The Gryphon's Skull

by H. N. Turteltaub

  “I'll never forget you,” he answered. It could have been a pretty compliment, a polite fib, but he heard the raw truth in his voice. Asine must have heard it, too, for she smiled, pleased with herself. She'd taken it for praise, then. As a last favor, Menedemos didn't tell her otherwise.

  A couple of naked little boys, one perhaps eight, the other six, were playing with a toy oxcart in the dusty street. They looked up as Menedemos came out of Nikodromos' house—looked up and started to giggle. His ears burned. He hurried off toward the market square.

  Sostratos waved to him as he came over to the little display the men of the Aphrodite had set up. “Glad you're back,” he called, and then, “Well?”

  “Very well, thanks. And you?”

  His cousin rolled his eyes. A couple of the sailors who'd fetched and carried for Sostratos guffawed. A third looked blank. One of the others leaned close to mutter something to him. Menedemos couldn't hear what it was, but saw the obscene gesture accompanying it. The third sailor laughed, getting it at last.

  “All right,” Sostratos said. “You didn't get held for ransom, you didn't get murdered—”

  “Not that I noticed, no,” Menedemos agreed.

  “Interrupt all you please,” Sostratos told him. “I'm still going to ask the questions that need asking. For instance, can we stay in Aigina without worrying about getting knifed whenever we show our faces away from the Aphrodite?”

  That was indeed a question worth asking. Menedemos thought about the two giggling little boys. They probably weren't the only neighbors to have noticed his coming to Nikodromos' house when the priest wasn't home. That meant. . . Menedemos tossed his head. “Maybe not.”

  “Another place we can't visit again anytime soon,” Sostratos said with a sigh. “Seems as though there's one every voyage, doesn't it?”

  “This isn't like Halikarnassos or Taras,” Menedemos said. “I think I'm just one in a long line of men Nikodromos hates.”

  “Ah. Like that, is it?”

  “Afraid so.” Menedemos didn't feel like dwelling on what he'd done, so he asked, “How are things going here?”

  Sostratos shrugged. “I've sold some silk and some crimson dye with it and a few jars of perfume, but people aren't rushing up to buy. Probably about time to have Diokles start pulling sailors out of the taverns and whorehouses, wouldn't you say?”

  “Time to leave Aigina, you mean,” Menedemos said, and Sostratos dipped his head.

  Menedemos thought it over. After a moment, he did the same. He said, “We might not do badly to head back to Rhodes. It's a little early in the season, but only a little, and we've gone through most of what we set out with.”

  “Do you know, my dear, I was thinking the very same thing not an hour ago,” Sostratos said. “Strikes me as a good idea. We'll show a solid profit if we do. But if we cruise around for another month without accomplishing much, maybe not. And I don't mind getting home early at all.”

  “Neither do I,” Menedemos said. What a liar I am, he thought.

  11

  As the Aphrodite glided east through the Saronic Gulf, away from Aigina, Sostratos mournfully peered north toward the mainland of Attica. There were Athens' two chief ports, Peiraieus and Phaleron, seeming almost close enough to touch. There on the higher ground inland lay Athens itself, the magnificent buildings of the akropolis tiny but perfect in the distance. Pointing to port, he burst out, “A pestilence take those pirates! We should be there now.”

  “We'll get there yet,” Menedemos said soothingly.

  “But not with the gryphon's skull.” Sostratos scowled at his cousin, though it wasn't Menedemos' fault. But he couldn't get the picture out of his mind: the pirate, maybe—he hoped—wounded, undoing the leather lashing that held the sack closed, staring in horrified dismay at the skull that stared blindly back, and then, cursing, flinging it into the sea while all his thieving comrades laughed.

  “Can't be helped. We were lucky to get away with our freedom and most of our goods,” Menedemos said.

  He was right again; Sostratos knew as much. But his cool indifference grated. “So much knowledge wasted!” Sostratos said.

  “A lot, a little—how can you tell?” Menedemos remained indifferent. “You can't even tell for sure whether your philosophical friends would have cared a tenth as much about the skull as you did.”

