Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

But Ptolemaios had hoped to seize the town by surprise. That hadn't worked. Now his men had to settle down to besiege it, which could take a long time. Troy took Agamemnon and Odysseus and the rest of the Akhaioi ten years, Menedemos thought, and wished he hadn't.

Things would go faster than that nowadays. Homer's hexameters said nothing of catapults that flung javelins or stone balls weighing thirty minai or more. Homer's hexameters, as a matter of fact, said next to nothing about siege warfare itself, even though the Iliad was about the siege of Troy. Alexander's army could probably have stormed Hektor's city in ten days, not ten years. Menedemos paused to scratch his head at that thought. Agamemnon and Akhilleus and the Aiantes and Diomedes and the rest might have been heroes, some of them the sons of gods, but they hadn't known a lot of things modern soldiers took for granted.

Alexander had admired Akhilleus. He'd taken a copy of the Iliad with him on his campaigns in the trackless east. Had he ever realized his men could have thrashed the warriors who'd sailed the black ships to Troy? Menedemos doubted it.

The next thing that went through his mind was, I can't tell Sostratos about this. His cousin might shrug and say he'd thought of the same thing years before. If Sostratos hadn't thought of it, though, Menedemos knew he would get no peace till his cousin had squeezed the whey out of every single related possibility. Keeping quiet was a better bet.

His own thoughts returned to the Aphrodite . He didn't want to try making those repairs himself. He wasn't worried about the steering oar; he was confident the amateur carpenters aboard the akatos could fashion a substitute. But the planking at the stern had taken even more damage than he'd thought, with seams sprung, tenons cracked, and mortises broken open for several cubits' distance from the actual point of the collision. He wanted those planks repaired properly. If the merchant galley started taking on seawater halfway across the Aegean . . . He shuddered. Not all ships came home.

I need real carpenters. But I can't get them. So what do I do now? Only one thing I can do: I have to wait till I can get them. That was logical. It made Menedemos hate logic.

I le stiffened when a pentekonter that might have come straight out of the Catalogue of Ships glided into the harbor. Such single-banked galleys were the only warships Homer had known. These days, though, they were pirate ships, not naval vessels. No pirate would have been mad enough to raid Kos harbor. And this ship peaceably tied up at a quay and started disgorging hoplites.

An officer rushed up the quay and took charge of the soldiers—or rather, tried to, for they eyed him with contempt veiled as thinly as the most transparent Koan silk might have done. Only after several minutes' talk—and only after the officer pointed back into the city of Kos, as if threatening to call for reinforcements—did the newcomers let him lead them away.

“More of Polemaios' men, I'd say,” Sostratos remarked.

“I'd say you're right,” Menedemos agreed. “They're slipping out of Khalkis a shipload at a time and heading this way.”

His cousin pointed toward the smoke rising from Halikarnassos. “If I were Ptolemaios”—he pronounced the ruler of Egypt's name with care, so Menedemos couldn't doubt which Macedonian he meant—”I'd send Polemaios' men across to the siege. . . and wouldn't it be a shame if they got used up?”

Menedemos didn't need to think about that for very long before dipping his head. “I'd do the same. But Ptolemaios doesn't seem to want to. He's just getting them out of the polis, making them encamp outside the walls. That doesn't seem safe enough to me.”

“Nor to me,” Sostratos said. “If he trusted Polemaios”—he named Antigonos' nephew carefully, too—”that would be one thing. But Polemaios turned on Antigonos, and then he turned on Kassandros, too. Ptolemaios would have to be feebleminded to think the man won't also turn on him the moment he sees a chance.”

“Ptolemaios isn't feebleminded,” Menedemos said. “He's one very sharp fellow.”

“He certainly is.” Now Sostratos dipped his head, “That's why I'm assuming he's got somebody keeping an eye on Polemaios and his soldiers. Remember how Polemaios tried to see if we knew which of Ptolemaios' officers would take a bribe?”

“That I do,” Menedemos answered. “I thought we'd be out of Kos and across the Aegean before it could possibly matter. But the stinking collision put paid to that, the collision and the fight across the channel. That cistern-arsed scow—I hope it did sink in the storm.”

“Maybe it did,” Sostratos said. “No sign of it here, anyhow.”

“Gods only know how long we'll be stuck here, though.” Menedemos drummed his fingers on the outside of his thigh.

His cousin's voice was tart: “Believe me, my dear, I like it no better than you do. I want to be in Athens. I burn to be in Athens. As a matter of fact, I burn to be anywhere but here. We ought to start going to the agora and selling what we can. We'll make something that way.”

“Not much,” Menedemos said in dismay. “Ships from Rhodes put in here ail the time. We won't get much of a price for perfume or ink—and how can we hope to sell the silk we just bought, except at a loss? Koans can buy direct from the folk who make it; they don't need to deal with middlemen.”

“I understand that, believe me,” his cousin replied. “But we have to pay the sailors no matter where we are or what we're doing, and that talent we got from Ptolemaios is melting away like the fat in a fire at a sacrifice to the gods.”

Instead of drumming his fingers, Menedemos suddenly snapped them. “I know what would bring us some money—-we've got those two lion skins. No lions on Kos. Somewhere in town, there'll be a temple to Zeus. Can't go wrong with a real lion-skin mantle for the god's image.”

“True.” Sostratos smiled, “And you're right—we ought to get a good price for at least one of the hides. Good idea.”

“Thanks,” Menedemos said. “Now if only I could come up with eight or ten more, we'd be fine.”

“Pity that fellow back in Kaunos didn't have a leopard skin to go with the others,” Sostratos said. “I know where the temple to Dionysos is.”

“Yes, I remember going by it, too, on the way from Ptolemaios' residence down here to the harbor.” Menedemos shrugged. “All we can do, though, is make the best of what we've got.”

As often happened in a town of Hellenes, finding out where Zeus' temple was cost Menedemos an obolos. Knowledge was a commodity like any other, and seldom given away for nothing. After he'd paid out the little silver coin, he was annoyed to discover that the temple lay only a couple of blocks beyond the market square. It was a small building, but elegant, in the modern Corinthian style, with columns whose capitals looked like inverted bells and were ornamented with acanthus leaves.

“Pretty,” said Sostratos, who was fond of modern architecture.

“If you like that sort of thing,” Menedemos said. “It looks busy to me. I like the good old Doric order better—no bases to the columns, and plain capitals that just go on about the business of holding up the architrave and the frieze. These fancy Corinthian columns”— he made a face—”they look like a garden that wants pruning.”

“There's a difference between plain and too plain, if you ask me,” Sostratos said. “And Doric columns are squat. These Corinthian ones can be taller for the same thickness. They make the building more graceful.”

“More likely to fall down in an earthquake, you mean,” Menedemos said. Then he and Sostratos both spat into the bosom of their tunics to avert the evil omen. In the lands around the Inner Sea, temblors came too often even without invitation,