The Gryphon's Skull

by Harry Turtledove

  “That's right.” Menedemos gave his name and Sostratos'. “If you heard that, you probably heard we fought off pirates, too. We had a man killed, and another who looks sure to die of his wounds.”

  Theagenes dipped his head. “I did hear that, yes. You'll want me to purify the vessel?”

  “If you please,” Menedemos said. “And we'd like to sacrifice here as a thanks offering for driving those whoresons away.” Sostratos stirred at that. Menedemos had been sure he would; he hated expense. But it needed doing.

  “Good enough.” The priest hesitated, then went on, “This wounded man, if he dies after I finish the job ...”

  “You'd have to do it over again,” Sostratos said.

  “That's what I meant, yes,” Theagenes agreed. “A death is a death. As far as the ritual goes, how it happens doesn't matter.”

  “We'll move him to the boat,” Menedemos said. He'd done that with the dying sailor after the clash with the trireme the year before. “Purifying that will be less work for you—and if you can't come for some reason, well, we can buy another boat.”

  “I understand,” Theagenes said. “Let me get my lustration bowl, and then I'll come to the harbor with you.” He went into the temple.

  When he came out again, Sostratos stirred. “How long has this temple had that bowl?” he whispered to Menedemos.

  “What do you—? Oh.” Menedemos saw what his cousin meant. The bowl had an image of in it. The god was done in black against a red background. That style had been replaced by red figures on a black background about the time of the Persian Wars. How many black-figure bowls still survived? Menedemos said, “They're very careful of it.”

  “I should think so,” his cousin answered.

  The two Rhodians and the priest walked back toward the seashore. When Theagenes got a good look at the , he said, “Your ship is too beamy to make a proper pirate, but I can see how people might think at first glance she was one.”

  “We've had it happen, yes,” Menedemos said. “As far as I'm concerned, or someone ought to sweep all pirates off the sea.”

  “I wish that might happen myself,” Theagenes said. “The world would be a better place.”

  Menedemos waved to the rowers waiting for his return. The men waved back. They took him and Sostratos and Theagenes out to the . Dorimakhos' body lay, wrapped in bloodstained sailcloth, at the stern of the boat. As Theagenes neared the akatos, he filled that ancient bowl with seawater. He handed it to Menedemos before scrambling from the boat to the ship.

  What would he do if I dropped it? Menedemos wondered. But he didn't: he just gave it back to Theagenes. The priest looked at the dark stains on the 's planking. “You did have a hard fight here,” he remarked.

  “It would have been harder still if we'd lost it,” Sostratos said.

  “Of course,” Theagenes said. He went up and down the ship, sprinkling the water from the bowl over the planks and murmuring prayers in a low voice. As he came up onto the poop deck, he remarked, “The sea purifies anything it touches.”

  “I suppose that's why, in the Iliad, Talthybios the herald threw the boar Agamemnon sacrificed when he finally apologized to Akhilleus into the sea,” Menedemos said.

  “Just so.” Theagenes sounded pleased. “The carcass of the boar carried the burden of Agamemnon's oath. It should not have been eaten by men. The sea was the path of its travel to earth, sun, and the Furies.” The priest beamed at Menedemos. “I see you are a man who thinks on such things.”

  “Well...” Menedemos was no more modest than he had to be, but he couldn't take that kind of praise with Sostratos standing beside him. He said, “My cousin leans more toward philosophy than I do.”

  “I don't particularly lean toward philosophy myself,” Theagenes said. “I think we ought to do as the gods want us to do, not make up fine-sounding excuses to do as we please.”

  Sostratos raised an eyebrow at that. Before he could start the sort of argument that had made Sokrates a candidate for hemlock, Menedemos said, “We do thank you for purifying the ship.” He gave Sostratos a look that said, Please don't.

  To his relief, Sostratos didn't. Theagenes said, “I am pleased to hear such words from you, young man. A man who loves the gods will be loved by them.” He went down into the waist of the ship and splashed a little seawater on Rhodippos. The wounded man, lost in a fever dream, moaned and muttered to himself. Theagenes sighed. “I fear you're right about him. Death reaches toward him even as we watch.”

