The Gryphon's Skull

by H. N. Turteltaub

  “What?” Sostratos artfully cupped a hand to his ear. “Say that again. I couldn't hear you.”

  His performance might have won applause on the comic stage, but it failed to impress Antigonos' soldiers. They wasted no time in consultation now. One word came very clearly over the widening expanse of water: “Shoot!”

  The handful of archers on the shore drew their bows and did their best. Sostratos thought the Aphrodite had got safely out of range. Indeed, most of the arrows splashed into the sea well short of the akatos. But one shaft, either shot with a superhuman tug on the bow or pushed along by a vagrant puff of breeze, thudded into the ship's planking a few cubits from Sostratos. That could have killed me, he thought with a sick dizziness he recognized only belatedly as fear.

  Menedemos pulled in on one steering-oar tiller and out on the other till the Aphrodite's bow swung toward the south. “Regular stroke!” Diokles commanded, and the rowers shifted from backing oars as smoothly as if they'd been working together for years. The archers kept on shooting, but now all their shafts fell short.

  “Lower the sail from the yard,” Menedemos called, and the sailors leaped to obey. The great linen square sail descended from the yard as the men released the brails that had tightly held it there. The sail wasn't a single piece of linen; for strength, it was sewn from many smaller squares. It also had light lines stretched horizontally across its front, perpendicular to the brails, giving it something of the appearance of a pavement made from square slabs of stone. The breeze blew from the north, as it usually did at this season of the year. As the sail filled with wind, the lines thrummed and the mast grunted in its socket as it leaned forward under the pull of the wind and got to work.

  Sostratos ascended to the poop deck. Menedemos grinned at him. “You did a good job with those soldiers,” he said. “You kept them confused till we were too far away for it to matter.” He snickered. 'Want to buy some silk?' “

  “That was foolish of me.” Sostratos was never satisfied with his own performance. “I should have said we came from Haiikarnassos or Knidos. Antigonos holds all the mainland cities, but Kos belongs to Ptolemaios.”

  “Don't worry about it. It didn't matter,” his cousin said.

  A new and unpleasant thought occurred to Sostratos. “You don't suppose they'll send a trireme after us, do you?”

  “I hope not!” Menedemos exclaimed, and spat into the bosom of his tunic to avert the evil omen. Sostratos was a modern man who prided himself on rationality, but he did the same thing. It can't hurt, he thought with a twinge of guilt.

  “I didn't see any triremes in the harbor,” Diokles said. Before that could do much to reassure Sostratos, the oarmaster went on, “I don't know how much it matters, though. A pentekonter or a hemiolia packed with soldiers could do for us nicely. Just depends on how bad that captain wants us.”

  He was right. Sostratos felt it at once. By Menedemos’ dismayed expression, so did he. When Diokles spoke of matters pertaining to the sea, he almost always knew what he was talking about. Menedemos called, “Oë, Kissidas!”

  “What is it?” the olive merchant asked.

  “How bad does Hipparkhos want you dead? Will he throw some of his mercenaries into a ship and come after us?”

  The blunt question made one of the women up on the foredeck begin to wail. But Kissidas tossed his head. “I don't think so. Now that I'm gone from Kaunos, he'll just go on about his business. He suspected me because I was Rhodian proxenos, not because I was myself, if you know what I mean.” He paused, then snarled a curse. “But I'll bet he steals my groves and my oil press, the son of a whore.”

  “If Ptolemaios really is coming west through Lykia, nobody who backs Antigonos will have long to enjoy them,” Sostratos said.

  “That's true.” Kissidas brightened. He asked, “How long a sail is it to Rhodes? Do you know, I've never been to your polis, even though I've represented her in Kaunos for years. I've never been farther away than the edge of my groves.”

  “If the wind holds, we should be in the harbor in the early afternoon,” Menedemos answered. “Even if the wind doesn't hold, we'll make it before nightfall. I'll put men at the oars to make sure we do, in case you're wrong and Hipparkhos does try to come after us.”

  The Rhodian proxenos—now, the exile—bowed. “From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for rescuing me and mine.”

  “My pleasure,” Menedemos replied. Then mischief glinted in his eyes. In a voice only Sostratos and Diokles could hear, he murmured, “From the heart of my bottom, you're welcome.”

