The Gryphon's Skull

9

“We're about ready to sail for Athens,” Menedemos told Sostratos as they stood on the Aphrodites poop deck after several profitable days in Miletos,

“All right,” his cousin said.

Menedemos laughed. “ 'All right? Is that the best you can manage? Before we got here, you would have been happy to skip this town and head straight for Cape Sounion, and you know it as well as I do.”

“I still want to go,” Sostratos said, sounding like a man doing his best not to sound annoyed. “You're making it seem as though I can't tear myself away from Metrikhe, and that isn't true.”

“Well, maybe not.” Menedemos laughed again. “You do come up for air every now and then—the way a dolphin does before it dives deep into the sea. Except you're diving deep into her—”

“Leave it alone, would you please?” Now Sostratos did sound annoyed.

Since irking his cousin was what Menedemos had had in mind, he did change the subject... in a way: “You've got to admit, we did the right thing coming here. Besides making you sleep like a dead man every night, we've unloaded most of the silk for a better price than we ever thought we'd get, and all but two of the emeralds. We'll show a profit when we get home. Our fathers won't have anything to complain about.” Keeping his father from having anything to com­plain about was one of his main goals in life. Trouble was, Philodemos complained whether he had anything to complain about or not.

“You could have sold those last two stones,” Sostratos said. “One of them's the best of the lot, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is—and I know I could have,” Menedemos said. “But I kept thinking: if I'm getting these prices in Miletos, what would I get in Athens? This polis hasn't been anything special for a long time—”

“Since before the Persian Wars,” Sostratos said.

“That's a long time,” Menedemos said. Somewhere close to two hundred years, he thought. Before his cousin could tell him exactly how long—to the hour, as likely as not—he went on, “Let's save a couple, anyhow, for a really big polis, a really rich polis. Maybe we'll do better with them there.”

“Maybe we will,” Sostratos agreed. “We couldn't very well try selling them in Alexandria. It's the richest city in the world, but...”

“Yes. But,” Menedemos said. “If we showed up with Egyptian emeralds in Ptolemaios' capital, people would wonder how we got them, and they'd take us apart trying to find out. I don't think I'd care to answer those kinds of questions.”

“Neither do I,” Sostratos said.

Menedemos pointed a finger at him. “Would your hetaira want to buy one of the emeralds? I'd bet she's got the cash for it.”

“I'm sure Metrikhe has the cash for it,” his cousin answered. “I mentioned them to her the other day, as a matter of fact. She said, 'They sound very pretty. I'll have to see if one of my friends will buy some for me.'

“Did she?” Menedemos laughed once more. “Sounds like she'd make a splendid merchant if she were a man—never use your own money when you can use someone else's instead.”

“She would. I'm sure of it,” Sostratos said. “And I don't think she'll be poor after her looks go, either. She'll use what she's got wisely.”

“Oh, I don't know. How can you be so sure?” Menedemos said. “Look what she's doing with you—giving it away for nothing. If that's not bad business, I don't know what is.”

Sostratos turned red. Menedemos grinned; he'd hoped that would embarrass his cousin. “If she wants to be foolish that particular way, I won't complain,” Sostratos said.

“No, eh?” Menedemos said. Sostratos tossed his head. Menedemos' grin got wider, not least to hide his annoyance that Sostratos had had such luck here and he hadn't. He'd even hinted a couple of times that he would like to meet Metrikhe—in a purely social way, of course. But Sostratos had made a point of not inviting him along when he went calling. Do you think I'd try to take your woman away? Would I do such a thing to my own cousin? Menedemos knew himself well enough to answer that honestly: if she were pretty enough. I

“Exactly when were you planning to sail?” Sostratos asked.

“Day after tomorrow,” Menedemos answered. “I was thinking we'd spend tomorrow in the agora, try to move as much as we can— silk, dye, perfume—”

“Balsam,” Sostratos broke in. “We only have a little bit of balsam left. It's done well for us.”

“It has, hasn't it?” Menedemos said. “I wish we'd bought more from those Phoenicians. Physicians and priests both snap it up. I hadn't expected quite so much demand.”

“Neither had I,” Sostratos said. “It's the perfect sort of thing for us to carry, though: it isn't bulky, and it's worth a lot. We ought to see if we can get more next year. We'd make money on it.”

“Himilkon would probably be able to find some for us,” Menedemos said. “All sorts of strange things come out of the east and end up in his warehouse. Peafowl, for instance.”

“Don't remind me,” Sostratos shuddered. He'd cared for the peafowl on the journey to Great Hellas the year before, and would likely spend the rest of his days trying to forget the experience. After a deep breath, he went on, “It might be worth our while to go east next spring and see if we can buy direct. Engedi, where the stuff comes from, is somewhere in Phoenicia, isn't it?”

