for perfection from himself. Being only human, he didn’t always get it. And, when he didn’t, he blamed himself more fiercely than he should have for falling short.
Menedemos almost said so to his face. But then, knowing his cousin as well as he did, he thought better of it. Instead, he simply guided Sostratos down into the merchant galley, guided him along to the leather sacks storing the silk, and opened one of them to draw out a bolt.
Sostratos’ eyes widened. Menedemos had known they would. Sostratos stared at the fine, fine fabric, then reached out to feel it. He dipped his head decisively. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. The Koans never dreamt of anything like this. Where does it come from? How is it made?” Curiosity came close to bringing him back to his usual self.
“I don’t know how it’s made,” Menedemos replied. “It’s from out of the east, Zakerbaal said—he’s the Phoenician I got it from. From somewhere beyond India, maybe north, maybe east, maybe both.”
“Like the gryphon’s skull,” Sostratos said.
“Yes, that occurred to me, too,” Menedemos agreed. “But I think we’ll see more of this silk coming west into the lands around the Inner Sea, where the gods only know if another skull like that will ever turn up.”
Plainly, Sostratos wanted to argue with him. Just as plainly, he couldn’t. He asked, “What did you pay for this, and how much did you get?” When Menedemos told him, he muttered to himself, then dipped his head again. “That’s not bad.”
“Thanks. I think we’re going to squeeze a pretty fair profit out of this run, though we’ll take a while to do it because so much of what we earn will depend on selling things we’ve got here back in Hellas,” Menedemos said.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure you’re right,” Sostratos sa
id. “I know where we can get a good price for some of this silk, or maybe all of it: in Salamis.”
“Do you really think so?” Menedemos asked. “Don’t you want to take it farther from Phoenicia?”
“Normally, I’d say yes,” Sostratos replied. “But remember, my dear, Menelaos is in Salamis. And if Ptolemaios’ brother can’t pay top price for something strange from far away, who can?”
Now it was Menedemos’ turn to say, “When you’re right, you’re right. I’d thought you meant we’d sell it to some rich Salaminian. But Menelaos is a special case, sure enough. Yes, we’ll definitely have to call on him when we get back to Cyprus.”
“How soon can we leave?” Sostratos asked.
“Now, or as soon as Diokles pulls all the men out of the wineshops and brothels,” Menedemos answered. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back—that’s all that’s been keeping me here. You’ll want to sell the mule and the donkey, too, I suppose, but that won’t take long. Diokles has always been good at getting the crew out of their dives, so we should be ready to go in a couple of days. I won’t be sorry to head home, believe me.”
“I don’t look forward to calling on Aristeidas’ family,” Sostratos said.
Menedemos grunted. “There is that, isn’t there? No, you’re right. I don’t look forward to it, either. But we’ve got to do it. How did he and the others do while you were wandering through Ioudaia?”
Sostratos looked around to see where Moskhion and Teleutas were before he answered. Once he’d made sure they couldn’t hear him, he said, “I haven’t got a bad word to say about poor Aristeidas, or about Moskhion, either. Teleutas . . . Teleutas did everything he was supposed to do as far as helping me went. He fought bravely against the robbers, too—of course, it was fight or die—but he stole from the Ioudaioi on the way back here from Jerusalem.”
“Did he?” Menedemos eyed Teleutas, who was talking to some of the other sailors, probably telling them of his adventures. “Why am I not surprised?”
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