“Not when I’m just going around the block. Thanks for the kind offer, though, best one, and thanks for invising me over,” Onetor said. “You and the Rhodians should think about truffle-flavored oil.”
“We will,” Phainias said, and Menedemos and Sostratos both dipped their heads.
Once Onetor had left, Menedemos told Phainias, “I don’t think we’ll last much longer, either.” Sostratos’ yawn showed he agreed.
“Here-we’ve got beds waising for you, most noble ones,” the Rhodian proxenos said. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.” He took a lamp off its chain to light his way to the back part of the house. Menedemos and Sostratos followed. Menedemos planted his feet with care, not wanting to step in a hole he didn’t see and fall down. Phainias pointed ahead. “These two rooms here.”
Menedemos suspected they’d been storerooms till the Mytilenean’s slaves brought in the beds. That didn’t bother him. Phainias was doing the Rhodians a favor by putting them up at all. He wasn’t an innkeeper; he didn’t have guests often enough to keep rooms permanently ready for them.
Now lamplight spilled out from under the doors. Phainias said, “The night’s a little on the chilly side, my friends, so I hope you sleep warm. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He headed for the stairs. “Which room do you want?” Menedemos asked Sostratos.
“I’ll take the one on the left,” his cousin answered, and went in.
When Menedemos opened the other door, he wasn’t surprised to find a slave woman sitting on the bed. He did grin to find he’d ended up with the woman he’d noticed before. “Hail, sweetheart,” he said. “Are you supposed to help me sleep warm?”
“That’s right, sir,” she answered, her Aiolic accent flavored with something else-she wasn’t a Hellene by birth.
“What’s your name?” Menedemos asked.
“People here call me Kleis,” she said. “It will do. I’m used to it. They can’t say the one I was born with.”
She would have come from somewhere on the Anatolian mainland, Menedemos guessed. She had a round face, a strong nose, very black hair and eyes, a bit of dark down on her upper lip. He thought she was two or three years older than he-just on the other side of thirty.
“Well, Kleis,” Menedemos said, “is it all right?” Some slave women hated giving themselves to men. Menedemos knew a few men who enjoyed taking them all the more because they hated it. To him, they were more trouble than they were worth.
But Kleis nodded-another proof she was no Hellene. “Yes, it’s all right,” she said. “What else have I got to do for fun?” She stood up and pulled her long chiton off over her head. Her breasts were full and heavy, with big, dark nipples.
Menedemos took off his tunic and bent his head to them-first one, then the other. She made a small, wordless noise, down in her throat. Smiling, Menedemos straightened. “I hope it’ll be fun.” He slid an arm around her waist, which was surprisingly slim. “Let’s find out.” They lay down on the bed together.
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.”