The Gryphon's Skull

by Harry Turtledove

  “Thanks very much,” Sostratos said, and kissed him on the cheek. “I don't think anyone has ever said anything kinder about me.”

  “I've never denied you have a clever mind, the cleverest I know,” Menedemos replied. But if he gave Sostratos two undiluted compliments in a row, his cousin might die from the shock, so he added, “Now if you only had the good sense the gods gave a gecko . ..”

  “You're a fine one to talk,” Sostratos shot back. “You're the one who jumps out of second-story windows to get away from a husband home too soon.”

  “And you're the one who's been mooning over an old skull as if it were a young hetaira,” Menedemos said. They chaffed each other all the way down to the harbor. Menedemos hurried down toward the . “Euxenides had better not keep us waiting. I want to get out on the open sea again.”

  “So do I.I want to sail for Athens.” Sostratos pointed ahead. “Isn't that the man himself, already on the foredeck? You were right, up by our houses.”

  “Dip me in dung if it's not, and so I was,” Menedemos said. “Good for him. I don't expect he got out of Phaselis and Xanthos by being late to his ship. And now he'll get out of , too.” He started up the pitch-smeared planks of the pier that led out to the akatos, calling, “Ahoy, the !”

  Diokles gave answer in his raspy bass: “Ahoy, skipper! Passenger's already aboard.”

  “Yes, we saw him,” Menedemos said. “Do we have all the rowers?”

  “All but one,” the oarmaster replied. “No sign of Teleutas yet.”

  Menederaos eyed the sun, which had just climbed up out of the sea. “We'll give him a little while—half an hour, maybe. If he's not here by then, we'll hire one of the harbor loungers, and many goodbyes to him. has plenty of men who know how to pull an oar.”

  “That's how we got Teleutas a year ago,” Sostratos said. “He's a funny one. He will work if you put him to it, but to him getting paid is the only part of the job that really matters.”

  “I still think he ran away in the market square in Kallipolis, too,” Menedemos said. “He came back with more sailors so fast, I couldn't really call him on it, but I think he left us in the lurch. I wouldn't be sorry to see somebody else on his bench.”

  He walked down the gangplank and onto the 's poop deck. Standing between the steering oars, even with the ship still tethered to the pier, was in its own way almost as satisfying as lying between a woman's legs.

  Fishing boats made their way out of the great harbor and onto the waters of the Aegean. Gulls followed them overhead like gleaners in the fields, knowing the pickings would be good. Menedemos drummed his fingers on the steering-oar tillers and gauged the creeping shadows. If he doesn't get here soon. I will sail without him.

  Teleutas came up the pier and aboard the just before Menedemos set about replacing him. “By the dog of Egypt, where have you been?” Menederaos snapped.

  The rower flinched. “Sorry, skipper,” he said with a placating gesture. He kept his own voice low and soft. He also squinted, as if even the early-morning light was too bright to suit his eyes.

  “You knew we were going out this morning,” Menederaos said. “Why did you get drunk last night?”

  “I didn't mean to,” Teleutas answered. “It just sort of . . happened.” He gave Menedemos a sickly, ingratiating smile.

  Menedemos wasn't about to let himself be appeased so readily. “Go to your oar,” he said. “I hope you hurt as much as you deserve all day long.” That hangdog smile still on his face, Teleutas hurried off the raised poop deck and down into the waist of the merchant galley.

  “Cast off!” Diokles called. Once the lines that had moored the to the quay were aboard, the keleustes smote his little bronze square. “Back oars! “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” The akatos slid away from the pier.

  Once Menedemos had room to do so, he swung the ship about till her bow pointed out toward the mouth of the harbor. But he hadn't even passed out beyond the moles before he said, “I want everybody to do lookout duty on this voyage. It's not just pirates we have to be careful of—it's Antigonos' war fleet, and Ptolemaios', too. If you see anything, sing out. You may be saving all of our necks, including your own,”

  “We're Rhodians, and neutrals,” Sostratos added. “That may help us in case of trouble, because neither side much wants to offend our polis. But some captains may not care about that. We'd rather not take the chance if we don't have to.”