  “I wish something could be done about wounds like his, whether by gods or healers,” Sostratos said—no, he wouldn't casually let it drop after all.

  “Asklepios has been known to work miracles,” the priest said.

  “So he has,” Sostratos agreed. “If he did it more often, though, they wouldn't be miracles, and a lot more men would have longer lives.”

  The priest sent him a sour stare. Menedemos felt like a man standing between two armies just before they shouted the paean and charged each other. Doing his best to change the subject, he said, “Come on boys, let's get Rhodippos into the boat. We'll give him the best care we can there.”

  Rhodippos howled piteously as several sailors lowered him into the boat. He kept on howling even after they rigged an awning of sailcloth to keep the sun off him. “The kindest thing we could do for him would be to cut his throat,” Sostratos said.

  “He doesn't know what's happening to him,” Menedemos said. “It's a small mercy, but a mercy.”

  “And the gods may yet choose to preserve his life,” Theagenes added.

  Menedemos didn't believe that, not for a moment. And, in his zeal to keep his cousin and the priest from squabbling, he'd been too clever for his own good. With Rhodippos in the boat, how was Theagenes to get back to Sounion? Menedemos hadn't the heart to take the wounded man out of there again. The sailors hailed a rowboat from the shore. He gave the fellow in it a couple of oboloi to row the priest home.

  Once Theagenes was out of earshot—or nearly so—Sostratos sniffed and said, “He may be holy, but he isn't what you'd call bright.”

  Theagenes' back got very straight. No, he hadn't been quite out of earshot; Menedemos hadn't thought so. “He probably thinks you're bright, but not very holy.”

  “I don't care what he thinks,” Sostratos said. “And if you think—”

  “I think the ship is ritually clean again,” Menedemos broke in. “And I think that's good. Don't you?” He gave Sostratos a hard look, as if to say he'd better.

  “Oh, yes,” his cousin admitted. “I try not to be superstitious, but I don't succeed so well as I'd like. I don't think you can be a sailor without being superstitious.”

  “I believe in luck and the gods. If you want to say that makes me superstitious, go ahead,” Menedemos said, and wondered how big an argument he'd get. To his surprise, he got none at all. Sostratos hadn't heard him; his cousin was watching a flock of seabirds flapping past. Menedemos laughed. “And how do the omens look?”

  Sostratos did hear that. “I wasn't watching them for the sake of omens,” he said. “I just don't think I've ever seen those particular petrels before.”

  “Oh,” Menedemos said, crestfallen. Many another man might have been lying when he made such a claim. Sostratos? Menedemos tossed his head. He believed his cousin implicitly.

  Rhodippos died three days later. The crew of the , acting for his family, buried him in the grave the local gravedigger had excavated. Theagenes came out to the merchant galley once more, this time to cleanse the boat. He gave Sostratos a sour look. Sostratos pretended not to see it.

  In the meanwhile, a round ship from the island of Aigina put in at Sounion. After talking with its captain, Menedemos declared, “Now I know where we're bound next.”

  “What? To Aigina?” Sostratos asked. His cousin dipped his head. Sostratos threw his hands in the air. “Why? Everything they make there is cheap junk. Aiginetan goods are a joke all over the Aegean. What have they got that would be worth our while to carr
y?”

  “They've got silver,” Menedemos said. “Lots and lots of lovely turtles. And they have a temple to they're talking about prettying up. is a huntress. Wouldn't her image look fine in a lion skin?”

  “Ah.” After some thought, Sostratos said, “You might convince them of that. You might even have a better chance than at Athens, I suppose. More hides come in to Athens than to Aigina, I'm sure.”

  Menedemos kissed him on the cheek. “Exactly what I was thinking, my dear. And it's only a day's journey from here.” He pointed west. “You can see the island, poking its nose up over the horizon.”

  “Islands have noses?” Sostratos said. “I don't think any philosopher ever suspected that.” Menedemos made a face at him. But his own whimsy didn't last long. With a sigh, he went on, “I wish we were heading to Peiraieus instead. Without the gryphon's skull, though, what's the point?”

  “Not much.” No, Menedemos wasn't heartbroken at the loss of the ancient bones. “We'll see how we do somewhere else.”

