Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

“Enough!” Ptolemaios' deep, angry rasp effortlessly dominated every other voice in the room. “The Rhodian asked a fair enough question,”

“He brought me here for pay.” Polemaios pointed to the leather sacks full of coins. “If my uncle gives him silver, he'll sing for pay, too.”

“What can he say? That you're here?” Ptolemaios shrugged. “Antigonos will know that by this time tomorrow. He'll have men here, the same as I do on the mainland. Some boat or other will sneak away from Kos and get over there with the news. Can't be helped.”

Antigonos' nephew scowled. He was, plainly, not a man who liked disagreement or back talk. Being who he was, being part of his family, he wouldn't have heard much of it, and he would have been able to ignore more of what he did hear. But he couldn't ignore Ptolemaios, not here in the middle of the ruler of Egypt's stronghold.

“All right, then—fine,” he said, not bothering to hide his disgust. “Tell them everything, why don't you?”

“I didn't say a word about telling them everything,” Ptolemaios replied. “I did say you were silly to insult them for no good reason. I said it, and I still say it.”

Could looks have killed, Ptolemaios would have been a dead man, with Sostratos and Menedemos lying lifeless on the floor beside him. Sostratos would have liked nothing better than hanging about and listening to the two prominent men wrangle: if that wasn't the raw stuff from which history was made, what was? But he didn't want Polemaios any angrier at his cousin and him than he was already, and he didn't want to make Ptolemaios angry by overstaying his welcome. Reluctantly, he said, “Menedemos and I had better get back to the Aphrodite .”

“Good idea,” Ptolemaios said. “You'll probably want an escort, too. I would, if I were walking through the streets with so much silver.”

“Thank you, sir—yes,” Sostratos said. “And if I might speak to your steward for a moment about the wine ...”

“Certainly.” Ptolemaios gave a couple of crisp orders. One slave went outside, presumably to talk to some of the soldiers there. Another led the Rhodians out into the courtyard, where the steward met them. He was a plump, fussy little man named Kleonymos, and had the details of Koan winesellers at his fingertips. Sostratos found out what he needed to know, thanked the man, and left Ptolemaios' residence.

By the time he got back to the Aphrodite , he discovered that lugging twenty minai of silver through the streets of Kos had other drawbacks besides the risk of robbery. His arms felt a palm longer than they had been when he set out. Menedemos seemed no happier. The concentrated mass of the silver made it seem heavier than if he'd been carrying, say, a trussed piglet of like weight.

After the soldiers headed back toward Ptolemaios' residence, Menedemos said, “Well, I can certainly see why Antigonos' nephew makes himself loved wherever he goes, can't you?”

“Yes, he's a very charming fellow,” Sostratos agreed. They could say what they wanted about Polemaios now: they didn't have him aboard the Aphrodite any more. Sostratos would have been just as well pleased never to have made his acquaintance, too.

But he'd made them a profit. Once aboard the akatos, they stowed the sacks of coins with the rest of their silver in the cramped space under the poop deck, where raiders—and any light-fingered sailors they happened to have in the crew—would have the hardest time stealing the money.

When they emerged once more, Sostratos said, “And now we can do what we should have done the last time we left Kos.”

“What's that, O best one?” Menedemos asked innocently. “Drill the crew harder on getting away from pirates and fighting them off if we can't? No doubt you're right.”

Sostratos, fortunately, wasn't holding one of those five-mina sacks of silver any more. Had he been, he might have tried to brain his cousin with it. As things were, the smile he gave Menedemos was as wolfish as he could make it. “That too, of course,” he said, “as we go to Athens.”

No matter what Menedemos' cousin wanted, the Aphrodite didn't immediately make for Athens, For one thing, Menedemos kept the promise he'd made to let the crew roister in the city of Kos for a couple of days to make up for the hard work they'd done rowing east from Kythnos in the calm. For another . . .

Menedemos eyed Sostratos with amusement as they walked through the streets of Kos. “This is your own fault, my dear,” he said. “You've got no business twisting and moaning as if you were about to shit yourself, the way Dionysos does in the Frogs.”

“Oh, to the crows with Aristophanes,” Sostratos snarled. “And to the crows with Di—”

“You don't want to say that.” Menedemos broke in before his cousin could curse the god of wine.

“You mean, you don't want me to say that.” Sostratos understood him well enough.

“All right, I don't want you to say that. However you please. Just don't say it.” Menedemos was a conventionally pious young man. He believed in the gods as much because his father did as for any other reason. Sostratos, he knew, had other notions. Most of the time, his cousin was polite enough to keep from throwing those notions in his face. When Sostratos started to slip, Menedemos wasn't shy about letting him know he didn't care for such remarks.

“Coming out!” a woman yelled from a second-story window, and emptied a chamber pot into the street below. The warning call let Menedemos and Sostratos skip to one side. A fellow leading a donkey wasn't so lucky; the stinking stuff splashed him. He shook his fist up at the window and shouted curses.

“You see?” Menedemos said as he and Sostratos walked on. “Aristophanes was as true to life as Euripides any day.” His cousin didn't even rise to that, which showed what a truly evil mood he was in. “It's your own fault,” Menedemos repeated. “If you hadn't asked Ptolemaios' steward about the wine we were drinking . . .”

“Oh, shut up,” Sostratos said. But then, relenting a little, he pointed to a door. “I think that's the right house.”

“Let's find out.” Menedemos knocked.

“Who is?” The question, in accented Greek, came from within. The door didn't open.

“Is this the house of Nikomakhos son of Pleistarkhos, the wine merchant?” Menedemos asked.

“Who you?” The door still didn't open, but the voice on the other side seemed a little less hostile.

''Two Rhodian traders.” Menedemos gave his name, and Sostratos'. “We'd like to talk to Nikomakhos about buying some wine.”

“You wait.” After that, Menedemos heard nothing. He started drumming his fingers on the outside of his thigh, Sostratos looked longingly back toward the harbor. If the door didn't open pretty soon, Menedemos saw he would have trouble persuading his cousin to hang around.

Just when Sostratos' grumbles were starting to turn into words, the door did open. The fellow standing there was a Hellene with a beard streaked with gray. He had a good-natured smile that showed a broken front tooth. “ 'Ail, my friends. I'm Nikomakhos. 'Ow are you today?” Most people on Kos used a Doric dialect not far from that of Rhodes, but he spoke an Ionian Greek, dropping his rough breathings.

“Hail,” Menedemos said, a little sourly. He introduced himself and Sostratos, then added, “Your surly slave there almost cost you some business.”

“Ibanollis is a Karian as stubborn as Kerberos,” Nikomakhos said with a sigh. “ 'E's been in the 'ouse'old since my father's day. Sometimes you're stuck with a slave like that. But do come in, and we'll talk. I've 'eard of you, 'aven't I? You were running some kind of errand for Ptolemaios.”