The Sacred Land (sam-3) by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sci_history

As Sostratos traveled father into Ioudaia, he began to see why Hellenes knew so little about the land and its folk. The people stuck together, clinging to their own kind and having as little to do with outsiders as they could. And the land worked with them. It was broken and hilly and hot and poor. As far as he could see, the Ioudaioi were welcome to it. Who in his right mind would want to take it away from them?

He knew he couldn’t have been so very many stadia from the Inner Sea. There it lay, off to the west, the broad highway that could swiftly waft him back to Rhodes. But the Ioudaioi turned their backs on it. They had their flocks of sheep and cattle, their olive trees and their vineyards, and they seemed content with those-and with their strange god, whose face no one ever saw.

In every village and town through which he passed, Sostratos had looked for a temple to this mysterious god. He never found one. At last, he’d asked a Ioudaian who’d proved friendly enough over a couple of cups of wine in a tavern. The fellow had shaken his head and looked amused at the question: amused and pitying, as if Sostratos couldn’t be expected to know any better.

“Our god has only one temple, where the priests offer prayer and sacrifice,” he’d said. “That is in Jerusalem, our great city.”

Everywhere in Ioudaia, people spoke of Jerusalem as Hellenes spoke of Athens or Alexandria. Every other town, they said, was as nothing beside it. And they spoke of their temple as Athenians might have spoken of the Parthenon-as the most perfect and beautiful building in the world.

They were only barbarians, and provincial barbarians at that, so Sostratos did discount a fair amount of what he heard. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for his first sight of Jerusalem, which he got from a rocky ridge a couple of hours’ travel north and west of the city.

He pointed ahead. “That’s it,” he said. “That has to be it. But is that all there is? That’s what all the Ioudaioi we’ve met were swooning over?”

“Doesn’t look like so very much, does it?” Aristeidas said.

“Now that you mention it, no,” Sostratos answered. The allegedly great city of the Ioudaioi straggled along a rise between a sizable valley to the east and a smaller, narrower ravine to the west. It might have been half a dozen stadia long; it was nowhere near half a dozen stadia wide. Some more homes-suburbs, though they hardly deserved the name-dotted the rise west of the narrow ravine. Smoke hung above everything: the unfailing mark of human habitation. Giving the place the benefit of the doubt, Sostratos said, “There are poleis that are smaller.”

“I can’t think of any that’re uglier,” Teleutas said.

Sostratos didn’t find that quite fair. The walls around Jerusalem and the bigger buildings he could see were built from the local stone, which had a golden color his eye found pleasing.

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