The Gryphon's Skull

by Harry Turtledove

  “ '—and none is more marvelous than man.' “ Menedemos finished the quotation from Sophokles for him. He clipped his head in agreement, too. “All the same, though, I've never seen anyone more eager to bite the hand that feeds him. You were clever to figure him out so fast.” He sent Sostratos a curious glance. His cousin wasn't usually so sharp a judge of people.

  “He's like someone from Thoukydides come to life,” Sostratos said now: “a man who's practically nothing but plots and ambitions. An ordinary chap is much harder to make out, at least for me.”

  That's because you're not an ordinary chap yourself, Menedemos thought. More often than not, he would have twitted Sostratos about it. Now, when Sostratos had solved a puzzle that baffled him, he kept quiet. His cousin had earned a respite. . . for a little while.

  6

  As the Aphrodite made her way south and east through the Kyklades toward Kos, Polemaios took to calling himself Alkimos of Epeiros. “He's a mercenary captain in my uncle's pay,” he explained to Sostratos and Menedemos, “and a big, big man himself.” He let more of his Macedonian accent come out; to an ordinary Hellene, it might well do for the speech of a man from another, equally barbarous, place.

  He is shrewd, Sostratos thought reluctantly. Odds were, that ran in the family like height. Antigonos was outstandingly clever, and his sons, and Philippos, also seemed able. And Polemaios had been one of Antigonos' leading officers till he chose to turn against his uncle. No one had ever said old One-Eye suffered fools gladly.

  Whether a fool or not, though, Polemaios alarmed Sostratos. Ambition blazed from the man as light blazed from a bonfire. Would he be able to conceal it when he got to Kos? If he couldn't, how long would Ptolemaios take to notice it? The ruler of Egypt struck Sostratos as a very canny fellow.

  Of course, Polemaios' soldiers would be following him to Kos. How many men did he have? Sostratos didn't know. How many did Ptolemaios have on the island? Sostratos didn't know that, either, though he could make a guess from the size of Ptolemaios' fleet. Would all of them stay loyal, or could Polemaios seduce them away from his near-namesake? An interesting question, sure enough.

  To keep from drawing undue attention to the return, Menedemos chose a route different from the one he'd used going up to Khalkis. No one would be able to note how many days lay between his westbound and eastbound visits to a port and, as a result, make guesses about where he'd been. From Karystos, on the southern coast of Euboia, he took the due south across the rough strait and, aided by a brisk northerly breeze, made the island of Kythnos by nightfall.

  Fig orchards and vines straggled across the sandy hills of Kythnos. Looking north and west, Sostratos could see Cape Sounion, the great rocky headland that marked Attica. He sighed. I should be showing (he gryphon's skull to Theophrastos, he thought, but instead I'm sailing away again. Where is the justice?

  Polemaios and his wife and bodyguards slept aboard the merchant galley. Antigonos' nephew took it in stride; he'd doubtless found worse places to lay his head on campaign. But, from Sostratos' place on the poop deck, he could hear the woman's shrill complaints at the other end of the ship. Polemaios sounded much less imperious with her than he did speaking to mere Rhodians.

  With a soft chuckle—very soft, to make sure Polemaios didn't hear—Sostratos murmured to Menedemos: “Every hero has his weakness.”

  His cousin's snort of laughter seemed much too loud to him. “Agamemnon lord of men had his vanity, Akhilleus his anger—and his heel,” Menedemos agreed. “Great Aias went mad.” He reached out and tapped Sostratos on the shoulder. “But what of resourceful Odysseus? He was always right, or as near as makes no difference, and he came home safe where most of the others died.”

  “And he paid the price for always being right, too,” Sostratos said after a little thought of his own. “He's a hero in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the playwrights make him out to be a villain, too clever for his own good. Nobody likes a man who's right all the time.”

  “You would know, wouldn't you?” Menedemos said.

  Sostratos grunted. That arrow hit too close to the center of the target for comfort. He had learned most people didn't take kindly to being corrected, even when they were wrong—often especially when they were wrong. He didn't do such things nearly so often as he had when he was younger. And if I hadn't done them so often then, I might be happier now.

  He shifted on the planks of the poop deck, trying not only to get comfortable but also to escape his own thoughts. Like the Furies, they pursued him whether he wanted them to or not. But he could escape them, unlike the Kindly Ones, by falling headlong into sleep, and he did.

