Harry Turtledove - The Sacred Land

Once the soldiers had turned a corner, Sostratos remarked, “Well, best one, you were probably wise not to talk about their women where they could hear you.” His cousin gave him a reproachful look, but kept quiet.

The street Sostratos had hoped would lead to the agora abruptly ended in a blank wall. He and Menedemos went back to the nearest intersection. As soon as he found someone who spoke Greek, he took an obolos from his cheek and gave the little silver coin in exchange for directions that would work. The Lykian turned out not to speak much Greek, and Sostratos made him repeat himself several times before letting him go.

Even then, he wasn’t sure he was heading the right way till he walked into the market square. By Menedemos’ pleased murmur, he was taken aback, too. “I only understood about one word in three from that barbarian,” he said,

“I had the advantage of you, then,” Sostratos said, doing his best not to show how relieved he was. “I’m sure I understood one word in two. Now let’s see if that obolos was silver well spent.” It wasn’t much silver, but he hated wasting money.

Menedemos pointed. “There’s a fellow with hams for sale. Shall we go over and see what he wants for them?”

“Why not?” Sostratos said again. He and his cousin pushed their way through the crowded market square. He heard both Greek and Lykian, sometimes in the same sentence from the same man. A fellow shoved a tray of plucked songbirds toward him, urging him to buy. “No, thank you,” he said. “I can’t cook them up properly.” The vendor gave back a spate of incomprehensible Lykian. Sostratos tossed his head and went on. The fellow understood that.

One of Ptolemaios’ soldiers was haggling with the man who sold hams.

“Come on,” Menedemos said out of the side of his mouth. “Let’s look at something else for a little while.”

“Right you are,” Sostratos agreed. If they started bidding for a ham, too, the bearded Lykian could use them and the soldier against each other and bump up the price.

“Here.” Menedemos took a Lykian-style hat and set it on his own head. “How do I look?”

“Like an idiot,” Sostratos told him.

His cousin bowed, “Thank you so very much, my dear. The Lykians who wear our clothes don’t look idiotic.”

“That’s because we don’t wear such funny-looking things,” Sostratos said.

“I should hope not.” Menedemos put back the hat. “And all those goatskin cloaks look like they’ve got the mange.”

“They sure do.” But then, instead of going on and mocking the Lykians even more, Sostratos checked himself, feeling foolish. “It’s only custom that makes our clothes seem right to us and theirs seem strange. But custom is king of all.”

“That last bit sounds like poetry,” Menedemos said. “Who said it first?”

“What, you don’t think I could have?” Sostratos said. His cousin impatiently tossed his head. Sostratos laughed. “Well, you’re right. It’s from Pindaros, quoted by Herodotos in his history.”

“I might have known you would have found it in a history-and I did know it was too good for you.” Menedemos peered around the agora. “Do you see anything else you want around here?”

“One of the women who was buying dried figs, but I don’t suppose she’d be for sale,” Sostratos answered.

Menedemos snorted. “That’s the sort of thing I’m supposed to say, and you’re supposed to roll your eyes and look at me as if I were a comic actor who’s just shit himself on stage. My only question is, how do you know she’s not for sale unless you try to find out?”

“I’m not going to worry about it,” Sostratos said. “Unlike some people I could name, I know there are other things in the world.”

“Oh, I know that, too,” Menedemos replied. “But none of the others is half as much fun,” He checked himself. “Well, I suppose boys are half as much fun. They’d be just as much fun if they enjoyed it the way women do.”

“I won’t quarrel with you,” Sostratos said. “A lot of men don’t care whether boys enjoy it or not, though.”

“They’re the same sort of men who don’t care if their women take pleasure, either.” Menedemos’ lip curled in contempt. “And, when a man like that beds a woman, she doesn’t take pleasure. You wonder why they even bother.”

“That soldier’s gone,” Sostratos said. “Let’s go find out what the Lykian wants for his hams.”

The merchant’s price for one ham didn’t seem too high. Menedemos asked him, “How many have you got?”

“Twenty-eight. No, twenty-seven. I just sell one.”

In a low voice, Menedemos asked, “How much is twenty times his price, my dear?” Sostratos stood there in a lip-moving trance of concentration. Part of him resented being used as an animate abacus. Much more of him, though, enjoyed showing off. He gave Menedemos the answer. Menedemos gave it back to the Lykian, saying, “We’ll give you that for all of them together.”

“All?” The fellow stared.

“Yes, all. We’ll take them east. For that. Not an obolos more. Yes? No?”

“All,” the Lykian said dazedly. He wasn’t used to doing business on that scale. He made mental calculations of his own, wondering whether a low price for one ham was worth getting a big sack of silver for the lot of them and not having to worry about when or whether they’d sell. Suddenly, he thrust out a hand. “All!”

Menedemos clasped it. Sostratos said, “Let’s head back to the ship. We’ll see how lost we get.”

He didn’t expect to; he’d made it from the Aphrodite to the agora, and, with his good head for directions, thought he’d be able to retrace his steps without much trouble. But he’d reckoned without Patara’s streets, which doubled back on each other even more enthusiastically than those of a Hellenic polis built before Hippodamos popularized the idea of a rectangular grid.

He came upon a carved stone column, inscribed in Lykian, planted in front of a potter’s shop. “Give the potter an obolos,” Menedemos said. “He’ll tell us how to get out of this maze.”

“Wait,” Sostratos said. He found a word on the column he recognized. “Mithradata put this up, I think.”

“Who’s Mithradata?” Menedemos asked.

“He was satrap here about the time our grandfather was born,” Sostratos replied. “He was one of the very first people to use his own portrait on his coins.”

“Everybody does that nowadays,” Menedemos said. “All the Macedonian marshals do, anyhow.”

“No, not all of them,” Sostratos said, precise as usual. “Antigonos’ silver still has Alexander ’s head on it.”

“Fine.” Menedemos sounded exasperated. “So old One-Eye puts somebody else’s portrait on his money. It’s still a portrait.”

“I wonder how much the portraits on coins and statues really look like Alexander.” Sostratos remained relentlessly curious. “He’s fifteen years dead, after all. They aren’t images of him any more: they’re copies of copies of copies of images of him.”

“You could have asked that of Ptolemaios when we were in Kos last year,” his cousin said. “You could ask any Macedonian veteran, as a matter of fact, or any Hellene who went east with the Macedonians.”

“You’re right. I could. Thanks, best one. Next time I think of it, I will.” Sostratos beamed. “Nice to run across a question that has an answer.”

“Ah, but has it got one answer or many?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you ask one veteran, he’ll give you an answer. But if you ask ten veterans, will they all give you the same answer? Or will some say the coins look like Alexander while others tell you they don’t?”