  As it had a few days before, the motion of the waves changed as soon as the akatos left the sheltered waters of the great harbor. Menedemos smiled. He liked the livelier feel to the ship. Sostratos looked less happy. He would have preferred the sea as quiescent as the land. Menedemos glanced toward crapulent Teleutas. The rower had already gone a delicate green. Too bad, Menedemos thought. It's his own foolish fault.

  “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” Clang! Clang! Diokles beat out the stroke. Once they were outside the harbor, Diokles cut the rowing crew down to eight men on each side. He left Teleutas at his oar. The rower sent him a look of appeal. He ignored it.

  Euxenides of Phaselis made his way back to the stair that led up to the poop. “May I come up?” he asked politely. Menedemos dipped his head, and Euxenides joined him and Dioldes. The passenger said, “You've got a good crew here.”

  He spoke in tones of professional appraisal. “Thanks,” Menedemos answered. “We're Rhodians, remember. We go to sea a lot.” He pointed to the mouth of the naval harbor, which lay just northwest of the great harbor. A trireme was coming out, all three banks of oars manned, each stroke enviably smooth. Not lifting his hands from the steering oars, Menedemos pointed toward it with a thrust of his chin. “Most of my men have rowed in one of those, or else in a five.”

  “I hadn't thought of that,” Euxenides said. “Now that I do, though, I see that you could put together a formidable little fleet.”

  “Little?” Menedemos said indignantly. But the indignation didn't last. Antigonos had all of Anatolia to draw upon, Ptolemaios the endless wealth of Egypt. Next to theirs, ' fleet would be small. Too small? Menedemos wondered. He hoped he'd never have to find out.

  Sostratos stood on the Aphrodite's little raised foredeck, peering north and west as if he expected to see Cape Sounion, the headland that announced one was coming up on Athens, appear over the horizon at any moment. Part of him did. Most of him, the rational part, knew perfectly well that Athens lay some days' journey from , and that trading on the way would further delay the akatos' arrival. But the childlike part that never quite dies in any man insisted Cape Sounion would be there because he so badly wanted it to be there. And so he kept on looking.

  The wind blew hard and steady out of the northeast—if anything, a little more out of the east than usual. The sailors had swung the yard from the starboard bow back toward the portside rear to take best advantage of it. The big square sail, full of the brisk breeze, pulled the along. Sostratos eyed the creamy wake thrown back from the ram and the cutwater. She was going about as fast as she could by sail alone.

  Euxenides of Phaselis came up to stand not far from Sostratos. The leather sack that held his food and whatever meager belongings he owned lay on the foredeck. Like any sensible passenger, he kept an eye on it.

  “Hail,” he said.

  “Hail,” Sostratos echoed, a bit embarrassed; he probably should have spoken first. But his mind had been elsewhere.

  Euxenides pointed, “What's that island there, off to the right?” The way he said it proved to Sostratos that, even if he'd traveled by sea, he was not a naval officer,

  “That's Syme,” Sostratos answered. “We stopped there our first night out of last year. But with the breeze so steady, we'll go farther today. I don't know whether Menedemos will make for Knidos”—he pointed, too, toward the end of the long finger of mainland north of Syme—”or whether he'll put in somewhere on Telos.” He pointed again, this time toward the island dead ahead.

  “I was in Knidos for a little while, three years ago I think it was, when Antigonos to
ok Karia away from that traitor, Asandros,” Euxenides said. “Telos I don't know at all. What's there?”

  “Nothing much,” Sostratos answered. “No polis. A few herders. A few farmers—not many, for it's not a well-watered island. But sometimes a quiet place where you can beach yourself and let your ship's timbers dry for a night is nothing to sneeze at.”

  Euxenides drummed his fingers on the rail, “I want to get to Miletos. I need to get to Miletos.”

  “I want to get to Athens,” Sostratos said with a smile. “I need to get to Athens. And I will—eventually.”

  “Sometimes 'eventually' isn't fast enough,” Euxenides said.

  “Well, best one, you won't get from to Miletos any faster than you will in the ,”“ Sostratos said.

  “Yes, I found that out,” Euxenides told him. He drummed his fingers some more. He might not be able to help it, but that didn't make him happy about it. He looked due north as avidly as Sostratos looked northwest.