  Sostratos bit down on that like a man biting down on a big piece of grit in a chunk of bread, and counted himself lucky not to break a mental tooth. He didn't know what the philosophers of the Lykeion and the Academy would have made of the gryphon's skull. He never would know now. He gave back the best answer he could: “Damonax was interested in it.”

  “Damonax didn't care about studying it—he wanted it for a decoration,” Menedemos said. “That says something nasty about his taste, but it doesn't say anything about what a real philosopher would think of it.”

  Stubbornly, Sostratos said, “Aristoteles wrote books about animals and the parts that make them up. His successor Theophrastos, whom I studied under, is doing the same thing with plants. He would have wanted to see the gryphon's skull.”

  “Why? Would he think it grew on a tree like a pine cone?”

  “You're impossible!” Sostratos said, but he laughed in spite of himself.

  Maybe that was what his cousin had had in mind. Little by little, Athens receded behind the Aphrodite. Sostratos found things with which to busy himself about the ship instead of mooning over the city like a lover over his lost beloved. Eventually, he looked up and saw that it lay far astern. I will come back, he thought, even if it is without the gryphon's skull.

  For now, though, mundane business: he asked Menedemos, “Are you going to put in at Sounion again tonight?”

  “That's right. Why?” His cousin gave him a suspicious look. “Do you plan on jumping ship and heading back to Athens even without your precious toy?”

  “No, no, no.” Sostratos tossed his head. Having taken so many barbs, Sostratos gave one back: “I was just thinking how handy it was that there are still a few places around the Inner Sea where you haven't outraged any husbands.”

  “Heh,” Menedemos said: one syllable's worth of laughter. But he'd never been a man who could dish it out without taking it. After a moment, he lifted one hand from the steering-oar tillers and waved to Sostratos. “All right, my dear, you got me that time.”

  Sounion, as far as Sostratos was concerned, remained as unprepossessing as it had been the last time the Aphrodite put in there, a few days earlier. Now, at least, the ship didn't need to be cleansed of pollution (unless adultery counts, he thought), and they had no dead or dying aboard. The setting sun sent gold and orange and crimson ripples across the sea as the akatos' anchors splashed down into the water.

  A boat rowed out from the hamlet toward the merchant galley. Sostratos had seen the man at the oars before, but not his passenger, a dapper fellow who looked out of place in Sounion. The dapper man hailed the ship: “Ahoy, there! Who are you, and where are you bound?”

  “We're the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes, and we're heading home,” Sostratos replied.

  “Told you so,” said the man at the oars in the small boat.

  The dapper man ignored him. “Will you take a passenger to Kos?” he called.

  “That depends,” Sostratos said.

  “Ah, yes.” The dapper man dipped his head and grinned. “It always does, doesn't it? Well, what's your fare?”

  Sostratos considered. This fellow plainly didn't belong here, which meant that, for one reason or another, he had some urgent need to go east. And so the only question was, how much to charge him? Sostratos thought of Euxenides of Phaselis, and how much they'd squeezed out of him for a much shorter trip. Bracing himself for either a scream of fury or a furious haggle, he named the most outrageous price he could think of: “Fifty drakhmai.”

  But the dapper man in the boat didn't scream. He didn't even blink. He just dipped his head and said, “Done. You sail in the morning, don't
you?”

  Behind Sostratos, Menedemos muttered, “By the dog of Egypt!” Sostratos couldn't tell whether that was praise for him or astonishment that the dapper fellow—the new passenger, he was now— hadn't screamed blue murder. Some of both, maybe. As for Sostratos himself, he had the feeling he could have asked for a whole mina, not just a half, and he would have got the same instant agreement.

  He had to make himself remember the man's question. “That's right,” he said. “You pay half then, half when we get there.”

  “I know how it's done,” the dapper man said impatiently. “I'll have my own food and wine, too.”

  “All right.” Sostratos knew he sounded a little dazed, but couldn't help it. He had to make himself come out with one more question: “And, ah, your name is. . . ?”

  “You can call me Dionysios son of Herakleitos,” the man answered. “I'll be aboard early enough to suit you, I promise.” He spoke to the local at the oars, who took him back to Sounion.

  Sostratos stared after him. “Well, well,” Menedemos said. “Isn't that interesting?”

