The Gryphon's Skull

by Harry Turtledove

  But when the poisoner came back, he said, “No, it's too late now. He may take a little longer, but he's still a dead man. With hemlock, you need to heave it up right away to have any chance of coming through.”

  Polemaios vomited again half an hour later. He cursed Ptolemaios, and also all the men who were watching him die. Sostratos spat into the bosom of his chiton to turn aside the omen. He wasn't the only one, either.

  “Cold,” Antigonos' nephew moaned. “So cold. And it's getting dark.” He paused, then tossed his head. “It can't be so late in the day already. The cursed drug must be stealing my sight.” Despite the ravages the hemlock worked on his body, his mind stayed clear. Sostratos would have preferred delirium.

  After a while, Polemaios fouled himself, adding one more stench to the air in the andron. The man who'd given him the hemlock came up to him and said, “I'm going to feel of you, to find out how far the drug has gone.”

  “Go ahead,” Polemaios answered. “I can't feel any of myself down past my middle anymore.”

  The poisoner probed at his groin and belly. “Your body's cold up to your navel. When it gets to your chest, that will be the end, because your heart will stop and you won't be able to breathe.”

  “I wish it would hurry up,” the big Macedonian said. “I don't want to go on lying here smelling like Ptolemaios.” Even as death advanced on him, he had the spirit to revile the man who was its author. But the ruler of Egypt had had the right of it, too: in the Phaidon, Platon had surely cleaned up the way Sokrates perished, not wanting to present his beloved teacher in an unflattering light.

  Polemaios began fighting for air, each breath coming harder than the one before. “Furies take—all of you—and especially—Ptolemaios,” he said, forcing the words out in little bursts. With ever increasing effort, he took a few more breaths, and then, after one last soft sigh, breathed no more.

  The man who'd given him the drug took hold of his wrist, feeling for a pulse like a physician. When the fellow let go, Polemaios' arm flopped down limply. The poisoner dipped his head to his audience. “It's over, best ones.”

  “About time, too,” grumbled the officer next to Sostratos. He got to his feet and stretched. “I really have to piss.”

  Another officer said, “Remember, we've got to mix his men in amongst our own so there aren't enough of 'em in any one place to give us trouble.”

  That struck Sostratos as a good idea, and very much the sort of thing Ptolemaios would think of. Yet another officer said, “As long as we pay 'em on time, they shouldn't cause too many problems. Mercenaries worry about what they get first and everything else afterwards.” He added, “Let's get out of here. This place stinks.”

  Sostratos was glad to breathe fresh air out in the courtyard, too. His shadow puddled at his feet. It was close to noon. He hadn't realized he'd been in the andron so long. Several slaves went into the room. They came out carrying Polemaios' corpse. Sostratos wondered whether whoever owned this place knew it had just been used for an execution. Were the house his own, it wouldn't have been just a matter of making it ritually clean once more. Even after that, he wouldn't have cared to hold a symposion, say, in the chamber where a man had been put to death.

  Fortunately, that wasn't his worry. He wouldn't see this place again, and he was glad of it. A soldier politely opened the door for him. When he stepped out into the street, a guard asked, “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

  How am I supposed to answer that? I was curious about how hemlock works, but did I really want to watch a man die? Finding no way to separate the one from the other, Sostratos sighed and said, “I suppose I did.” He hurried away before the guard could find any other questions he didn't care to think about.

  When he got back to the harbor, Menedemos hailed him with, “It's over, eh?” Sostratos dipped his head. His cousin went on, “How did he do?”

  “As well as he could,” Sostratos answered. “Ptolemaios was right— it's an uglier business than Platon made it out to be.” He could change the subject here, could and did: “How's the doing?”

  Before Menedemos could answer, the sound of a man pounding on something with a mallet came from under the poop deck, Sostratos' cousin beamed. “That's Nikagoras,” he said. “He got here just after you went into the polis, and he's been banging away like Talos the bronze man ever since.” He raised his voice: “Oë, Nikagoras! Come out for a cup of wine and say hello to my cousin,”

  More banging, and then someone—presumably Nikagoras—spoke from below: “Let me finish driving this treenail home. After that, I'm your man.” The banging resumed.

