“I am your slave,” Ithran said, also in Aramaic. “Name any boon, and it shall be yours.” Aramaic was made for flowery promises no one would or intended to keep.

I wonder what would happen if I said, “Give me your wife to keep my bed warm till I go back to Sidon,” Sostratos thought, and then, No, I don’t wonder. That would show the differences between polite promises and real ones, and show it in a hurry.

While such musings filled the Rhodian’s head, Ithran turned and shouted into the inn: “Zilpah! Pour wine! The Ionians have returned from the Lake of Asphalt.”

“Have they?” The Ioudaian woman’s voice, a mellow contralto, floated out into the street. “They are very welcome, then.”

“Yes.” Ithran nodded vigorously. He returned to Greek so all the men from the Aphrodite could understand: “You is all very welcome. Go in, drink wine. Slave will see to your beasts.”

Teleutas, Aristeidas, and Moskhion looked eager to do just what he’d said. In a dry voice, Sostratos told the sailors, “Get the goods off the donkey before we start drinking. We’ve come a long way to get what we’ve got. If we let somebody steal it, we might as well have stayed in Rhodes.”

A little sulkily, the men obeyed. It was only a few minutes before they did sit down in the taproom to drink the wine Zilpah had poured. The room was dark and shadowed, light sneaking in only through the doorway and a couple of narrow windows. That gloom and the inn’s thick walls of mud brick left the taproom much cooler than the bake-oven air outside.

“Is Hekataios still here?” Sostratos asked Zilpah when she refilled his cup.

She shook her head. “No. He left the day after you did, bound for his home in Egypt.” Her shrug was dismissive. “He is a clever man, but not so clever as he thinks he is.”

“I think you are right,” Sostratos said. He wondered if she would say the same thing about him after he left for Sidon. He hoped not, anyhow. Because the sailors from the akatos had learned so little Aramaic, he could speak to her as freely as if they weren’t there. He took advantage of that, adding, “I think you are beautiful.”

“I think you should not say these things,” Zilpah answered quietly. Out in the courtyard, Ithran started hammering away at something-perhaps at a door for one of the rooms. A burst of guttural curses in Aramaic proclaimed that he might have hammered his own thumb, too.

Aristeidas gulped down his wine. “What do you say we pay a visit to the girls down the street?” he said in Greek. Moskhion and Teleutas both dipped their heads. All three men hurried out of the inn.

“Where are they going?” Zilpah asked.

“To the brothel,” Sostratos said. Ithran kept pounding in the courtyard. As long as he did that, no one could have any doubts of where he was. Sostratos went on, “I was sorry to go. I am glad to be back.”

“And soon you will go again,” Zilpah said.

Sostratos shrugged and nodded; the gesture was almost starting to feel natural to him. “Yes, that is so. I wish it were different, but it is so.” He reached out and touched her hand, just for a moment. “We have little time. Should we not use it?”

She turned away from him. “You should not say such things to me. You make me think things I am not supposed to think.”

“Do you think that I think you are beautiful? Do you think that I think you are sweet?” Sostratos said. “Do you think that I want to love you? You should think that, because it is true.”

Still not looking at him, Zilpah spoke in a very small voice: “These are things I should not hear from you. I have never heard these things before.” She laughed. “I have heard from men who want to sleep with me. What innkeeper’s wife has not? But you… you mean what you say. You are not telling lies to get me to lie down with you.”

“Yes, I mean them. No, I am not lying,” Sostratos said.

“People who mean these things should not say them,” Zilpah insisted. “I have never heard things like these from someone who means them.”

“Never?” Sostratos raised an eyebrow. “You spoke of this before. These are things your husband”-who kept on hammering out in the courtyard-”should say.”

“Ithran is a good man,” Zilpah said, as if the Rhodian had denied it.

Sostratos said nothing at all. He let her words hang in the air, let her listen to them again and again in her own mind. She brought her hands up to her face. Her shoulders shook. Sostratos knew a moment of raw fear. If she started crying loud enough for Ithran to notice, what would the Ioudaian do to him? He didn’t know, not in detail. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t likely to be pretty.

“I think,” Zilpah said, “I think you had better go to your room now.”

“I would rather sit here and drink wine and talk with you and look at you so I can see how beautiful you are,” Sostratos said.

The Ioudaian woman swung back toward him. Her black eyes flashed.

“I said, I think you had better go to your room,” she snapped. “Do you understand me when I tell you something?”

“I understand what you say. I do not understand why you say it,” Sostratos replied. Once again, a why question seemed all-important.

Here, though, it got no answer. “Go!” Zilpah said, and he could hardly tell her no, not when this was her inn, this was her city, this was her country-and that was her husband out there in the courtyard. He gulped his wine and hurried out of the taproom. Ithran waved to him as he hurried back toward his room. He waved back. The innkeeper might have suspected something if he hadn’t. Part of him felt ashamed at treating the Ioudaian in a friendly way when he wanted to make love to the man’s wife. The rest of him, though… When he saw a good-sized stone in the courtyard, that other part of him wanted to pick it up and bash in Ithran’s head.

Still seething, he went into his room and closed the door behind him. It didn’t drown out the noise of Ithran’s hammering. He paced back and forth in the cramped little chamber, feeling trapped. What could he do in here? Nothing except lie down and go to sleep, which he didn’t want to do, or pace and brood. He didn’t want to do that, either, but did it even so.

After what seemed forever, the hammering stopped. Sostratos kept right on pacing. He wished he’d gone to the brothel with the sailors. But if he went there now, they’d know he’d failed with Zilpah. He didn’t feel like humiliating himself right this minute. Later would do.

Someone tapped at the door. When Sostratos noticed the tapping, he had the feeling it had been going on for some little while. He wondered what the sailors were doing back from the brothel so soon. But when he opened the door, no sated Hellenes stood there. Instead, it was Zilpah.

“Oh,” Sostratos said foolishly. “You.”

“Yes, me.” She ducked inside, past Sostratos, who stood frozen, as if seeing a Gorgon had turned him to stone. “Are you daft?” she said. “Shut the door. Quick, now.”

“Oh,” he said again. “Yes.” He did as she said. He found he could move after all, if only jerkily.

“Ithran is gone for a while. The slave is gone for a while. And so…” Zilpah didn’t go on for a moment. In the gloom inside the little chamber, her eyes were enormous. With a gesture that seemed more angry than anything else, she threw off her mantling robe and then the shift she wore under it. “Tell me you love me,” she said. “Tell me you think I’m beautiful. Make me believe you, at least for a little while.” Her laugh was harsh and rough as dry branches breaking. “It shouldn’t be hard. No one else is going to tell me anything like that.”

“No?” Sostratos said. Zilpah shook her head. He sighed. “You spoke of that before. It is too bad, for someone misses a perfect chance. You are very beautiful, and I will love you as best I know how.”

“Talk to me, too,” she said. “Tell me these things. I need to hear them.”