11

Menedemos pulled in on one 5teering-oar tiller and pushed the other one out. The Aphrodite rounded Cape Pedalion, the highland that marked the southeastern corner of Cyprus. Diokles said, “That headland is supposed to be sacred to Aphrodite, so there’s a good omen for our ship, if you like.”

“I like good omens just fine, thanks very much,” Menedemos answered. “I’ll take ‘em wherever I can find ‘em, too.”

“Why is this part of Cyprus sacred to the love goddess?” Sostratos asked. “Didn’t she rise from the sea at Paphos? Paphos isn’t near here, is it?”

“No, young sir, Paphos is way off to the west,” the oarmaster said. “I don’t know why Cape Pedalion’s sacred to her. I just know that it is.”

Sostratos still looked discontented. Menedemos shot him a glance that said, Shut up. For a wonder, his cousin got the message. Menedemos wanted the sailors to think the omens were good. The happier they were, the better they’d work. If Diokles hadn’t given him a real one, he might have invented a good omen to keep them cheerful.

The beaches west of Cape Pedalion were of fine white sand, the soil inland from them a red that promised great fertility, though fields lay fallow under the hot sun, waiting for fall and the rains that would bring them back to life. But the promontory did strange things to the wind, which went fitful and shifting, now with the merchant galley, now dead against her.

“By the gods, I’m glad I’m in an akatos,” Menedemos said. “I wouldn’t care to sail this coast in a round ship. You could spend days going nowhere at all. And if the wind did blow in one direction, like as not it’d drive you aground instead of taking you where you wanted to go.”

“You don’t want that,” Sostratos said. “You don’t want that anywhere. You especially don’t want it on a shore where nobody knows you.”

Diokles dipped his head. “No, indeed. And you really especially don’t want it on this shore, where most of the people are Phoenicians, not Hellenes at all. Kition, the next city up ahead, is a Phoenician town.”

“From what we saw in Sidon, Phoenicians aren’t any worse than Hellenes,” Sostratos said.

“I’m not saying they’re worse. I’m saying they’re foreign,” the keleustes replied. “If I were a Phoenician skipper, I’d sooner go aground here than up by Salamis, where the people are mostly Hellenes.”

“I’d sooner not go aground anywhere,” Menedemos said. “I’d sooner not, and I don’t intend to.”

He did put in at Kition the next day to buy fresh bread. It looked like a Phoenician town, with tall buildings crowding close together and with men in caps and long robes. The gutturals of Aramaic dominated over Greek’s smooth rising and falling cadences.

“I can understand what they’re saying,” Sostratos exclaimed. “When we first set out, I wouldn’t have followed even half of it, but I can understand almost all of it now.”

“You’ve been speaking the language yourself,” Menedemos said. “That’s why. I can even understand a little myself. But I expect I’ll forget it as soon as we get back to Rhodes. I won’t need to know it anymore.”

“I don’t want to forget!” Sostratos said. “I never want to forget anything.”

“I can think of a few things I’d just as soon forget,” Menedemos said, “starting with Emashtart.” He laughed and tossed his head. “I didn’t have any trouble keeping my oath on account of her. How about you, O best one? Outrage any husbands in Ioudaia? You never swore you wouldn’t.”

To his surprise-indeed, to his amazement-his cousin coughed and shuffled his feet and generally acted flustered. “How did you know?” Sostratos asked. “Were you talking with Moskhion or Teleutas? Did they blab?”

“They never said a word, my dear, and I never thought to ask them about that,” Menedemos answered. “But now I’m asking you. Who was she? Was she pretty? You wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t thought she was pretty, would you?”

“Her husband ran the inn where we stayed in Jerusalem,” Sostratos said slowly. “Her name was Zilpah.” He bared his teeth in what wasn’t quite, or wasn’t just, a smile. “While I was going after her, I thought she was the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Menedemos laughed out loud. “Oh, yes. I know all about that. I kept trying to tell you, but you didn’t want to listen.”

“I understand better now.” By the way Sostratos said it, he wished he didn’t.

Laughing still, Menedemos said, “So you finally got her, did you?”

“Yes, on the way back from Engedi.” Sostratos didn’t sound particularly proud of himself. “If she hadn’t been angry at her husband, I never would have.”

“They all say that,” Menedemos told him. “Maybe they even believe it. It gives them an excuse for doing what they want to do anyhow. Well? How was it?”

“Better than with a whore, certainly-you’re right about that,” Sostratos admitted.

“Told you so,” Menedemos said.

“You tell me all sorts of things,” Sostratos said. “Some of them turn out to be true, and some of them don’t. She started crying afterwards, though, and wished she’d never done it. Everything was fine-better than fine-up till then. As soon as we’d finished, though…” He tossed his head.

“Oh. One of those. Just your luck to run into one like that the first time you play the game,” Menedemos said sympathetically, and put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “It happens, I’m afraid.”

“Obviously, since it happened to me,” Sostratos said. “And it did feel like a game. I didn’t like that.”

“Why not? What else is it?” Menedemos asked in honest puzzlement. “Best game in the world, if you ask me, but still, only a game.”

Sostratos groped for an answer: “It shouldn’t be only a game. It’s too important to be only a game. For a little while there, I was… in love, I suppose. I don’t know what else to call it.”

“That can happen,” Menedemos agreed. Sostratos hadn’t sounded happy about it. Menedemos didn’t blame him. Love was as dangerous a passion as the gods had inflicted on mankind. Menedemos went on, “I don’t suppose you can do anything halfway, can you?”

“Doesn’t seem that way, does it?” Sostratos spread his hands. “There’s my story, such as it is. I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t done before.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, it’s something you haven’t done before.”

“I know.” No, Menedemos’ cousin didn’t seem happy at all. “Now I understand the fascination of your game. I wish I didn’t.”

“Why?” Menedemos asked. “Because now you have a harder time looking down your nose at me?”

Relentlessly honest, Sostratos dipped his head. “Yes, that’s the main reason why, and I won’t tell you any different. And because I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep from doing something like that again one of these days. I hope so, but how can I know for certain?”

“Don’t worry about it so much,” Menedemos told him. “You got away. You’ll never see the woman or her husband again. Nobody got hurt. Why are you in such an uproar? You don’t need to be.”

Sostratos was relentlessly precise as well as relentlessly honest. “I wouldn’t say nobody got hurt. If you’d seen Zilpah afterwards…” His mouth tightened. He was looking back on a memory that didn’t please him at all.

But Menedemos repeated, “Don’t worry about it. Women get funny sometimes, that’s all. The day after you left the inn, she’d probably forgotten all about you.”

“I don’t think so,” Sostratos said. “I think she thought she loved me, the same way I thought I loved her. Then we lay with each other, and that made her decide her husband was really the important one. I think she- how do I put it?-blamed me for not being who, or maybe what, she thought I was.” He sighed.

“Well, what if she did?” Menedemos asked. “How is that your fault? It isn’t, my dear, and that’s all there is to it.”

“ ‘That’s all there is to it,’“ Sostratos echoed in a hollow voice. “Easy enough for you to say, O best one. Not so easy for me to persuade myself.”