Harry Turtledove: The Gryphon's Skull

“You've already missed a good deal,” Damonax said.

“That's all right. I expect you and Father will start raking things up again.”

The older man chuckled. “You're probably right.”

In the andron, Lysistratos waited till a slave had served out wine and olives and cheese before getting down to business. Sostratos' father said, “So Damonax, you don't think a dowry of two talents of silver is enough?”

“No, sir,” Damonax answered with polite firmness. “Neither do my kinsfolk.”

Lysistratos sighed. “I'm sorry to hear that, best one. Don't you think two talents would help you redeem some of your olive crop?”

Damonax flinched. “Redeem it? From whom?” Sostratos asked.

“From creditors, I'm afraid,” his father answered. “Damonax's family sank a lot of silver into part of a cargo on a round ship—and the ship either met pirates or it sank, because it never got to Alexandria. The year's olive crop is collateral.”

“How did you find that out?” Damonax demanded. “Our creditors swore they wouldn't blab.”

“They didn't,” Lysistratos said. “That's why I needed so long to figure this out. But I'm not wrong, am I, even if I pieced things together from hither and yon?”

“No, you're not wrong,” Damonax said bitterly. “It's a pity, though—the match would have been a good one.”

Sostratos got to his feet. “Father, walk out into the courtyard with me for a moment, would you?” he said.

Looking a little surprised, Lysistratos followed him out of the andron. In a low voice, he asked, “Well? What would you say to me that you don't care to have Damonax hear?”

“Only that he would be a good match for Erinna, if he'll settle for the dowry we want,” Sostratos answered. “I do think he wants her for herself as well as for the money; he told me how her first husband praised her as a housekeeper to him. And Erinna does want to marry again, and we saw matches for her aren't so easy to come by when that other family chose a younger girl in her place.”

His father looked thoughtful. “Something to that,” he admitted. “And Damonax would be beholden to us for going forward, and his family's fortunes may recover.” He sighed. “You're right about your sister—she does want children of her own. A father's not supposed to put much weight on such things, but how can I help it?” He dipped his head in sudden decision. “If he agrees to the dowry, I'll make the match.”

When Sostratos and Lysistratos came back into the andron, Damonax rose. “I'll be going,” he said. “Not much point to any more talk, is there?” Pained resignation had replaced bitterness.

“That depends,” Lysistratos said. “You're not going to squeeze more than two talents' worth of dowry out of me, but we'll go on from there if you can live with that.”

Damonax sank back onto his stool as if his legs didn't want to support him. “You would do that?” he whispered.

“Hard to blame a man too much for wanting to keep his family's money problems to himself,” Sostratos said. Not all Hellenes would have agreed with him, but he was an intensely private man himself, and understood the urge to put such embarrassments in chests, as it were, and hope no one else found out about them.

His father said, “Tell me one thing very plainly, Damonax: you've lost your crop for the year, is it not so, but not the land itself?”

“Yes.” Jerkily, Damonax dipped his head. “Yes, that is so. I swear it by Zeus and all the other gods.”

“All right, then,” Lysistratos said. “You people can recover from that, and even if two talents is less than you would have wanted, it will go a long way toward keeping you and your family afloat.”

“Thank you, sir,” Damonax said. “I am in your debt—we're all in your debt.” Sostratos smiled to himself. That was what he'd had in mind. Gratitude and a sense of obligation didn't always last, of course, but sometimes they did. Damonax went on, “The marriage will give you legitimate grandchildren, sir.”

“That's the point of marriage, after all,” Sostratos' father said. “Now go on home. Make sure your kin are satisfied, and we'll take it from there.”

After Damonax had left, Erinna came down from the women's quarters. When Sostratos told her of the agreement, she whooped with delight and threw herself into his arms. “This is wonderful!” she said. “It's like a second chance. It is a second chance.”

“May everything go as well as it possibly can, my dear,” Sostratos said. “Gods grant it be so.”

“Gods grant it indeed,” Lysistratos said. He eyed Sostratos. “One day before too long, son, we'll find you a match, too. Thirty's a good age for a man to wed, and you're getting there.”

“Me?” Sostratos hadn't thought about it much. Marriage seemed neither real nor important to him. He patted his sister on the shoulder. She wanted a home to manage, but every port on the Inner Sea was his. The gods made me a man, not a woman; a Hellene, not a barbarian , he thought. Truly, I'm the lucky one.

The Gryphon's Skull is set in 309 B.C. I found the idea for the novel— that the skull of a Protoceratops, weathered out of its stony matrix, might have given the ancient world the basis from which it invented the gryphon—in John R, Horner's fascinating book, Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing an Evolutionary Saga (co-written with Edwin Dobb; HarperCollins: New York, 1997). It was first advanced by classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor. During early Hellenistic times, Greek cities were founded as far east and north as modern Afghanistan; if ever a dinosaur skull from Mongolia could—almost—have come to Athens, that was the era. Obviously, such a skull never truly reached the Greek scholarly community. I hope I've made this near miss plausible and interesting, which is, I think, the most one can reasonably expect from a historical novelist.

Real characters appearing in the story are Menedemos, Euxenides of Phaselis, Ptolemaios of Egypt, and Antigonos' rebellious nephew Polemaios (whose name is also spelled as Ptolemaios in the surviving histories, but Polemaios in inscriptions—I gladly seized the difference to differentiate him from his more famous contemporary). Others mentioned but not on stage include Alkimos of Epeiros, Antigonos, his sons Demetrios and Philippos, Lysimakhos, Kassandros, Seleukos, Polyperkhon, Eurydike, Berenike, and Ptolemaios' son Ptolemaios, who was indeed born on Kos in this year. Over this entire era hangs the enormous shadow of Alexander the Great, now dead fourteen years.

Exactly how Polemaios came from Euboia to Kos is not known; it might well have been by stealth, as plenty of people between the one island and the other wanted him dead. Equally unknown is Menedemos' connection, if any, to the invention of the trihemiolia. A few years later, however, he is the first man known to have captained such a vessel, so the connection might well have existed.

I have for the most part spelled names of places and people as a Greek would have: thus Knidos, not Cnidus; Lysimakhos, not Lysimachus. I have broken this rule for a few place names that have well-established English spellings: Rhodes, Athens, the Aegean Sea, and the like. I have also broken it for Alexander the Great and his father, Philip of Macedon. This helps distinguish them from the large number of men named Alexandras and Philippos, and they deserve such distinction.

All translations from the Greek are my own. As in Over the Wine-Dark Sea, I claim no particular literary merit for them, only that they convey what the original says. Menedemos' bit of doggerel in Chapter 12 is a poem of Palladas' from the Greek Anthology that actually dates from the fourth or fifth century A.D. I concede the anachronism—but Menedemos might have said it, even if he didn't.