“Tush! Go to!” the Cypriot exclaimed. “Think you to gull me so? You rank cozener! Why, water’s water, be it salt or fresh. An you throw a man in’t, if he swim not, he’ll sink down and drown. ‘Tis but natural that it be so. Who told you such lies?”
“No one told me,” Sostratos said. “I saw this with my own eyes, felt it with my own body. I went into this lake, I tell you, and it bore me up from the great amount of salt in it.”
Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make the longshoreman believe him. “By Apollo Hylates, I’ve met folk like you aforetimes,” the fellow said. “Always ready with a tall tale, the which no man hereabouts may check. Go to, I say again! You’ll not catch me crediting such nonsense and moonshine.”
Sostratos wanted to insist he was telling the truth. He wanted to, but he didn’t bother. He knew he would only waste his time and end up out of temper. People who often clung to the most absurd local superstitions wouldn’t trust a foreigner to tell them the truth about a distant land. The Cypriot had asked him for a strange story and then refused to believe it once he got it.
Moskhion came up onto the poop deck. “Don’t worry about it, young sir,” he said. “Some people are just natural-born fools, and you can’t do a thing about it.”
“I know,” Sostratos said. “Arguing with somebody like that is nothing but a waste of breath. He wouldn’t have believed you and Teleutas, either.”
“That’s why I kept quiet,” Moskhion said, dipping his head. “I didn’t see any point in quarreling, that’s all. It wasn’t on account of I wouldn’t back you.”
“Of course not,” Sostratos said. “I’d never think such a thing, not when we fought side by side there in the rocks north of Gamzo. We owe each other our lives. We’re not going to split apart over a foolish argument with somebody who’s probably never gone fifty stadia from Kourion in his life.”
Menedemos said, “We still have a little while before sunset. Shall we go into the agora and see what they’re selling there?”
“Well, why not?” Sostratos answered. “You never can tell. I wouldn’t bet on finding anything worth buying, but I might be wrong. And walking around in any market square will remind me I’m back among Hellenes.”
His cousin dipped his head. “Yes, I had the same thought.” He ran the gangplank from the poop deck to the quay. “Let’s go.”
Kourion wasn’t a big city, but it was an old one. Even its larger streets meandered in every direction. One of these days, Sostratos supposed, someone might rebuild the place with a neat Hippodamian grid of avenues, such as Rhodes and Kos and other newer foundations enjoyed. Meanwhile, the locals knew their way around, while strangers had to do their best. Eventually, he and Menedemos did find the agora.
Men wandered from stall to stall, examining produce and pots and leather goods and nets and carved wood and cloth and a hundred other things. Sellers praised their goods; buyers sneered. Men with trays ambled through the square, selling figs and wine and fried prawns and pastries sweetened with honey. Knots of men gathered here and there, arguing and gesticulating. It was the most ordinary scene imaginable, in any town full of Hellenes along the Inner Sea.
Tears stung Sostratos’ eyes. “By the gods, I never dreamt I could miss this so much.”
“Neither did I,” Menedemos agreed. “Let’s see what they’ve got, eh?”
“Of course, my dear,” Sostratos said. “You never know what we might find.” They strolled the agora together. Sostratos knew what he hoped to find: another gryphon’s skull. That one was most unlikely to turn up in this out-of-the way little polis bothered him not at all. He had his hopes, and would keep on having them as long as he lived.
He saw no sign of any such wonder in Kourion, though. He saw no sign of any wonders in the market square. The agora was almost staggeringly dull, at least for someone looking for cargo for a merchant galley. A local miller or farmer would surely have found it delightful.
As soon as he realized he wouldn’t see anything much he wanted to buy, he started listening to the talk in the agora. Talk, after all, was the other main reason men came to the market square. Thanks to the Cypriot dialect, he had to listen harder than he would have back in Rhodes. The more he listened, though, the more easily he followed it.
People kept talking about a gamble or a risk. They all knew what it was, and they wisely discussed this fellow’s chance of bringing it off, or that one’s, or someone else’s. They also talked about the price of failure, without saying what that was, either.
Finally, Sostratos’ curiosity got the better of him. He walked up to a local and said, “Excuse me, O best one, but may I ask you a question?”
The man from Kourion dipped his head. “Certes, stranger. Say on.”
“Thank you kindly.” As had happened before on Cyprus, the accent here made Sostratos acutely conscious of his own Doric dialect, which came out more than usual. He persisted even so: “What is this gamble I hear you all talking about?”
“Why, to touch the altar of Apollo Hylates unbeknownst to the priests serving the god, of course,” the man from Kourion replied.
Sostratos stared. “But isn’t it death to touch that altar? Don’t they throw you off the cliffs?” He pointed westward.
“In good sooth, sir, ‘tis indeed. An a man be caught, he suffereth infallibly that very fate. ‘Tis the price of failure,” the local said.
Menedemos said, “In that case, why on earth would anybody be crazy enough to want to do it?”
Shrugging, the man from Kourion replied, “It hath of late become amongst the youth of this our city a passion, a sport, to make their way to yon temple by twos and threes-the odd young men being witness to him who dareth-to lay hold of the altar, and then to get hence with all the haste in ‘em.”
“Why?” Sostratos asked, as Menedemos had before him. Again, the local only shrugged. When he saw the Rhodians had no more questions for him, he politely dipped his head again and went on his way.
Sostratos kept scratching his own head and worrying at the question like a man with a bit of squid tentacle stuck between his teeth. At last, he said, “I think I understand.”
“More than I can say,” Menedemos replied.
“Look at Athens more than a hundred years ago, when Alkibiades and some of his friends profaned the mysteries of Eleusis and mutilated the Herms in front of people’s houses,” Sostratos said. “They probably didn’t mean any real harm. They were drunk and having a good time and playing foolish games. That’s what the young men are doing here, I suppose.”
“It’s not a foolish game if the priests catch you,” Menedemos pointed out.
“I wonder what sort of watch they keep,” Sostratos said. “If it is only a game, they might look the other way most of the time… though Alkibiades came to grief when people who should have kept their mouths shut didn’t.”
“We’ll be out of here tomorrow,” Menedemos said. “We’ll never know.”
“I wish you hadn’t put it like that,” Sostratos said. “Now it will keep on bothering me for the rest of my days.”
“Not if you don’t let it,” Menedemos said. “What bothers me are the goods in this agora. I can’t see a single thing I’d want to take away from here.” He snapped his fingers. “No, I take that back-there was one very pretty boy.”
“Oh, go howl!” Sostratos told him. Boys’ beauty drew his eyes, but in the same way as a fine horse’s beauty might have. He admired without wanting to possess. When he thought about such things, he wondered if that was because he’d been so completely ignored while he was a youth. Maybe the sting of that humiliation remained with him yet.
Menedemos, by contrast, had had his name and the usual epithets- MENEDEMOS IS BEAUTIFUL or MENEDEMOS IS BEST or THE BOY MENEDEMOS IS MOST LOVELY-scrawled on walls all over Rhodes. He knew Sostratos hadn’t-he hardly could help knowing. Most of the time, as now, he was tactful: “Well, my dear, I did happen to notice him. But he’s probably got no honor-just another little wretch with a wide arsehole.”