“We'd better find out,” Sostratos replied. “We can't sell what we haven't got any more,”
“You tend to that,” Menedemos said. “You know where everything's supposed to be.”
“Right,” Sostratos said tightly. Every once in a while, he wished he didn't have such a retentive memory. He also wished his cousin didn't take that memory so much for granted. Neither wish seemed likely to come true here.
Menedemos, for a wonder, noticed his glower and asked, “Is something wrong?”
“Never mind,” Sostratos answered. He was as he was, just as Menedemos was as he was. And his cousin did have plenty of other things to do. Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth as he ducked under the poop deck. Being as he was, he found himself taking the other fellow's point of view, which made staying annoyed harder.
He hadn't seen any of the pirates get down under there, but the silver was the first and most important thing he needed to check. A glance told him all the leather sacks were where they had been before the hemiolia dashed out from behind the headland on . He breathed a sigh of relief. After all they'd sold on Miletos, losing their money would have been a dreadful blow.
He came out with care, and felt a certain amount of pride at not banging his head. What next? he wondered. The answer wasn't long in coming: the balsam. It was literally more precious than silver. He knew under which bench it was stowed. When he squatted there, he found it undisturbed.
Now that I've made sure of the money and the balsam, he thought, Menedemos can't blame me if I check the gryphon's skull. He knew exactly where it was (of course I know exactly where it is, went through his mind): port side, stowed under the ninth rower's bench. He hurried forward and stooped as he had to make sure the balsam was where it belonged.
The gryphon's skull wasn't there.
Sostratos straightened. His first, automatic, assumption was that he'd counted benches wrong. He counted them again. This was the ninth. He bent again. Still no trace of the big leather sack that had held the skull. He looked under the eighth, and also under the tenth, on the off chance—the preposterous, ridiculous, utterly unlikely off chance—he'd miscounted benches when stowing the skull. No sign of it under either bench, only what he recalled putting in those places.
Desperation clanging inside his mind, he checked the starboard benches. Maybe you put it over there after all. But he hadn't. The gryphon's skull was gone.
Wild-eyed, Sostratos stared out to sea. The hemiolia was long vanished. With it went a skull that had come from the edge of the world; a skull that, by an accident of fate, had found the perfect owner; a skull that now, by a more malign accident of fate, would never reach the men who might have wrung sense from its strangeness. Gone. Gone with a filthy pirate who surely couldn't write his name, who cared nothing for knowledge, who'd chosen theft and robbery in place of honest work. Gone. Gone forever, past hope of returning.
Sostratos burst into tears.
“What's the matter, young sir?” Diokles asked, “What did the thieving whoresons get?”
“The gryphon's skull,” Sostratos choked out.
“Oh. That thing.” The oarmaster visibly cast about for something to say. At last, brightening, he found it: “Don't fret too much. It wouldn't've brought in all that much cash anyways.”
“Cash?” The word tasted like vomit in Sostratos' mouth. He cursed as foully as he knew how—not with Menedemos' Aristophanic brio, perhaps, but with far more real anger, real hatred, behind the foul language.
Sailors shied away from him. They'd never seen him in such a transport of temper. He'd never known himself in such a fury, either. He would gladly have crucified every pirate ever born and set fire to every forest from which the shipwrights shaped the timbers of their hemioliai and pentekonters.
From the stern, Menedemos called, “What's gone missing?”
He had to say it again: “The gryphon's skull.”
“Oh,” his cousin said. “Is that all?”
“All?” Sostratos howled. More curses burst from him. Still hot as iron in the forge, he finished, “They could have taken anything else on this ship—anything, do you hear me? But no! One of those gods-detested rogues had to steal the single, solitary thing we carried that will—would—matter a hundred years from now.”
Menedemos came forward and set a hand on his shoulder. “Cheer up, my dear. It's not so bad as that.”
“No. It's worse,” Sostratos said.
His cousin tossed his head. “Not really. Just think: right this very minute, you're probably having your revenge.”
“My what?” Sostratos gaped, as if Menedemos had suddenly started speaking Phoenician. “What are you talking about?”
