Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

“One more thing to take care of.” But Sostratos didn't argue about that, either. The blood spilled aboard the akatos, the deaths she'd seen, left her ritually polluted. After his time in the Lykeion, Sostratos wasn't sure he still believed in such pollutions. But he was sure the sailors, superstitious to a man, did. Cleansing the ship would put them at ease, and so it needed doing.

“I wonder how much the gods-detested pirates managed to steal when they went back aboard their ship,” Menedemos said.

“We'd better find out,” Sostratos replied. “We can't sell what we haven't got any more,”

“You tend to that,” Menedemos said. “You know where everything's supposed to be.”

“Right,” Sostratos said tightly. Every once in a while, he wished he didn't have such a retentive memory. He also wished his cousin didn't take that memory so much for granted. Neither wish seemed likely to come true here.

Menedemos, for a wonder, noticed his glower and asked, “Is something wrong?”

“Never mind,” Sostratos answered. He was as he was, just as Menedemos was as he was. And his cousin did have plenty of other things to do. Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth as he ducked under the poop deck. Being as he was, he found himself taking the other fellow's point of view, which made staying annoyed harder.

He hadn't seen any of the pirates get down under there, but the silver was the first and most important thing he needed to check. A glance told him all the leather sacks were where they had been before the hemiolia dashed out from behind the headland on Andros. He breathed a sigh of relief. After all they'd sold on Miletos, losing their money would have been a dreadful blow.

He came out with care, and felt a certain amount of pride at not banging his head. What next? he wondered. The answer wasn't long in coming: the balsam. It was literally more precious than silver. He knew under which bench it was stowed. When he squatted there, he found it undisturbed.

Now that I've made sure of the money and the balsam, he thought, Menedemos can't blame me if I check the gryphon's skull. He knew exactly where it was (of course I know exactly where it is, went through his mind): port side, stowed under the ninth rower's bench. He hurried forward and stooped as he had to make sure the balsam was where it belonged.

The gryphon's skull wasn't there.

Sostratos straightened. His first, automatic, assumption was that he'd counted benches wrong. He counted them again. This was the ninth. He bent again. Still no trace of the big leather sack that had held the skull. He looked under the eighth, and also under the tenth, on the off chance—the preposterous, ridiculous, utterly unlikely off chance—he'd miscounted benches when stowing the skull. No sign of it under either bench, only what he recalled putting in those places.

Desperation clanging inside his mind, he checked the starboard benches. Maybe you put it over there after all. But he hadn't. The gryphon's skull was gone.

Wild-eyed, Sostratos stared out to sea. The hemiolia was long vanished. With it went a skull that had come from the edge of the world; a skull that, by an accident of fate, had found the perfect owner; a skull that now, by a more malign accident of fate, would never reach the men who might have wrung sense from its strangeness. Gone. Gone with a filthy pirate who surely couldn't write his name, who cared nothing for knowledge, who'd chosen theft and robbery in place of honest work. Gone. Gone forever, past hope of returning.

Sostratos burst into tears.

“What's the matter, young sir?” Diokles asked, “What did the thieving whoresons get?”

“The gryphon's skull,” Sostratos choked out.

“Oh. That thing.” The oarmaster visibly cast about for something to say. At last, brightening, he found it: “Don't fret too much. It wouldn't've brought in all that much cash anyways.”

“Cash?” The word tasted like vomit in Sostratos' mouth. He cursed as foully as he knew how—not with Menedemos' Aristophanic brio, perhaps, but with far more real anger, real hatred, behind the foul language.

Sailors shied away from him. They'd never seen him in such a transport of temper. He'd never known himself in such a fury, either. He would gladly have crucified every pirate ever born and set fire to every forest from which the shipwrights shaped the timbers of their hemioliai and pentekonters.

From the stern, Menedemos called, “What's gone missing?”

He had to say it again: “The gryphon's skull.”

“Oh,” his cousin said. “Is that all?”

“All?” Sostratos howled. More curses burst from him. Still hot as iron in the forge, he finished, “They could have taken anything else on this ship— anything, do you hear me? But no! One of those gods-detested rogues had to steal the single, solitary thing we carried that will—would—matter a hundred years from now.”

Menedemos came forward and set a hand on his shoulder. “Cheer up, my dear. It's not so bad as that.”

“No. It's worse,” Sostratos said.

His cousin tossed his head. “Not really. Just think: right this very minute, you're probably having your revenge.”

“My what?” Sostratos gaped, as if Menedemos had suddenly started speaking Phoenician. “What are you talking about?”

“I'll tell you what,” Menedemos answered. “Suppose you're a pirate. Your captain decides to go after an akatos for a change. 'It'll be a tough fight, sure enough,' he says, 'but think how rich we'll be once we take her.' You manage to board the Aphrodite . Her sailors are all fighting like lions. Somebody stabs you in the leg. Somebody else cuts off half your ear.”

He paused. “Go on,” Sostratos said, in spite of himself.

Grinning, Menedemos did: “Pretty soon, even Antigonos the One-Eyed can see you aren't going to win this scrap. You grab whatever you can—whatever's under that bench there—and you hop back aboard your hemiolia. You have to get away from those fighting madmen on the merchant galley, so you pull your oar till you're ready to drop dead. Somebody slaps a bandage on your ear and sews up your leg. And then, finally, you say, 'All right, let's see what's in this sack. It's big and heavy—it's got to have something worthwhile inside.' And you open it—and there's the gryphon's skull looking back at you, as ugly as it was in the market square in Kaunos. What would you do then?”

Slowly, Sostratos smiled. That was vengeance, of a sort.

But Diokles said, “Me, I'd fling the polluted thing straight into the sea.

That struck Sostratos as horribly likely. In his mind's eye, he could see the pirate staring at the skull. He could hear the fellow cursing, hear his mates laughing. And he could see the blue waters of the Aegean dosing over the gryphon's skull forevermore.

“Think of the knowledge wasted!” he cried.

“Think of the look on that bastard's face when he opens the sack,” Menedemos said.

It was the only consolation Sostratos had. It wasn't enough, wasn't anywhere close to enough. “Better I should have sold the skull to Damonax,” he said bitterly. “What if it sat in his house? Maybe his son or his grandson would have taken it to Athens. Now it's gone.”

“I'm sorry,” Menedemos said, though he still seemed more amused than anything else. He pointed west, toward the distant mainland of Attica. “We still might get to Cape Sounion by sundown.”

“I don't care,” Sostratos said. “What difference does It make now?” He'd hoped his name might live forever. Sostratos the Rhodian, discoverer of. . . He tossed his head. What had he discovered? Thanks to the pirate, nothing at all.