Sostratos dreamt something had fallen on him, so that he couldn’t move his legs. Had he been in an earthquake? Had sacks of grain, piled high waiting to go aboard a round ship, toppled and pinned him down? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. He only knew he was trapped.
He opened his eyes-and stared into the face of a sleeping woman, only a palm or so from his own. Her bare thigh, warm and soft, was draped over his. No wonder he couldn’t move-but he hadn’t been dreaming about such a pleasant trap.
Her eyes opened, too. They were greenish blue, the hair that framed her freckled face foxy red. Like Threissa back on Rhodes, she came from the lands north of the Aegean. “Good day, Gongyla,” Sostratos said. “Did I make a noise and wake you? I was having a strange dream.”
She shook her head. “No, sir. I don’t think so.” She sounded like Threissa, too, though she was several years older. “I just woke up, I think.”
“All right.” Sostratos shifted on the narrow bed. Gongyla took her leg off his. His hand brushed her breast. He let it rest there, and idly, hardly even noticing what he was doing, began to tease her nipple with thumb and forefinger.
“So early?” she said, frowning a little.
He hadn’t really been thinking about having her, but he was still on the randy side of thirty. Her question decided him. “Yes, why not?” he said. A slave woman never had an answer to that. Sostratos did his best to warm her up. He wasn’t sure his best did the job, as he had been the night before.
She still sulked even after he gave her a couple of oboloi. Menedemos would either have ignored that or jollied her into a better mood. Sostratos, not callous enough for the one, tried the other, saying, “You have a pretty name.”
“Not mine,” Gongyla said. “You Hellenes took mine, gave me this one.” By the way she scowled at Sostratos, he might have done it personally.
“But it’s a famous name among us,” he said.
“Famous? How?” Her eyes called him a liar.
“Gongyla-the first Gongyla I know of-was a friend of the great poet Sappho, here on Lesbos perhaps three hundred years ago.” Sostratos wasn’t sure exactly when Sappho had lived, but this Gongyla wouldn’t know, either.
“Who remembers so long? How?” the slave woman asked.
“People wrote down Sappho’s poems,” Sostratos answered. “That’s how they remember them-and the people in them.”
“Squiggles. Marks.” Gongyla couldn’t read. Sostratos would have been astonished had she proved literate; even among Hellenes, few women were. She brushed back a lock of coppery hair that had fallen down onto her nose. Not least for its strangeness, red hair fascinated and attracted Sostratos. Gongyla frowned in thought. “But these squiggles, these marks, they make this name remembered?”
“That’s right.” Sostratos dipped his head.
“Maybe something to wrising after all,” the Thracian woman said; her Greek had an Aiolic accent, too. “I just thought it was for keeping track of oil and money and things like that.” She hesitated, then asked, “Is Kleis in this Sappho ’s poems, too?”
“Yes-she was the poet’s daughter.”
“A woman poet?” Gongyla noticed the feminine endings.
“That’s right,” Sostratos said again.
“How funny.” Gongyla got out of bed, pulled the chamber pot out from under it, squatted over the pot, and then put on her chiton. Sostratos also pissed into the pot. Then he got dressed, too. He noticed Gongyla eyeing him as he might have examined some bird he’d never seen before that chanced to perch in the Aphrodite’s rigging. “You know strange things. Many strange things,” she remarked.
“Yes, that’s true,” Sostratos agreed. Most people noticed; not many noticed it as soon as Gongyla had.
Someone knocked on the door. “You in there, my dear?” Menedemos called. “You doing anything you don’t want to stop just now? “
“No, we’ve taken care of that,” Sostratos replied.
“Have you? How… efficient,” Menedemos said. “Well, in that case come out and have some breakfast.”
“All right.” Sostratos’ stomach growled. Waking up in bed with a woman had kept him from noticing how hungry he was. Appetites and appetites, he thought.
He opened the door. When Menedemos got a look at Gongyla, he started to laugh. “Now I understand,” he said. “You’ve got a weakness for redheads. I saw as much with that Keltic girl of yours back in Taras a few years ago.”
“I wouldn’t call it a weakness,” Sostratos said with dignity. “More of a… taste.” He waited for his cousin to make an Aristophanic pun on that.
But Menedemos just said, “Come on. Have some porridge and some wine. Then we can go talk to Onesimos and Onetor. Do you want to go together to each of them in turn, or shall we beard them separately?”
“I’d just as soon do them separately, if it’s all the same to you,” Sostratos answered as they walked toward the andron. “We’ll save time that way. You can haggle over wine as well as I can, and I’ll dicker with the truffle-seller.”
Menedemos chuckled. “I might have known you’d want to split things like that. Don’t spend so much time asking Onetor questions about truffles that you forget to buy any.”
Phainias was already eating breakfast in the men’s chamber when Sostratos and Menedemos walked in. “Hail, best ones,” the proxenos said. “Good day to you both.” He used the dual number in talking about the two Rhodians. It seemed natural in his speech, but would have been hopelessly old-fashioned on Rhodes. “I hope you passed pleasant nights.”
“I bent Kleis like a lioness on a cheese grater,” Menedemos said.
Phainias laughed. Sostratos wondered where his cousin had come up with that figure of speech, then realized it probably came from Aristophanes. He said, “I enjoyed myself with Gongyla, too. Do you name all your slave women after people from Sappho ’s poems?”
“You’re clever for spotting that,” Phainias said. “Not everyone does.”
“I didn’t,” Menedemos said. “But you’re right, most noble one-he is a clever fellow.”
The Rhodian proxenos went on, “As a matter of fact, I do. Makes it easier for me to remember what to call them. I don’t think I’m the only one on Mytilene who does the same thing, either.”
“It’s efficient,” Sostratos said, borrowing Menedemos’ word. “Makes perfectly good sense to me.” A male slave came in with porridge for him and Menedemos. Salt fish and bits of chopped olive livened up what would otherwise have been a bland bowl of barley mush. Sostratos dug in with a horn spoon. Between bites, he asked, “You said Onetor’s house was around the block from you?”
“That’s right,” Phainias answered. “Go one street north, then turn left, Onetor lives in the third house on the left-hand side of the street.”
“One street north, left, third house on the left.” Sostratos dipped his head. “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”
“He will, too,” Menedemos said. “And if we come back here next year, he’ll still remember it then.” He sounded half proud, half wary about Sostratos’ memory.
“I’m not a trained monkey,” Sostratos said. “You don’t need to show me off.”
“Nothing wrong with keeping track of things in your head,” Phainias said. “I only wish I were better at it.”
Once Sostratos had finished breakfast, he said, “I’m going to head over to Onetor’s. We’re up and the sun’s up, so he ought to be up, too.”
When he went north from Phainias’ house, the breeze blew straight down the street and straight into his face. He was glad he had to walk only one block before turning. Then the houses on the north side of the east-west street shielded him from the worst of the wind. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to look as neat as he could.
At the third house on the left, he knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” someone called from within.
“Is this the house of Onetor son of Diothemis?”
“That’s right. Who are you?”
“I’m Sostratos son of Lysistratos, one of the Rhodians Onetor dined with last night. I’d like to talk business with him.”