“I'll tell you what,” Menedemos answered. “Suppose you're a pirate. Your captain decides to go after an akatos for a change. 'It'll be a tough fight, sure enough,' he says, 'but think how rich we'll be once we take her.' You manage to board the . Her sailors are all fighting like lions. Somebody stabs you in the leg. Somebody else cuts off half your ear.”
He paused. “Go on,” Sostratos said, in spite of himself.
Grinning, Menedemos did: “Pretty soon, even Antigonos the One-Eyed can see you aren't going to win this scrap. You grab whatever you can—whatever's under that bench there—and you hop back aboard your hemiolia. You have to get away from those fighting madmen on the merchant galley, so you pull your oar till you're ready to drop dead. Somebody slaps a bandage on your ear and sews up your leg. And then, finally, you say, 'All right, let's see what's in this sack. It's big and heavy—it's got to have something worthwhile inside.' And you open it—and there's the gryphon's skull looking back at you, as ugly as it was in the market square in Kaunos. What would you do then?”
Slowly, Sostratos smiled. That was vengeance, of a sort.
But Diokles said, “Me, I'd fling the polluted thing straight into the sea.
That struck Sostratos as horribly likely. In his mind's eye, he could see the pirate staring at the skull. He could hear the fellow cursing, hear his mates laughing. And he could see the blue waters of the Aegean dosing over the gryphon's skull forevermore.
“Think of the knowledge wasted!” he cried.
“Think of the look on that bastard's face when he opens the sack,” Menedemos said.
It was the only consolation Sostratos had. It wasn't enough, wasn't anywhere close to enough. “Better I should have sold the skull to Damonax,” he said bitterly. “What if it sat in his house? Maybe his son or his grandson would have taken it to Athens. Now it's gone.”
“I'm sorry,” Menedemos said, though he still seemed more amused than anything else. He pointed west, toward the distant mainland of Attica. “We still might get to Cape Sounion by sundown.”
“I don't care,” Sostratos said. “What difference does It make now?” He'd hoped his name might live forever. Sostratos the Rhodian, discoverer of. . . He tossed his head. What had he discovered? Thanks to the pirate, nothing at all.
10
Menedemos brought the Aphrodite into the little harbor of the village of Sounion, which lay just to the east of the southernmost tip of the cape. He pointed inland, towards a small but handsome temple, asking, “Who is worshiped there?”
“That's one of 's shrines, I think,” Sostratos answered. “Athena's is the bigger one farther up the isthmus.”
“Ah. Thanks,” Menedemos said. “I haven't stopped here before, so I didn't remember, if I ever knew. Sounion ...” He snapped his fingers, then dipped his head, recalling some lines from the Odyssey:
“ 'But when we reached holy Sounion, the headland of Athens
There Phoibos Apollo the steersman of Menelaos
Slew, assailing him with shafts that brought painless death.
He held the steering-oar of the racing ship in his hands:
's son, who was best of the race of men
At steering a ship whenever storm winds rushed.' “
“Not storm winds now, gods be praised,” his cousin s
aid. “You did a good job steering the , though, to get us here before nightfall.”
“Thanks,” Menedemos said. “Do you suppose we could get a priest to purify the ship now, or will we have to wait here till morning?” He answered his own question: “Morning, of course, so we can get Dorimakhos' body off the ship and set him in his grave.” He lowered his voice: “And you were right, worse luck—Rhodippos has a fever I don't like, enough to put him half out of his head.”
“I know.” Sostratos sorrowfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I wish such things didn't happen with belly wounds, but they do.” He ground out, “I wish I'd shot the bastard who stole the gryphon's skull right in the belly. I want him dead.”
He was usually among the most gentle of men. Menedemos regarded him with more than a little curiosity. “I don't think you'd sound so savage if someone stole half our silver.”
“Maybe I wouldn't,” Sostratos said. “We can always get more silver, one way or another. Where will we come by another gryphon's skull?”
“For all you know, there'll be another one in the marketplace at Kaunos next year,” Menedemos answered. “Who knows what will come out of the trackless east these days?”
