He wondered if he was growing up at last. Most people seemed to do it by the time they turned eighteen. He was more than ten years past that. Better late than never, he said to himself, and hoped it was true.
Menedemos said, “We’ll find out where the people who advise Ptolemaios live, the ones who help him run Egypt and fight his wars for him. They’re the men who can afford the best, and the men who sell it to them will have their shops close by.”
He was trying to get away from whatever private woe gnawed at him. Sostratos could see that. But what he said made good sense. Sure enough, he was less silly than he sometimes liked to pretend.
“That’s a fine plan!” Sostratos meant it and was acting—perhaps overacting—at the same time. Have to steer the akatos of conversation away from the rocks, he thought. “We’ll do it! It will give us the excuse for more sightseeing, anyhow.”
“As if you need an excuse,” Menedemos gibed. His eyes were grateful. He went on, “I know you. I know you too well, in fact. First chance you get, you’ll climb on a riverboat and go down the Nile to see the Sphinx and the whatever-you-call-’ems.”
“The Pyramids,” Sostratos supplied. “I’d like to. Wouldn’t you? We’re so close and they’re so grand. Nothing else like them anywhere, not in the whole world. Be a shame to go back to Rhodes without looking at them if we can.”
“And then you’ll go a little farther down the Nile, and a little farther yet, and then I’ll hear you’re living in a mud hut with an Egyptian girl and raising a flock of brown babies,” Menedemos said.
“If I ever live with a woman, I’ll want one I can talk to,” Sostratos said. “That will be hard enough if she speaks Greek.”
His cousin snorted. “Talking is for men. Women are for babies and for running your household.”
“If that were true, hetairai would go out of business,” Sostratos said.
“Hetairai are different. I thought you were talking about wives,” Menedemos said.
Sostratos didn’t see the distinction. “Hetairai or wives, they’re all women, aren’t they? If you have a wife you can talk to, you don’t need to go looking for a hetaira who’d never look at you if you didn’t give her silver or perfume or fancy jewelry.”
“You’d best be careful, my dear.” Menedemos eyed him the way he’d inspected a lizard in Palestine whose like he’d never seen in Hellas. “You tell that to someone who isn’t related to you and doesn’t know you’re a bit daft, he’ll think you’re a dangerous radical.”
“Well, let him.” Sostratos rather liked the idea. “If I tell it to women, by the gods, I bet it will draw them to me the way spilled wine draws ants.” He rubbed his chin. He rather liked that idea, too.
Most of the servants in Ptolemaios’ palace were Egyptians. Hellenes came to Egypt hoping to get rich and have slaves and servants working for them. They didn’t come to sweep other people’s floors or wash clothes or put fresh linen on beds. Menedemos understood that. If you were someone else’s subordinate, were you truly a free man?
He had no trouble coaxing one of the little brown women into bed one morning after Sostratos went out looking for jewelers and wine merchants. He spoke not a word of Egyptian, while she knew only a little Greek, but a charming manner and some kisses and the promise of a drakhma proved persuasive enough. More than persuasive enough, in fact; the eagerness with which she nodded her head convinced Menedemos he’d overpaid.
When he took off her chlamys, he found she was as nicely made as he’d hoped. When he took off his own tunic … she laughed in surprise and pointed at his phallos. “What wrong with it?” she asked. “I never did with Hellene before. All Hellenes like that?” She didn’t seem to care for the notion.
“There’s nothing wrong with it, and of course we’re all like that. How else would we be?” Menedemos said in some annoyance. He’d wanted a good time, not a girl who mocked him for how he was made. But then he remembered some of the stories Sostratos had brought back from the land of the Ioudaioi. “Wait! Do Egyptian men circumcise?” Her blank look said she didn’t follow. He tried again, with simpler words: “Do Egyptian men cut off their foreskins?” He used fingers to show what he meant, too.
She nodded so vigorously, it made her breasts bob. “Oh, yes. Men do. Not look—funny.”
“I don’t think I look funny. I think men with naked cockheads look funny,” Menedemos said with dignity. He wasn’t sure she followed him. She didn’t get off the bed and run out of the chamber, though, so he went on, “No matter what it looks like, it works the same way once it’s in there. Come on!”
Egyptians and Hellenes proved to differ even in their preferred postures. He would have bent her forward and gone in from behind. When she lay on her back and urged him atop her, though, he acquiesced. He wasn’t fussy, and he expected it would be fine any which way.
And it was. Of course, it was almost always fine for a man. His partner also seemed happy enough. After he got off her, she squatted over the chamber pot and let his seed dribble out of her. “No baby,” she said. “I hope no baby.”
Menedemos dipped his head. He didn’t want a little brownish bastard, either. “Did being the way I am make any difference?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Not much. Still funny-looking.”
“Is this funny-looking?” He gave her a Rhodian drakhma with the head of Helios the sun god on one side and his polis’ rose on the other.
She looked surprised and pleased. “I not even got to asking. You my first Hellene. All honest like you?”
“Don’t count on it, sweet one!” Menedemos exclaimed. She understood his tone if not the words. He asked, “How does it happen that I’m your first Hellene?”
Bad grammar and small vocabulary made her need to back and fill several times before he got the story. Her uncle was a baker in the palace, and had just got her a position here. Plainly, though, she hadn’t been a shy innocent in whatever Delta village she came from. She wasn’t a maiden, and she knew what to do in bed.
As she put her tunic back on, she asked, “You want again, another time? And your friend here?”
Menedemos chuckled. “Dear, you love us for our silver alone! But we aren’t the mines of Laureion in Attica.” That flew straight over her head. She opened the door, blew him a kiss, and was gone.
After Sostratos got back from his ramble through the overgrown city, he told Menedemos, “Well, I’ve found a couple of men who seem to have the money and the interest to buy some of the amber, anyway.”
“Euge!” Menedemos said, miming applause.
“And how was your morning?” Sostratos’ tongue didn’t really drip venom, but he enjoyed acting as if it did.
“Pretty good. Better than pretty good, in fact. She wasn’t used to a sausage still in the skin, but that didn’t keep her from enjoying it.”
Sostratos stared at him. “A sausage still in the—? What are you going on about now?”
Menedemos told him exactly what he was going on about. He added, “She asked about you, too.”
“Did she?” his cousin said. “Well, a drakhma’s not a terrible price. I don’t know how you feel about sharing a woman, though. Come to that, I don’t know how I feel about it, either. We’ve never tried that before.”
“She’s only an Egyptian. It’s not as though either one of us will fall in love with her or anything, She won’t fall for us, either. She’s as mercenary as one of those Cretans who sells his sling to whoever pays him most.”