Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

Fortunately, that wasn't his worry. He wouldn't see this place again, and he was glad of it. A soldier politely opened the door for him. When he stepped out into the street, a guard asked, “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

How am I supposed to answer that? I was curious about how hemlock works, but did I really want to watch a man die? Finding no way to separate the one from the other, Sostratos sighed and said, “I suppose I did.” He hurried away before the guard could find any other questions he didn't care to think about.

When he got back to the harbor, Menedemos hailed him with, “It's over, eh?” Sostratos dipped his head. His cousin went on, “How did he do?”

“As well as he could,” Sostratos answered. “Ptolemaios was right— it's an uglier business than Platon made it out to be.” He could change the subject here, could and did: “How's the Aphrodite doing?”

Before Menedemos could answer, the sound of a man pounding on something with a mallet came from under the poop deck, Sostratos' cousin beamed. “That's Nikagoras,” he said. “He got here just after you went into the polis, and he's been banging away like Talos the bronze man ever since.” He raised his voice: “Oë, Nikagoras! Come out for a cup of wine and say hello to my cousin,”

More banging, and then someone—presumably Nikagoras—spoke from below: “Let me finish driving this treenail home. After that, I'm your man.” The banging resumed.

“He's already joining the timbers, is he?” Sostratos was impressed. “He does know his business.”

“I heard that. I should hope I do,” Nikagoras said. After still more banging, he grunted. “There. That'll hold the son of a whore.”

“Best part of it is, Ptolemaios is paying for him, too,” Menedemos said.

“That is good news,” Sostratos agreed. “Being laid up here has cost us too much already.” He lowered his voice: “Maybe he's grateful we didn't sail away with Andgonos' nephew.”

“Maybe.” Menedemos also spoke quietly. “To the crows with me if I know where we would have taken him, though, even if we'd wanted to take him anywhere.”

Sostratos dipped his head. “A point.” Polemaios had made enemies of all the Macedonian marshals except Lysimakhos up in Thrace and Seleukos in the distant east, and no doubt the only reason he hadn't fallen foul of them, too, was that he hadn't had much to do with them.

Nikagoras came up the stairs and onto the poop deck. He was in his early forties, naked as a sailor, with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and scarred, gnarled hands. “Hail,” he said to Sostratos, and wiped the back of one hand across his sweaty forehead.

“Hail,” Sostratos said. “Sounds as though you're making good progress.”

“Sure am,” Nikagoras said. “Thanks,” he told Menedemos, who'd given him the promised wine. He spilled a feu7 drops onto the deck, drank, and then gave his attention back to Sostratos, “After all the battle damage I've repaired lately, this is almost like a holiday for me.”

“I hadn't thought of it like that,” Sostratos said.

“You would have if you were in my line of work,” the carpenter told him, “Rams are bad enough. That's collision damage, too, like what you took, only worse, on account of a ram's going fast and the fins concentrate where it hits. But if you think that's rough, you ought to try patching up a ship that's had a couple-three thirty-mina stones smack into her right about at the waterline.”

“Bad?” Sostratos asked.

“Worse,” Nikagoras said. “Sometimes it seems like you end up taking out half the planks and replacing them. And naturally the captain's screaming at you that he's got to get back into the fight as fast as he can, and that everything'll be buggered forever if you don't get him fixed up right away. You want to drown big-mouthed bastards like that, by the gods—they think you're too cursed stupid to figure things out for yourself.”

“I'm just glad you're finally here,” Menedemos said. “It's taken a month of screaming at people to get a carpenter at all. Of course, the Aphrodite 's no warship.”

“No, but you can fight if you have to. And,” Nikagoras said shrewdly, “a lot of the time, being able to fight means you don't have to, doesn't it?”

“That's right,” Sostratos said. “You're a man who sees how things work.”

“I try,” the carpenter said. “And that's a game I know myself. I haven't been in a brawl in close to twenty years now, on account of I look like I'm tough.” He made a fist, then grinned. “Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But nobody wants to find out the hard way.”

“Fair enough,” Sostratos said. Men seldom wanted to brawl with him, either, because he was well above average size. He knew perfectly well that he wasn't particularly tough, but that wasn't obvious from looking at him.

Nikagoras gulped the rest of the wine, wiped his mouth, and set down the cup. “Thank you kindly, best one. That hit the spot,” he told Menedemos, and then disappeared under the poop deck once more. A moment later, he started banging away with the mallet again.

“A good man,” Sostratos said. “I wonder if you could persuade him to go to sea.”

His cousin laughed. “My dear, you're reading my mind. I asked him that very thing, but he said, 'I repair ships for a living. D'you think I'd be daft enough to want to travel on one when I know what all can happen to them?' “

“Hmm.” Sostratos plucked at his beard. “What does that say about us?”

Menedemos laughed again. “Nothing good, I'm certain.”

“ Come on, you lazy whoresons,” Diokles called to the Aphrodites rowers. “Put your backs into it, and your arms, too. Do you still remember how to pull an oar? Rhyppa pai!. Rhyppa pai!”

A couple of men groaned as they stroked. Listening to them, Menedemos could tell how much the unnatural layoff had cost them as a crew. “We'll have plenty of sore muscles tonight,” he predicted as the Aphrodite glided out of Kos' harbor.

“That we will,” the keleustes agreed. “Blistered hands, too, same as we do when we start out in the spring.”

“If they'll rub oil on their hands as soon as they start getting raw, they won't blister so much,” Sostratos said.

“Not a bad notion,” Diokles agreed, smiting his bronze square to give the rowers their stroke. “I'd do that myself every now and again when I pulled an oar, and I did enough rowing to make my palms hard as horn.”

Menedemos kept the merchant galley close to the coast of Kos. Across the channel, Ptolemaios' ships and soldiers still laid siege to Halikarnassos. Stopping up a harbor tight as a wine jar wasn't easy, though. Every so often, one or two of Antigonos' war galleys would slip out and sink or capture any ships they could catch, Menedemos didn't want to make things easy for them.

He glanced over to his cousin. “Oë, Sostratos, there's history going on, just a few stadia away.”

“Well, so there is,” Sostratos said. “But it's not going on very fast, is it? I don't think I'll miss much if I look northwest instead of northeast.”

Look towards Athens, he meant. Menedemos said. “We're not there yet, and we're not going there yet, either. Why don't you look due north instead? That's where Miletos lies, near enough. We need the money we'll make there, too.”

“I know,” Sostratos said, “Every word you say is true. I understand that. But I have a hard time caring.”

“You'd better not,” Menedemos warned him. “When we trade there, we'll have to haggle extra hard, squeeze all the silver we can out of the merchants. If you're mooning over that miserable gryphon's skull, you won't do us any good.”