Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

To his relief, Sostratos didn't. Theagenes said, “I am pleased to hear such words from you, young man. A man who loves the gods will be loved by them.” He went down into the waist of the ship and splashed a little seawater on Rhodippos. The wounded man, lost in a fever dream, moaned and muttered to himself. Theagenes sighed. “I fear you're right about him. Death reaches toward him even as we watch.”

“I wish something could be done about wounds like his, whether by gods or healers,” Sostratos said—no, he wouldn't casually let it drop after all.

“Asklepios has been known to work miracles,” the priest said.

“So he has,” Sostratos agreed. “If he did it more often, though, they wouldn't be miracles, and a lot more men would have longer lives.”

The priest sent him a sour stare. Menedemos felt like a man standing between two armies just before they shouted the paean and charged each other. Doing his best to change the subject, he said, “Come on boys, let's get Rhodippos into the boat. We'll give him the best care we can there.”

Rhodippos howled piteously as several sailors lowered him into the boat. He kept on howling even after they rigged an awning of sailcloth to keep the sun off him. “The kindest thing we could do for him would be to cut his throat,” Sostratos said.

“He doesn't know what's happening to him,” Menedemos said. “It's a small mercy, but a mercy.”

“And the gods may yet choose to preserve his life,” Theagenes added.

Menedemos didn't believe that, not for a moment. And, in his zeal to keep his cousin and the priest from squabbling, he'd been too clever for his own good. With Rhodippos in the boat, how was Theagenes to get back to Sounion? Menedemos hadn't the heart to take the wounded man out of there again. The sailors hailed a rowboat from the shore. He gave the fellow in it a couple of oboloi to row the priest home.

Once Theagenes was out of earshot—or nearly so—Sostratos sniffed and said, “He may be holy, but he isn't what you'd call bright.”

Theagenes' back got very straight. No, he hadn't been quite out of earshot; Menedemos hadn't thought so. “He probably thinks you're bright, but not very holy.”

“I don't care what he thinks,” Sostratos said. “And if you think—”

“I think the ship is ritually clean again,” Menedemos broke in. “And I think that's good. Don't you?” He gave Sostratos a hard look, as if to say he'd better.

“Oh, yes,” his cousin admitted. “I try not to be superstitious, but I don't succeed so well as I'd like. I don't think you can be a sailor without being superstitious.”

“I believe in luck and the gods. If you want to say that makes me superstitious, go ahead,” Menedemos said, and wondered how big an argument he'd get. To his surprise, he got none at all. Sostratos hadn't heard him; his cousin was watching a flock of seabirds flapping past. Menedemos laughed. “And how do the omens look?”

Sostratos did hear that. “I wasn't watching them for the sake of omens,” he said. “I just don't think I've ever seen those particular petrels before.”

“Oh,” Menedemos said, crestfallen. Many another man might have been lying when he made such a claim. Sostratos? Menedemos tossed his head. He believed his cousin implicitly.

Rhodippos died three days later. The crew of the Aphrodite , acting for his family, buried him in the grave the local gravedigger had excavated. Theagenes came out to the merchant galley once more, this time to cleanse the boat. He gave Sostratos a sour look. Sostratos pretended not to see it.

In the meanwhile, a round ship from the island of Aigina put in at Sounion. After talking with its captain, Menedemos declared, “Now I know where we're bound next.”

“What? To Aigina?” Sostratos asked. His cousin dipped his head. Sostratos threw his hands in the air. “Why? Everything they make there is cheap junk. Aiginetan goods are a joke all over the Aegean. What have they got that would be worth our while to carry?”

“They've got silver,” Menedemos said. “Lots and lots of lovely turtles. And they have a temple to Artemis they're talking about prettying up. Artemis is a huntress. Wouldn't her image look fine in a lion skin?”

“Ah.” After some thought, Sostratos said, “You might convince them of that. You might even have a better chance than at Athens, I suppose. More hides come in to Athens than to Aigina, I'm sure.”

Menedemos kissed him on the cheek. “Exactly what I was thinking, my dear. And it's only a day's journey from here.” He pointed west. “You can see the island, poking its nose up over the horizon.”

“Islands have noses?” Sostratos said. “I don't think any philosopher ever suspected that.” Menedemos made a face at him. But his own whimsy didn't last long. With a sigh, he went on, “I wish we were heading to Peiraieus instead. Without the gryphon's skull, though, what's the point?”

“Not much.” No, Menedemos wasn't heartbroken at the loss of the ancient bones. “We'll see how we do somewhere else.”

Winds in the Saronic Gulf were fitful the next day; the rowers spent a good deal of time at the oars. But they seemed glad enough to row. Maybe they were eager to escape Sounion, where two of their comrades would lie forever. That wasn't anything Sostratos could ask, but it wouldn't have surprised him.

With a circumference of perhaps 180 stadia, Aigina wasn't a big island. These days, it also wasn't an important island, though that hadn't always been true. When the Aphrodite made for the polis, which lay on the western side of the island, Sostratos said, “This place would be a lot better off if it hadn't gone over to Dareios before Marathon.”

“It got what it deserved afterwards, eh?” Menedemos said.

“If you want to call it that,” Sostratos replied. “The Athenians dispossessed the Aiginetans and planted their own colonists here. Then, after the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans threw those people out and brought back the original Aiginetans and their descendants.”

“So who's left nowadays?” Menedemos asked.

“Aiginetans,” Sostratos said. “They're a mongrel lot, I suppose, but that's true of a lot of Hellenes these days. If a polis loses a war ...” He clicked his tongue between his teeth; he didn't like to think of such things. But he refused to shy away from them: “Remember, Rhodes had a Macedonian garrison when we were youths.”

His cousin looked as if he would have been happier forgetting. “It's our job to make sure that never happens again.”

“So it is,” Sostratos said. If we can, he added, but only to himself. He might think words of evil omen, but he would do his best not to speak them aloud.

Whatever their ultimate origins, the modern Aiginetans spoke a dialect halfway between Attic and Doric. It sounded odd to Sostratos. Menedemos, though, said, “They talk almost the same way you do.”

“They do not!” Sostratos said indignantly.

“They do so,” Menedemos said. “They sound like people who started out speaking Doric but went to school in Athens.”

“Most of them sound as though they've never been to school at all,” Sostratos retorted. He was proud of the Atticisms in his own speech; they showed him to be a man of culture. To his ear, the Aiginetans didn't sound cultured at all. He and his cousin might have been the asses in Aisop's fable, except that they were dithering over dialects rather than bales of hay.

“All right. All right. Let it go.” Menedemos, having planted his barb, was content to ease up. “We made it past the rocks. Now that we're in the harbor, we'll sell the lion skin and make the trip worthwhile.”

“Rocks?” Sostratos said.

Before Menedemos could answer, Diokles spoke up: “Didn't you notice how careful-like your cousin was steering, young sir? The approach to this harbor's as nasty as any in Hellas, but he handled it pretty as you please.”