  “He's already joining the timbers, is he?” Sostratos was impressed. “He does know his business.”

  “I heard that. I should hope I do,” Nikagoras said. After still more banging, he grunted. “There. That'll hold the son of a whore.”

  “Best part of it is, Ptolemaios is paying for him, too,” Menedemos said.

  “That is good news,” Sostratos agreed. “Being laid up here has cost us too much already.” He lowered his voice: “Maybe he's grateful we didn't sail away with Andgonos' nephew.”

  “Maybe.” Menedemos also spoke quietly. “To the crows with me if I know where we would have taken him, though, even if we'd wanted to take him anywhere.”

  Sostratos dipped his head. “A point.” Polemaios had made enemies of all the Macedonian marshals except Lysimakhos up in Thrace and Seleukos in the distant east, and no doubt the only reason he hadn't fallen foul of them, too, was that he hadn't had much to do with them.

  Nikagoras came up the stairs and onto the poop deck. He was in his early forties, naked as a sailor, with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and scarred, gnarled hands. “Hail,” he said to Sostratos, and wiped the back of one hand across his sweaty forehead.

  “Hail,” Sostratos said. “Sounds as though you're making good progress.”

  “Sure am,” Nikagoras said. “Thanks,” he told Menedemos, who'd given him the promised wine. He spilled a feu7 drops onto the deck, drank, and then gave his attention back to Sostratos, “After all the battle damage I've repaired lately, this is almost like a holiday for me.”

  “I hadn't thought of it like that,” Sostratos said.

  “You would have if you were in my line of work,” the carpenter told him, “Rams are bad enough. That's collision damage, too, like what you took, only worse, on account of a ram's going fast and the fins concentrate where it hits. But if you think that's rough, you ought to try patching up a ship that's had a couple-three thirty-mina stones smack into her right about at the waterline.”

  “Bad?” Sostratos asked.

  “Worse,” Nikagoras said. “Sometimes it seems like you end up taking out half the planks and replacing them. And naturally the captain's screaming at you that he's got to get back into the fight as fast as he can, and that everything'll be buggered forever if you don't get him fixed up right away. You want to drown big-mouthed bastards like that, by the gods—they think you're too cursed stupid to figure things out for yourself.”

  “I'm just glad you're finally here,” Menedemos said. “It's taken a month of screaming at people to get a carpenter at all. Of course, the 's no warship.”

  “No, but you can fight if you have to. And,” Nikagoras said shrewdly, “a lot of the time, being able to fight means you don't have to, doesn't it?”

  “That's right,” Sostratos said. “You're a man who sees how things work.”

  “I try,” the carpenter said. “And that's a game I know myself. I haven't been in a brawl in close to twenty years now, on account of I look like I'm tough.” He made a fist, then grinned. “Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But nobody wants to find out the hard way.”

  “Fair enough,” Sostratos said. Men seldom wanted to brawl with him, either, because he was well above average size. He knew perfectly well that he wasn't particularly tough, but that wasn't obvious from looking at him.

  Nikagoras gulped the rest of the wine, wiped his mouth, and se
t down the cup. “Thank you kindly, best one. That hit the spot,” he told Menedemos, and then disappeared under the poop deck once more. A moment later, he started banging away with the mallet again.

  “A good man,” Sostratos said. “I wonder if you could persuade him to go to sea.”

  His cousin laughed. “My dear, you're reading my mind. I asked him that very thing, but he said, 'I repair ships for a living. think I'd be daft enough to want to travel on one when I know what all can happen to them?' “

  “Hmm.” Sostratos plucked at his beard. “What does that say about us?”

  Menedemos laughed again. “Nothing good, I'm certain.”

  “Come on, you lazy whoresons,” Diokles called to the rowers. “Put your backs into it, and your arms, too. Do you still remember how to pull an oar? Rhyppapai!. Rhyppapai!”

  A couple of men groaned as they stroked. Listening to them, Menedemos could tell how much the unnatural layoff had cost them as a crew. “We'll have plenty of sore muscles tonight,” he predicted as the glided out of Kos' harbor.

