He went back to calling about the perfume and its virtues. Threitta might not be-probably wasn’t-the only hetaira’s slave in the market square this morning. Menedemos didn’t much care to whom he sold perfume. He cared only about selling it and getting his price.

By the time Threitta came back, he had sold a jar to a plump man who insisted so loudly that he was buying it for his wife, he convinced Menedemos he was lying through his teeth. Some people never did figure out that the best way to lie was not to trumpet the untruth all over the landscape but to pass it off lightly or, indeed, to keep quiet about it. Why should I care who gets the perfume? Menedemos thought. It’s not my business, or it wouldn’t have been unless that fool made it so.

When Threitta returned to the agora, Menedemos didn’t notice her till she’d got within a few paces of him. He had an excuse: her companion drew all eyes his way. The blond, long-mustached Kelt was taller than Sostratos, handsome, wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted: he looked like a pankratiast, or perhaps more like a demigod. His eyes were the color of Egyptian emeralds. He stared through Menedemos as if the Rhodian didn’t exist.

“Hail,” Menedemos said to Threitta. “Who’s your… friend?”

“Bolgios is Potheine’s body-servant,” she answered.

I’ll bet he is. That’s quite a body. Menedemos didn’t say it, though it quivered on the tip of his tongue. “I see,” was all that came out.

Threitta went on, “He has the money for you. My mistress wants five jars of perfume.”

Sure enough, Bolgios thrust out a fat leather sack that clinked when Menedemos took it. The Kelt’s hand, the back of it thatched with little hairs like wires of finest gold, was as enormous as every other part of him. It could have swallowed Menedemos’, as a father’s swallows that of his toddler son when they go walking together. No one would have dreamt of robbing such a brute.

“Let me count the silver,” Menedemos said. The bag felt as if it held about the right amount of silver-just under two minai.

Bolgios’ eyes flashed green fire. “Are you after calling my mistress a cheat, now?” he asked: a musically accented snarl.

Menedemos quailed before few men. If he said yes to that, though, he knew the barbarian would tear him limb from limb. “By no means,” he answered, as politely as he could. “But anyone can make a mistake. There might even be an owl or two too many in here. I don’t want anything that shouldn’t be mine, but I do want everything that should.”

Bolgios stood there, considering. At last, grudgingly, he nodded. Yes, he’d wanted to wreak a little havoc. Now he had to accept the idea that he wouldn’t get the chance. “You speak as a proper man might,” he allowed. “Count the silver.”

Menedemos did, making piles of coins, ten drakhmai to the pile. “It is as it should be,” he said at last, and hoped he didn’t sound too relieved.

“He gets nothing above what he should?” Bolgios asked Threitta. Maybe the Kelt didn’t know how much Potheine was supposed to pay. Maybe he just had trouble counting.

“No.” The Thracian woman shook her head. “All’s well.” Bolgios grunted. That all was well plainly disappointed him.

“Here is the perfume.” Menedemos handed Threitta the little jars. “I hope your mistress has pleasure from them.” He smiled his most charming smile. “If I could, I would like to meet her and thank her for her business.”

“She is not looking for clients now,” Threitta said. “She has all she needs.”

And she had Bolgios. When Menedemos made his request, the barbarian stiffened. Menedemos could almost see the hair rise at the back of his neck, as it might have on a dog just before the beast bit. Was Bolgios sleeping with Potheine? Menedemos couldn’t tell. Was he jealous of any other man who did? Of that the Rhodian had not the slightest doubt. He didn’t try to sweeten Threitta and get her to change her mind, as he might have done if she’d come back to the agora by herself.

She and the enormous Kelt went off side by side. Thanks to Bolgios’ height and bright blond head, Menedemos had no trouble tracking them as they wandered through the market square. Again, he wasn’t the only one following Bolgios with his eyes. An elephant parading through the agora might have drawn more attention. Then again, it might not.

Gathering himself, Menedemos took up his call again: “Fine perfume from Rhodes, the island of roses! Perfume fit for Athens’ finest hetairai!” He didn’t know Potheine was one of those, but anybody who’d been able to buy Bolgios couldn’t be poor. He sold several more jars before the day was done. Maybe that extra line he’d tacked on to the pitch helped.

Sostratos had been to a fair number of symposia in his day. Nothing, though, prepared him for this one down in Mounykhia. He’d heard things about the kinds of parties Macedonians threw. Now he was seeing them at first hand. If he wanted to sell wine to the men from the north who held Athens for Kassandros, he’d discovered, he also had to drink wine with them. If, once he got back to Protomakhos’ house, he remembered a quarter of what was going on around him, he would have stories to dine out on for years to come.

If I get back to Protomakhos’ house, he thought muzzily. If I don’t pass out here, or maybe fall over dead here. Not least because Macedonians were so powerful, everyone accepted that they really were Hellenes, even if a proper Hellene could make out only about one word in three of their dialect. Like the barbarians Demosthenes had accused them of being a generation before, though, they drank their wine neat. And so, perforce, did the people who drank with them.

The symposion wasn’t in a proper andron, but in a big chamber in one of the Macedonians’ barracks halls inside their fortress at Mounykhia. Sostratos’ couchmate was a tetrarkhos-a man who commanded a quarter of a phalanx: an important officer-named Alketas. A black-bearded rowdy of about forty, he was the fellow who’d been interested in buying Byblian.

He gave Sostratos a shot in the ribs with his elbow. “Not a bad bash, eh?” he bawled-he could speak perfectly good Greek when he felt like it (and when he wasn’t too drunk to remember how).

“Well…” Sostratos said, and said no more. He couldn’t even tell Alketas he’d never seen anything like it, because this wasn’t the first Macedonian carouse in the occupiers’ seaside fortress he’d had to attend.

Alketas looked at his cup. “But, my dear, you’re not drinking!” he exclaimed. He shouted for a slave. How the poor slave heard anything through the din filling the room baffled Sostratos, but he did. Alketas pointed to the enormous mixing bowl in the middle of the floor. Why the Macedonians bothered with a mixing bowl was also beyond Sostratos, since they didn’t mix their wine with water. The slave plied the dipper and filled the Rhodian’s cup, then brought it back to him.

Even the bouquet of neat wine seemed plenty to make his head spin. And, under Alketas’ watchful gaze, he had to take a long pull at the cup. The neat wine (not anything he’d sold the tetrarkhos) was almost thick enough to chew, and sweet as honey. He could feel it snarl when it crashed down into his stomach. He didn’t want to get too drunk, but around Macedonians there often seemed little choice.

Two couches over, an officer between Sostratos’ age and Alketas’ had already drunk himself unconscious. He sprawled on his back, his arm, like a corpse’s, dangling down to the floor. His cup sat forgotten on his belly. The fellow who shared the couch with him grabbed for it but missed-he only knocked it over. Wine red as blood soaked the blind-drunk man’s tunic as if he were dreadfully wounded. He never stirred. He’ll feel wounded come morning, Sostratos thought.