“In it or near it,” Menedemos said. “I'm pretty sure of that.” He stroked his chin. “If we took a cargo along, so we could sell as well as buy—”

“Well, of course,” Sostratos said.

“Yes, yes.” Slowly, Menedemos dipped his head. “We've talked about this once or twice before, in an idle sort of way, but now I'm starting to catch fire, I truly am. We could save a fortune in the middlemen's fees the Phoenicians charge.”

“We'll have to talk to Himilkon when we get back to Rhodes— see what he can tell us about the country and its customs,” Sostratos said. “We'll have to hope it's not at war, too. If Ptolemaios decides to try to take it away from Antigonos, it's a good place to stay away from. We almost got stuck in their fight a couple of times this sailing season.”

“We did get stuck at Kos,” Menedemos said.

“So we did,” Sostratos said. “But it is a good idea, I think. Not that many Hellenes go there. We could make quite a profit. And we can stop in the cities of Cyprus on the way there and back. I think we should have an easy time persuading our fathers,”

Menedemos made a sour face, his enthusiasm suddenly half quenched. “You can say that. Uncle Lysistratos is a pretty easygoing fellow. But trying to talk my father into anything ...” He tossed his head. “It's like trying to pound sense into a rock.”

“I'm sure he says the same thing about you,” his cousin remarked.

“What if he does?” Menedemos said. “I'm the one who's right.” Sostratos didn't argue with him. Menedemos assumed that meant his cousin thought he was right. That it might mean Sostratos merely thought there was no point to arguing never crossed his mind.

The evening before they sailed, Diokles went through the brothels and taverns of Miletos, rounding up the Aphrodite's, crew. He made sure everybody was back aboard the merchant galley before she left the harbor. Menedemos clapped him on the back. “You go after them the way a hound goes after hares, and you dig them out wherever they hide.”

“I know the spots,” the oarmaster answered. “I'd better, by the gods. When I pulled an oar myself, I spent enough time drinking and screwing in them, and hoping my officers wouldn't grab me and haul me away.”

Not long after sunrise the next morning, the Aphrodite left Miletos. Some of the sailors looked wan and unhappy, but some of them were bound to look wan and unhappy going out of any port. Sostratos stared west across the water at a destination he could see only in his mind's eye. “Athens,” he murmured. “At last.”

Menedemos gave him a quizzical look. “I've never seen anyone run so hard from a pretty girl, especially when nobody's running after you.

His cousin shrugged. “Metrikhe was pleasant, but she was only a hetaira.”

“Only, eh?” Menedemos gave a skeptical snort. “I suppose that's why you made such a point of not introducing me to her.”

Sostratos turned red. Menedemos hid a smile. Coughing a couple of times, Sostratos said, “I did find her first, you know.” His voice got a little stronger, a little sharper: “And I don't see you introducing me to the women you meet at our stops.”

“Well, my dear, you do get so tedious about meeting other men's wives,” Menedemos said, Sostratos coughed again, this time as if he were choking. He soon found an excuse to go forward. Menedemos grinned and gave his attention to the steering oars.

Waves slapped the Aphrodite's starboard side as she made her way west across the Ikarian Sea. The sail now bellied full, now lay limp in a fitful breeze from out of the north. Menedemos kept six, sometimes eight, men a side on the oars to push the akatos along even when the breeze fell. To the north and northwest, Samos and Ikaria and several smaller islands reared out of the water as if their central hills were the notched backs of mythical beasts.

Though the two were much of a size, Samos was an important place, Ikaria a backwater where nothing much ever happened. Here, Menedemos didn't need to ask his history-minded cousin why the neighboring islands differed so much, Samos had a good harbor. Ikaria didn't. As a result, it had no poleis, only a handful of villages and some herdsmen and their flocks. The world had passed it by, and the Aphrodite would do the same.

The akatos put in at Patmos, a small island south of Ikaria, for the night. Patmos had a decent harbor—it boasted several bays a ship might enter, in fact—but very little else. It was dry and rocky, baked brown as a bread crust by the sun. As the Aphrodites anchors splashed into the sea, Sostratos looked over the desolate terrain and said, “Now I understand.”

“Understand what?” Menedemos asked.

“In the early days of the Peloponnesian War, a Spartan admiral named Alkidas was operating north of here, up near Ephesos,” his cousin answered. “In those days, the Athenian fleet was much stronger than Sparta's. The Athenian commander—his name was Pakhes—found out the Spartans were around. He chased them as far as Patmos here, but then he turned back,”

Menedemos scratched his head. “I'm still not following you, my dear.”

“He took one look at this place and then went away,” Sostratos said. “Wouldn't you?”