“Maybe.” But Sostratos didn't sound as if he believed it. On reflection, Menedemos couldn't blame his cousin. The gryphon's skull wasn't obviously valuable, and was large and heavy and bulky. How many merchants would carry such a thing across ten thousand stadia and more on the off chance someone in the west might want it? Not many—that one had still surprised Menedemos.
He said, “Now that we haven't got it any more, do you still want to go on to Athens?”
“I don't know,” Sostratos answered. “Right now, I'm so tired and so angry and so disgusted, I know I can't think straight. Ask me again in the morning, and maybe I'll be able to tell you something that makes sense.”
“Fair enough,” Menedemos said. “Let's have some more wine now. It's been a long time since the fight.”
They were on their second cup when someone on shore pushed a boat into the water and rowed out toward the merchant galley; no one had bothered to build quays here, and the lay at anchor a couple of plethra from the beach. “What ship are you?” a man called from the boat.
“The , out of ,” Menedemos answered. “We were bound for Athens, but pirates came after us between Euboia and . We fought them off, and here we are.”
“Fought 'em off, you say?” The fellow in the boat sounded dubious. “What's your cargo?”
He thinks we're pirates, Menedemos realized. When a galley came into an out-of-the-way harbor like this one, the locals often started jumping to conclusions. “We've got Koan silk aboard, and crimson dye from Byblos,” Menedemos said, “and perfume from Rhodes, and fine ink, and some papyrus from Egypt—though we're almost sold out of that—and a splendid lion skin from Kaunos on the Anatolian mainland, and the world's best balsam from Phoenicia.”
“World's best, eh?” The man in the boat laughed. “You sound like a tradesman, all right.”
“And we've got news,” Sostratos added.
“News?” With the one word, Menedemos' cousin had done a better job of snaring the man in the rowboat than he had himself with his whole long list of what the carried. “Tell it, man!” the local exclaimed.
“Polemaios ' son is dead,” Sostratos said. “When he went to Kos, he tried to raise a rebellion against Ptolemaios, and the lord of Egypt made him drink hemlock. We were there when it happened.” As usual, he said nothing about taking Polemaios to Kos, or about watching Antigonos' nephew die.
What he did say was plenty. “Polemaios dead?” the Sounian echoed. “You're sure?” Menedemos and Sostratos solemnly dipped their heads. “That is news!” the man said, and started rowing back to shore as fast as he could go.
“We could have just told him that, and he wouldn't have worried about anything else,” Menedemos said. He yawned. After the desperate day, those two cups of wine were hitting him hard. As the stars shone down on the merchant galley, he stretched out on the poop deck and dove into sleep like a dolphin diving into the sea.
However worn he was, he did not pass a restful night. Rhodippos woke him—woke the whole crew—two or three times with cries of rage and dread as the wounded, feverish sailor battled demons only he could see. By the time the sun followed rosy-fingered dawn up out of the sea to the east, the man was moaning almost continuously.
Menedemos pulled the stopper from a fresh amphora of wine. “Last night this made me sleepy,” he said as he dipped some out. “Now I hope it'll wake me up.” He added water to the wine and drank.
“Get me some, too, please,” Sostratos said. “Poor fellow,” he added around a yawn. “It's not his fault.”
“Fault doesn't matter.” Menedemos was yawning, too. His head felt filled with sand. Most of the sailors were awake, too, though a couple snored on despite Rhodippos' ravings. Menedemos envied them their exhaustion.
Sostratos said, “We need to see about one burial—two soon—and about getting the ship cleansed of pollution.” Menedemos envied him, too, for being able to concentrate on what they had to do when he was as weary as everyone else.
Despite Dorimakhos' corpse, they used the akatos' boat to go ashore. For an obolos, an old man pointed them toward the burial ground outside Sounion, and toward the gravedigger's house. “You'll be the Rhodians,” that worthy said when they knocked on his door. Gossip, as usual, had wasted no time. “You lost someone in your fight with the pirates?”
“We lost one man, and we're losing another,” Menedemos answered.
“Will you stay here till he dies?” the gravedigger asked. Menedemos and Sostratos looked at each other. Sostratos sighed and shrugged. Menedemos dipped his head. So did the gravedigger. “Three drakhmai, then, for two graves,” he said.
