Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

Menedemos said, “The silk and the emerald will help some.”

“A little,” Asine said—she was one of those people who, no matter what they had, always wanted more. Menedemos understood that well enough; he was the same way himself. “You'd better go,” she told him.

“Yes, you're right.” He wondered if coming here in the first place had been worthwhile. He supposed so. He hadn't been looking for anything more than a morning's pleasure. It had never felt so empty afterwards, though.

Asine gave him a kiss as she unlatched the door. “Will you remember me after you sail away?” she asked.

“I'll never forget you,” he answered. It could have been a pretty compliment, a polite fib, but he heard the raw truth in his voice. Asine must have heard it, too, for she smiled, pleased with herself. She'd taken it for praise, then. As a last favor, Menedemos didn't tell her otherwise.

A couple of naked little boys, one perhaps eight, the other six, were playing with a toy oxcart in the dusty street. They looked up as Menedemos came out of Nikodromos' house—looked up and started to giggle. His ears burned. He hurried off toward the market square.

Sostratos waved to him as he came over to the little display the men of the Aphrodite had set up. “Glad you're back,” he called, and then, “Well?”

“Very well, thanks. And you?”

His cousin rolled his eyes. A couple of the sailors who'd fetched and carried for Sostratos guffawed. A third looked blank. One of the others leaned close to mutter something to him. Menedemos couldn't hear what it was, but saw the obscene gesture accompanying it. The third sailor laughed, getting it at last.

“All right,” Sostratos said. “You didn't get held for ransom, you didn't get murdered—”

“Not that I noticed, no,” Menedemos agreed.

“Interrupt all you please,” Sostratos told him. “I'm still going to ask the questions that need asking. For instance, can we stay in Aigina without worrying about getting knifed whenever we show our faces away from the Aphrodite? ”

That was indeed a question worth asking. Menedemos thought about the two giggling little boys. They probably weren't the only neighbors to have noticed his coming to Nikodromos' house when the priest wasn't home. That meant. . . Menedemos tossed his head. “Maybe not.”

“Another place we can't visit again anytime soon,” Sostratos said with a sigh. “Seems as though there's one every voyage, doesn't it?”

“This isn't like Halikarnassos or Taras,” Menedemos said. “I think I'm just one in a long line of men Nikodromos hates.”

“Ah. Like that, is it?”

“Afraid so.” Menedemos didn't feel like dwelling on what he'd done, so he asked, “How are things going here?”

Sostratos shrugged. “I've sold some silk and some crimson dye with it and a few jars of perfume, but people aren't rushing up to buy. Probably about time to have Diokles start pulling sailors out of the taverns and whorehouses, wouldn't you say?”

“Time to leave Aigina, you mean,” Menedemos said, and Sostratos dipped his head.

Menedemos thought it over. After a moment, he did the same. He said, “We might not do badly to head back to Rhodes. It's a little early in the season, but only a little, and we've gone through most of what we set out with.”

“Do you know, my dear, I was thinking the very same thing not an hour ago,” Sostratos said. “Strikes me as a good idea. We'll show a solid profit if we do. But if we cruise around for another month without accomplishing much, maybe not. And I don't mind getting home early at all.”

“Neither do I,” Menedemos said. What a liar I am, he thought.

As the Aphrodite glided east through the Saronic Gulf, away from Aigina, Sostratos mournfully peered north toward the mainland of Attica. There were Athens' two chief ports, Peiraieus and Phaleron, seeming almost close enough to touch. There on the higher ground inland lay Athens itself, the magnificent buildings of the akropolis tiny but perfect in the distance. Pointing to port, he burst out, “A pestilence take those pirates! We should be there now.”

“We'll get there yet,” Menedemos said soothingly.

“But not with the gryphon's skull.” Sostratos scowled at his cousin, though it wasn't Menedemos' fault. But he couldn't get the picture out of his mind: the pirate, maybe—he hoped—wounded, undoing the leather lashing that held the sack closed, staring in horrified dismay at the skull that stared blindly back, and then, cursing, flinging it into the sea while all his thieving comrades laughed.

“Can't be helped. We were lucky to get away with our freedom and most of our goods,” Menedemos said.

He was right again; Sostratos knew as much. But his cool indifference grated. “So much knowledge wasted!” Sostratos said.

“A lot, a little—how can you tell?” Menedemos remained indifferent. “You can't even tell for sure whether your philosophical friends would have cared a tenth as much about the skull as you did.”

Sostratos bit down on that like a man biting down on a big piece of grit in a chunk of bread, and counted himself lucky not to break a mental tooth. He didn't know what the philosophers of the Lykeion and the Academy would have made of the gryphon's skull. He never would know now. He gave back the best answer he could: “Damonax was interested in it.”

“Damonax didn't care about studying it—he wanted it for a decoration,” Menedemos said. “That says something nasty about his taste, but it doesn't say anything about what a real philosopher would think of it.”

Stubbornly, Sostratos said, “Aristoteles wrote books about animals and the parts that make them up. His successor Theophrastos, whom I studied under, is doing the same thing with plants. He would have wanted to see the gryphon's skull.”

“Why? Would he think it grew on a tree like a pine cone?”

“You're impossible!” Sostratos said, but he laughed in spite of himself.

Maybe that was what his cousin had had in mind. Little by little, Athens receded behind the Aphrodite . Sostratos found things with which to busy himself about the ship instead of mooning over the city like a lover over his lost beloved. Eventually, he looked up and saw that it lay far astern. I will come back, he thought, even if it is without the gryphon's skull.

For now, though, mundane business: he asked Menedemos, “Are you going to put in at Sounion again tonight?”

“That's right. Why?” His cousin gave him a suspicious look. “Do you plan on jumping ship and heading back to Athens even without your precious toy?”

“No, no, no.” Sostratos tossed his head. Having taken so many barbs, Sostratos gave one back: “I was just thinking how handy it was that there are still a few places around the Inner Sea where you haven't outraged any husbands.”

“Heh,” Menedemos said: one syllable's worth of laughter. But he'd never been a man who could dish it out without taking it. After a moment, he lifted one hand from the steering-oar tillers and waved to Sostratos. “All right, my dear, you got me that time.”

Sounion, as far as Sostratos was concerned, remained as unprepossessing as it had been the last time the Aphrodite put in there, a few days earlier. Now, at least, the ship didn't need to be cleansed of pollution (unless adultery counts, he thought), and they had no dead or dying aboard. The setting sun sent gold and orange and crimson ripples across the sea as the akatos' anchors splashed down into the water.

A boat rowed out from the hamlet toward the merchant galley. Sostratos had seen the man at the oars before, but not his passenger, a dapper fellow who looked out of place in Sounion. The dapper man hailed the ship: “Ahoy, there! Who are you, and where are you bound?”