Kaunos was an old town. Its streets ambled every which way instead of sticking to a neat rectangular grid like those of Rhodes. All the inscriptions used Greek letters, but not all were in Greek: a few were in the Karian tongue, for Kaunos had been a Karian town before Hellenes settled there, and it remained a place where folk of both bloods lived. Pointing to an inscription he couldn’t read, Sostratos said, “I wonder what that means.”
“Some barbarous blather or other,” Menedemos said indifferently. “If it were anything important, they’d’ve written it in Greek.”
“You say that, on your way to Phoenicia?” Sostratos said. “Hardly anyone knows Greek there. If more people did, would I have been wrestling with Aramaic all winter long?”
“If you want to wrestle, go to the palaistra,” Menedemos answered, misunderstanding him on purpose. “As for the Phoenicians, well, there haven’t been many Hellenes in their towns till lately. The Kaunians have no excuse.”
“Always ready to see things to your own advantage, aren’t you?” Sostratos said.
“To whose better?” his cousin returned.
Despite the town’s twisting roads, Sostratos led both of them to the agora. “Here we are!” he said as the street opened out onto the market square.
“Yes, here we are.” Menedemos scratched his head. “And how did you lead us here? Me, I’d’ve had to take an obolos out of my mouth and give it to somebody to get him to tell us the way.”
“Why?” Sostratos said in surprise. “We were here last year. Don’t you remember the way?”
“If I did, would I be saying I didn’t?” Menedemos replied. “My dear, there are times when you forget ordinary mortals haven’t got your memory, I’m not sure all-powerful Zeus has your memory.”
“Of course not-he has his own,” Sostratos said. Menedemos’ praise displeased him not at all. Pointing across the agora, he went on, “The fellow who sold us the gryphon’s skull had his stall there.”
“Well, so he did.” Menedemos started across the square, picking his way between a farmer hawking dried figs and a fellow who’d gathered a great basketload of mushrooms out in the meadows and woods in back of Kaunos. “Let’s get this over with.” He brightened a little. “Maybe he’ll have more hides to sell us, anyhow.”
Sostratos’ heart pounded with excitement as he hurried after his cousin. For a moment, hope outran reason. There was the stall, there was the fellow who’d sold them the gryphon’s skull, there was a lion skin on display… No gryphon’s skull. Sostratos sighed. He did his best to remind himself he really shouldn’t have expected to see another one, not when the first had come from far to the east, beyond the edge of the known world.
His best wasn’t good enough to mask disappointment.
“Why, it’s the Rhodians!” the local exclaimed. “Hail, O best ones! Can we do business again? I hope we can.”
“Of course he does,” Menedemos muttered behind his hand. “He played us for fools once, unloading that skull on us.”
“Oh, go howl,” Sostratos told him. He asked the Kaunian, “Have you by any chance seen another gryphon’s skull?”
“Sorry, my friend, but no.” The fellow tossed his head, dashing Sostratos’ hopes once and for all. Menedemos didn’t say, I told you so, which was just as well. Sostratos thought he might have picked up a rock and brained his cousin for a crack like that right then.
Then Menedemos asked the Kaunian, “Have you seen another tiger’s hide?”
The local tossed his head again. “No, not one of those, either. You fellows want all the strange things, don’t you? I’ve got this fine lion skin here, you see.” He pointed to it.
“Oh, yes,” Menedemos said, though he sounded anything but impressed. “I suppose we’ll buy it from you, but we’d make more money with the stranger things.”
“Especially in Phoenicia,” Sostratos added. “We’re sailing east this year, and they have lions of their own there. How much would they care about one more hide in, say, Byblos?”
“I don’t know about that, but if you’re going to Phoenicia, you’ll be going by way of Cyprus,” the local merchant said. “They may have lions in Phoenicia, but they don’t on the island. You could get a good price selling it there.”
He was right. Neither Sostratos nor Menedemos had any intention of admitting as much; that would only have driven the price higher. Grudgingly, Menedemos said, “I suppose I might give you as much for this hide as I paid for the ones last year.”
“Don’t do me any favors, by the gods!” the Kaunian exclaimed. “This is a bigger hide than either of the ones I sold you then. And look at that mane! Herakles didn’t fight a fiercer beast at Nemea.”
