The Gryphon's Skull

by H. N. Turteltaub

  Sostratos thought it over, not that he needed long. “Good idea,” he said. “Splendid idea, in fact. If you put it to the Assembly, it would carry in a flash,”

  Neither he nor Menedemos bothered watering the wine they dipped from an amphora, either. As Menedemos sipped, he said, “I don't do this every day”; he had to know they were being immoderate as well as Sostratos did.

  Sostratos replied, “Well, my dear, we don't fight off a pirate ship every day, either.”

  “No, we don't, and a good thing, too,” Menedemos said. “Most of those abandoned catamites have better sense than to tangle with a ship like ours. And I'm going to make sure our boys do plenty of wineshop bragging, too. Let the word get around: the Aphrodite's a hedgehog, too prickly to quarrel with.”

  “That's good. That's very good,” Sostratos said. After a couple of swigs of strong neat wine, it certainly seemed good.

  Menedemos drained his cup and filled it again. Catching sight of Sostratos' expression, he grinned. “Don't worry—I still know where Attica lies.”

  “You'd better,” Sostratos told him.

  “What I wish I knew,” his cousin said, “is how to keep pirates from coming after merchants in the first place. It's not just that no one patrols the sea hard enough, though we Rhodians do what we can. But a pirate in a hemiolia can show his heels to any ship afloat; even a trireme can't always catch a hemiolia. Honest men ought to be able to beat the bastards at their own game.”

  “You've said that before,” Sostratos remarked. “What's the answer? “

  “To the crows with me if I know. If it were easy, somebody would have thought of it a long time ago, wouldn't you say? But there's got to be one somewhere.”

  Sostratos started to ask him why there had to be one, but checked himself. He didn't want to argue, not now. All he wanted to do was take a moment to be glad he remained alive and free and unmaimed. A little wine sloshed out of his cup. He laughed in embarrassment. “I'm not pouring a libation. My hand is shaking.”

  “That's a sign you need more wine,” Menedemos said, refilling the cup before Sostratos could protest. His cousin went on, “It's all right to shake a little now, when everything's over. I've done that myself—you start thinking about what might have been. But you did fine when you needed to.”

  “I didn't have time to be afraid then.” Sostratos took a pull at the wine and decided not to complain about Menedemos' giving him more.

  Menedemos' mind was already moving on to other things: “We'll have to put poor Dorimakhos' body in the boat. You know how the men reel about having a corpse on board ship. And when we do get in to Attica, we'll have to pay a priest to purify the boat—and the Aphrodite.”

  “One more thing to take care of.” But Sostratos didn't argue about that, either. The blood spilled aboard the akatos, the deaths she'd seen, left her ritually polluted. After his time in the Lykeion, Sostratos wasn't sure he still believed in such pollutions. But he was sure the sailors, superstitious to a man, did. Cleansing the ship would put them at ease, and so it needed doing.

  “I wonder how much the gods-detested pirates managed to steal when they went back aboard their ship,” Menedemos said.

  “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 Andros. 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 afte
r 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 Aphrodite. 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 Poseidon'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:

  Phrontis Onetor'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 said. “You did a good job steering the Aphrodite, 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 Aphrodite lay at anchor a couple of plethra from the beach. “What ship are you?” a man called from the boat.

  “The Aphrodite, out of Rhodes,” Menedemos answered. “We were bound for Athens, but pirates came after us between Euboia and Andros. 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 Aphrodite carried. “Tell it, man!” the local exclaimed.

  “Polemaios 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 Poseidon'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 Aphrodite 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.”