He exclaimed all over again. Eliphaz had been right, and more than right. He could keep his head and shoulders and feet out of the supremely salty water with the greatest of ease. Indeed, when he tried to force more of his torso down into the Lake of Asphalt, other parts of him rose out of it. So long as that included only more of his long legs, he didn’t worry about it. When his groin bobbed up out of the water, though, he set a hand over it, lest he offend any Ioudaioi who happened to be keeping an eye on what a foreigner did.

“What’s it like?” Aristeidas called to him.

“I think it may be the strangest thing I’ve ever felt,” Sostratos answered. “It’s like reclining on a couch at a supper or a symposion, only there is no couch, and it doesn’t resist me if I lean back more. And it’s wonderfully warm, too. Do you want to try after I come out?”

“Maybe I will,” the sailor said. “I wasn’t going to, but coming all this way and then not going in would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it?”

“I certainly think so,” Sostratos said. “Others may think otherwise.”

After perhaps a quarter of an hour, Sostratos emerged from the Lake of Asphalt. He put on his chiton as fast as he could, to keep from scandalizing the locals. Half a plethron down the shore, a Ioudaian dawdled much more than he did over re-donning clothes. He found that amusing.

The Ioudaian, he saw before the fellow dressed, was circumcised. He wished the man had been closer; he would have liked a better look at the mutilation. Why anyone would subject himself to anything so painful and ugly was beyond him. The Ioudaian himself would probably say it was at the command of his god; that seemed to be the locals’ explanation for everything. But why would a god want such a mark on his people? It was a puzzlement.

Aristeidas did strip off his tunic and walk out into the Lake of Asphalt. As Sostratos had, he exclaimed in surprise at the way the water bore him up. “You can push yourself around with one finger!” he said. “You won’t ever drown, either.”

“No, but you might turn into a salt fish if you stay in there too long,” Sostratos answered. The fierce sun had quickly dried the water on his arms and legs. But a crust of salt crystals remained. His skin itched, far more than it would have after bathing in the Inner Sea. When he scratched, the salt stung. He said, “We’ll have to rinse off with fresh water

when we get back to the inn.”

“No doubt you’re right,” Aristeidas said. “Then what?”

“Then we go back to Jerusalem,” Sostratos said. “And from there, we

go back to Sidon. And from there-”

He and Aristeidas both said the same word at the same time: “ Rhodes.”

For the first time in his travels, Menedemos found himself bored. He’d done everything he’d set out to do in Sidon. Most summers, that would mean the Aphrodite could go on to some other port and give him something new to do. Not here, though, not now. He couldn’t very well leave before Sostratos and his escorts got back.

And he couldn’t do what he would have done in most ports to hold off boredom: he’d given his cousin his oath not to go looking for a love affair with some other man’s wife this sailing season. He’d known nothing but dismay when Emashtart came looking for a love affair with him.

A visit to a brothel proved not to be the answer he was looking for. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good time; he did. But he’d spent some silver and he’d spent some time, and he had nothing but the memory to show for them. Considering how often he’d done the same thing, and in how many cities all around the Inner Sea, he doubted whether in a few years- or even in a few days-that memory would mean much to him.

It was harder to amuse himself in Sidon than it would have been in a polis full of Hellenes. The Phoenician town boasted no theater. He couldn’t even go to the market square to pass the time, as he would have in a polis. Among Hellenes, everyone went to the agora. People met and gossiped and hashed out things of more consequence than mere gossip. He couldn’t imagine a Hellenic town without its agora.

Things weren’t the same in Sidon. He’d seen that shortly after arriving here. The market square among Phoenicians was a place of business, nothing more. Even if it hadn’t been, his ignorance of Aramaic would have shut him out of city life here.

And, of course, he couldn’t exercise in the gymnasion, for Sidon had no more gymnasion than theater. Sostratos had been right about that. A gymnasion was a place to exercise naked-and how else would a man exercise? But Phoenicians didn’t go naked. As far as Menedemos could tell, they didn’t exercise, either, not for the sake of having bodies worth admiring. The ones who did physical labor seemed fit enough. More prosperous, more sedentary men ran to fat. Menedemos supposed they would have been even less attractive if they hadn’t covered themselves from neck to ankles.

Eventually, Menedemos found the taverns where Antigonos’ Macedonians and Hellenes drank. There, at least, he could speak-and, as important, hear-his own language. That did help, but only so much.

“They’re funny people,” he said to Diokles one morning back at the Aphrodite . “I never realized how funny they were till I spent so much time listening to them talk.”

“What, soldiers?” The oarmaster snorted. “I could’ve told you that, skipper.”

“I suppose it’s just shoptalk when one of them explains how to twist the sword after you’ve thrust it into somebody’s belly, so you make sure the wound kills,” Menedemos said. “Killing the enemy is part of your job. But when they start going on about how best to torture a prisoner so he tells you where his silver is…” He shivered in spite of the building heat.

“That’s part of their job, too,” Diokles observed. “Half the time, their pay is in arrears. Only reason they get paid at all, sometimes, is that they’d desert if they didn’t, and their officers know it.”

“I understand that,” Menedemos said. “It was just the way they talked about it that gave me the horrors. They might have been potters talking about the best way to join handles to the body of a cup.”

“They’re bastards,” Diokles said flatly. “Who’d want to be a soldier to begin with if he wasn’t a bastard?”

He wasn’t wrong. He was seldom wrong; he had good sense and was far from stupid. Nevertheless, Menedemos thought, By the gods, I miss Sostratos. He couldn’t talk things over with Diokles the way he could with his cousin.

Even though the soldiers made him wish they were barbarians (not that Macedonians didn’t come close), he kept going back to the taverns they frequented. The chance to speak Greek was too tempting to let him stay away.

Once, he happened to walk in right behind Antigonos’ quartermaster. “Oh, hail, Rhodian,” Andronikos said coolly. “Did you ever unload that ridiculously overpriced olive oil of yours?”

“Yes, by Zeus,” Menedemos answered with a savage grin. “Almost all of it, as a matter of fact. And I got a better price than you were willing to pay. Some people do care about what they eat.”

Andronikos only sneered. “My job is to keep the soldiers well fed for as little silver as I can. I have to do both parts of it.”

“You certainly do it for as little silver as you can, O marvelous one,” Menedemos replied. “But if you kept the men well fed, they wouldn’t need to buy from me, would they? I’ve sold all my hams and smoked eels, too.”

A soldier said, “ Ham? Smoked eels? We wouldn’t see those from Andronikos, not if we waited the next hundred years.”

The quartermaster was unmoved. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “They’re needless luxuries. If a soldier wants them, he can spend his own money to get them. Barley and salt fish and oil are what he needs to stay in fighting trim.”