  “I wonder what he's running from,” Sostratos said. “Nothing right here in town, surely, or he'd have asked to spend the night on the foredeck. Something back in Athens, I suppose. He looks like an Athenian—sounds like one, too.”

  “I wonder who he is,” Menedemos said.

  “Dionysios son of Herakl—” Sostratos began.

  His cousin tossed his head. “He said we could call him that. He didn't say it was his name.” Sostratos thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He prided himself on noticing such things, but he'd missed that one. Menedemos went on, “He strung a couple of the most ordinary names in the world together, is what he did. He might have been Odysseus telling Polyphemos the Cyclops to call him Nobody.”

  “Trust you to haul Homer into it somehow,” Sostratos said, but he had to admit the comparison was apt. And then his own wits, stunned since Dionysios so casually agreed to that ridiculous fare, started to work again. “He wants to go to Kos.”

  “He said so,” Menedemos agreed. After a moment, he snapped his fingers. “And staying on Kos—”

  “Is Ptolemaios,” Sostratos finished for him, not wanting to hear his own thought hijacked. “I wonder if he's some sort of envoy from Demetrios of Phaleron here in Attica, or from Kassandros, or if he's one of Ptolemaios' spies.”

  “I'd bet on the last,” Menedemos said. “Ptolemaios has all the money in the world, so why should his spies have to quarrel about fares?”

  “That makes sense,” Sostratos said. “Of course, just because it makes sense doesn't have to mean it's true. I'll tell you something else.” He waited for Menedemos to raise a questioning eyebrow, then continued, “Whatever he is, we won't find out from him.”

  “Well, my dear, if you think I'm going to argue about that, you're mad as a maenad,” Menedemos said.

  Dionysios son of Herakleitos—or whatever his real name was— proved as good as his word. He hailed the Aphrodite so early the next morning, some of her sailors were still asleep. Carrying a leather sack big enough to hold food and wine and the few belongings a traveling man needed, he scrambled up from the local's rowboat into the low waist of the merchant galley.

  “Hail,” he said as Sostratos came up to him.

  “Good day,” Sostratos replied.

  “I doubt it,” Dionysios replied. “It's going to be beastly hot. I hope you don't expect a man to bring his own water along with everything else.”

  “No,” Sostratos said. “Water we share, especially on a hot day— and I think you're right: this will be one. My eyes feel drier than they should, and the sun's not even over the horizon.” He held out his hand. “Now, if you'd be so kind, the first part of the fare.”

  “Certainly.” Dionysios reached into the sack for a smaller leather wallet. He took coins from it and gave them to Sostratos one by one. “Here you are, best one: twenty-five drakhmai.”

  The coins had an eagle on one side and a blunt-featured man's profile on the other. “These are Ptolemaios' drakhmai!” Sostratos said in dismay—they were far lighter than the Attic owls he'd expected.

  “You never said in whose currency you wanted to be paid,” Dionysios pointed out.

  “Have we got a problem?” Menedemos called from the stern. After Sostratos explained, his cousin asked, “Well, what do we do about that? Shall we send him back to shore unless he comes up with the proper weight of silver?”

  “Where's the justice in that?” Dionysios demanded. “I'm not cheating you out of anything I promised to give.”

  “So what?” Menedemos said. “If you don't pay us what we want, you can wait for another ship.” That made the dapper man unhappy, try as he would to hide it.

  But Sostratos reluctantly tossed his head—that gibe about justice struck home. “He's right, Menedemos. It's my own fault, for not saying we wanted it in Attic money.” He took advantage of exchange rates whenever he could; it wasn't often that anyone got the better of him, but it had happened here.

  “You're too soft for your own good,” Menedemos grumbled.

  Dionysios son of Herakleitos gave Sostratos a bow. “What you are, my dear fellow, is a kalos k'agathos.”

  “A gentleman? Me? I don't know about that,” Sostratos said, more flattered than he was willing to show. “I do know I expect people who deal with me to be honest, so I'd better give what I hope to get.”

  “And if that doesn't make you a kalos k'agathos, to the crows with me if I know what would,” Dionysios said.

