Harry Turtledove - The Sacred Land

“I’m not likely to forget that,” Sostratos said tartly. “Antigonos’ soldiers almost caught us here in the harbor.”

“Hush,” Menedemos told him. “You don’t want to say such things where these boys might hear you.”

That, no doubt, was good advice. “What ship are you?” called the soldier with the fancier plume in his helmet, “Where are you from? What’s your cargo? “

“We’re the Aphrodite , best one, out of Rhodes,” Sostratos answered. Rhodes tried to stay on good terms with all the squabbling Macedonian marshals, but was especially friendly to Ptolemaios of Egypt, who shipped enormous amounts of wheat through her harbor. “We’ve got perfume, fine oil, Koan silk, books-”

“Let me see a book,” the soldier said.

“What would you like? We have some of the best parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or a poem that’s as, ah, spicy as anything you’ve ever read,”

Ptolemaios’ trooper tossed his head. “I’ve never read anything at all, on account of I haven’t got my letters.” He seemed proud of his illiteracy, too. “But if you’ve really got books, I know you’re traders and not some gods-detested spies.”

Maybe that was logic. Maybe it was just stupidity. Sostratos couldn’t quite decide which. Would spies be clever enough to bring books along in case some officious junior officer decided he wanted to have a look at them? Who could guess? Sostratos stooped under a rower’s bench, opened an oiled-leather sack, and took out a roll of papyrus. He worked the wooden spindles to show the soldier the roll did indeed have words written on it.

“All right. All right. I believe you.” The fellow motioned for him to stop. “Put the silly thing away. By Zeus, you are what you say you are.” He turned on his heel and tramped back down the pier. The other soldier, who’d never said a word, followed him.

“That was easier than I’ve seen it a good many places,” Menedemos remarked.

“I know.” Sostratos looked up to the forts atop the hills west of Kaunos. Antigonos’ soldiers had held out for a while in one of them, even after the city fell to Ptolemaios’ men. “I wonder if the Rhodian proxenos ever came back here.”

“If you really care, we can ask,” Menedemos said with a shrug. A year before, the Aphrodite had taken the Kaunian who looked after Rhodian interests in his city to Rhodes itself; he’d feared arrest from Antigonos’ men when word came that Ptolemaios’ soldiers were sweeping west along the southern coast of Anatolia. He’d had reason to fear, too; soldiers who’d come to arrest him had got to his house just too late, and they’d come down to the harbor just too late to keep the Aphrodite from sailing.

Sostratos went back behind the steering oars, picked up the gangplank, and stretched it from the poop deck to the wharf. Normally, that was work for an ordinary seaman, not the merchant galley’s toikharkhos. Sostratos didn’t care. He was too eager to care. He gave Menedemos an inviting wave. “Come on, my dear. Let’s see what there is to see.”

“You’re not going to find another gryphon’s skull,” his cousin told him.

“If I don’t look for one, I certainly won’t,” Sostratos replied with dignity. “Are you coming?”

“Oh, yes,” Menedemos said. “If you think I’ll pass up a chance to see you act foolish, you can think again.”

“I don’t see how seeking something I want is foolish,” Sostratos said, more dignified than ever. “When you seek what you want, it usually wears a transparent chiton and perfume.”

“Well, I’d rather have a live girl than a dead gryphon. If that makes me a fool, I’ll answer to the name.”

Kaunos was an old town. Its streets ambled every which way instead of sticking to a neat rectangular grid like those of Rhodes. All the inscriptions used Greek letters, but not all were in Greek: a few were in the Karian tongue, for Kaunos had been a Karian town before Hellenes settled there, and it remained a place where folk of both bloods lived. Pointing to an inscription he couldn’t read, Sostratos said, “I wonder what that means.”

“Some barbarous blather or other,” Menedemos said indifferently. “If it were anything important, they’d’ve written it in Greek.”

“You say that, on your way to Phoenicia?” Sostratos said. “Hardly anyone knows Greek there. If more people did, would I have been wrestling with Aramaic all winter long?”

“If you want to wrestle, go to the palaistra,” Menedemos answered, misunderstanding him on purpose. “As for the Phoenicians, well, there haven’t been many Hellenes in their towns till lately. The Kaunians have no excuse.”

“Always ready to see things to your own advantage, aren’t you?” Sostratos said.

“To whose better?” his cousin returned.

Despite the town’s twisting roads, Sostratos led both of them to the agora. “Here we are!” he said as the street opened out onto the market square.

“Yes, here we are.” Menedemos scratched his head. “And how did you lead us here? Me, I’d’ve had to take an obolos out of my mouth and give it to somebody to get him to tell us the way.”

“Why?” Sostratos said in surprise. “We were here last year. Don’t you remember the way?”

“If I did, would I be saying I didn’t?” Menedemos replied. “My dear, there are times when you forget ordinary mortals haven’t got your memory, I’m not sure all-powerful Zeus has your memory.”

“Of course not-he has his own,” Sostratos said. Menedemos’ praise displeased him not at all. Pointing across the agora, he went on, “The fellow who sold us the gryphon’s skull had his stall there.”

“Well, so he did.” Menedemos started across the square, picking his way between a farmer hawking dried figs and a fellow who’d gathered a great basketload of mushrooms out in the meadows and woods in back of Kaunos. “Let’s get this over with.” He brightened a little. “Maybe he’ll have more hides to sell us, anyhow.”

Sostratos’ heart pounded with excitement as he hurried after his cousin. For a moment, hope outran reason. There was the stall, there was the fellow who’d sold them the gryphon’s skull, there was a lion skin on display… No gryphon’s skull. Sostratos sighed. He did his best to remind himself he really shouldn’t have expected to see another one, not when the first had come from far to the east, beyond the edge of the known world.

His best wasn’t good enough to mask disappointment.

“Why, it’s the Rhodians!” the local exclaimed. “Hail, O best ones! Can we do business again? I hope we can.”

“Of course he does,” Menedemos muttered behind his hand. “He played us for fools once, unloading that skull on us.”

“Oh, go howl,” Sostratos told him. He asked the Kaunian, “Have you by any chance seen another gryphon’s skull?”

“Sorry, my friend, but no.” The fellow tossed his head, dashing Sostratos’ hopes once and for all. Menedemos didn’t say, I told you so, which was just as well. Sostratos thought he might have picked up a rock and brained his cousin for a crack like that right then.

Then Menedemos asked the Kaunian, “Have you seen another tiger’s hide?”

The local tossed his head again. “No, not one of those, either. You fellows want all the strange things, don’t you? I’ve got this fine lion skin here, you see.” He pointed to it.

“Oh, yes,” Menedemos said, though he sounded anything but impressed. “I suppose we’ll buy it from you, but we’d make more money with the stranger things.”

“Especially in Phoenicia,” Sostratos added. “We’re sailing east this year, and they have lions of their own there. How much would they care about one more hide in, say, Byblos?”