  “That we will,” the keleustes agreed. “Blistered hands, too, same as we do when we start out in the spring.”

  “If they'll rub oil on their hands as soon as they start getting raw, they won't blister so much,” Sostratos said.

  “Not a bad notion,” Diokles agreed, smiting his bronze square to give the rowers their stroke. “I'd do that myself every now and again when I pulled an oar, and I did enough rowing to make my palms hard as horn.”

  Menedemos kept the merchant galley close to the coast of Kos. Across the channel, Ptolemaios' ships and soldiers still laid siege to Halikarnassos. Stopping up a harbor tight as a wine jar wasn't easy, though. Every so often, one or two of Antigonos' war galleys would slip out and sink or capture any ships they could catch, Menedemos didn't want to make things easy for them.

  He glanced over to his cousin. “Oë, Sostratos, there's history going on, just a few stadia away.”

  “Well, so there is,” Sostratos said. “But it's not going on very fast, is it? I don't think I'll miss much if I look northwest instead of northeast.”

  Look towards Athens, he meant. Menedemos said. “We're not there yet, and we're not going there yet, either. Why don't you look due north instead? That's where Miletos lies, near enough. We need the money we'll make there, too.”

  “I know,” Sostratos said, “Every word you say is true. I understand that. But I have a hard time caring.”

  “You'd better not,” Menedemos warned him. “When we trade there, we'll have to haggle extra hard, squeeze all the silver we can out of the merchants. If you're mooning over that miserable gryphon's skull, you won't do us any good.”

  “I know,” Sostratos said again. But his gaze went back to the rower's bench under which the skull was stowed. A lover's gaze might have gone to his beloved in the same way. A lover's gaze would have been no more tender, either.

  “Me, I'll be glad when we get to Athens, just so we're rid of the miserable, ugly thing,” Menedemos said.

  “Anything you can learn from is beautiful,” his cousin said stiffly.

  “When I want beauty, I'll find it in a girl's flesh, not a gryphon's bone,” Menedemos said.

  “There's beauty of the flesh, and then there's beauty of the mind,” Sostratos said. “The gryphon's skull has none of the one, but thinking about it may lead those who love wisdom to the other.”

  After a few heartbeats, Menedemos tossed his head. “I'm afraid that's beyond me, my dear. Nothing you say can make that bone seem anything but ugly to me.”

  “Let it go, then,” Sostratos said, somewhat to Menedemos' sur­prise: when his cousin felt philosophical, he was often inclined to lecture. A moment later, Sostratos explained himself: “I've got Platon and Sokrates on my mind, that's all.”

  “Why?” Menedemos asked. Before Sostratos could, he answered his own question: “Oh. Hemlock, of course.”

  “That's right,” Sostratos said. “There's a good deal of talk about the relationship between physical beauty and real love in the Symposion.”

  “Is there? Well, that's more interesting than philosophy usually gets.”

  “Scoffer.”

  “Scoffer?” Menedemos assumed a hurt expression. “Now you've gone and got me interested, and you complain I'm scoffing. What does Sokrates have to say about it? Or should I ask, what does Platon have to say?”

  “That's a good question,” Sostratos said thoughtfully. “There's probably no one left alive who can say how much of what Platon put in Sokrates' mouth really belongs there, and how much comes from the younger man.”

  “Don't get sidetracked,” Menedemos told him. “What does beauty have to do with real love? That's a lot more interesting than who wrote what.”

  “You were the one who brought it up, but never mind,” Sostratos said. “If you follow the argument in the Symposion, not a great deal. Physical beauty leads you on toward beauty of the mind, and that's where real love lies.”

  “Sounds like an old man's argument to me,” Menedemos said. “If your prick won't stand, you talk about the beauty of the mind so you don't have to fret yourself about it.”

  “You are a scoffer,” Sostratos said, and then, “I just had a nasty thought.”

  “What's that?”

  “Do we dare put in at Miletos? We spent all that time stuck in Kos when we hadn't planned to. By now, news that we brought Polemaios there will have spread all over the place. Antigonos' men may want to roast us over a slow fire.”