“It’s a lion skin,” Menedemos said in dismissive tones. “I won’t be able to charge any more for it, and you’re mad if you think I’m going to pay any more for it.”
“We wasted our time coming here,” Sostratos said. “Let’s go back to the ship.”
Words like those were part of every dicker. More often than not, they were insincere. More often than not, both sides knew as much, too. Here, Sostratos meant what he said. When he saw the merchant had no gryphon’s skull, he stopped caring about what the fellow did have. The sooner he got away from Kaunos and from the memory of what the local had had, the happier-or, at least, the less unhappy-he would be.
And the Kaunian heard that in his voice. “Don’t get yourselves in an uproar, best ones,” he said. “Don’t do anything hasty that you’d regret later. You made a good bargain last year, and it would still be a good bargain at the same price this year, is it not so?”
“It might be tolerable at the same price,” Sostratos said. “It might, mind you. But a moment ago you were talking about wanting more for this hide than you did for those. ‘Look at that mane!’ “ He mimicked the Kaunian to wicked effect.
“All right!” The fellow threw his hands in the air, “You haggle your way, I haggle mine. When you do it, you’re wonderful. When I do it, it’s a crime. That’s how you make it seem, anyhow.”
Menedemos grinned at him. “That’s our job, my friend, the same as your job is to sneer at every offer we make. But we do have a bargain here, don’t we?”
“Yes.” The Kaunian didn’t sound delighted, but he dipped his head and stuck out his hand. Sostratos and Menedemos clasped it in turn.
Menedemos went back to the ship to get the money-and to bring along a couple of sailors to make sure he wasn’t robbed of it before returning to the agora. Sostratos wandered through the market square till his cousin came back. He didn’t think, Maybe someone will have a gryphon’s skull. He knew how unlikely that was. Whenever the notion tried to climb up to the top part of his mind, he suppressed it. But he couldn’t help hoping, just a little.
Whatever he hoped, he was disappointed. The agora held fewer interesting things of any note than it had the year before. He spent an obolos for a handful of dried figs and ate them as he walked around. Had they been especially good, he might have thought about getting more to put aboard the Aphrodite . But they were ordinary- Rhodes grew far better. He finished the ones he’d bought and didn’t go back to the man who was selling them.
After Menedemos handed the Kaunian with the lion skin a sack of silver coins, Sostratos was glad to go back with him to the akatos. “This hide is better cured than the ones we got last year,” he remarked. “You can’t smell it halfway across a room.”
“I know. I noticed that, too. It’s one reason I wanted to pick it up.” Menedemos cocked his head to one side. “I am sorry you didn’t sniff out a gryphon’s skull, my dear.”
Sostratos sighed, “So am I, but I can’t do anything about it. I’ll keep looking, I suppose. Maybe, one of these days, I’ll get lucky again.” Maybe, he thought. But maybe I won’t, too.
“Rhyppapai!” Diokles called as the Aphrodite sailed east and south out of Kaunos. “Rhyppapai!” The merchant galley’s oars rose and fell, rose and fell. Before long, the keleustes stopped calling the stroke a
nd contented himself with beating it out with his hammer and bronze square. That let him ask Menedemos, “Skipper, are you going to serve out weapons to the men?”
“I should hope so!” Menedemos exclaimed. “We’d look like fools, wouldn’t we, going into Lykian waters without weapons to hand?”
The Lykian coast harbored pirates as a filthy man harbored lice. It was rocky and jagged, full of headlands and little inlets in which a pentekonter or a hemiolia might hide, and from which the pirate ship might rush out against a passing merchantman. And the Lykians themselves seemed to take the attitude that anyone not of their blood was fair game.
Not that Lykians are the only ones manning these pirate ships, Menedemos thought. Some of the sea raiders in these parts came from other Anatolian folk: Lydians, Karians, Pamphylians, Kappadokians, and the like. And some-too many-were Hellenes. Like Kaunos, the towns on the Lykian coast were half, maybe more than half, hellenized. But Greek pirates came to these parts no less than honest settlers.
Sailors passed out swords and hatchets and pikes and bronze helmets. Menedemos called, “Aristeidas!”
“Yes, skipper?” replied a young man at one of the oars.
