Departures Read Free Page B

Hellene explained, “It’s coming from a banking family that does it, excellent
saris
. Most of the inland towns in this satrapy still cling to the old language for doing business, so naturally I’ve had to learn to read and write it as well as speak it.”
    “Ah,” Mithredath said again. That made a certain amount of sense. “We’ll see how things go, then.”
    “Very good,” Polydoros said. “What are your plans? Will you travel up to the ruins each day or had you planned actually to stay in Athens?”
    “Just how far inland is it?” Mithredath asked.
    “A parasang and a half, maybe.”
    “Close to two hours walk each way? In the little time I’d have in the ruins, how could I hope to accomplish anything? I’d sooner pitch a tent there and spend a much shorter while in a bit more discomfort. That will let me return to the east all the sooner.”
    “As you wish, excellent
saris
. After tomorrow, I shall be at your service.”
    “Why not go tomorrow?” Mithredath asked rather grumpily. “I can send my servants out at once to buy tent cloth and other necessities.”
    “You pardon, sir, but as I said, I am of a banking family. Tomorrow the monthly silver shipment from the Laurion mines south of here will arrive, and I’ll need to be present to help with weighing and assaying the metal. The mines don’t produce as they did when the great lode was found not long after Hellas came under Persia, but there will still be close to a talent of silver: forty or fifty pounds of it, certainly.”
    “Do what you must, of course,” Mithredath said, yielding to necessity. “I’ll look forward to seeing you morning after next, then.” He bowed, indicating that Polydoros could go.
    But the Hellene did not depart immediately. Instead he stood with a faraway expression on his face, looking through Mithredath rather than at him. The eunuch was growing annoyed when at last Polydoros said dreamily, “I wonder how the conquest would have gone, had the Athenians stumbled onto that silverbefore Khsrish’s”—he pronounced it
Xerxes’
, too—“campaign. Money buys the sinews of war.”
    A banker indeed, Mithredath thought scornfully. “Money does not buy bravery,” he said.
    “Perhaps not, excellent
saris
, but even the bravest man, were he naked, would fare badly against an armored warrior with a spear. Had Athens been able to build ships to match the Persian fleet, the Hellenes might not have fallen under the empire’s control.”
    Mithredath snorted. “All the subject peoples have their reasons why they should have held off Persia. None did.”
    “Of course you are right, excellent
saris
,” Polydoros said politely, wise enough to hide his true feelings, whatever they were. “It was but a fancy of the moment.” He bowed. “Till the day after tomorrow.” He hurried off.
    “I came to the proper decision.” Mithredath lifted his soft felt cap from his head and used it to wipe sweat from his face. “I shouldn’t care to have to make this journey coming and going each day.”
    “As you say, excellent
saris.
” With a broad-brimmed straw hat and thin, short Hellenic mantle, Polydoros was more comfortably dressed than Mithredath, but he was sweating, too. Behind them the eunuch’s servants and a donkey bore their burdens in stolid silence. One of the servants led a sheep that kept trying to stop and nibble grass and shrubs.
    Something crunched under Mithredath’s shoe. He looked down and saw a broken piece of pottery and, close by it, half-buried in weeds, a chunk of brick. “A house stood here once,” he said. He heard the surprise in his voice and felt foolish. But knowing this wilderness had been a city was not the same as stumbling over its remains.
    Polydoros was more familiar with the site. He pointed. “You can see a fragment of the old wall there among the olive trees.”
    Had he noticed it, Mithredath would have taken it for a pile of rocks. Now that he looked closely, though, he saw they had