  When he woke, it was to the sound of Menedemos cursing as if those Kindly Ones were hot on his trail. Yawning, Sostratos asked, “What's wrong?”

  “Call yourself a seaman?” Menedemos snarled, which was most unfair: Sostratos was suddenly roused from sleep, and still flat on the deck besides. Upright and irate, Menedemos went on, “There's no polluted wind, that's what. None.”

  “Oh.” Sostratos uncocooned himself from his himation and got to his feet, too. He wasn't naked, as he would have been most mornings aboard ship; out of deference to Polemaios’ wife, he'd left his chiton on. Menedemos was right: not a breath of breeze stirred his hair. “Oimoi! This isn't good. We'll have a hard time making Paros by sundown on oars alone.”

  “Isn't that the sad and sorry truth?” his cousin agreed. “And even if we do, the men will be worn to nubs and in a dreadful temper. To the crows with me if I blame 'em, either. Rowing all day is a hard way to make a drakhma and a half.”

  “I know.” Sostratos set a consoling hand on Menedemos' shoulder. “Well, my dear, we got this job because we can go against the wind, or even without it. We could give the rowers a couple of days to roister in Kos once we get there.”

  “Not a bad notion.” Menedemos dipped his head, then smiled a wicked smile. “There you go, being right again.”

  “I'm sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again,” Sostratos said, and thought he came out of the exchange fairly well.

  Menedemos had the pleasure of waking Diokles, who wasn't up quite so fast as usual. The oarmaster noted the calm as fast as the captain had. “The men'll have their work cut out for 'em today if things don't pick up,” he said, and set about shaking sailors out of sleep. “We can't afford to waste time, then.”

  Polemaios and his bodyguards also roused. So did Polemaios' wife, who was no more happy about waking up aboard ship than she had been about the sleeping arrangements the offered. Barley rolls and raisins and olives for breakfast didn't seem to be to her taste, either, and she had some sharp things to say about the wine the akatos carried.

  “It'll be hot work,” Sostratos said. The sun was just climbing over the horizon, but, with the air so still, he could feel the furnace of noontime in his mind hours before it turned real. “Have we got enough water and wine to get us to Paros? We're carrying all those extra passengers.”

  “For one day, we'll be all right,” Menedemos answered. Sostratos dipped his head; that was likely true. His cousin went on, “Besides, if I water the ship here, we lose that much traveling time, and we haven't got much to spare today.”

  Diokles put eight men at the oars on each side of the . At his orders, the oarblades bit into the sea. The galley glided out of Kythnos harbor, past the southern tip of the island, and then south and east toward Paros.

  Navigating in the Kyklades was easy enough. A sailor rarely found himself out of sight of land. There was Seriphos, due south of Kythnos, and there due east lay Syros. A tiny islet between them gave a good course for Paros, and in the distance Sostratos could see clouds hovering about Mount Marpessos, Paros' central peak. Before long, the mountain itself came into view.

  The sea seemed smooth as a polished piece of Parian marble. The oars rose and fell, rose and fell. Diokles gave the rowers shifts of about two hours, keeping them as fresh as he could. Polemaios' wife amused herself by complaining. His bodyguards prow
led the ship like so many feral dogs on the prowl for something they could eat.

  They were going to steal this and that. Sostratos knew as much. He couldn't keep his eye on all of them all the time. They couldn't steal too much, if only because they had nothing but their already-full sacks of personal goods in which to conceal their loot.

  Not all of them seemed to realize that. One—the big fellow who'd been standing outside Polemaios' front door—bent down under an unoccupied rower's bench and came up holding the big leather sack that contained the gryphon's skull. Sostratos jerked as if stuck by a pin. “Put that down!” he yelped.

  “Who's going to make me?” the guard demanded. His free hand went to the hilt of his sword. He hadn't doffed his armor aboard ship. Under the brim of his bronze helmet, his face twisted into a nasty grin. Sostratos wore only a wool tunic, and had nothing but a knife on his belt. He bit his lip in humiliation.

  From the stern, Menedemos called, “Well, best one, if you want what you've got so much, why don't you see what it is?”