“Oh.” Menedemos took another look at the island: at the rocks and the sand and the miserable little fishing village in front of which they were anchored. “A point. I wouldn't want to live out my days here, that's sure.”

A few minutes later, just before the sun sank into the Aegean, a small boat put out from the village and made for the Aphrodite. As it drew near, one of the men inside called, “ 'Oo are you? Where are you comin' from? Where are you 'eaded for?” His dialect was odd: half Ionic, half Doric, and thoroughly rustic.

After naming the merchant galley, Menedemos said, “We're out of Miletos, bound for Athens.”

“Ah.” The local dipped his head. “All them big places. Don't 'ave much truck with 'em 'ere.” I believe that, Menedemos thought. If you weren't a day's nail out of Miletos, no one would ever have anything to do with you. The fellow in the boat asked, “What are you car-ryin'?”

Sostratos spoke up: “Koan silk. Crimson dye. Rhodian perfume. Papyrus and ink. Fine balsam from Engedi. A lion's skin.” He didn't, Menedemos noted with amusement, mention the gryphon's skull. Was he afraid the people here might want to steal it? If he was, that had to be one of the more foolish fears Menedemos had ever heard of.

“Fancy stuff,” the Patmian said. “I might've known. Thought you was a pirate when I first seen you.”

Folk often made that mistake about the Aphrodite. Hearing of pirates got Menedemos' attention. “Have you seen any lately? Are they sailing in these waters?” he asked.

“Every now and again,” the local answered, which might mean anything or nothing. He paused to spit into the sea, then asked a question of his own: “What d'you want for a jar o' your perfume? My woman'd take it right kindly if she got one.”

“By the gods!” Menedemos muttered. “I never expected to do business here.”

“Eight drakhmai,” Sostratos told the Patmian, as calmly as if he were dickering in the market square in Rhodes.

Menedemos admired that calm. He also expected to see the local recoil in horror: a drakhma a day would keep a man and his family housed and fed, if not in fancy style. He looked toward the village again. Nothing here was fancy.

But the man just shrugged and said, “Deal, pal. I got the silver. Don't hardly got nothin1 to spend it on, though. 'Ereabouts, we mostly just swap back and forth.” He nudged the other man in the boat, who started to row toward shore. Over his shoulder, he called, “Be right back.”

“Will he?” Menedemos wondered. “Or is he without an obolos to his name, and just trying to save face in front of us?”

Sostratos shrugged. “No way to tell. Either he'll come or he won't. If he does, I wonder what he'll use for money. They can't possibly mint coins here.”

The boat beached itself a plethron or so from the Aphrodite. One of the men in it got out and went into a house close by the sea. The other man, the rower, sat in the boat, waiting. That made Menedemos begin to believe the first Patmian did have the money. And sure enough, as twilight began to deepen, he emerged from his house and trotted back to the boat. A moment later, it headed out toward the merchant galley.

“Can I come aboard?” the local called as it drew near.

“Come ahead,” Menedemos answered. The boat pulled up alongside the akatos' waist. One of the sailors reached out and helped haul the Patmian into the ship. He walked back to the stern and up onto the poop deck.

“Hail,” Sostratos said.

“ ‘Ail,” the Patmian replied. “You got the perfume there? .. . That's not what you'd call a right big jar, is it?”

“It's the size we always sell,” Sostratos said, which was true. “There's not a whole lot left after they boil down the roses and mix the scent with oil. It will last you a while—your wife won't need much to make herself smell sweet.”

Menedemos wondered how true that was. The local hadn't bathed any time recently, which meant the odds were good his wife hadn't, either. True, this was a dry island, but even so. ... There was no room to get upwind of the fellow, either. Menedemos did his best not to breathe.

With sudden decision, the Patmian dipped his head. “All right. I'll take it.” He held out a couple of coins to Sostratos. Menedemos' cousin took them, hefted them, and handed the local the perfume. “Thank you kindly,” the fellow said. He scrambled back into the boat. When he and his friend beached it this time, they pulled it well up out of the water and they both went into the village.

“What did he give you?” Menedemos asked.

“See for yourself.” Sostratos set the coins on Menedemos' palm.

In the fading light, Menedemos held them up close to his face. “A tetradrakhm from Corinth,” he said. “That's a pretty Pegasos on it. And another tetradrakhm from Aigina. Very nice—I'm always glad to get turtles, because they're so heavy.”

“Notice anything unusual about this particular turtle?” Sostratos asked.

“I didn't.” Menedemos looked more closely. “It's got a smooth shell.”

