Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

Menedemos brought the Aphrodite into the little harbor of the village of Sounion, which lay just to the east of the southernmost tip of the cape. He pointed inland, towards a small but handsome temple, asking, “Who is worshiped there?”

“That's one of Poseidon's shrines, I think,” Sostratos answered. “Athena's is the bigger one farther up the isthmus.”

“Ah. Thanks,” Menedemos said. “I haven't stopped here before, so I didn't remember, if I ever knew. Sounion ...” He snapped his fingers, then dipped his head, recalling some lines from the Odyssey:

“ 'But when we reached holy Sounion, the headland of Athens

There Phoibos Apollo the steersman of Menelaos

Slew, assailing him with shafts that brought painless death.

He held the steering-oar of the racing ship in his hands:

Phrontis Onetor's son, who was best of the race of men

At steering a ship whenever storm winds rushed.' “

“Not storm winds now, gods be praised,” his cousin said. “You did a good job steering the Aphrodite , though, to get us here before nightfall.”

“Thanks,” Menedemos said. “Do you suppose we could get a priest to purify the ship now, or will we have to wait here till morning?” He answered his own question: “Morning, of course, so we can get Dorimakhos' body off the ship and set him in his grave.” He lowered his voice: “And you were right, worse luck—Rhodippos has a fever I don't like, enough to put him half out of his head.”

“I know.” Sostratos sorrowfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I wish such things didn't happen with belly wounds, but they do.” He ground out, “I wish I'd shot the bastard who stole the gryphon's skull right in the belly. I want him dead.”

He was usually among the most gentle of men. Menedemos regarded him with more than a little curiosity. “I don't think you'd sound so savage if someone stole half our silver.”

“Maybe I wouldn't,” Sostratos said. “We can always get more silver, one way or another. Where will we come by another gryphon's skull?”

“For all you know, there'll be another one in the marketplace at Kaunos next year,” Menedemos answered. “Who knows what will come out of the trackless east these days?”

“Maybe.” But Sostratos didn't sound as if he believed it. On reflection, Menedemos couldn't blame his cousin. The gryphon's skull wasn't obviously valuable, and was large and heavy and bulky. How many merchants would carry such a thing across ten thousand stadia and more on the off chance someone in the west might want it? Not many—that one had still surprised Menedemos.

He said, “Now that we haven't got it any more, do you still want to go on to Athens?”

“I don't know,” Sostratos answered. “Right now, I'm so tired and so angry and so disgusted, I know I can't think straight. Ask me again in the morning, and maybe I'll be able to tell you something that makes sense.”

“Fair enough,” Menedemos said. “Let's have some more wine now. It's been a long time since the fight.”

They were on their second cup when someone on shore pushed a boat into the water and rowed out toward the merchant galley; no one had bothered to build quays here, and the Aphrodite lay at anchor a couple of plethra from the beach. “What ship are you?” a man called from the boat.

“The Aphrodite , out of Rhodes,” Menedemos answered. “We were bound for Athens, but pirates came after us between Euboia and Andros. We fought them off, and here we are.”

“Fought 'em off, you say?” The fellow in the boat sounded dubious. “What's your cargo?”

He thinks we're pirates, Menedemos realized. When a galley came into an out-of-the-way harbor like this one, the locals often started jumping to conclusions. “We've got Koan silk aboard, and crimson dye from Byblos,” Menedemos said, “and perfume from Rhodes, and fine ink, and some papyrus from Egypt—though we're almost sold out of that—and a splendid lion skin from Kaunos on the Anatolian mainland, and the world's best balsam from Phoenicia.”

“World's best, eh?” The man in the boat laughed. “You sound like a tradesman, all right.”

“And we've got news,” Sostratos added.

“News?” With the one word, Menedemos' cousin had done a better job of snaring the man in the rowboat than he had himself with his whole long list of what the Aphrodite carried. “Tell it, man!” the local exclaimed.

“Polemaios Polemaios' son is dead,” Sostratos said. “When he went to Kos, he tried to raise a rebellion against Ptolemaios, and the lord of Egypt made him drink hemlock. We were there when it happened.” As usual, he said nothing about taking Polemaios to Kos, or about watching Antigonos' nephew die.

What he did say was plenty. “Polemaios dead?” the Sounian echoed. “You're sure?” Menedemos and Sostratos solemnly dipped their heads. “That is news!” the man said, and started rowing back to shore as fast as he could go.

“We could have just told him that, and he wouldn't have worried about anything else,” Menedemos said. He yawned. After the desperate day, those two cups of wine were hitting him hard. As the stars shone down on the merchant galley, he stretched out on the poop deck and dove into sleep like a dolphin diving into the sea.

However worn he was, he did not pass a restful night. Rhodippos woke him—woke the whole crew—two or three times with cries of rage and dread as the wounded, feverish sailor battled demons only he could see. By the time the sun followed rosy-fingered dawn up out of the sea to the east, the man was moaning almost continuously.

Menedemos pulled the stopper from a fresh amphora of wine. “Last night this made me sleepy,” he said as he dipped some out. “Now I hope it'll wake me up.” He added water to the wine and drank.

“Get me some, too, please,” Sostratos said. “Poor fellow,” he added around a yawn. “It's not his fault.”

“Fault doesn't matter.” Menedemos was yawning, too. His head felt filled with sand. Most of the sailors were awake, too, though a couple snored on despite Rhodippos' ravings. Menedemos envied them their exhaustion.

Sostratos said, “We need to see about one burial—two soon—and about getting the ship cleansed of pollution.” Menedemos envied him, too, for being able to concentrate on what they had to do when he was as weary as everyone else.

Despite Dorimakhos' corpse, they used the akatos' boat to go ashore. For an obolos, an old man pointed them toward the burial ground outside Sounion, and toward the gravedigger's house. “You'll be the Rhodians,” that worthy said when they knocked on his door. Gossip, as usual, had wasted no time. “You lost someone in your fight with the pirates?”

“We lost one man, and we're losing another,” Menedemos answered.

“Will you stay here till he dies?” the gravedigger asked. Menedemos and Sostratos looked at each other. Sostratos sighed and shrugged. Menedemos dipped his head. So did the gravedigger. “Three drakhmai, then, for two graves,” he said.

Sostratos gave him three Rhodian coins. He took them without a murmur, though they were lighter than Athenian owls. Menedemos asked, “Who's the chief priest at Poseidon's temple here? We'd like him to purify our ship.”

“That would be Theagenes,” the gravedigger replied.

As the two Rhodians walked toward the temple, Menedemos asked, “Where do we go from here?”

His cousin looked at him. “Why, back to the ship, I would think.”

Menedemos made an exasperated noise. “No. What I mean is, where does the Aphrodite go from here?—and you know it, too.”

“Well, what if I do?” Sostratos walked along for several paces, his bare feet kicking up dust from a dirt path that hadn't seen rain since spring. Then, suddenly he stopped and sighed and shrugged. “I'd hoped I would change my mind with some sleep, but I haven't. Without the gryphon's skull, I don't much care where we go. What difference does it make now?”