Off in a corner, a frightened-looking flute-girl played. She seemed to hope no one noticed her. Considering some of the things that might happen if the Macedonians did, Sostratos couldn’t blame her. A scarred veteran who’d surely marched with Alexander, his skin burnt almost Ethiop black by years of sun, was drumming with bare palms on the table by his couch. His pounding rhythm had nothing to do with the love song the flute-girl was playing.
Another percussive rhythm came from a few couches past the veteran. Two younger Macedonians were sitting face-to-face, taking turns slapping each other. Whap! One’s head would jerk to the side as he was struck. Then he would slap the other fellow. Whap! Every once in a while, they would pause for a bit and, laughing uproariously, drink more wine. Then they would start again. Whap!… Whap!
“Do you Macedonians often play that game?” Sostratos asked Alketas.
“What?” The officer said. Sostratos pointed at the two men matching slap for slap. Alketas eyed them for a little while, then said, “No, I’ve never seen that before.” He watched a little longer. “Looks like fun, eh? Want to try it?”
“No, by the dog!” Sostratos exclaimed. He was willing to do a lot of things to sell wine. Getting his brains rattled again and again, though, went too far.
“Suit yourself,” Alketas said with a broad-shouldered shrug. “I was just trying to liven things up. Pretty dull symposion so far, isn’t it?”
“That’s not the word I’d use, most noble one,” Sostratos replied. With neat wine buzzing through his veins, he had trouble deciding which word he would use, but dull definitely wasn’t it. A soldier had hiked up another flute-girl’s tunic and bent her forward onto the couch. He stood behind her, thrusting hard. That sort of thing could happen at a lot of symposia. Sostratos wasn’t shocked, though he’d never before heard a man shout out a war cry at the moment he spent himself.
Four Macedonians began singing a raucous song in their own dialect. One by one, most of the other men in the room joined them. The swarthy veteran gave up his drumming. The two men who were slapping each other didn’t stop, but they did sing between blows. The din was indescribable-and, to Sostratos, incomprehensible.
Alketas started howling at the top of his lungs. He paused only once, to nudge Sostratos again with his elbow and shout, “Sing!”
“How can I?” the Rhodian answered. “I don’t know the words. I don’t even understand them.”
“Sing!” Alketas said again, and gave himself back to the song. It seemed to go on forever. From snatches Sostratos picked up here and there, he gathered it was a battle song that came from a Macedonian civil war several generations earlier. The irony made him want to laugh, but he didn’t. The civil war the Macedonians were fighting now spanned most of the civilized world. The one they were singing about had been some tribal brawl as likely as not to have gone unnoticed by the true Hellenes to the south.
Of course, it wasn’t as if those true Hellenes hadn’t had plenty of faction fights of their own, both between cities and within them. Sostratos sighed and sipped at his wine; raising the cup gave him an excuse for not singing. Faction fights were the curse of Hellas. All the men, all the groups, all the poleis were so jealous of their rights and privileges, they refused to acknowledge anyone else’s. He wondered what the answer was, and whether there was an answer. If so, Hellenes had never found it.
Four more flute-girls swayed into the room. They wore short chitons-chitons that would have been short even on men-of filmy Koan silk. The silk was thin enough to let Sostratos see they’d singed off the hair between their legs. Alketas forgot his Macedonian war song. Sostratos thought his eyes would bug out of his head.
The flute-girls stayed in the open space in the middle of the room, where none of the symposiasts could grab them without leaping off his couch. A moment later, the din from the Macedonians redoubled, for a troupe of dancing girls followed the musicians, and the dancers wore nothing at all. Their oiled skin gleamed in the light of lamps and torches.
“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Alketas whooped. He turned to Sostratos. “Things are finally picking up a little, eh?”
“Yes,” Sostratos said politely. Yes, if you like getting blind drunk and rumpling slave girls, he added to himself. By all the signs, the Macedonians liked nothing better. One of the dancing girls did a series of flips. An officer jumped up and caught her in midair-not the least impressive show of strength Sostratos had ever seen. As if they’d rehearsed it, she wrapped her legs around his midsection. To the cheers of his comrades, he carried her back to his couch. They went on from there.
A couple of other Macedonians also grabbed girls for themselves. Dancing was all very well, they seemed to say, but other things were more fun. That deprived the men who would have been content to watch the dancers for a while of some of their enjoyment, but the Macedonians wouldn’t have been what they were if they’d spent much time worrying about other people’s feelings.
The two men who’d got into the slapping match paid no attention to flute-girls, naked dancing girls, or anything else. Whap!… Whap! Sostratos wondered how long they’d stay at it. Till one gave up? In that case, they might be here a long, long time. Whap!… Whap! If they’d had any brains when they started, they wouldn’t by the time they were through.
“Come here, sweetheart!” Alketas beckoned to one of the dancers. She came, probably not least because the meaty, hairy arm with which he’d beckoned had on it a heavy golden armlet. He shifted on the couch so his feet came down onto the floor and splayed his legs apart. “Why don’t you make me feel good?”
“That’s what I am here for, my master,” she said, and dropped to her knees. Her head bobbed up and down. Sostratos wondered what she was thinking. Had she been born a slave and known no other life?
Or had some misfortune brought this fate upon her? She spoke Greek like a Hellene.
Alketas put his hand on her head, setting her rhythm. Her dark hair spilled out between his ringers. He grunted. She pulled away, gulping and choking a little. “That was fine,” the Macedonian said. “Here.” He gave her a fat, heavy tetradrakhm, an enormous fee for what she’d done.
“Thank you, most noble one,” she said. She had nowhere obvious to store the coin, but it disappeared nonetheless.
Alketas pointed to Sostratos. “Take care of my friend here, too.”
“Yes, sir.” She dipped her head, which probably meant she was a Hellene. Looking at Sostratos, she asked, “What would you like?”
“What you did for him,” Sostratos answered with dull embarrassment. He didn’t like performing in public, but he also didn’t want to take the girl outside into the darkness and have Alketas laugh at him. He was, after all, trying to sell the man more wine.
“Shift a little, sir, if you please,” the girl said. Sostratos did. She knelt in front of him and began. For a little while, his embarrassment kept him from rising. That would have made Alketas laugh at him, too; the Macedonians enjoyed sneering at effete Hellenes. But then the pleasure her mouth brought led him to forget embarrassment and everything else except what she was doing. As the tetrarkhos had, he pressed her head down on him and groaned when she brought him to the peak.
Afterwards, he gave her a didrakhm: a compromise between the usual price of such things and his desire not to seem too stingy after the Macedonian’s extravagant generosity. Again, she made the coin vanish even though she was naked.
Sostratos turned to Alketas to talk about Byblian. Before he could, a brawl broke out. This was no game-the Macedonians overturned couches as they pummeled each other. One smashed a cup over the other’s head. More men leaped into the fight, not to break it up but to join it. More crockery smashed. Howls of pain mingled with howls of glee.