Sostratos gave him three Rhodian coins. He took them without a murmur, though they were lighter than Athenian owls. Menedemos asked, “Who's the chief priest at 's temple here? We'd like him to purify our ship.”
“That would be Theagenes,” the gravedigger replied.
As the two Rhodians walked toward the temple, Menedemos asked, “Where do we go from here?”
His cousin looked at him. “Why, back to the ship, I would think.”
Menedemos made an exasperated noise. “No. What I mean is, where does the go from here?—and you know it, too.”
“Well, what if I do?” Sostratos walked along for several paces, his bare feet kicking up dust from a dirt path that hadn't seen rain since spring. Then, suddenly he stopped and sighed and shrugged. “I'd hoped I would change my mind with some sleep, but I haven't. Without the gryphon's skull, I don't much care where we go. What difference does it make now?”
“It makes a lot of difference,” Menedemos answered. “It makes a difference in what we end up selling, and for how much.”
Sostratos shrugged again. “We'll show some profit this sailing season. We won't show a really big one, the way we did coming back from Great Hellas after the peafowl and that mad dash down to Syracuse loaded with grain.”
“That wasn't mad. That was brilliant,” Menedemos said. It had been his idea.
“It turned out to be brilliant, because we got away with it. That doesn't mean it wasn't mad,” Sostratos said, relentlessly precise as usual. A fly lit on Menedemos' hand. He brushed it away. Back among the trees, a cuckoo called. Sostratos continued, “Without the gryphon's skull, whether we go to Athens or not doesn't matter to me. It's just another polis now, as far as I'm concerned.”
“You really do mean that,” Menedemos said. His cousin dipped his head. He looked as sad as a man whose child had just died. Trying to cheer him up, Menedemos asked, “Couldn't you—I don't know— tell your philosopher friends about the gryphon's skull?”
He didn't know whether he'd cheered Sostratos, but saw he had amused him. “Kind of you to think of such things, my dear, but it wouldn't do,” Sostratos said. “It would be like. . .” He paused a moment in thoug
ht, then grinned and pointed at Menedemos. “Like you bragging about some woman you've had, where nobody else has seen her or knows whether you're telling the truth.”
“Don't you listen to the sailors?” Menedemos said. “Men talk like that all the time.”
“Of course they do. I'm not saying they don't,” Sostratos answered. “But the point is, half the time the people who listen to them think, By the gods, what a liar he is! If I can't hold up the skull to show the men of the Lykeion and the Academy, why should they believe me?”
“Because they know you?” Menedemos suggested. “I'd be likelier to believe you bragging about a woman than I would most people I can think of. I'm still jealous about that hetaira back in Miletos, and you didn't even brag about her.”
“Men know about women. They know what they're like—as much as men can hope to, anyhow,” Sostratos said, and Menedemos laughed. His cousin went on, “But suppose men had only known boys up till now. Think about that.”
“I like women better,” Menedemos said. “They enjoy it, too, and boys usually don't.”
“Never mind that,” Sostratos said impatiently. “Suppose all we'd known were boys, and somebody started talking about what a woman was like. Would you believe him if he didn't have a woman there with him to prove what he was saying?”
Menedemos thought about it. “No, I don't suppose I would,” he admitted.
“All right, then. That's what I'd be up against, talking about the gryphon's skull without being able to show it.” Sostratos let out another sigh, a lover pining for a lost love. “It's over now. Nothing to be done about it. Let's find this Theagenes and get the ship purified.”
The priest was pruning a fig tree in a little orchard by the temple when the Rhodians came up to him. “Hail,” Menedemos called.
“Hail,” Theagenes answered over his shoulder. “Just a moment, and I'll be right with you.” A smooth-barked branch thudded to the ground. Theagenes grunted in satisfaction and lowered his saw. He turned toward Menedemos and Sostratos. He was a short man, shorter than Menedemos, but with wiry muscles shifting under his skin as he moved. “There. That's better. Now, what can I do for the two of you? You'll be from the ship that got in last night?”
The Gryphon's Skull Page 33