  As usual, most of the fishing boats whose crewmen saw the fled from her, fearing she was a pirate. That made the rowers laugh. It made Sostratos sad. Here close to , even, men feared sea raiders. He feared sea raiders himself, as a matter of fact; he just knew he wasn't one of their number.

  Menedemos held the merchant galley steady on a westerly course, and didn't swing north toward Knidos. Sostratos walked back to the stern. “You're going to put in on Telos?” he asked.

  His cousin dipped his head. “That's right. We're not heavily laden, so I'll beach her for the night. It'll be good for the planking, and Telos is about as safe a place to put in as any under the sun.”

  “True enough,” Sostratos said. “It hasn't got enough people to make up a decent-sized band of robbers.”

  “Just what I was thinking. And this splendid breeze is taking us straight there,” Menedemos said. “Only drawback I can see is that it'll be a longer pull to Kos tomorrow, and the men will have to do more rowing. But we're still early in the season and getting the crew beaten in, so even that won't be so bad.”

  Diokles chuckled. “Easy for you to say, skipper. You're not one of the horn-handed bastards pulling an oar.”

  “I know how,” Menedemos said. “Sostratos and I both know how, as a matter of fact. Our fathers made sure we do.” He took his hands off the steering-oar tillers to show their palms. “And I've got calluses of my own.”

  Sostratos looked down at the palms of his own hands. They were fairly smooth and soft; he would blister if he ever had to do any rowing. The only real callus he had was one just above the first knuckle of the middle finger of his right hand: a callus showing where a pen or a stylus spent a lot of time. But Menedemos was right—he did know how.

  The wind held. Telos drew near, the sun dropping down the sky towards it. The island was long and thin and curved, rather like a strigil lying in the water. Only a couple of fishing boats bobbed offshore; they were plenty to bring home opson for the inhabitants of the village near the north coast that was Telos' largest settlement.

  A stretch of beach in front of the village was the most common spot for ships to put in, but Menedemos sailed past it. “Why did you do that?” Sostratos asked.

  “Something one of the sailors told me while you were on the fore-deck,” his cousin answered. “Once we get past this rocky stretch here”—he waved at the forbidding coastline they were passing— “there's another good bit of beach, one where sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. They ought to make good eating. We can boil up a mess of them and have opson for the whole crew.”

  “Turtle eggs, eh?” Sostratos felt the lure of the exotic. “I've never tried them. Lead on, O best one.” He patted his stomach. “It's been a long time since bread and wine back on .”

  “Hasn't it just?” Menedemos agreed.

  From the bow, Aristeidas pointed ahead and to port. “There's the beach, skipper!” the sharp-eyed sailor sang out.

  “Good,” Menedemos said, and then started calling out orders: “Brail the sail up to the yard! Rowers every other bench! Come on— move faster there. Do it as if you had pirates breathing down your neck.”

  To Sostratos, the men seemed to be moving quite fast enough, but Menedemos drove them like the commander of a trireme. The sailors didn't grumble. They knew they would have to be able to work together without thinking if they ever did need to flee pirates or fight them.

  This length of beach was considerably shorter than the one near the village. Peering toward it, Sostratos exclaimed in excitement: “That fellow was right! I just saw a turtle crawling back into the sea.”

  Whistling, his cousin swung the ship so that her stern pointed toward the beach and her bow out to sea. A couple of men got into the boat she towed and rowed it ashore. “Back oars!” Diokles called. The rowers reversed their stroke. After the beached, pushing her into the sea again come morning would be easier bow-first.

  Menedemos kept stealing glances back over his shoulder at the beach as the covered the last couple of plethra. Plovers scurrying along the sand took to the air when the merchant galley drew too close to suit them. “That's fine,” Menedemos said, “just fine. Keep it going and—”

  A grinding, scraping noise interrupted him. “What's that?” Sostratos asked at the same time as his cousin exclaimed in surprise and dismay. “Have we struck a rock?” It didn't feel like that, and the akatos still moved backwards through the water.