  Diokles guffawed. Sostratos snorted and gave his cousin a severe look. “You really have read too much Aristophanes for your own

  “There's no such thing as too much Aristophanes,” Menedemos said.

  Before Sostratos could rise to that—and he would have, as surely as a tunny would rise to the anchovy impaled on a fisherman's hook—Kissidas called back to the poop in plaintive tones: “Excuse me, gentlemen, but does this boat always jerk and sway so?” He followed the question with a gulp audible all the way from the fore-deck.

  “He hasn't got any stomach at all, has he?” Menedemos muttered.

  “No,” Sostratos said. He sometimes got sick in what most sailors reckoned moderate seas, but this light pitching didn't bother him in the least. “Good thing it is only a day's journey.” To a seasick man, of course, only was the wrong word; the voyage would seem to last forever.

  His cousin must have been thinking along the same lines, for he spoke up urgently: “If you have to heave, O best one, in the name of the gods lean out over the rail before you do.”

  “Good thing we've got a following breeze,” Diokles said with wry amusement. “Otherwise, you'd have to explain the difference between leeward and windward—if he didn't find out by getting it blown back into his face.”

  Menedemos laughed the callous laugh of a man with a bronze stomach. “One lesson like that and you remember forever.”

  Well before noon, Kissidas and one of the women of his household bent over the rail, puking. From his post at the steering oars, Menedemos avidly stared forward. “Trying to see what she looks like without her veil?” Sostratos asked, his voice dry.

  “Well, of course,” his cousin answered. “How often do you get the chance to look at a respectable woman unveiled? Unwrapped, you might say?”

  “You might,” Sostratos said as another spasm of vomiting wracked the woman. “Tell me, though, my dear—if she came back here right now and wanted to give you a kiss, how would you like that?”

  Menedemos started to say something, then checked himself. “Mm, maybe not right now.” But he kept looking ahead. After a moment, he gave a dismissive shrug. “Besides, she's not very pretty. She must have brought a fat dowry.”

  The familiar bulk of the island of Rhodes swelled in the south, dead ahead. Sostratos said, “We will get in not long after noon.”

  “So we will,” Menedemos replied.

  Sostratos gave him a curious look. “Aren't you glad to be able to spend a couple of extra days at home?”

  “No,” Menedemos said. Goodness, Sostratos thought as his cousin steered the akatos south without another word and with his face as set and hard as iron. His quarrel with his father must he worse than I thought.

  “OöP!” Diokles called, and the rowers rested at their oars. Sailors tossed lines to a couple of longshoremen, who made the Aphrodite fast to one of the quays in the great harbor of Rhodes.

  “What are you doing here?” one of the longshoremen asked, looping the coarse flax rope round a post. “Nobody thought you'd be back till fall. Get in trouble up in Kaunos?” He leered at die merchant galley, and at Menedemos in particular.

  “We had to get out in a hurry, all right,” Menedemos said, and the longshoreman's leer got wider. You haven't heard the news, then, Menedemos thought. He smiled, too, but only to himself. After a suitably dramatic pause, he went on, “Ptolemaios has an army and a fleet operating in Lykia. He's taken Phaselis, an
d he's heading west— he'll probably take the whole country. Antigonos’ garrison commander in Kaunos was going to seize the Rhodian proxenos there, and maybe us, too, so we grabbed Kissidas and his family and got away. *

  “Ptolemaios is in Lykia?” That wasn't just the one longshoreman; that was almost everyone within earshot, speaking as if in chorus. Heads swung to the northeast, as if men expected to see Ptolemaios from where they stood. An excited gabble rose.

  “That will be all over the polis by sunset,” Sostratos remarked.

  “It should be. It's important,” Menedemos said. “Now we ought to take Kissidas and his people to the Kaunian proxenos here. Do you know who handles Kaunos' affairs in Rhodes?”

  “Isn't it that moneychanger named Hagesidamos?” Sostratos said. “He'll be easy to find—he'll have a table in the agora where foreigners can turn their silver into Rhodian money.”