  “I know you. You're still looking for an excuse to head straight for Athens,” Menedemos said. “That one won't do, though. Remember, Demetrios of Phaleron is Kassandros' puppet, and Kassandros won't be happy to find out Polemaios got loose, either.” He suddenly grinned. “Besides, it's not a worry anymore.”

  “Why not?” Sostratos asked.

  “I'll tell you why not. Suppose they blame us for letting Polemaios get loose so he can plague his uncle. What do we say? We say, 'Well, O marvelous one, you don't need to lose any sleep about that, be­cause we watched Polemaios die.' They won't be angry at us for that news—they'll be glad to hear it.”

  His cousin looked sheepish. “You're right. You're absolutely right, of course. I can't think of anybody who wouldn't be glad to hear Polemaios was dead.”

  “Neither can I,” Menedemos said. “He made himself loved as much for his mind as for his beauty, didn't he?”

  Sostratos started just to dip his head, but broke out laughing with the motion half done. “You're not just a scoffer, you're a dangerous scoffer, I think you'd make Sokrates choke on his wine.”

  “No, no—Sokrates choked down his hemlock, the same as Polemaios did,” Menedemos replied.

  He and Sostratos kept on chaffing each other as the sailed north and west through the strait between the Anatolian main­land and the island of Kalymnos. This time, the akatos had fine weather for the journey. One of Ptolemaios' war galleys came out from the newly captured town of Myndos to look her over, but turned back on recognizing what ship it was. “I remember you,” an officer aboard the five called to Menedemos. “You're the fellow who brought what's-his-name—Antigonos' nephew—back to Kos.”

  “That's right,” Menedemos answered, lifting a hand from the steering-oar tillers to wave to the war galley.

  After the five swung away toward the east, Sostratos said, “You didn't tell him what's-his-name was dead.”

  “I certainly didn't,” Menedemos said. “He would have wasted an hour of our time asking questions, and we haven't got an hour to spare, not if we want to make Miletos by sundown. You're not the only one who can be in a hurry to get where we're going, you know.”

  Not long after the war galley came out from the mainland, the passed a sponge boat most likely from Kalymnos, which had a lot of sponge divers. A trident in his right hand to free sponges from the ocean floor and a large stone clutched to his chest to make him sink quickly, a diver leaped off the stern of the boat and splashed into th
e blue water. He came up again a couple of minutes later, hanging on to black sponges of varying sizes. The other men on the boat took the sponges from him and hauled him aboard again. Naked and dripping, he waved to the .

  From his station at an oar, Moskhion said, “This is what I was talking about when we fothered the sailcloth over the planks. Gods know I'd rather be here than over there doing that.”

  “I believe you,” Menedemos said. As he had to the men on Ptolemaios' five, he did wave back. “He doesn't think we're pirates, anyhow. Either that or he knows there's nothing worth stealing on his boat.”

  “I wouldn't want his sponges, that's certain,” Sostratos said. “They don't look like the ones you'd use in a fine bathhouse.”

  “Of course they don't,” Moskhion said. “They haven't been cleaned and dried yet.”

  “Sponge diving is as hard a way to make a living as any other kind of fishing,” Menedemos said.

  “Harder,” Moskhion said with conviction. “Believe me—harder.”

  ''When you get right down to it, there's no easy way to make a living,” Sostratos said.

  “I'd rather be doing this than that,” Menedemos said. Sostratos and Moskhion both dipped their heads in agreement, Menedemos went on, “Easy work, now—wouldn't you like to be a sophist and make speeches in the market square for money?”

  “By the dog of Egypt, I would,” Moskhion said.

  “It can't be that easy,” Sostratos said. “If it were, more men would be able to make a living at it. Most of the ones who try fail, you know. You need to be able to think on your feet, and people have to want to listen to you. Otherwise, you go hungry.”

  Menedemos hadn't thought about that. Sostratos had a way of reminding him of things he hadn't thought of. “Maybe you're right,” Menedemos allowed. “It must be something like being an actor.”

  “Not so easy as acting, I'd say,” his cousin answered. “A sophist hasn't got a mask to hide behind, the way an actor does.”