“Get somebody to take your place there and go on up to the foredeck,” Menedemos told him. “You’ve got the best eyes of anybody on this ship, I want you seeing where we’re going, not where we’ve been.”
“All right,” Aristeidas said agreeably. “Come on, Moskhion, will you pull for me?”
A lot of sailors would have been angry to be bidden to hard work. Moskhion only dipped his head and sat down on the rower’s bench as Aristeidas rose. “Why not?” he answered. “I’d sooner be doing this than diving for sponges any day.”
Up on the foredeck, Aristeidas took hold of the stempost with one hand and shielded his eyes with the other as he peered first dead ahead, then to port, and then to starboard. Sostratos chuckled. “Not only are his eyes better than ours, he’s showing us how much better they are. He ought to be a lookout in a play-say, in Aiskhylos’ Agamemnon.”
“I don’t care how showy he is,” Menedemos said. “As long as he spots trouble soon enough for us to do something about it, that’s what matters.”
“Oh, certainly,” his cousin said. “I wasn’t complaining about the job he does, only saying he’s got a fancier way of doing it than he did a couple of years ago.”
“Not a thing wrong with that,” Menedemos said again,
Sostratos looked at him. “Are we both speaking Greek?”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Menedemos asked. Sostratos didn’t answer, annoying him further. He knew his cousin didn’t think he was as bright as he might have been. More often than not, that amused him, for he thought Sostratos got less pleasure from life than he might have. Every so often, though, supercilious Sostratos struck a nerve, and this was one of those times, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Menedemos repeated, more sharply than before.
“If you can’t figure it out for yourself, I don’t see much point to explaining it,” Sostratos retorted.
Menedemos fumed. An ordinary sailor who spoke to him so insolently might have found himself paid off and let go at their next stop. He couldn’t do that to his cousin, however tempting it was.
Before he could snarl at Sostratos, Aristeidas sang out: “Sail ho! Sail ho to starboard!”
Along with everyone else’s, Menedemos’ eyes swung to the right. He needed a moment to spy the little pale rectangle; Aristeidas did have sharper eyes than the usual run of men. Having spotted it, Menedemos struggled to make out the hull to which it was attached. Did it belong to a plodding round ship or to a wolf of the sea on the prowl for prey?
Sostratos said, “I don’t think that’s a pirate.”
“Oh? How can you be so sure?” Menedemos snapped. “Your eyes aren’t even as good as mine.”
“I know that, but I also pay attention to what I see,” his cousin replied. “Most pirates dye their sails and paint their hulls to look like sky and sea, so they’re as hard to spot as possible. That ship has a sail of plain, undyed linen, and so she probably isn’t a pirate.”
He spoke as if to a halfwitted child. What really stung was that he was right. Menedemos hadn’t thought of that, and it was true. Furies take me if I’ll admit it, though, he thought.
A couple of minutes later, Aristeidas said, “Looks like she’s turning away-maybe she thinks we’re pirates and doesn’t want any part of us.”
“We see that every year,” Menedemos said.
“We see it every year even though we’re still close to Rhodes,” Sostratos said. “That’s what really makes me sad, because our navy does everything it can to put pirates down.”
“Ptolemaios’ captains seem to go after them pretty hard, too,” Menedemos said. “That’s one reason to like him better than Antigonos: they say old One-Eye hires pirates to eke out his own warships. To the crows with that, as far as I’m concerned.”
Sostratos dipped his head. There the two cousins agreed completely. “It’s all one to Antigonos,” Sostratos said. “To him, pirate fleets on the sea are the same as mercenary regiments on land.”
Menedemos shuddered. Any trader would have done the same. “Mercenary regiments can turn bandit-everybody knows that’s so. But pirates are bandits, right from the beginning. They live by robbery and plunder and kidnapping for ransom.”
“Robbery. Plunder.” Sostratos spoke the words as if they were even viler than was in fact the case. A heartbeat later, he explained why: “The gryphon’s skull.”
“Yes, the gryphon’s skull,” Menedemos said impatiently. “But you seem to forget: if those gods-detested, polluted whoresons had had their way, they wouldn’t just have taken your precious skull. They’d have gone off with everything the Aphrodite carried, and they’ve have murdered us or held us for a ransom that would have ruined the family, or else sold us into slavery.”