  “And where he can turn a profit,” Menedemos added. “Moneychangers never starve.” He raised his voice: “Kissidas! Oe, Kissidas! Gather up your kin and come along with us. We'll take you to the Kaunian proxenos here. He'll make arrangements for all of you.”

  “Send the gangplank across to the pier,” Kissidas said. “When I reach dry land again, I'll kiss the ground.”

  Menedemos gave the order. Bald head shining in the sun, Kissidas hurried up onto the quay, followed by his kinsfolk. He bustled down it to the end, stepped off onto the soil of Rhodes, and kept his promise. Sostratos took an obolos out of his mouth and gave it to a fellow standing on the wharf. “Go to my father's house, near the temple to Demeter in the north end of the city. Let him know we've returned, and that we'll see him soon. Menedemos' father lives next door. Tell him, too.”

  “Yes, tell my father we're home,” Menedemos echoed with a singular lack of enthusiasm. Eager to put off the moment when he saw Philodemos again, he went on, “Let's go scare up old Hagesidamos.” He started up the gangplank himself.

  His cousin followed, but kept looking back over his shoulder. “Are you sure. . . things will be all right here?”

  “I know you.” Menedemos laughed in his face. “You don't mean 'things.' You mean your precious gryphon's skull. Answer me this, my dear: what thief would be mad enough to steal it?”

  Sostratos' ears turned red. “I think the skull is worth something,” he said with dignity. “I think the philosophers in Athens will agree with me, too.”

  “Anyone else?” Menedemos asked. Sostratos proved his basic honesty by tossing his head. Menedemos laughed again. It wasn't likely, and he knew it. He waved to Kissidas. “Come along with my cousin and me. We'll take you to the proxenos.”

  Having done that, though, he had little choice but to go home. His father waited for him in the courtyard. “I heard you were home,” Philodemos said when he came in, “but I haven't heard why yet.”

  “I'll tell you,” Menedemos said. He plunged into the tale, heading for the andron as he did. “—and so,” he finished a little later, “I didn't see what else I could do except bring Kissidas and his family back here to Rhodes.”

  His father studied him. He's looking through me, not at me, Menedemos thought nervously. Somewhere outside the men's room, a woodpecker drummed on a tree trunk. The sudden noise made Menedemos start. “No need to jump, son,” Philodemos said. “I don't see what else you could have done, either. If a man's made himself your guest-friend, you can't very well leave him behind to be harmed by his enemies.”

  Menedemos tried not to show how relieved he was. “My thought exactly. He took us in even though he knew it might anger Antigonos' captain. And then this news of Ptolemaios. . .”

  “Yes.” Philodemos dipped his head. “That's part of the picture, too. If Ptolemaios is coming west across Lykia, it puts the war right on our doorstep. I wish it were farther away. If he and Antigonos start hammering away at each other next door to us, one of them or the other is bound to notice what fine harbors we have and what useful subjects we'd make.”

  “I wish I thought you were wrong, sir.” Menedemos wished that for more reasons than one. Not only did he worry about his polis, he also worried about agreeing with his father. To keep from thinking about it, he changed the subject: “What sort of opson will Sikon have for us tonight?”

  “I don't know,” Philodemos replied, “He ran out to the market square as soon as that fellow from the harbor came here shouting that the Aphrodite had come in. He was muttering something as he went, something about why hadn't anyone told him.” He rolled his eyes. “You know what cooks are like.”

  “Everybody knows what cooks are like,” Menedemos said. Like any prosperous household's cook, Sikon was a slave. But, because he ruled the kitchen like a king, he often acted as if he were master of the whole house. Menedemos rose from his chair, “If you'll excuse me, Father, I think I'll go in there and find out what he's up to.”

  “Good luck.” Even iron-willed Philodemos often lost his skirmishes with Sikon.

  The cook was a middle-aged man, on the plump side—who would have wanted a man who didn't care for the meals he turned out? “Snooping, are you?” he said when Menedemos stuck his head in the door.

  “I live here, every now and again,” Menedemos said mildly. He didn't want to quarrel with the cook, either. A man who did that often regretted it in short order.

  “Oh. It's you, young master.” Sikon relaxed. “I thought it'd be your stepmother.” He snorted, sounding amazingly like a bad-tempered donkey. Philodemos' second wife was ten years younger than her stepson. The cook went on, “You won't pitch a fit if I spend a couple of oboloi so the house has something better than sprats or salt fish for opson.”