  “I will.” The Macedonian undid the lashing that held the sack closed. The gryphon's skull stared out at him from empty eye sockets. Now he was the one who yelped, in surprise and superstitious fear.

  “Don't you dare drop that,” Sostratos warned. This time, he managed to put a snap rather than a whine in his voice. “Put it back where you got it.” Perhaps too startled not to, the bodyguard obeyed. He didn't close the sack, but that could wait.

  Once the gryphon's skull was stowed under the bench once more, the fellow managed a question of his own: “What do you want with that horrible, ugly thing?”

  Sostratos smiled his most sinister smile. “Before we got the commission to bring your master back to Kos, I was going to take it up to Thessalia, to sell it to one of the witches there.” Northeastern Hellas was notorious for its witches. Sostratos didn't believe in witchcraft—not with the top part of his mind, anyhow—but to protect the precious gryphon's skull he grabbed any weapon that came to hand.

  And this one worked. The big, fierce Macedonian went pale as milk. His ringers writhed in an apotropaic gesture. He said something in Macedonian that Sostratos couldn't understand. Once he got it out of his system, he switched to a dialect of Greek that made more sense: “I hope the witches turn you into a spider, you wide-arsed son of a whore.”

  Grinning, Sostratos said, “I love you, too, my dear.” Behind the grin was a fright he wouldn't show. If the bodyguard got angry enough, or frightened enough, he would draw that sword, and Sostratos couldn't do much to fight back.

  But the big man only shuddered and made another warding gesture before turning and stomping back up toward the foredeck. A couple of minutes later, Polemaios strode toward the stern. “Thessalian witchcraft?” he said.

  How superstitious was he? Sostratos couldn't tell by the tone of the question. He just said, “That's right,” and waited to see what happened next.

  Polemaios grunted, ascended to the poop deck, and pissed into the sea. Then he too returned to his station on the foredeck. He and his bodyguard got into a shouting match. To Sostratos' frustration, it was in Macedonian. The bodyguard wasn't shy about saying whatever was on his mind, waving his hands in Polemaios' face and bunching them into fists. Polemaios showed no more restraint.

  “A charming people, the Macedonians,” Sostratos remarked in a low voice as he went up to stand near his cousin.

  “Aren't they, though?” Menedemos rolled his eyes.

  “And they rule almost the entire civilized world,” Sostratos said mournfully. He drew himself up with more than a little pride. “But not Rhodes.”

  “Gods be praised!” Menedemos exclaimed, and Sostratos dipped his head.

  “OöP!” Dlokles called, and the 's weary rowers rested at their oars. Behind them, the setting sun streaked the Aegean with blood and fire. A couple of harbor men took the lines sailors tossed them and made the akatos fast to a quay in the polis of Paros. Up at the top of Mount Marpessos, the sunlight remained a good deal brighter than it was down here on the sea.

  Menedemos clapped his hands together. “Euge!” he called to the merchant galley's crew. “Very well done! It's a long haul from Kythnos to here.”

  “Don't we know it!” somebody—Teleutas—said. Menedemos would have bet he'd be the one to speak up and carp, but he'd done as much as anybody else at the oars, and so he'd earned the right.

  “Amorgos tomorrow,” Menedemos said. “Then Kos, and a layover. You boys will have earned it.”

  Til say we will.” Again, Teleutas took it on himself to speak for the rest of the sailors, and to make agreement sound halfway like a threat.

  “We won't make Kos in one day from Amorgos, not unless we get a gale out of the west,” Diokles remarked. “Not likely, although . . .” The oarmaster tasted the air, wetly smacking his lips a couple of times. “We'll have wind, I think. Tomorrow won't be a dead-calm day like this one.”

  “I think you're right,” Menedemos said. The faintest ghost of a breeze brushed against his cheek, softer than a hetaira's hand. He looked north. A few clouds drifted across the sky; they didn't hang in place, as they had all through this long, hot day. “Be good to let the sail down.”

  “That'll be fine, sure enough,” Diokles agreed. “Still and all, though, even be a push, because we will have to spend some time filling our water jars before we sail tomorrow. Can't let ourselves go dry.”

  “I know, I know.” Menedemos consoled himself as best he could: “Paros has good water, not the brackish stuff we'd have got on Kythnos.”

