Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

Menedemos clapped his hands together. “Euge!” he called to the merchant galley's crew. “Very well done! It's a long haul from Kythnos to here.”

“Don't we know it!” somebody—Teleutas—said. Menedemos would have bet he'd be the one to speak up and carp, but he'd done as much as anybody else at the oars, and so he'd earned the right.

“Amorgos tomorrow,” Menedemos said. “Then Kos, and a layover. You boys will have earned it.”

Til say we will.” Again, Teleutas took it on himself to speak for the rest of the sailors, and to make agreement sound halfway like a threat.

“We won't make Kos in one day from Amorgos, not unless we get a gale out of the west,” Diokles remarked. “Not likely, although . . .” The oarmaster tasted the air, wetly smacking his lips a couple of times. “We'll have wind, I think. Tomorrow won't be a dead-calm day like this one.”

“I think you're right,” Menedemos said. The faintest ghost of a breeze brushed against his cheek, softer than a hetaira's hand. He looked north. A few clouds drifted across the sky; they didn't hang in place, as they had all through this long, hot day. “Be good to let the sail down.”

“That'll be fine, sure enough,” Diokles agreed. “Still and all, though, even Amorgos'H be a push, because we will have to spend some time filling our water jars before we sail tomorrow. Can't let ourselves go dry.”

“I know, I know.” Menedemos consoled himself as best he could: “Paros has good water, not the brackish stuff we'd have got on Kythnos.”

He stayed aboard the Aphrodite again that night. He didn't want to; he wanted to go into one of the harborside taverns, drink himself dizzy, and sleep with a serving girl or find a brothel. He hadn't had a girl since putting in at Kos. For a man in his mid-twenties, going without for several days felt like a hardship.

But somebody would ask, Say, who's that big son of a whore with those soldiers? Answering Alkimos of Epeiros might serve. On the other hand, it might not, and he might talk too much if he got drunk. He knew himself well enough to understand that. And so he wrapped himself in his himation on the poop deck, stared up at the stars for a little while, and fell asleep.

When he woke up, only the faintest hint of gray touched the jagged eastern horizon. He felt like cheering, for a brisk northerly breeze ruffled his hair. With sail and oars together, they had a much better chance of making Amorgos by nightfall. Then he took a deep breath, and frowned a little. The air felt damp, as if it was the harbinger of rain. He shrugged. It was late in the season for a downpour, but not impossibly so.

As soon as it got light enough for colors to start returning to the black and silver world of night, he started shaking sailors and sending them into Paros with the Aphrodite 's water jars. “How will we find a fountain?” Teleutas whined.

“Ask somebody,” Menedemos said unsympathetically. “Here.” He gave the grumbling sailor an obolos. “Now you can give something for an answer, and it's not even coming out of your own pay.”

Teleutas, no doubt, liked lugging a hydria no more than anybody else. But Menedemos had quashed his objections before he could make them. He popped the obolos into his mouth and went off with his comrades. Menedemos imagined the surprise at a fountain when the sailors descended on women filling their water jars for the day's cooking and washing. Then he tossed his head. As at Naxos, a lot of ships put in at Paros. The local women would be used to such visits.

Sostratos pointed north. “I wonder if we'll get some rain,” he said. “Some of those clouds look thicker and grayer than the usual run.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Menedemos answered. “It would be a nuisance. Trying to figure out a course when we can't see more than a couple of stadia isn't easy. It'd slow us down, too, if the sail got soaked.”

“The men might not mind, not after rowing all day in the hot sun,” his cousin said. “Cool weather's more comfortable.”

“At first, maybe,” Menedemos said. “But it's easy to take a chill when you come off your stint at the oars, and to cramp up, too. Rain's no fun when you haven't any way to keep it off your head.”

They left Paros almost as early as he'd hoped they would. As soon as they were out of the harbor, he ordered the sail lowered from the yard. The freshening breeze thrummed in the rigging. The mast creaked in its socket as that breeze filled the sail and pulled on it. The merchant galley ran before the wind till she slid through the channel between Paros and Oliaros, the smaller island to the southwest.

“I've heard there's a cave full of spikes of rock sticking up from the floor and down from the ceiling on Oliaros,” Sostratos said. “That's the sort of thing I'd like to see.”

“Why?” Menedemos asked. At his orders, the sailors swung the yard so that it stretched back from the port bow to take best advantage of the wind.

“Why?” Sostratos echoed. “It might be pretty. It would certainly be interesting. And they say some men Alexander the Great was after hid out there for a while.”

“Do they?” Menedemos lifted his right hand off the steering-oar tiller to wag a forefinger at his cousin. “You're always going on about how 'they say' all sorts of things, and most of the time what 'they say' turns out to be nothing but a pack of nonsense. So why do you believe 'them' now?”

“There's supposed to be some writing inside the cave,” Sostratos answered, “but I guess you're right—that doesn't have to mean anything. People could have written it in the years since Alexander died.”

“Why would they?” Menedemos asked. “To draw visitors to these caves? If you ask me, anybody who wanted to go crawling through them would have to be daft.” He gave Sostratos a meaningful look.

Having been on the receiving end of a lot of those looks, Sostratos ignored this one. “Maybe,” he said, “though you'd need more than scratchings on a stalactite to get anyone to come to Oliaros. You'd need divinities born there, the way Delos has Apollo and Artemis.”

Menedemos, who was much more conventionally religious than his cousin, bit down on that like a man unexpectedly biting down on an olive pit. By the way Sostratos said it, the god and goddess might not actually have been born on Delos, but the Delians might have claimed they were for no better reason than to draw people to the island and separate them from their silver. Menedemos didn't ask if he did mean that, for fear he would say yes. He did ask, “What other reason would somebody have for writing something that wasn't true?”

“Perhaps just for the sake of fame,” Sostratos replied. “You know, like that madman who burned down the temple back before the Peloponnesian War. He did it just so he'd be remembered forever. Herodotos found out what his name was—and then didn't put it in his history,”

“Euge!” Menedemos exclaimed. The more he thought about it, the more elegant he reckoned that revenge.

Several small islands lay south of Naxos, on the way to Amorgos. They were like Telos, over by Rhodes; they had villages, not poleis, and a few people scratched out a living in their hinterland. They drew steadily nearer as the Aphrodite glided east. So did the clouds the rising breeze brought down from the north.

Those clouds covered the sun. The day went from bright to gloomy. Before long, rain started pattering down, light at first but then increasing. A little rain made a sail perform better, holding more of the wind than the weave of the linen could by itself. More than a little, and the sail got heavy and saggy. Menedemos could only try to wring as much advantage from what was going on as he could.