“Did you have suitable pleasure in me last night?” she asked next, with what irony he could not be certain.
“Well, I must admit I expected something else.”
“Oh?”
“You fell asleep.”
“Oh, yes. I always do. That’s why I like a man to hold me.”
Ivo tried to make something of this and failed. “While it certainly was stimulating holding you, I did find it a bit frustrating.”
“How could that be?”
“I had somehow thought we were going to make love.”
She turned to face him, resplendent in a purple skirt that stopped at the waist, and nothing else. Hold a bowl to her midriff… he thought. “Didn’t you?”
“I said you were asleep.”
“Of course.”
Ivo looked at her, disgruntled. “You mean you expected me to — to go ahead anyway?”
“Certainly. As many times as you desired.”
“Maybe next time,” he said, not clear whether he should feel angry or foolish.
They spent the day feasting and resting, since there was no predicting how much of either exercise they would get for some time to come. Aia acquainted him, in snatches, with her own history: Brought to one of the violent Aramean states from her home in the Kingdom of Urartu — Urartu being the most civilized nation of the world, by her definition — because she was the daughter of a traveling trader. Upon maturity, she had undertaken a marriage to a prince of Sidon. “He was the one I loved,” she confided. “If Baal will not succor a prince, what good is he?” But she had never seen Sidon; his merchant ship had been waylaid by a galley from Tyre and taken captive, her betrothed killed resisting. Thus, a year ago, she had found herself here, hostage, in daily peril of being added to the temple staff as a ritual prostitute. Only the suggestion of wealthy family connections had saved her from that; a hostage used by Melqart lost value. But the truth was that her family had suffered reverses and was not wealthy, and momentarily the temple accountant would verify this and dissipate her subterfuge. “So you see, I have been waiting for a chance to escape — and now, with you, I have it.”
Ivo perceived holes in her story, but did not challenge it. Undoubtedly her past was more mundane than she cared to admit. “How far is Urartu from here?”
“Very far. But I don’t want to go there. The politics will have changed, and my family could not afford me now. I will go with you.”
Ivo shrugged, appreciating her help but having no idea where to journey. First, however, they had to get off the island that was Tyre, hardly a mile in circumference; then he could make longer-range plans.
They packed as much as could be concealed under heavy cloaks: breads, dried fish, small crocks of wine. The host-merchant had been too canny to leave anything really valuable in his house during his absence; there was no gold or jewelry. Ivo inquired about coins, and learned by her reaction that they had not yet been invented. Trade was largely by barter, with weighed metals increasing as a medium of exchange, but no standardization had occurred.
At dusk Aia took him to the edge of the city, where the high wall balked their escape. Guards paced along the top of it, carrying dim lanterns. Ivo wondered how the open-dish lamps had been adapted for windy wet outdoor use, but they did not get close enough for him to observe. He would be satisfied just to know how they could get past the wall.
The girl knew what she was doing, however. “The factories go through,” she whispered. “And no one watches inside at night.”
Factories?
She led him into a dark building. He had to hold on to her hand to keep from getting lost, as he could not see at all inside. But that was not his major concern of the moment. His nose was.
The smell was appalling — a suffocating redolence of corruption unlike any he had encountered before. He tried to seal off his nostrils, but the thought of taking such putrefaction unfiltered into his lungs repelled him even more. “What — what?” he whispered.
She laughed. “They can’t hear us here. Speak up.”
“What died here? A flatulent whale?”
“Oh, you mean the murex. It is a little strong, but that’s the price of industry.”
So industry polluted the atmosphere in ancient days too! “What is it?”
“The murex. The shellfish. Don’t you know how they process it?”
“No.” He hoped they would soon be through the building and into clean air again.
“That’s right. I forgot it’s a trade secret. Well, they gather the murex, break the shells, extract the fish and dump it in big vats. They let it rot there for some time, until the yellow forms. For the darker shades they have to put it in the sun. Then they filter it down and market it. It’s a big industry here; no one outside of the Seven Cities knows the secret. Here, I’ll find a shell for you.”
She banged about in the dark, and in due course pressed an object into his hand. It was a shell resembling that of a spiny conch.
“Market what?” he demanded, perplexed about the point of all this.
“The dyes, of course. Yellow, rose, purple—”
“From decomposing shellfish?” But now he understood. The great mystery of the purple dye of the Phoenicians! He was thankful he hadn’t chosen to wear a purple outfit.
At length they emerged, and he took in refreshing lungfuls of partially oxygenated air. They were outside the wall, walking along a narrow starlit beach strewn with crushed shell, hunching in the fortification’s shadow in order to avoid the gaze of the patrolling guards.
They arrived circuitously at a docking area where the lesser ships were tied. This was a shallow harbor facing toward the mainland, evidently limited to local shuttling. There were also several coracles: doughnut-shaped little boats or rafts (depending on viewpoint) with calked boards across the inside where the hole might have been. Ivo remembered the macroscope station, and wondered whether the stations of the future — his future — would be as far beyond the torus as atomic liners were beyond the coracle.
The tiny boats did not look seaworthy, but Aia assured him that they were the best to be had for a crew of two on the sneak. She climbed into one about six feet in diameter, and he followed her and experimented with the paddles. There were V-notched sticks braced at either side, fulcrums for the long oars; he had to take up one while she managed the other.
He stood within the precarious structure and looked across the water at the mainland. Suddenly it seemed very far away, and the calm, shallow water intervening seemed ominously deep and rough. “Somebody should build a causeway,” he muttered.
“We must pull together,” she said, “or the craft will simply spin about. Not too hard — I am not as strong as you.” Privately, he wondered. She was careful to flatter him regularly, but she was a well-conditioned female. She was uncommonly knowledgeable about nonfeminine affairs, from temple politics to coracle paddling.
After some initial unsteadiness, much of it stemming from his early flinching as he tried to put too much weight on his left arm, they managed to stroke the clumsy craft out of the harbor. The water was gentle, yet even little swells rolled the party about alarmingly, and progress was hard work. It was the coracle’s natural ambition to rotate, and only continuous and well-synchronized paddling kept it on course.
In that period of silence and painful effort — why did sword-swinging superheroes never feel their wounds the following day? — Ivo reviewed his recent experience mentally. How had it all come about? It was obviously impossible for him to be where he seemed to be. Could he in some fashion have traversed three thousand or more light-years without benefit of galactic machinery, he still could not have landed in Earth’s past. The future, yes; the present, possibly; the past, never. The past was forever gone, and anything like time travel brought calamitous paradox. He could not physically participate in past events without altering history, which in turn meant that it was not the past; that was the fact that made it unapproachable.