Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

It would be easy, he thought. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip till he tasted blood. “I don't know,” he said woodenly. “I just don't know.”

And then, to his horrified dismay, his father's wife hung her head and quietly began to cry. In a small, broken voice, she said, “Maybe he's angry with me because I haven't got pregnant yet. I've done everything I know how to do—I've prayed, I've sacrificed—but I haven't caught. Maybe that's it.”

My father is an old man. His seed is bound to be cold. If I sow my seed in the furrow he's plowed, it would almost be doing him a favor. Menedemos sprang to his feet from the bench in the courtyard, so abruptly that Baukis blinked in surprise. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled. “I've just remembered—I've got an appointment down by the harbor. I'm late. I'm very late.”

The lie was clumsy. Baukis had to know it was a lie. Menedemos fled the house anyway, fled as if the Kindly Ones dogged his heels. And so they might, he thought as he looked around on the street, wondering where he would really go. If I stayed on the road I was traveling there, so they might.

He squeezed his hands into fists till his nails bit into his callused palms. Did Baukis know, did she have any idea, of the turmoil she roused in him? She'd never given any sign of it—but then, if she was a good wife, she wouldn't. Not all the seductions Menedemos tried succeeded.

He laughed, a harsh, bitter noise having nothing to do with mirth. This is a seduction I haven't tried, curse it. This is a seduction I'm not going to try. Baukis trusted him. By all the signs, she liked him. But she was his father's wife. “I can't,” he said, as if he were choking. “I can't. And I won't.”

All at once, he knew where he would go to keep his “appointment.” The closest brothel was only a couple of blocks away. That wasn't what he wanted, but maybe it would keep him from thinking about what he did want and—he told himself yet again—what he couldn't have.

Sostratos gaped at Himilkon. “What?” he said. “The conjugation of a verb in Aramaic changes, depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine? That's crazy!”

The Phoenician shook his head. “No, best one. It's only different.” “Everything's different,” Sostratos said. “None of the words is anything like Greek. You have all these choking noises in your language.”

“I have learned Greek,” Himilkon said. “That was as hard for me as this is for you.”

He was bound to be right. That made Sostratos feel no better. “And did you tell me your alpha-beta has no vowels, and you write it from right to left?” Himilkon nodded. Sostratos groaned. “That's . . . very strange, too,” he said.

“We like our aleph-bet as well as you like yours,” Himilkon told him. The Phoenician scratched his head. “Interesting how some of the letters have names that are almost the same.”

“It's no accident,” Sostratos answered. “We Hellenes learned the art of writing from the Phoenicians who came with King Kadmos. We changed the letters to suit our language better, but we learned them from your folk. That's what Herodotos says, anyhow.”

“If you changed them, you should not blame us for leaving them the way they were,” Himilkon said. “Shall we go on with the lesson now? You are doing pretty well, you really are.”

“You're only saying that to keep me coming back.” Sostratos didn't think he was doing well at all. Aramaic seemed harder than anything he'd tried to learn at the Lykeion.

But Himilkon said, “No, you have a good memory—I already knew that—and your ear is not bad. Anyone who hears you speak will know you for a Hellene (or at least for a foreigner, for in some of these little places they will never have heard of Hellenes), but people will be able to understand you.”

“Will I be able to understand them, though?” Sostratos said. “Following you is even harder than speaking, I think.”

“Do the best you can. When spring comes and you sail east, you may decide you want an interpreter after all. But even if you do, you are better off knowing some of the language. That will help keep him from cheating you.”

“True. Very sensible, too.” Sostratos thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if trying to knock in some wisdom. “Yes, let's get on with it.”

His brain felt distinctly overloaded as he walked back up toward the northern tip of the city and his home. He was going over feminine conjugations in his mind, and so engrossed in them that he didn't notice when someone called his name.

“Sostratos!”

The second—or was it the third?—time, that pierced his shield of concentration. He looked up. “Oh. Hail, Damonax. Where did you spring from?”

Damonax laughed. “Spring from? What, do you think Kadmos sowed a dragon's tooth and reaped me? Not likely, my dear. I've been walking up the street beside you for half a plethron, but you never knew it.”

Sostratos' cheeks heated. “Oh, dear. I'm afraid I didn't. I'm sorry. I was . . . thinking about something.”

“You must have been, by Zeus,” Damonax said. “Well, Sokrates was the same way if Platon's telling the truth, so you're in good company.”

Sokrates, Sostratos was sure, had never pondered the vagaries of Aramaic grammar. “I was talking about Kadmos just a little while ago,” he said, “though not in connection with the dragon's teeth.”

“What then?” Damonax asked. “How Euripides shows him in the Bakkhai?”

“No.” Sostratos tossed his head. “In aid of the Phoenicians' bringing their letters to Hellas.”

“Oh. That.” Damonax shrugged. “History interests me less than philosophy. Did I hear rightly that your splendid gryphon's skull was lost at sea?”

“I'm afraid you did,” Sostratos replied. “What are you doing in this part of the city?”

“Why, coming to see your father, of course. He must have told you I'd like to marry your sister,” Damonax said.

“Yes, he did. The news surprised me more than a little. We aren't a family with land out to the horizon.” And you come from that kind of family — or you did, Sostratos thought. Have you squandered everything? Is that it?

Damonax's smile, bright and bland, told him nothing. “Of course I expect she'd bring a suitable dowry with her,” he said, “but that would be true of any man seeking her hand, is it not so?”

It was so, and Sostratos knew it perfectly well. He did say, “What one side finds a suitable dowry may seem outrageous to the other.”

Damonax surprised him by saying, “Oh, I hope not, not here. I knew your sister's first husband—we weren't close, but he was good friends with my older brother, who was nearer his age. He would sing Erinna's praises by the hour, in the areas where a wife should be praised: her spinning, her weaving, the way she ran the household. So I already have some notion of what I'd be getting, you might say, and I'm looking forward to it.”

“Really?” Sostratos said. Maybe that explained why he was paying court to a widow and not to a maiden. Maybe. Sostratos still had his suspicions. He knocked on the door. When Gyges opened it, he told the Lydian majordomo, “Here's Damonax, whom I ran into on the street. He's come to talk with Father.”

“Yes, of course, sir—we're expecting him.” The house slave turned to Damonax and gave him a polite little bow. “Hail, most noble one.”

“Hail,” Damonax answered. “Is Lysistratos in the andron?”

“That's right,” Gyges said. “Just come with me. I'll take you there.” He glanced toward Sostratos. “You may find this interesting yourself.”

“So I may,” Sostratos said. “One of these days, I may have a daughter myself. I'd like to see how the dicker goes.”