Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

“Up in the north, maybe,” Menedemos said. “There's that broad reach from Lesbos to Skyros. Otherwise, though”—he tossed his head—”no, I wouldn't think so.”

Some of the sailors baited lines with bits of bread and cheese and let them down into the sea. They caught a few sprats and a mackerel or two. And then, just when Menedemos was about to order the anchors dropped, Moskhion pulled in a gloriously plump red mullet. “He'll have friends tonight,” Sostratos said.

“Won't he, though?” Menedemos agreed. The splendid fish made his mouth water. “I hope I'm Moskhion's friend tonight.” As the captain of a merchant galley learned to do, he pitched his voice to carry.

Moskhion looked up from the mullet, an impish grin on his face. “Have we met, sir?” he asked, as bland as if he were a man with estates out to the horizon condescending to speak to a tanner.

Menedemos laughed as loudly as everyone else who heard the sailor. “You'll find out whether we've met,” he growled, mock fierce.

As the sun set, the men who'd caught fish grilled them over little braziers. The savory scent of the flesh filled the air. Moskhion did share the mullet as widely as he could, and sent small portions back to Menedemos, Sostratos, and Diokles. “That's only a bite,” Sostratos said as he washed his down with a swallow of wine, “but it's a mighty tasty bite.”

“It sure is,” Menedemos agreed. “A bite of mullet's worth a bellyful of cheese any day.” He knew a hungry man would say no such thing, but he enjoyed the luxury of a full belly. He ate an olive and spat the pit into the sea.

Diokles pointed into the southern sky, a little west of the meridian. “There's Zeus' wandering star,” he said.

“Where?” Sostratos said, and then, “Ah. There. Now I see it. I wonder if it's true, as the Babylonians say, that the motions of the stars foretell everything we do.”

“How can anyone know something like that?” Menedemos said. “Me, I want to think I do things because I want to do them, not because some star says I must.”

“Yes, I want to believe the same thing,” his cousin said. “But is it really true, or do I want to believe it because the stars say I should want to?”

Diokles grunted and refilled his wine cup. The oarmaster said, “That kind of talk makes my head ache.”

“What do the Babylonians have to say about twins?” Menedemos asked. “They're born at the same time, and sometimes they're like each other, but other sets are as different as eggs and elephants. By the stars, they should all be just alike, shouldn't they?”

“That's true.” Sostratos beamed at him. “Very logical, in fact. I wonder if any philosophers have ever thought about what that means. When we get to Athens, I hope I remember to ask.”

Twilight deepened. More stars came out. Menedemos spotted Kronos' wandering star, dimmer and yellower than that of Zeus, not far above the eastern horizon. Pointing to it, he said, “I know what that star foretells: not long after I see it, I'll go to sleep.”

“Amazing,” Sostratos said. “I was born half a year before you, but it means the very same thing for me.” They both laughed.

The Aphrodite rocked gently on the sea. Menedemos took the motion altogether for granted. It wasn't enough to bother his cousin, who was more sensitive to such things. They lay down side by side on the poop deck. Diokles went forward to sleep on a rower's bench.

When Menedemos woke, morning twilight had replaced that of the evening. He yawned and stretched and watches stars fade from the sky, as he'd watched them come out the night before. High up in the air, a gull screeched.

He got to his feet and tasted the wind, then dipped his head in satisfaction. It hadn't swung during the night, nor had it died. Up toward the bow, one early-rising sailor spoke to another: “Doesn't look like we'll have to pull too hard today,”

“Good,” the second sailor answered.

Sostratos stayed asleep till the men started hauling in the anchors. Then he looked about in bleary confusion. “Hail, slugabed,” Menedemos said.

“Oh. Hail.” Sostratos looked around some more, rubbed his eyes, and got to his feet. As he did, he wet a finger to test the wind. What he found brought a smile to his face and eagerness to his voice. “Do you think we'll be able to slide between Andros and Euboia this afternoon?”

“Maybe.” Menedemos shook a stern finger at his cousin. “But even if we do, we've got another day's sail after that before we put in at Peiraieus.”

“I know. I know.” Sostratos waved impatiently. “But we're so close now, I can all but taste Athens.”

Menedemos pursed his lips as if he were tasting, too. “Rocks and dirt and a little bit of hemlock, left over from Sokrates. Splash it with oil and it's not so bad.”

“Splash you with oil and you're still an idiot,” Sostratos said, doing his best not to splutter.

After a bow and a wave for his cousin, Menedemos raised his voice to call out to the sailors: “Eat your breakfast, lads, and then we'll be away. As long as the gods are kind enough to give us the breeze we need, we'd be fools and worse than fools if we didn't make the most of it.”

Down came the sail from the yard. A gust of wind filled it almost at once. The mast creaked as it took up the strain. At Menedemos' shouted instructions, the men swung the yard from the starboard bow back to take best advantage of the breeze. The Aphrodite slid through the light chop, graceful as a tunny.

Flying fish sprang out of the water. So did dolphins, which leapt far higher and more gracefully. Menedemos tossed a barley roll into the Aegean. The merchant galley's boat had hardly passed it before a dolphin snapped it up. The sailors murmured in delighted approval. A couple of them clapped their hands. “Good for you, skipper,” Diokles said. “There's good luck.”

No less superstitious than any other seafaring man, Menedemos dipped his head. “Good luck for the dolphin, too,” he said. “If it hadn't been in just the right spot, a sea bird would have got there first.”

Sure enough, a small gull with a black head that had been swooping toward the roll pulled up with an angry screech: “Ayeea!” A moment later, a tern plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak.

“Between the dolphin and the bird, they've got sitos and opson,” Menedemos said.

Instead of laughing at his little joke, Sostratos tossed his head. “For dolphins and terns, fish are sitos: they're what they have to have. When you gave them the barley roll, that was opson for them, even though it would be sitos for us.”

Diokles clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Here I've been going to sea almost as long as you've been alive, young sir, and I never once thought of it like that. You've got an odd way of looking at the world—an interesting way,” he hastened to add.

“A left-handed way,” Menedemos said, which wasn't a compliment.

They didn't have the sea to themselves but for wild things that day. A few fishing boats were out on the wide water east of the Kyklades. When their crews saw the Aphrodite approaching, they lowered their sails and made for first Tenos and then, in the afternoon, Andros as fast as they could go. One of the crews cut a net free to be able to flee the faster.

“Poor frightened fools,” Menedemos said. “That'll cost them a good bit of silver or a good bit of time to make good, and we didn't want anything to do with them.”

“We ought to paint a legend on the side of the ship: I AM NOT A PIRATE,” Sostratos said.

“And how long would it be before a pirate painted the same thing on his hemiolia?” Menedemos returned.

Sostratos screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue in a Gorgon's grimace. “That's a horrible thought,”