  The sun, a ball of molten bronze, rose over the little island of Helena, where Helen had paused on her way home to Sparta after the Trojan War. Almost at once, the air began to quiver and dance, as it would above hot metal in a smithy. Those first few harsh beams seemed to scorch the hillsides back of Sounion. They'd been sere and dry and brown before; Sostratos knew as much. But he could almost watch the last moisture baking out of them now. He marveled that he couldn't watch the sea steam and retreat, as water would in a pot left over the fire too long.

  “Papai!” he exclaimed. “I hope we have some wind. Rowing in this will be worse than it was the last time we went through the Kyklades.”

  Dionysios rummaged in his sack again. This time, he pulled out a broad-brimmed hat, which he set on his head. “I don't care to cook, thank you very much,” he said.

  “Why don't you go up to the foredeck so the rowers can work freely?” Sostratos said.

  “Oh, of course. I don't mean to be a bother.” Dionysios picked up his bag and headed for the bow.

  Sostratos went back to the stern and climbed up onto the poop deck. He waited for Menedemos to rake him over the coals; his cousin had earned the right. But Menedemos just clicked his tongue between his teeth and said, “Well, well—the biter bit.”

  “I never dreamt he'd give me Ptolemaios' money,” Sostratos said. “He's as cocksure as an Athenian ought to be; he speaks good Attic Greek; I expected owls. This does make it all the more likely he's Ptolemaios' man.”

  “Because he uses coins from Egypt? I should say so.”

  “Well, that, too, but it isn't what I had in mind. I was thinking that he acts like a rich cheapskate, the way Ptolemaios did when we were haggling over the price for the tiger skin,” Sostratos said.

  “A rich cheapskate.” Menedemos savored the paradox before dipping his head in agreement. “That's good. He can get anything he wants and pay anything he wants, and he knows it, but he still doesn't want to pay too much.”

  Up at the bow, capstans creaked as sailors brought up the anchors. Rich cheapskate or not, Dionysios son of Herakleitos knew enough to stay out of their way. Sweat and olive oil sheened their naked bodies. Sostratos swiped a forearm across his brow. It came away wet. “I'm going to get a hat for myself, too,” he said. “I don't care to bake my brains today.”

  His cousin wet a finger and tested the breeze—or would have, had there been any breeze to test. He sighed. “That's a good idea, howev
er much I wish it weren't.”

  Diokles said, “I'm only going to put half a dozen men on a side at the oars, and I'll change shifts more often than I usually do. Otherwise, we'll lose somebody from heatstroke, sure as sure.”

  “As you think best,” Menedemos told the keleustes.

  With shouted orders from the captain and the oarmaster, the Aphrodite left the little harbor of Sounion and started east across the Aegean toward Kos and then toward Rhodes and home. Sostratos kept looking back towards the north and west, towards Athens, toward what might have been. He cursed the pirate who'd stolen the gryphon's skull—and every other pirate who'd ever lived. Those curses felt weak, empty. The skull was gone, and he'd never see its like again. He wondered if the world would.

  RATHER THAN MERELY cursing pirates, Menedemos got ready to fend them off, serving out weapons to the crew as he had on the voyage towards Attica. Seeing that, the Aphrodite's passenger took a hoplite's shortsword from his bag and belted it on around his waist. He had the air of a man who knew what to do with it.

  In a dead calm, the Aegean lay smooth as polished metal under that fierce, broiling sun. Sweat rivered off Menedemos as he stood at the steering oars. He guzzled heavily watered wine to keep some moisture in him. So did the rowers. They couldn't pull their best, not in heat like this. Diokles didn't chide them. The oarmaster knew they were giving what they could.

  Halfway between Sounion and Keos, the Aphrodite slid past a becalmed round ship. Sailors on the tubby merchantman shouted in alarm when they spied the merchant galley. Had she been a pirate ship, they couldn't possibly have escaped. The sailors on the round ship shouted again, this time in relief, when the akatos didn't turn toward them.

  Well before noon, Menedemos decided to put in at Keos. “We'll fill up our water jars and hope for wind tomorrow,” he told Sostratos. “I know we've only come about a hundred stadia, but even so. ...”

  To his relief, his cousin didn't feel like arguing. “We wouldn't have made Kythnos by sundown, anyhow, and we need the fresh water.”

  “That's right.” Menedemos dipped his head. “And the water here is better than the nasty stuff they have on Kythnos.”