“People say all sorts of silly things,” Aristeidas observed. “Do you believe any of that nonsense?”

“Right now, I don’t know whether to believe or disbelieve,” Sostratos said. “Some strange things turn out to be true: look at peafowl. And look at the gryphon’s skull we had last year. Who would have thought gryphons were anything but legendary beasts till we came across that? But I’m not going to worry about it now, not when I’ll see for myself in a day or two.”

“All right. I guess that’s fair,” Aristeidas said. “This place we’re going to, though-it can’t be as big as Jerusalem, can it?”

Sostratos tossed his head. “I wouldn’t think so, anyhow. By the way the Ioudaioi talk, Jerusalem is the biggest city in their land.”

“It’s not much,” Teleutas said.

He spoke slightingly as a matter of course. Even if things did impress him, he didn’t let on. Here, though, Sostratos had to agree with him. Next to Athens or Rhodes or Syracuse, Jerusalem wasn’t much. Sidon, with its tall buildings, outdid this little local center, too. One day before too long, he supposed, people would forget all about it. Even the temple of the Ioudaioi would probably lose its importance as people hereabouts took on more and more Hellenic ways.

Eventually, he thought, they’ll sacrifice a pig on that altar and no one will care. The world belongs to us Hellenes nowadays.

The road from Jerusalem toward Engedi first ran south through the hilly country in which the main town of the Ioudaioi sat and then east toward the Lake of Asphalt. Sostratos had asked several different people in Jerusalem how far Engedi was and had got several different answers. No one had ever properly measured distances in this country, as Alexander ’s surveyors had done during his campaigns of conquest. Eventually, too, Sostratos supposed, whichever of Antigonos or Ptolemaios held on to Ioudaia would do the job. Till then, each man’s opinion seemed as good as that of the next-and was certainly maintained with every bit as much passion. Though the precise distance remained loudly in doubt, Sostratos did think Engedi lay about two days’ journey from Jerusalem, as he’d told Aristeidas.

He and his men paused to rest in the heat of the day at the little town of Bethlehem. They bought wine from a tavernkeeper and used it to wash down the loaves they’d brought from Jerusalem. The taverner’s daughter, who was about ten, stared and stared at them as she carried the wine to their table. Sostratos would have bet she’d never seen a Hellene before.

“Peace be unto you,” he said in Aramaic.

She blinked. “And to you also peace,” she answered. If it hadn’t been a set phrase, she might have been too startled to bring it out. Her dark eyes were enormous in a skinny, none too clean face that still promised considerable beauty as she got older.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Maryam,” she whispered. Then, obviously gathering her courage, she asked, “What’s yours?”

“I’m Sostratos son of Lysistratos,” he answered. The funny-sounding foreign syllables made her giggle. She skipped away. Sostratos asked the taverner, “Why did you give her a name that means ‘bitter’? She seems a happy child.”

“Yes, so she does now,” the man answered, “but bearing her almost killed my wife. For weeks, I thought it would. That’s why, stranger.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Sostratos said, curiosity satisfied. And then, remembering his manners, he added, “I am glad your wife did not die.”

“Thank you again.” But the taverner’s face did not lighten. “She lived another three years, then perished of-” The word was meaningless to Sostratos. He spread his hands to show as much. The Ioudaian arched his back, threw back his head, and clenched his jaw. He was a good mime, good enough to make Sostratos shiver.

“Oh. Tetanus, we call that in Greek,” the Rhodian said. “I am very sorry, my friend. That is a hard way to die. I have seen it, too.”

With a shrug, the tavernkeeper said, “Our god willed it so, and so it came to pass. Magnified and sanctified be the name of our god throughout the world he created according to his will.” The way he rattled off the words, they had the sound of a prayer he knew by heart. Sostratos would have liked to ask him about that, too, but Moskhion distracted him by asking what he was talking about, so he didn’t.

He didn’t even think of it again till he and the sailors had already left Bethlehem. When he did, he muttered to himself in annoyance. Then he rode the mule to the top of a little hill and, peering east, got a good look at the Lake of Asphalt.

What first struck him was how far down the water looked. These hills weren’t very high, but the lake seemed far below him. Teleutas looked in that direction, too. “In the name of the gods,” he said, “that’s some of the ugliest-looking country I’ve seen in all my days.”

Though Teleutas liked to disparage everything he saw, that didn’t mean he was always wrong. He wasn’t wrong here; Sostratos thought it far and away the ugliest-looking country he’d seen in his life, too. The hills through which he and his fellow Rhodians were traveling descended to the Lake of Asphalt through a series of cliffs of reddish flint on which hardly anything grew. Below those cliffs were bluffs of buff limestone, every bit as barren.

The plains between the high ground and the lake were dazzlingly white. “You know what that reminds me of?” Moskhion said. “When they set out pans full of seawater to dry up, and they do, and there’s all the salt left in the bottom, to the crows with me if that’s not what it looks like.”

“You’re right,” Sostratos said. But salt pans weren’t very big. These salt flats, if that was what they were, went on for stadion after stadion. “Looks as though half the salt in the world is down there.”

“Too bad it’s not worth bringing a donkeyload back with us,” Aristeidas said. “It’s just lying there waiting for somebody to scoop it up. You wouldn’t have to bother with pans.”

“If so many Hellenic poleis didn’t lie by the sea, we might make a profit on it,” Sostratos said. “As things are-” He tossed his head.

Under the sun, the Lake of Asphalt itself shone golden. Beyond it, to the east, lay more hills, these of a harsh, purplish stone. Sostratos had hardly noticed them in the morning, when he’d set out from Jerusalem, but they grew ever more visible as the day wore along and the angle of the sunshine falling on them changed. He saw no trees or even bushes on them, either. The Lake of Asphalt and almost everything surrounding it might as well have been dead.

Pointing east across the lake to the rugged purple hills, Aristeidas asked, “Are those still a part of Ioudaia, too, or do they belong to some other country full of different barbarians?”

“I don’t know, though I’m sure a Ioudaian would,” Sostratos answered. “By the look of them, though, I’d say they aren’t likely to be full of anything, except maybe scorpions.”

“The scorpions here are bigger and nastier than anything we’ve got back in Hellas,” Teleutas said. “Back in Jerusalem a couple of days ago, I smashed one this big.” He stuck up his thumb and shuddered. “Almost makes me wish I’d got into the habit of wearing shoes.”

For the next quarter of an hour, he and Moskhion and Aristeidas were skittish on the road, shying away from rocks that might hide scorpions and from shadows or sticks they feared were the stinging vermin.

Even Sostratos, who was on muleback and whose feet didn’t touch the ground, kept looking around nervously. Then a scorpion did skitter across the dirt, and it vanished into a crevice in the rocks before anyone could kill it. Teleutas’ curses should have been plenty to do it in all by themselves.

After a while, the track leading down to the salt flats got so steep, Sostratos dismounted and walked beside the mule. The animal placed each foot with the greatest of care. So did the pack donkey, which Aristeidas led. Slowly, the Rhodians and their beasts descended from the hills.