Pum’s quicksilver mood froze to seriousness. He frowned and stared into space for a few heartbeats, before he snapped his fingers and cackled. “Ah, indeed! Well, excellent master, I can recommend no better beginning than a visit to the High Temple of Asherat.”
“Hey?” Startled, Everard flipped through the information planted in his brain. Asherat, whom the Bible would call Astarte, was the consort of Melqart, the patron god of Tyre – Baal-Melek-Qart-Sor…. She was a mighty figure in her own right, goddess of fruitfulness in man, beast, and land, a female warrior who had once dared hell itself to recall her lover from the dead, a sea queen of whom Tanith might be simply an avatar… yes, she was Ishtar in Babylon, and she would enter the Grecian world as Aphrodite….
“Why, the vast learning of my lord surely includes the fact that it would be foolish for a visitor, most especially a visitor as important as he, not to pay homage to her, that she may smile upon his enterprise. Truly, if the priests heard of such an omission, they would set themselves against you. That has, indeed, caused difficulties with some of the emissaries from Jerusalem. Also, is it not a good deed to release a lady from bondage and yearning?” Pum leered, winked, and nudged Everard. “Besides being a pleasurable romp.”
The Patrolman remembered. For a moment, he was taken aback. Like most other Semites of this era, the Phoenicians required that every freeborn woman sacrifice her virginity in the fane of the goddess, as a sacred prostitute. Not until a man had paid for her favor might she marry. The custom was not lewd in origin, it traced back to Stone Age fertility rites and fears. To be sure, it also attracted profitable pilgrims and foreign visitors.
“I trust my lord’s folk do not forbid such an act?” the boy inquired anxiously.
“Well…. They do not.”
“Good!” Pum took Everard by the elbow and steered him off. “If my lord will allow his servant to accompany him, quite likely I shall recognize someone whom he would find it useful thus to get acquainted with. In all abasement, let me say that I do get around and I do keep eyes and ears open. They are utterly at the service of my master.”
Everard grinned, on one side of his mouth, and strode along. Why shouldn’t he? To be honest with himself, after his sea voyage he felt damnably horny; and it was true, patronizing the holy whorehouse was, in this milieu, not an exploitation but a kindness; and he might even get some lead in his mission….
First I’d better try to find out how reliable my guide is. “Tell me something about yourself, Pum. We may be together for, well, several days if not more.”
They came out on the avenue and threaded their way through jostling, shouting, odorous throngs. “There is little to tell, great lord. The annals of the poor are short and simple.” That coincidence startled Everard too. Then, as Pum talked, he realized that the phrase was false in this case.
Father unknown, presumably one of the sailors and laborers who frequented a certain low-life hostel while Tyre was under construction and had the wherewithal to enjoy its serving wench, Pum was a pup in a litter, raised catch-as-catch-can, a scavenger from the time he could walk and, Everard suspected, a thief, and whatever else might get him the local equivalent of a buck. Nonetheless, early on he had become an acolyte at a dockside temple of the comparatively unimportant god Baal Hammon. (Everard harked back to tumbledown churches in the slums of twentieth-century America.) Its priest had been a learned man once, now gentle and drunken; Pum had garnered considerable vocabulary and other knowledge from him, like a squirrel garnering acorns in a wood, until he died. His more respectable successor kicked the raffish postulant out. Despite that, Pum went on to make a wide circle of acquaintances, which reached into the palace itself. Royal servants came down to the waterfront in search of cheap fun…. Still too young to assume any kind of leadership, he was wangling a living however he could. His survival to date was no mean accomplishment.