Harry Turtledove - The Gryphon's Skull

“And if we don't run into pirates,” his cousin added. Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic. After a moment, Sostratos did the same. He went on, “Shall I pass out the weapons again, just in case?”

“Maybe you'd better,” Menedemos said with a sigh.

They saw no pirate galleys on the Aegean, only fishing boats and one round ship that took the Aphrodite for a pirate and sped away, running before the wind. Syros rose from the sea ahead of them: a sun-baked island much longer from north to south than from east to west. The only polis on the island, also called Syros, lay by a bay on the eastern coast; Menedemos brought the Aphrodite down from the north into the harbor.

He quoted from the Odyssey as the akatos' anchors splashed into the Aegean:

“ 'There is an island called Syrie, if perhaps you have heard of it,

Above Ortygie, where the turning points of the sun are.

It is not very populous, but it is good—

With fine cattle, fine sheep, full of wine, rich in wheat.

Famine never enters that folk, nor does any other

Dire plague come upon wretched mortals.

But when the race of men grows old in the city,

Apollo of the silver bow comes with Artemis.

He assails them with his painless shafts and kills them.

There are two cities there, and everything is divided in two between them.

My father was king over both:

Ktesios son of Ormenos, a man like the immortals.' “

“That's Eumaios the swineherd talking to Odysseus, isn't it?” Sostratos asked.

“Yes, that's right,” Menedemos said.

Sostratos took a long look at Syros, then clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Well, if Eumaios was telling as much truth about his ancestors as he was about the island, he must have been a pig-keeper from a long line of pigkeepers.”

“Scoffer!” Menedemos said, deliciously scandalized. But, the more he eyed the dry, barren landscape beyond the steeply rising streets of the polis of Syros, the more he realized Sostratos had a point: he saw not a tree, hardly even a bush. Still, he went on, “It must grow something, or no one would live here.”

“I suppose so,” Sostratos said grudgingly. “All the same, this is one of those places that prove Homer was a blind poet.” He pointed ahead. “Even the polis is a miserable little dump. Herodotos never says a word about it, and neither does Thoukydides. I see why not, too.”

“Why should they?” Menedemos said. “Nothing much happens here.”

“That's what I mean,” Sostratos said. “You could live out your life in this polis. You could be as big a man here as that Kallimedes son of Kallias was back on Keos, and nobody who's not from Syros would ever hear of you, any more than we'd heard of Kallimedes. In Rhodes or Athens or Taras or Syracuse or Alexandria, at least you have a chance to be remembered. Here?” He tossed his head.

Menedemos wondered if bright young men, ambitious young men, left Syros and crossed the sea to some other polis where they could seek their heart's desire. He supposed some had to. But most, surely, lived out their lives within a few stadia of where they were born. All through the civilized world, most people did.

The heat wave broke that night. The northerly breeze that blew the next morning had a distinct nip to it, a warning that autumn, even if it hadn't got here yet, would come. Menedemos enjoyed that, but he enjoyed its steadiness even more. “Now we'll show that son of a whore what the Aphrodite can do,” he muttered, dipping a chunk of bread into olive oil and taking a big bite.

“If the wind holds, we'll make Naxos easy as you please,” Diokles agreed, “and that's a pretty fair day's run.”

Wind thrummed in the rigging and quickly filled the sail when Menedemos ordered it lowered. The merchant galley seemed to lean forward, letting that wind pull her along. Naxos lay at the heart of Antigonos' Island League. With malice aforethought, Menedemos asked Dionysios son of Herakleitos, “When we get there, shall we tell the Naxians how eager you are to go on to Kos?”

The passenger's eyes were cool as marble. “Tell them anything you please, O best one. It's all the same to me.” He was probably lying about that, but he'd made his point, and Menedemos stopped twitting him.

From Naxos to Amorgos the next day was an even better run. Menedemos steered past several little islands that housed a few shepherds and fishermen. He'd almost gone aground on one of them in the rain on his last trip through the Kyklades, with Polemaios aboard. No danger of that here; not with the weather fine and sunny, but he did have to do several usual days' worth of steering before he left them astern. Sostratos said, “Any one of those horrid little rocks makes Syros look like Athens.”

“And if that's not a frightening thought, Furies take me if I know what would be,” Menedemos replied.

He took the Aphrodite south and west again the following day, to Astypalaia, where they spoke Doric Greek like his own rather than Ionic. A great many fishing boats bobbed in the offshore waters; a fertile valley stretched behind the polis, which lay in the southeastern part of the island.

“One more place where nobody ever made a name for himself,” Menedemos said.

To his surprise, Sostratos tossed his head. “Don't you know the story of Kleomedes of Astypalaia?” he asked.

“Can't say that I do,” Menedemos admitted. “Who was he?”

“A pankratiast, back around the time of the Persian Wars,” Sostratos answered. “He would have won at the Olympic Games, but he killed his foe in the all-out fight and got disqualified. He must have gone mad with grief after that. He came back to Astypalaia and pulled down a pillar that held up the roof for a boys' school—fifty or sixty people died. He fled to Athena's temple and hid in a wooden chest there, but when the Astypalaians broke it open he wasn't inside, either: not alive, not dead, just. . . gone.”

Menedemos felt the hair at the back of his neck try to prickle up in awe and dread. “What happened then?” he asked.

“They sent to Delphi to find out what they should do, and the verse they got back was,

'Last of the heroes—Kleomedes the Astypalaian. Honor him with sacrifices, he being mortal no more.' “

“Do they?” Menedemos asked.

“I've never heard otherwise,” Sostratos said.

“A demigod, from as late as the Persian Wars,” Menedemos mused. “That's strange all by itself. . . although people are saying Alexander was divine, too.”

“They're saying it, all right,” Sostratos agreed. “What do you think of it?”

“I don't know,” Menedemos answered. “He did things no ordinary mortal could do. Maybe that does make him divine. Who knows where humanity stops and divinity starts? It's not as though there were a neat line between gods and men.” He poked his cousin in the ribs. “What do you think?”

“I don't know, either.” Sostratos sounded uncomfortable, even a little annoyed: he always hated not knowing. He went on, “He was just a man—Ptolemaios and Polemaios knew him. I'm not comfortable with calling anyone a god—but, as you say, he did things you wouldn't think a mere man could do. I wish I had a better answer, but I don't. I wonder what Ptolemaios would say if we asked him.”

“Well, we're only a couple of days from Kos,” Menedemos said. “You can do that, if you've got the nerve.”

“Oh, I'm sure he'd talk about Alexander—Alexander's dead, divine or not,” Sostratos said. “Now, if I were to start talking about Antigonos ... I don't think I'd want to do that.” He glanced toward Dionysios son of Herakleitos, who'd dropped a fishing line over the side to see if he could catch some opson to go with his sitos. In a low voice, he added, “You never can tell who might be listening.”