Was this what women felt when some obnoxious man wouldn’t leave them alone? Menedemos had had some idea of what that was like; as a youth in Rhodes, he’d had plenty of suitors sniffing after him. But what he’d known then was chiefly scorn for the silly men who chased him. Now he felt real annoyance-and fear, too, for, in a city of her own people, Emashtart might be able to cause him a lot of trouble. He didn’t dare let her in now, lest she claim he’d tried to rape her instead of the other way round.

She started to say something else. Before she could, a man in a nearby room yelled in Aramaic. Menedemos didn’t understand a word of it, but he would have bet the other man was telling her to shut up and let him get some sleep. In the other fellow’s place, that was what Menedemos would have said.

Emashtart shouted back, anger in her voice. The man in the other room gave as good as he got. He and the innkeeper’s wife went back and forth at the top of their lungs. Menedemos couldn’t follow their argument, but it sounded spectacular. Aramaic, with its gutturals and hisses, was made for quarreling.

The racket Emashtart and the first man made disturbed others at the inn. Before long, six or eight people were shouting at one another. They all sounded furious. For the next quarter of an hour, Menedemos hadn’t the slightest hope of sleeping, but he was entertained.

At last, the bickering died away. Menedemos wondered whether Emashtart would start scratching at his door again. To his vast relief, she didn’t. He twisted and turned on the narrow, lumpy bed, and finally went back to sleep.

When he came out the next morning, he found Sedek-yathon sitting on a stool in the taproom drinking a cup of wine. The innkeeper looked somewhat the worse for wear. Menedemos wondered how much he’d drunk the night before. But that didn’t matter. Sedek-yathon spoke more Greek than his wife. That did. Menedemos said, “I’m sorry, best one, but I have to move back to my ship today.”

“You say you stay till new moon,” the innkeeper said. “You already pay to stay to new moon. Not get silver back.”

Normally, that would have infuriated the Rhodian. Here, he only shrugged. “Fine,” he said. He would have paid more than a few drakhmai to escape the inn. He gathered up his belongings and headed back to the Aphrodite . In some ways, he wouldn’t be so comfortable. In others… In others, he couldn’t wait to return to the merchant galley.

Growing up in Rhodes, Sostratos had never seen snow fall till he went to Athens to study at the Lykeion. Even in Athens, snow had been rare. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about heat. Engedi, on the shore of the Lake of Asphalt, proved he hadn’t known so much as he thought.

Whenever he went out of doors, the sun beat down on him with almost physical force. He wore his broad-brimmed hat every moment of the day and imagined he felt the weight of the sunlight pressing it down onto his head. Even the air seemed heavy and thick and suffused with sunshine.

And yet, despite that suffocating heat, despite the poisonously salty lake and the wasteland all around, Engedi lay in the midst of a patch of some of the most fertile soil he’d ever seen. As he’d guessed, springs bubbling up from underground let life not only survive but flourish here.

Outside the walls of Engedi, persimmon trees and henna plants grew among other crops. Sostratos knew the balsam-makers turned their sap into the medicinal, sweet-smelling product for which the town was famous. Just how they did it, he didn’t know. No one outside of Engedi did. He tossed his head. Since coming to Ioudaia, he’d learned that wasn’t quite true. One other place, a town called Jericho, also produced the balsam.

He shrugged. The stuff was always called balsam of Engedi. If he bought it here, he could truthfully say he had the authentic product.

More persimmon trees grew in front of the house of Eliphaz son of Gatam, the leading balsam-maker in Engedi. In the savage weather the land here by the Lake of Asphalt knew, their shade was doubly welcome.

A skinny, black-bearded slave opened the door when Sostratos knocked. “Peace be unto you, my master,” he said in Aramaic with an accent slightly different from that which the Ioudaioi used.

“And to you also peace, Mesha,” Sostratos replied. Mesha was a Moabite, one of the nomads who, Sostratos had learned since coming to Engedi, dwelt in the desert east of the Lake of Asphalt. Sostratos didn’t know by what misfortune he’d ended up a slave. Getting captured on a raid struck the Rhodian as likely; Mesha had the look of a man who would rob for the sport of it.

“May Khemosh favor you, Ionian,” Mesha said. Khemosh was a Moabite god. Sostratos would have liked to find out more about him, but Mesha named him only furtively; Eliphaz didn’t approve of anyone’s calling on any god in his house save the invisible one the Ioudaioi worshiped. In a lower voice yet, the Moabite added, “May you swindle the beard off my master’s chin.” He might be a slave, but he wasn’t resigned to serving the balsam-maker.

Another persimmon tree and a pale-barked fig spread shade over Eliphaz’s courtyard. The Ioudaian waited in that shade. He was tall and solidly made, and within a few years of forty: Sostratos could see the first few white threads in his dark beard. Inclining his head to Sostratos, he said, “Peace be unto you, Ionian.”

“And to you also peace, my master,” Sostratos said politely.

“My thanks.” Eliphaz son of Gatam clapped his hands. “Fetch us wine, Mesha.” Nodding, the slave hurried away. Eliphaz muttered something under his breath. It sounded like lizard-eating savage. Maybe he had no more love for Mesha than the Moabite did for him.

The wine was good enough without being anything special. Sostratos, unaccustomed to wine without water, drank carefully. After polite chitchat, he said, “Here is a jar of the fine Rhodian perfume I mentioned when we met yesterday.” With use, his own Aramaic got more fluent by the day.

“Let me smell of it,” Eliphaz said gravely. Sostratos handed him the small jar. He pulled out the stopper, sniffed, touched the rim of the jar, and rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “It is made with grease, I see. What is the grease?”

“ Olive oil, my master, nothing else,” Sostratos replied.

“Ah.” A smile appeared on the balsam-maker’s face. “We may freely use olive oil, you understand. If it were animal fat-especially if it were pig fat-I could not think of trading for it no matter how sweet it smells.”

“I understand that it is so, yes,” Sostratos said. “I do not understand why it is so. If you could make this plain, I would be in your debt.”

“It is so because the one god commands us to shun the pig and all other beasts that do not chew their cud and divide their hooves,” Eliphaz said.

Even that was more than Sostratos had known before. But it was not enough more to satisfy him. “Why does your one god command you so?” he asked.

“Why?” Now Eliphaz son of Gatam stared at him in amazement. “Who are we, to ask why the one god orders this or forbids that? It is his will. We can only obey, and obey we do.” He sounded proud of such obedience.

That struck Sostratos as very strange. It was as if a man declared he was proud to be a slave and had no desire for freedom. Since he saw no diplomatic way to say that to the balsam-maker, he let it go. He did say, “You can travel all over the world, my master, and you will find no sweeter, no stronger, no longer-lasting perfume than what we make on the island of Rhodes.”

“It could be. It is good perfume,” Eliphaz said. “But you, Ionian, you will find no finer balsam than what we make here by the Dead Sea.”

“Is that what you name the water?” Sostratos said. Eliphaz nodded. Sostratos said, “I have also heard it called the Lake of Asphalt.”