He confidently expected the Phoenician to say he’d just sold it, or that he’d seen it year before last in another town, or to give some other excuse for not producing it. Instead, Zakerbaal called out to the slave again, rattling off a string of Aramaic gutturals and hisses. The slave bowed and hurried away. Zakerbaal turned back to Menedemos. “Be so kind as to wait but one moment, my master. Tubalu will fetch it.”

“All right.” Cautiously, Menedemos sipped more wine. Did Zakerbaal really believe he had cloth finer than Koan silk? Menedemos tossed his head. The barbarian couldn’t possibly. Or, if he did, he had to be wrong.

Tubalu took considerably longer than the promised moment. Menedemos began to wonder if he would come back at all. But he did, carrying in his arms a good-sized bolt of cloth. He bore it as tenderly as if it were a baby. Even so, Menedemos turned to Zakerbaal in perplexity and annoyance. “I mean no disrespect, best one, but that is only linen, and not the finest linen, either.”

The Phoenician nodded. “Yes, that is only linen. But it is also only a cover for what lies within, just as your leather sacks cover your Koan silk and keep it safe.” He took the bolt of linen from Tubalu as carefully as the slave had carried it. Unfolding it, he drew from it the fabric it concealed and held that out to Menedemos. “Here. Behold with your own eyes, with your own fingers.”

“Ohhh.” Menedemos’ soft exclamation was altogether involuntary. For the first time, he understood exactly how Sostratos had felt the moment he set eyes on the gryphon’s skull. Here, too, something completely unexpected and at the same time completely marvelous came before a Hellene for the first time.

Menedemos hadn’t cared so much about the gryphon’s skull. One had to love wisdom for its own sake more than he did to get excited about ancient bones, no matter how unusual they were. This… This was different.

He’d shown Zakerbaal the finest Koan silk he had. Next to the fabric the Phoenician merchant showed him, that cloth might almost have been coarse wool by comparison. Here, it was as if someone at a loom had managed to weave strands of air into cloth. The delicate blue of the dye only made the resemblance stronger, for it put him in mind of the color of the sky on a perfect spring day.

Then, ever so gently, Menedemos touched the cloth. “Ohhh,” he said again, even more softly than before. Under his hand, the fabric was as soft, as smooth, as the fanciest courtesan’s skin to a lover’s fingers.

Zakerbaal didn’t even gloat. He only nodded again, as if he’d expected nothing else. “You see, my friend,” he said.

“I see.” Menedemos didn’t want to stop stroking the… silk? He supposed it had to be silk, though it was far finer, far smoother, far more transparent than anything the Koan weavers made. He forced himself to stop staring at it and looked up to Zakerbaal. “I see, O marvelous one”- for once, he meant that literally-”I see, yes, but I don’t understand. I know cloth-well, I thought I knew cloth-but I never dreamt there could be anything like this. Where does it come from?”

“I know cloth, too-well, I thought I knew cloth,” the Phoenician answered. He eyed the blue silk with as much wonder as Menedemos showed, and he’d seen it before. “Your Koan fabric comes here now and again. When I first saw-that-I thought it more of the same. Then I got a better look, and I knew I had to have it.” He might have been a rich Hellene speaking of a beautiful hetaira.

And Menedemos could only dip his head in agreement. “Where does it come from?” he asked again. “The Koans would kill to be able to make cloth like this. They never imagined anything so fine, and neither did I.” As a trader, he should have stayed blasй, uninterested. He knew that. Here, in the presence of what might as well have been a miracle, he couldn’t make himself do it.

Zakerbaal’s slow smile said he understood. It even said he might not take advantage, which surely proved how miraculous that silk was. “It comes from out of the east,” he said.

“Where?” Menedemos asked for the third time. “The east, you say? India?”

“No, not India.” The cloth merchant shook his head. “Somewhere beyond India-maybe farther east, maybe farther north, maybe both. The man from whom I bought it could tell me no more than that. He did not know himself. He had not brought it all the way, you understand-he had bought it from another trader who had got it from another, with who knows how many more since it left the land where it was made?”

Menedemos stroked the astonishing silk once more. As his fingers slid across its amazing smoothness, the gryphon’s skull came to mind again. It too had entered the world Hellenes knew from out of the trackless east. Alexander had conquered so much, people-especially people who still dwelt by the Inner Sea-often thought he’d taken all there was to take. Things like this were a reminder that the world was larger and stranger than even Alexander had imagined.

Like a man slowly emerging from a trance, Menedemos looked up from the silk to Zakerbaal. “How much of this do you have?” the Rhodian asked. “What price do you want?”

Zakerbaal sighed, as if he too didn’t much care to return to the mundane world of commerce. “I have twelve bolts in all, each much like this in size, some in different colors,” he answered. “I would have bought more, but that was all the trader had. Price?” He smiled a sad smile. “I would say it is worth its weight in gold. And now I have made you want to flee, I doubt not.”

“No, best one.” Menedemos tossed his head. “If I’d heard about this without seeing it, I would have laughed in your face. Now… Now I understand why you say what you say.” He did laugh then. “Telling you something like that makes me a terrible trader, one who deserves to be overcharged. But here, for this, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.”

“You respect the cloth,” Zakerbaal said seriously. “I respect you because of it. With stuffs like this, we throw out the ordinary rules.” He mimed tossing the contents of a chamber pot out the window and into the street below.

“Worth its weight in gold, you say?” Menedemos asked, and the Phoenician nodded. Menedemos didn’t even try to argue with him. Considering how far the silk had come, considering how fine it was, that seemed fair. But he didn’t want to give up gold or silver for the silk, not directly. “What would you say if I offered you half again its weight in my Koan silk here? “

“I would say, that is not enough,” Zakerbaal replied at once. “Koan silk is all very well. I mean no insult, Rhodian, but I say this is far better. I say it is so much better, if ever it comes here often and in large quantities, the Koans will go out of business, for they cannot compete with it.”

Half an hour before, Menedemos would have laughed at him. With the silk from the distant east in his lap, under his fingers, he suspected Zakerbaal might be right. Even so, he said, “All right. Koan silk is not so splendid. How can I deny it? But Koan silk is still very fine cloth. Koan silk is still no common thing itself in Phoenicia. So-one and a half times the weight is not enough, you say. What would be enough?”

The Phoenician looked up toward the sky. His lips moved silently. Sostratos got the same faraway expression when he was calculating. At last, Zakerbaal said, “Three and a half times.”

“No. That’s too much.” Menedemos tossed his head once more. Zakerbaal had indeed dealt with a good many Hellenes, for he showed he understood the gesture by a small nod of his own. Menedemos, for his part, knew that nod wasn’t one of agreement, only of acknowledgment. He went on, “Here in Sidon, you’ll be able to get just about as much for Koan silk as you will for this cloth from out of the east, because they’re both foreign and exotic in Phoenicia.”

“There is, perhaps, some truth in what you say, best one, but only some,” the cloth merchant replied. “What I have is better than what you are trying to trade for it, though.”