  Winds in the Saronic Gulf were fitful the next day; the rowers spent a good deal of time at the oars. But they seemed glad enough to row. Maybe they were eager to escape Sounion, where two of their comrades would lie forever. That wasn't anything Sostratos could ask, but it wouldn't have surprised him.

  With a circumference of perhaps 180 stadia, Aigina wasn't a big island. These days, it also wasn't an important island, though that hadn't always been true. When the made for the polis, which lay on the western side of the island, Sostratos said, “This place would be a lot better off if it hadn't gone over to Dareios before Marathon.”

  “It got what it deserved afterwards, eh?” Menedemos said.

  “If you want to call it that,” Sostratos replied. “The Athenians dispossessed the Aiginetans and planted their own colonists here. Then, after the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans threw those people out and brought back the original Aiginetans and their descendants.”

  “So who's left nowadays?” Menedemos asked.

  “Aiginetans,” Sostratos said. “They're a mongrel lot, I suppose, but that's true of a lot of Hellenes these days. If a polis loses a war ...” He clicked his tongue between his teeth; he didn't like to think of such things. But he refused to shy away from them: “Remember, had a Macedonian garrison when we were youths.”

  His cousin looked as if he would have been happier forgetting. “It's our job to make sure that never happens again.”

  “So it is,” Sostratos said. If we can, he added, but only to himself. He might think words of evil omen, but he would do his best not to speak them aloud.

  Whatever their ultimate origins, the modern Aiginetans spoke a dialect halfway between Attic and Doric. It sounded odd to Sostratos. Menedemos, though, said, “They talk almost the same way you do.”

  “They do not!” Sostratos said indignantly.

  “They do so,” Menedemos said. “They sound like people who started out speaking Doric but went to school in Athens.”

  “Most of them sound as though they've never been to school at all,” Sostratos retorted. He was proud of the Atticisms in his own speech; they showed him to be a man of culture. To his ear, the Aiginetans didn't sound cultured at all. He and his cousin might have been the asses in Aisop's fable, except that they were dithering over dialects rather than bales of hay.

  “All right. All right. Let it go.” Menedemos, having planted his barb, was content to ease up. “We made it past the rocks. Now that we're in the harbor, we'll sell the lion skin and make the trip worthwhile.”

  “Rocks?” Sostratos said.

  Before Menedemos could answer, Diokles spoke up: “Didn't you notice how careful-like your cousin was steering, young sir? The approach to this harbor's as nasty as any in Hellas, but he handled it pretty as you please.”

  Menedemos looked smug. Praise from a seaman as accomplished as the oarmaster would have left anyone feeling smug. And I didn't even pay attention to what he was doing, Sostratos thought ruefully.

  The next morning, the two cousins took their tawny hide up to the temple of Artemis, which stood close by those of Apollo and . Menedemos peered into the one dedicated to Apollo. “We might try here if we have bad luck with ' priest,” he said. “The Apollo is naked—carved from wood, looks like, and old as the hills.”

  That made Sostratos look, too. “I wonder just how old that statue is,” he said. “People have been making images of marble or bronze for a long time now.” Menedemos only shrugged, and with reason. They had no better way of learning the statue's age than they'd had of finding out how old the gryphon's skull was. Sostratos grimaced, wishing he hadn't thought of that comparison. He couldn't see Attica from here; the higher ground of the north of Aigina shielded the mainland from his eye, which was more than a small relief.

  The marble statue of was draped, but only in a carved tunic that didn't even reach the goddess' knees. “Why, she'd catch her death of cold if she didn't don our skin for a cloak,” Menedemos said.

  Sostratos looked around. “Where's the priest?” he asked, seeing no one in the sacred precinct. He got no answer, either.

  Before long, an Aiginetan ambled in. “Are you the priest?” Menedemos asked him.

  He tossed his head. “Not me. Nikodromos is probably still in town. He's a man who likes to sleep late, he is.”

  “What shall we do till he gets here?” Sostratos asked in annoyance. “Grow moss?”

  “You might as well, pal,” the local replied. “He isn't going to get here till he gets here, if you know what I mean.”