  He stayed aboard the again that night. He didn't want to; he wanted to go into one of the harborside taverns, drink himself dizzy, and sleep with a serving girl or find a brothel. He hadn't had a girl since putting in at Kos. For a man in his mid-twenties, going without for several days felt like a hardship.

  But somebody would ask, Say, who's that big son of a whore with those soldiers? Answering Alkimos of Epeiros might serve. On the other hand, it might not, and he might talk too much if he got drunk. He knew himself well enough to understand that. And so he wrapped himself in his himation on the poop deck, stared up at the stars for a little while, and fell asleep.

  When he woke up, only the faintest hint of gray touched the jagged eastern horizon. He felt like cheering, for a brisk northerly breeze ruffled his hair. With sail and oars together, they had a much better chance of making Amorgos by nightfall. Then he took a deep breath, and frowned a little. The air felt damp, as if it was the harbinger of rain. He shrugged. It was late in the season for a downpour, but not impossibly so.

  As soon as it got light enough for colors to start returning to the black and silver world of night, he started shaking sailors and sending them into Paros with the 's water jars. “How will we find a fountain?” Teleutas whined.

  “Ask somebody,” Menedemos said unsympathetically. “Here.” He gave the grumbling sailor an obolos. “Now you can give something for an answer, and it's not even coming out of your own pay.”

  Teleutas, no doubt, liked lugging a hydria no more than anybody else. But Menedemos had quashed his objections before he could make them. He popped the obolos into his mouth and went off with his comrades. Menedemos imagined the surprise at a fountain when the sailors descended on women filling their water jars for the day's cooking and washing. Then he tossed his head. As at Naxos, a lot of ships put in at Paros. The local women would be used to such visits.

  Sostratos pointed north. “I wonder if we'll get some rain,” he said. “Some of those clouds look thicker and grayer than the usual run.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Menedemos answered. “It would be a nuisance. Trying to figure out a course when we can't see more than a couple of stadia isn't easy. It'd slow us down, too, if the sail got soaked.”

  “The men might not mind, not after rowing all day in the hot sun,” his cousin said. “Cool weather's more comfortable.”

  “At first, maybe,” Menedemos said. “But it's easy
to take a chill when you come off your stint at the oars, and to cramp up, too. Rain's no fun when you haven't any way to keep it off your head.”

  They left Paros almost as early as he'd hoped they would. As soon as they were out of the harbor, he ordered the sail lowered from the yard. The freshening breeze thrummed in the rigging. The mast creaked in its socket as that breeze filled the sail and pulled on it. The merchant galley ran before the wind till she slid through the channel between Paros and Oliaros, the smaller island to the southwest.

  “I've heard there's a cave full of spikes of rock sticking up from the floor and down from the ceiling on Oliaros,” Sostratos said. “That's the sort of thing I'd like to see.”

  “Why?” Menedemos asked. At his orders, the sailors swung the yard so that it stretched back from the port bow to take best advantage of the wind.

  “Why?” Sostratos echoed. “It might be pretty. It would certainly be interesting. And they say some men the Great was after hid out there for a while.”

  “Do they?” Menedemos lifted his right hand off the steering-oar tiller to wag a forefinger at his cousin. “You're always going on about how 'they say' all sorts of things, and most of the time what 'they say' turns out to be nothing but a pack of nonsense. So why do you believe 'them' now?”

  “There's supposed to be some writing inside the cave,” Sostratos answered, “but I guess you're right—that doesn't have to mean anything. People could have written it in the years since died.”

  “Why would they?” Menedemos asked. “To draw visitors to these caves? If you ask me, anybody who wanted to go crawling through them would have to be daft.” He gave Sostratos a meaningful look.

  Having been on the receiving end of a lot of those looks, Sostratos ignored this one. “Maybe,” he said, “though you'd need more than scratchings on a stalactite to get anyone to come to Oliaros. You'd need divinities born there, the way Delos has Apollo and .”

  Menedemos, who was much more conventionally religious than his cousin, bit down on that like a man unexpectedly biting down on an olive pit. By the way Sostratos said it, the god and goddess might not actually have been born on Delos, but the Delians might have claimed they were for no better reason than to draw people to the island and separate them from their silver. Menedemos didn't ask if he did mean that, for fear he would say yes. He did ask, “What other reason would somebody have for writing something that wasn't true?”