  “We haven't,” Menedemos answered. “But our starboard steering oar just did. Almost tore my arm out of the socket when it hit, too.” Sure enough, the steering oar was torn out of the housing that secured it to the ship. And another crackle of splintering timber said the narrow length of the tiller hadn't come through undamaged, either.

  The rock missed impaling the 's flank. A moment later, soft sand scrunched under her false keel as she beached herself as prettily as anyone could have wanted.

  “Well, that's a nuisance,” Sostratos said.

  “It certainly is,” Menedemos said, “I can guide the ship well enough with only one steering oar, but it's not something I want to do. If you've only got one and something goes wrong ...”

  He's a sensible and cautious seaman, Sostratos thought, most of the time, anyway. Why doesn't his mind work the same way when he's on dry land?

  One more crackle and the steering oar fell away from the tiller and onto the sand, leaving Menedemos holding what was left of the tiller. With an oath, he threw it down onto the poop deck, narrowly missing Sostratos’ toes. “What a miserable piece of luck,” he said. “It was only a year old, and part of the best pair we ever had.”

  “You want to make repairs here, skipper, or go on up to Kos and have the shipwrights there do a proper job of it?” Diokles asked.

  “I'm going to have to think about that,” Menedemos answered. “For now, let's push her farther out of the water. I'll be able to take a better look at the damage then, too.”

  “Makes sense,” the oarmaster agreed. He angled the gangplank down from the deck to the beach and descended. Sostratos and Menedemos followed. Sailors in the undecked waist of the ship simply scrambled over the side and dropped to the sand.

  Sostratos, Menedemos, and Diokles added their weight and strength to those of the sailors. Sostratos' hands gripped the thin lead sheathing that helped hold shipworms at bay; his toes dug into the sand. Digit by digit, the moved up the beach.

  Euxentdes of Phaselis helped, too, and had plainly done such work before. After they'd shifted the ship far enough to suit Menedemos, the passenger asked, “Have you got woodworking tools aboard?”

  “Of course we do,” Sostratos answered. “If we end up in trouble, we may not find a kind-hearted nymph like Kalypso to lend us axe and adze and drill, as resourceful Odysseus did.”

  “I'm usually the one who quotes ,” Menedemos said, “and you're usually the one who says I shouldn't, and that it doesn't fit. What have you got to say for yourself now?”

  “Quoting him does fit here,” Sostratos admitted. To keep f
rom admitting any more, he turned back to Euxenides. “Are you a shipwright yourself, then?”

  “No, no.” The passenger tossed his head. “But I make and I serve catapults. I'm a good carpenter. If I can't repair that steering oar, I can certainly make you another to match it.”

  That wasn't Sostratos' choice to make. He glanced over to Menedemos. His cousin rubbed his chin. He didn't want to be beholden to Euxenides; Sostratos could see as much. “We've got men aboard who can do the same job,” Menedemos said at last.

  “No doubt,” Euxenides answered, “but I can do it right”

  “He has a point,” Sostratos said. “There isn't much in the way of carpentry that's more complicated than what goes into catapults.”

  “That's right,” Euxenkles said. “No offense to your trade, captain, but shipbuilding is child's play beside it.”

  Menedemos grimaced. Sostratos turned away so his cousin wouldn't see him smile. More often than not—almost all the time, in fact—Menedemos did the pushing. Here, he was being pushed, and he liked it no better than anyone else did. “Let's talk about it in the morning,” he said. “Nothing's going to happen till then anyhow.”

  “As you say, best one,” Euxenides answered politely. Sostratos didn't think he could have phrased his own indecision as smoothly as Menedemos had done.

  The 's crew had already realized they weren't going to get anything much in the way of repairs done before sunset. Some of them were gathering brush and driftwood for fires. Others went up and down the beach, thrusting spearshafts and sticks into the sand in search of sea-turtle nests. A couple of plethra away from the akatos, one of them stooped to dig with his hands, then whooped and waved. “Found some eggs!” he called.

  Sostratos trotted over. “Let me have a look at those, Pasiphon, before you throw 'em in a pot,” he said.

  Pasiphon had pulled an oar on the the year before, and knew of Sostratos' ever-wakeful curiosity. “Sure thing,” he said, and tossed Sostratos an egg as he might have thrown him a ball.