"What?" Sostratos stared as blankly as if she'd spoken Oscan or Latin rather than pretty good Greek. "She can't do that!" With a shrug, the slave just repeated herself. Sostratos started to push past her. A couple of other slaves - men: toughs with the look of bouncers - appeared behind her. He checked himself. "Let me talk to Lamakhos, then." The woman nodded and went away.
"Hail, friend," the brothelkeeper said, his smile still broad and, Sostratos judged, still false.
"Hail," Sostratos replied. "We had a bargain, you know."
"Yes, I do know." Lamakhos shrugged. "Women are funny, that's all I can tell you."
"We had a bargain," Sostratos repeated: for him, that was sacred. Lamakhos shrugged again. Sostratos nervously cracked his knuckles. "Is she angry at me? If I did something to offend her, I'll apologize."
Lamakhos turned to the slave woman. "Go find out." She nodded again and hurried off in the direction of Maibia's chamber.
When she came back, she spoke to Sostratos: "She says it is not that. She says you should come back tomorrow. Maybe then."
Realization smote. She's playing at being a hetaira. A girl in a brothel had to take her customers as they came, do what they wanted when they wanted it. A high-class courtesan, on the other hand, had the looks and the charm and the wit to take men on her terms, not theirs. That made them more alluring, of course - if you had to persuade them, that showed, or seemed to show, they really wanted you.
Do I let her get away with it? Sostratos plucked at his beard. Maybe Maibia thought he really had fallen head over heels in love, in which case he would put up with anything from her. If she thought that, she was mistaken. What Menedemos thought of as foreign homeliness attracted him - but love? He tossed his head. He couldn't imagine falling in love with someone with whom he couldn't talk seriously . . . and Maibia's mental horizons were no wider than was to be expected of a girl kidnapped from a Keltic village and sold to a brothelkeeper.
That still didn't answer his question. He'd given Lamakhos a break on the price of the silk for free access to the girl. He supposed - no, he was certain - Lamakhos could make Maibia give herself to him now. But that would only make her sullen, and Sostratos wasn't one of those who enjoyed his girls resentful. Had he been, he would have bedded the Thracian slave back home more often.
Or he could ask Lamakhos for the five-drakhma discount back. He could - but the brothelkeeper would laugh in his face and tell him to go to law. The fuss and feathers would prove more trouble than the money was worth, and what were his chances of getting a fair judgment, even against a brothelkeeper, in a polis not his own?
"Well?" Lamakhos said. "Shall I go shake this nonsense out of her?"
"No, never mind," Sostratos answered - the blunt question made up his mind for him. "I'll come back tomorrow."
As he turned to go, he saw contempt in Lamakhos' eyes. The brothelkeeper tried to hide it behind his friendly mask. His slaves didn't bother. "Pussy-whipped," one of them said to the other, not quite softly enough to keep Sostratos from hearing. His ears tingled, but he kept walking.
Back at the rented house, Menedemos said the same thing. "Complain all you want about me and Phyllis," he added, "but that's nothing beside letting a barbarian slave lead you around by the prick."
"No, no, no - you don't understand," Sostratos said. "She isn't. I'm not mad for her, the way men get when they're assotted of a woman. By the gods, I'm not."
"Then why didn't march right in there and screw her?" his cousin demanded. "You let yourself look like a fool in front of a whoremaster."
"Maybe a little," Sostratos admitted - though it was more than a little. "But I'm not going to buy the girl and take her with me. This way, her owner will start thinking of her as somebody who could be a hetaira: after all, didn't she have the merchant from Rhodes wrapped around her finger? She'll have an easier time of it after I'm gone. Maybe she'll even get the chance to buy herself free."
His cousin gave him a quizzical look. "You'd never catch me acting the fool for the sake of some slave girl."
"You probably wouldn't catch me doing it back in Rhodes," Sostratos said. "Here in Taras" - he shrugged - "who cares?"
Menedemos didn't seem altogether convinced. "I still think she's got you by the balls, and you're making up excuses."
"Think whatever you like," Sostratos answered. "You'll see."
But when he went to Lamakhos' the next day, he had all the earmarks of a worried lover. He sighed with relief when the house slave said Maibia would deign to see him. "I brought her a present," he said, and showed the slave a small vial of cloudy green glass.
"Maybe she will like that," the slave said, but her eyes showed her scorn.
Maibia waited inside the chamber where they'd joined before. Sostratos had expected her to be naked, but she wore a chiton of the Koan silk Lamakhos had bought from him. Her nipples pushed against the filmy fabric; he could see their rosy pinkness through it. Down below, the thin silk showed him the groove between her legs - like most women who lived among Hellenes, she singed away the hair that grew around it.
"You look - lovely." Sostratos' voice sounded hoarse even in his own ears. He might not be madly in love with the Keltic girl, but that didn't mean he didn't want her. Oh, no, it didn't mean that at all.
"Indeed and I'm glad you think so," she said, cocking her hip at a provocative angle. She pointed to the glass vial. "And what might you have for me there?"
Sostratos started to say, I might have anything, but he'd used that joke before. Some people repeated themselves endlessly, not even noticing they were doing it. He wasn't - he hoped he wasn't - that sort of fool. Other sorts? Possibly. He handed her the vial. "It's rose perfume from Rhodes," he answered.
Maibia opened, sniffed, and sighed. "Sweet it is - like you." She dabbed on a little, then closed the vial and cast her arms around his neck. He could feel her body through the silk chiton as if she were bare, too.
Before very long, she was. The next little while passed most enjoyably indeed, at least for Sostratos. Maibia kissed him on the end of the nose, then leaned down and bestowed another, similar, kiss. "There, you see?" she purred. "Was I not worth waiting for?"
That brought Sostratos around to what he'd come to the brothel for - to one of the reasons he'd come to the brothel - faster than he'd expected. He sat up in bed and stroked Maibia's hair, which was a distracting mistake. "There's something you need to understand," he said.
"And that is?" Maibia found a way of her own to be distracting. She glanced up at him, mischief in her eyes. "How soon your spear's ready to pierce my flesh, now?"
"No." Sostratos tossed his head. To prove he meant it, he sat up in bed and pulled away from her. "What you need to understand is, I'm not nearly so wild for you as Lamakhos and his slaves think, and you're not going to squeeze me dry no matter how hard you try. The harder you try, in fact, the more annoyed you'll make me."
His tone got through to her. She was mercenary - considering what life had given her, she had to be mercenary - but she wasn't stupid. Fear replaced mischief on her face. "Why didn't you just have 'em thump me, then?" she asked sullenly. "I know some who'd take their pleasure from it, sure and I do."
"I wouldn't," Sostratos said. "Here is the bargain: I will not buy you, no matter what. I've already told you that. But I will let you play the hetaira with me and have your little ways - so long as you don't do it often enough to make me angry. That will give you a better chance to go on playing the hetaira after I leave Taras, it is not so?"
Maibia studied him as if she'd never really seen him before. Maybe she hadn't. Maybe hope and greed had kept her from noticing the person inside the man who enjoyed her body. "Not just cool, but cold-blooded as a frog y'are!" she exclaimed.