  “Baukis takes the business of being a wife seriously.” Menedemos didn't want to criticize the girl. What he wanted to do ... Had she been another man's, any other man's, wife, he would have gone after her without hesitation. He knew himself well enough to be sure of that. But even he fought shy of adultery with his own father's new spouse.

  “Seriously!” Sikon threw his hands in the air. “You'd think we'd all eat nothing but barley porridge for the next ten years if I buy something tasty. Can you talk some sense into her, young master? Your father doesn't want to do it; that's pretty plain. She just looks down her nose at me, the way free people do with slaves sometimes, but maybe she'd listen to you.”

  “Maybe,” Menedemos said uncomfortably. He didn't want reasons to talk with Baukis; he wanted reasons to stay away from her. But Sikon had given him an opening to shift the subject, and he seized it: “What sort of tasty things did you find this afternoon?”

  “Some nice shrimp—they were still wriggling when I got 'em,” Sikon answered. “I'm going to glaze them with honey and oregano, the way your father likes. And a fellow there in the market had the first good eels I've seen this spring. What do you say to eel pie, baked with cabbage and mushrooms and silphium from Kyrene? And a cheesecake, to use up the rest of the honey I got for the glaze.”

  “What do I say? I say hurry up and cook, and quit wasting your time talking to me. Eels!” Menedemos had all he could do not to lick his chops like a hungry dog. He didn't ask what the seafood had cost. All he wanted to do was eat it.

  And he did, along with his father in the andron. He supposed Sikon also sent some of the splendid supper to Baukis in the women's quarters. She would surely find out from Philodemos what the cook had bought; sharing the bounty might make her better inclined to him. If anything could, that would.

  As he usually did, Menedemos woke before sunrise the next morning. He went to the kitchen for some barley rolls—leftovers from sitos at supper—and olive oil and wine for breakfast. Carrying them out to the courtyard, he sat down on a stone bench there and watched the sky get light. He would have done the same thing lying on the Aphrodite's poop deck after a night spent at sea.

  A couple of slaves dipped their heads to him as they ducked into the kitchen for their morning meal. They ate the same sort of breakfast he did; Philodemos wasn't the sort of master who gav
e them a precisely measured ration of flour every day and made sure they didn't sneak into the kitchen to supplement it. To make up for that generosity, he worked them hard.

  When a laughing dove fluttered down into the courtyard, Mene-demos tossed a small chunk of roll onto the ground in front of it. It walked over, head bobbing, examined the morsel, and ate it. They were very tame birds. Had Sikon tossed it crumbs, it would have been with a view toward netting it for a meal.

  Someone came down the stairs and out into the courtyard. Tame or not, the dove took off, wings whirring. “Good day, Menedemos,” Baukis said.

  “Good day,” Menedemos answered gravely.

  “How are you?” his stepmother asked. The title, applied to a girl who couldn't have had more than sixteen years, was as absurd as Sikon's snort had made it. She was no great beauty, and even at sixteen had hardly more breasts than a boy.

  “I'm well, thanks.” Menedemos kept his tone formal. He knew what his father saw in her: dowry, family connection, the chance for another son or two. He was much less sure what he saw in Baukis himself. Maybe nothing but the chance to outrage his father in the greatest possible way. But maybe something more, too. Doing his best not to think about that, he asked, “And you?”

  She thought before answering, “Well enough.” She was no fool; the way she said even commonplace things showed that. And so? Menedemos jeered at himself. Are you Sostratos, to look for what a woman has between her ears before you look for what she has between her legs? Baukis went on, “I didn't expect to see you back in Rhodes so soon.”

  “I didn't expect to be in one of Antigonos' cities so close to where Ptolemaios started his campaign,” Menedemos replied.

  “This endless war is liable to be the death of trade,” she said. “That would be bad for Rhodes, and especially bad for this family,”

  “True,” Menedemos agreed. No, she was no fool; plenty of men who stood up and blathered in the Assembly couldn't see so clearly.

  Her expression sharpened. “You surprised Sikon when you came home, too. Do you know how much he paid for last night's shrimp and eels?”