Harry Turtledove: The Gryphon's Skull

And, when he wasn't at the gymnasion or the agora, he went down to the harbor. Not many ships came in much more than a month after the autumnal equinox, but the harbor stayed busy even so, with new vessels a-building and old ones—the Aphrodite among them— hauled up on the beach for repairs and refitting. The talk was good there, too, though different from that in the market square: centered on the sea, much less concerned over either the latest juicy gossip or the wider world.

“You're lucky you're here, and not in shackles in a slave market in Carthage or Phoenicia or Crete,” a carpenter said, driving home a large-headed copper tack that helped secure lead sheathing to a round ship's side.

“Believe me, Khremes, I know it,” Menedemos answered. “A pestilence take all pirates.” Everyone working on the merchantman dipped his head. In a savage mood, Menedemos went on, “And if the pestilence doesn't take 'em, the cross will do.”

“I'd like to see that myself,” Khremes said. “But those whoresons are hard to catch. Remind me—I heard your story, but this bit didn't stick—was it a pentekonter that came after you, or one of those gods-detested hemioliai?”

“A hemiolia,” Menedemos said. “To the crows with the whoreson who first thought up the breed. He must have been a pirate himself. I hope he ended up on a cross and died slow. They're only good for one thing—”

“Might as well be women,” Khremes broke in, and all the men in earshot laughed.

That hit closer to the center of the target than Menedemos would have liked. To keep anyone else from guessing, he took the gibe a step further with a bit of doggerel:

“Every woman's gall,

But she has two moments:

In bed, and dead.”

“Euge!” Khremes exclaimed, and put down his hammer to clap his hands. The other carpenters and the harborside loungers bending an ear dipped their heads.

“Thanks,” Menedemos said, thinking, I'll have to remember that one and spring it on Sostratos when he's got a mouthful of wine — see if I can make him choke. He made himself go back to hemioliai: “Cursed ships are only good for darting out to grab a merchantman—and for showing a pair of heels to anything honest that chases em.

“Sometimes a trireme'll catch 'em,” Khremes said, picking up the hammer once more and choosing another short copper tack.

“Sometimes,” Menedemos said morosely. “Not often enough, and we all know it.”

The Rhodians dipped their heads again. A lot of them had pulled an oar in one of the polis' triremes, or in one of the bigger, heavier warships that were fine for battling their own kind but too slow and beamy to go pirate-hunting despite their swarms of rowers.

Khremes started hammering away. A man who looked as if he had a hangover winced and drew back from the round ship. As the carpenter drove the tack home, he said, “Don't know what to do about it. Triremes are the fastest warships afloat, and they have been for—oh, I don't know, a mighty long time, anyways. Forever, you might almost say.”

Sostratos would know how long — probably to the hour, Menedemos thought. He didn't himself, not exactly, but he had some notion of how things worked. He said, “Biremes are faster than pentekonters because they can pack just as many rowers into a shorter, lighter hull. Hemioliai are especially little and light—the back half of that upper bank of oars only gets used part-time.”

“Triremes are a lot bigger'n two-bankers,” one of the loungers said.

Menedemos dipped his head. “Truth. But they pack in a lot more rowers, too, so they go just about as fast, and the extra weight makes 'em hit a lot harder when they ram. What we could really use is a trireme built fast and light like a hemiolia, maybe with the same way to stow mast and yard where the back half of the thranite bank of oarsmen work.”

He'd been talking to hear himself talk. He hadn't expected anything particularly interesting or clever to come out. But Khremes slowly put down the hammer and gave him a long, thoughtful look. “By the gods, best one, I think you may have thrown a triple six there,” he said.

Menedemos listened in his own mind to what he'd just said. He let out a soft whistle. “If we wanted to, we really could build ships like that, couldn't we?” he said.

“We could. No doubt about it—we could. And I think maybe we should,” Khremes said. “They'd be quick as boiled asparagus, they would. And they'd have enough size and enough crew to step on a hemiolia like it was a bug.”

“One of them would be a hemiolia, near enough,” Menedemos said. “An oversized hemiolia, a hemiolia made from a trireme's hull. You could call it a ...” He groped for a word. He didn't think the one he came up with really existed in the Greek language, but it suited the idea, so he used it anyway: “A trihemiolia, you might say.”

Whether that was a word or not, it got across what he wanted, for Khremes dipped his head. Excitement in his voice, the carpenter said, “When I close my eyes, I can see her on the water. She'd be wicked fast—fast as a dolphin, fast as a falcon. A trihemiolia.” It came off his tongue more readily than it had from Menedemos'. “You ought to talk to the admirals, sir, Furies take me if I'm lying. A flotilla of ships like that could make a big pack o' pirates sorry they took up their trade.”

“Do you think so?” Menedemos asked. But he could see a tri-hemiolia in his mind's eye, too, see it gliding over the Aegean, swift and deadly as a barracuda.

Khremes pointed north and west, toward the military harbor. “If you don't find one of the admirals at the ship sheds, I'd be mighty surprised. And, by the gods, I think this is something they need to hear.”

“Come with me, will you?” Menedemos said, suddenly and uncharacteristically modest. “After all, you're one of the men who'd have to build a trihemiolia, if there were to be such a thing.”

The carpenter stuck the hammer on his belt, carrying it where a soldier would have worn a sword. “Let's go.”

Ship sheds lined the military harbor: big, wide ones that held the fives Rhodes used to defend herself against other naval craft; smaller ones for the triremes that hunted pirates. When not on patrol or on campaign, war galleys were hauled up out of the water so their hulls stayed dry and light and swift.

A few guards tramped back and forth by the ship sheds. When Menedemos and Khremes came up to one of them and asked their question, the fellow dipped his head, which made the crimson-dyed horsehair plume on his helmet nod and sway. He pointed with his spear. “Yes, as a matter of fact, Admiral Eudemos just went into that shed there. The Freedom's been having trouble with her sternpost, and he wants to make sure they got it fixed.”

When Menedemos walked into the shed that housed the five, his eyes needed a few heartbeats to adjust to the gloom. He heard Eudemos before spotting him up on the deck of the war galley: “You really think she's sound this time?” he was asking a carpenter.

“Yes, sir, I do,” the man answered.

“All right. She'd better be,” Eudemos said. “Nothing much wrong with having trouble—that's going to happen. But taking three tries to fix it? That's a shame and a disgrace.” He noticed Menedemos and Khremes at the mouth of the shed and raised his voice to call out to them: “Hail, the two of you. What do you need?”

For a moment, Menedemos didn't know what to say. Come on, fool, he told himself. You've got something to sell, same as you would in the agora. That steadied him. “Sir, I've had an idea that might interest you,” he said.

“It's a good one, Admiral,” Khremes added.