  Sostratos grunted. The Aiginetan had a point. Another man came into the temple. He wasn't Nikodromos, either. He was somebody else looking for the priest. “Lazy, sour bastard's probably still home snoring,” he said. Nikodromos' habits were evidently well known. He would never have made a seaman—but then, he hadn't tried. As a priest, he could sleep late if he wanted to.

  “Maybe we ought to find his house in town and throw rocks at the shutters,” Menedemos said a little later.

  Just when Sostratos was starting to think that sounded like a pretty good idea, Nikodromos strolled into the temple with a self-satisfied expression on his face. Both Aiginetans promptly started dunning him for money they said he owed them. What followed wasn't quite a screaming row, but wasn't far from one, either.

  In a low voice, Sostratos said, “If we do sell him the hide, let's make sure we see the silver before we hand it over.”

  Menedemos dipped his head. “I've heard ideas I liked a lot less.”

  After half an hour or so, Nikodromos' creditors threw their hands in the air and left. He hadn't promised them a thing. In an abstract way, Sostratos admired him. In the real world with which he had to deal, he wondered if this image of really needed to be draped with a lion skin after all.

  “Hail,” the priest said, coming up to the two Rhodians. “And what do you want today? You've been patient as can be while those idiots spouted their lies.”

  He didn't seem too sour to Sostratos, but then, Sostratos hadn't been trying to get money out of him. His foxy features did not inspire confidence, though. Neither did his squabbles with a pair of Aiginetans unconnected to each other. Nonetheless, after naming himself and Sostratos, Menedemos said, “We've got a splendid Karian lion skin here, with which you can adorn the statue of the Maiden.”

  “Do you indeed?” Nikodromos' eyes widened slightly. Excitement or art? Sostratos wondered. He would have bet on art. Those eyes were a light brown that in certain lights seemed tinged with amber: as foxy as the rest of him, or maybe even more so. He went on, “Let me see it, best ones. By all means, let me see it.”

  Menedemos and Sostratos spread out the skin on the temple floor. Then Sostratos, with a happy inspiration, picked it up and draped it over the marble ' shoulders. “See how fine she'd look?” he said.

  “Not bad,” Nikodromos said—small praise, but praise. “That skin might remind people of what a great huntress she is, true. But, of course, one question remain
s: how much do you want for it?”

  “Five minai,” Menedemos said. Sostratos hid a smile behind his hand. If his cousin would get cheated, he aimed to get cheated out of a lot of money.

  Nikodromos coughed. “My dear fellow, you can't be serious.”

  Menedemos smiled his most charming smile. “I'll make it six if you like. Not so many lions left in Europe these days, you know.”

  “And so you think you can charge whatever you please when you bring one here?” the priest said.

  “Not quite,” Sostratos told him. “But no one ever said we had to sell our goods at a loss, either.”

  “Five minai is out of the question,” Nikodromos said. “I might pay two.”

  “You might indeed,” Menedemos said pleasantly. “But not to us. As my cousin said, we need to make money to stay in business.”

  “Well, two minai and a half, then,” Nikodromos said.

  “Come on, Menedemos,” Sostratos said. “Let's head back to the ship. Plenty of other temples, plenty of other poleis.”

  They made as if to begin rolling up the lion skin and putting it back into its leather sack. Sostratos watched Nikodromos out of the corner of his eye. If the priest let them leave, then he did, that was all. But they hadn't got very far before Nikodromos said, “Wait. I might go to three.”

  “We might talk a little more, in that case,” Menedemos said.

  Nikodromos would have failed as a trader for more reasons than sleeping late. He kept coming up and up, and didn't draw the line till the price had gone to four minai, twenty drakhmai, though he grumbled and whined every step of the way. He did his best to make it seem as if he were doing the Rhodians a favor by dealing with them at all.

  “Four minai, twenty.” Sostratos looked from him to Menedemos and back again. “Bargain?”

  “Bargain.” His cousin and the priest spoke at the same time.

  “Good enough.” As far as Sostratos was concerned, it was better than good enough. They hadn't got nearly such a fine price for the other hide back on Kos. Nice, solid profit, he thought.