“That’s true,” Sostratos said in thoughtful tones. “You’re right-I don’t usually remember it as well as I ought to.” More readily than anyone else Menedemos knew, his cousin was willing to admit he was wrong. He went on, “All the more reason to crucify every pirate ever born, I’d nail ‘em to the cross myself.” That carried more weight from him than it would have from another man, for he normally had little taste for blood.
Diokles said, “Begging your pardon, young sir, but I’d have to ask you to wait your turn there. I’ve been going to sea longer than you have, and so I’ve got first claim.”
Sostratos bowed. “Just as you say, most noble one. I yield to you as the heroes of the Iliad yielded to ancient Nestor.”
“Now wait a bit!” Diokles exclaimed. “I’m not so old as that.”
“Are you sure?” Menedemos asked slyly. The keleustes, who was graying-but no more than graying-gave him a sour look. The rowers close enough to the stern to hear the chatter grinned back toward Diokles.
“You’re making for Patara?” Sostratos asked as the Aphrodite sailed southeast.
“That’s right,” Menedemos said. “I don’t want to put in anywhere along this coast except at a town. That’d be asking for trouble. I’d sooner spend a night at sea. We were talking about bandits a little while ago. This hill country swarms with ‘em, and there might be bands big enough to beat our whole crew. Why take chances with the ship?”
“No reason at all,” his cousin said. “If you were as careful with your own life as you are with the akatos here…”
Menedemos glowered. “We’ve been over this ground before, you know. It does grow tedious.”
“Very well, best one; I’ll not say another word,” Sostratos replied. Then, of course, he said several more words: “Helping to keep you out of harm’s way after you debauch some other man’s wife grows tedious, too.”
“Not to me,” Menedemos retorted. “And I don’t usually need help.”
This time, Sostratos said nothing. His silence proved more embarrassing to Menedemos than speech might have, for his ow
n comment wasn’t strictly true. Sometimes he got away with his adulteries as smoothly as Odysseus had escaped from Kirke in the Odyssey. In Taras a couple of years before, though, he had needed help, and in Halikarnassos the year before that…
He didn’t want to think about Halikarnassos. He still couldn’t set foot there for fear of his life, and he’d been lucky to escape with that life. Some husbands had no sense of humor at all.
Gulls and terns wheeled overhead. A black-capped tern plunged into the sea only a few cubits from the Aphrodite ’s hull. It emerged with a fine fat fish in its beak. But it didn’t enjoy its dainty for long. A gull started chasing it and buffeting it with its wings and pecking at it. At last, the tern had to drop the fish and flee. The gull caught the food before it fell back into the water. A gulp and it was gone.
Sostratos had watched the tern and gull. “As with people, so with birds,” he said. “The uninvited guest gets the choice morsel.”
“Funny,” Menedemos said, grinning.
But his cousin tossed his head. “I don’t think so, and neither did the tern.”
“Haven’t you ever got drunk at one symposion and then gone on to another one?” Menedemos asked. “Talking your way in-sometimes shouting your way in-is half the fun. The other half is seeing what sort of wine and treats the other fellow has once you do get inside.”
“If you say so. I seldom do such things,” Sostratos answered primly.
Thinking back on it, Menedemos realized his cousin was telling the truth. Sostratos always had been a bit of a prig. Menedemos said, “You miss a good deal of the fun in life, you know.”
“You may call it that,” Sostratos said. “What about the fellow whose drinking party you invade?”
“Why would he throw a symposion in the first place if he didn’t want to have fun?” Menedemos said. “Besides, I’ve been to some that turned out jollier on account of people who came in, already garlanded, off the street.”
He suspected he sounded like Bad Logic in Aristophanes ’ Clouds, and he waited for Sostratos to say as much. Menedemos liked Aristophanes ’ bawdy foolery much more than his cousin did, but Sostratos knew-and disapproved of-the Clouds because it lampooned Sokrates. To his surprise, though, Sostratos brought up the Athenian in a different way: “You may be right. You know Platon’s Symposion, don’t you, or know about it? That’s the one where Alkibiades comes in off the street, as you say, and talks about the times when he tried to seduce Sokrates.”
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