“And flippers, not regular feet,” his cousin agreed. “It's a sea turtle, not a tortoise. Aigina hasn't made them like that since the days of the Persian Wars. I wonder how this one ended up here.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if this fellow's five-times-great-grandfather stole it from an Aiginetan, and it's been here ever since,” Menedemos answered. “I'm just glad he's off my ship. Did you smell him?”

“I could hardly help it.” Sostratos took back the coins. “However he got the silver, though, it doesn't stink.”

“True.” Now Menedemos was the one who looked west, towards Athens. “A couple of nights at sea coming up.”

“I think that's a better bet than going through the Kyklades again,” Sostratos said. “Too many pirates in those waters, and sooner or later we'd come across one who'd sooner fight than go the other way.”

“That's what I think, too.” Menedemos took off his chiton and threw it down on the poop deck. “Might as well go to sleep now.”

When he woke the next morning and untangled himself from the folds of his himation, he exclaimed in low-voiced delight as he stood by the rail and pissed into the harbor of Patmos. The breeze came out of the northeast, strong and with a certain feel to it that made him think it would hold all day. Every once in a while, such feelings let him down. More often than not, though, he gauged the wind rightly.

Diokles looked up from the rower's bench where he'd passed the night. “Kind of day that makes you want to get out to sea as fast as you can,” he said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Menedemos said. The eastern sky was pink, but the sun wouldn't rise for some little while yet. He looked down at Sostratos, who still lay snoring on the poop deck, and stirred him with his foot.

His cousin gasped and sputtered and opened his eyes. “What was that for?” he asked indignantly, sitting up.

“What's the matter?” Menedemos was the picture of innocence. “Don't you want to go to Athens?”

“I want you to go to the crows.” Sostratos got to his feet so quickly and fiercely, Menedemos wondered if he would have to fight his cousin. But then the angry glow faded from Sostratos' eyes. “That's a splendid wind, isn't it?”

“Feels good to me,” Menedemos said. “The keleustes likes it, too. And I can't imagine anyone being sorry to get away from Patmos,”

“All right.” Sostratos walked naked to the rail, as Menedemos had moments before. When he turned back, he said, “Let's start getting the sailors up.”

Diokles had already started waking the ones who hadn't roused by themselves. They ate bread and oil, drank watered wine, and had the anchors hauled up and stowed by the time the sun crawled above the horizon. They didn't even have to row out of the harbor. It faced west, and the breeze carried the Aphrodite away from it as soon as the sail came down from the yard.

Looking back over his shoulder, Menedemos watched Patmos recede behind him. Had he taken the akatos due west, he would have sailed through the Kyklades for the third time that sailing season. Instead, he used the steering oars to swing her somewhat to the north, so that she went up between Ikaria on his right hand and Mykonos on his left. Tenos lay northwest of Mykonos, Andros northwest of Tenos, Euboia northwest of Andros. Menedemos steered the Aphrodite on a course parallel to them but well to the east, out in the middle of the Aegean. He didn't see another ship all day, which suited him fine.

“Late tomorrow or early the next day, we'll be able to slide through the channel between Andros and Euboia and make for Athens,” he said.

“Good enough. Better than good enough, in fact,” Sostratos said. “You had the right of it: not many ships out here in the middle of the sea.”

“We don't guarantee getting through without any trouble this way,” Menederaos said. “We do make our chances better, though. And we never get out of sight of land, the way you can sailing west to Great Hellas. So we always know where we are.”

“Not easy to get out of sight of land in the Aegean,” Sostratos said. “I'm not sure you could do it, not on a clear day.”

“Up in the north, maybe,” Menedemos said. “There's that broad reach from Lesbos to Skyros. Otherwise, though”—he tossed his head—”no, I wouldn't think so.”

Some of the sailors baited lines with bits of bread and cheese and let them down into the sea. They caught a few sprats and a mackerel or two. And then, just when Menedemos was about to order the anchors dropped, Moskhion pulled in a gloriously plump red mullet. “He'll have friends tonight,” Sostratos said.

“Won't he, though?” Menedemos agreed. The splendid fish made his mouth water. “I hope I'm Moskhion's friend tonight.” As the captain of a merchant galley learned to do, he pitched his voice to carry.

Moskhion looked up from the mullet, an impish grin on his face. “Have we met, sir?” he asked, as bland as if he were a man with estates out to the horizon condescending to speak to a tanner.

Menedemos laughed as loudly as everyone else who heard the sailor. “You'll find out whether we've met,” he growled, mock fierce.

As the sun set, the men who'd caught fish grilled them over little braziers. The savory scent of the flesh filled the air. Moskhion did share the mullet as widely as he could, and sent small portions back to Menedemos, Sostratos, and Diokles. “That's only a bite,” Sostratos said as he washed his down with a swallow of wine, “but it's a mighty tasty bite.”

“It sure is,” Menedemos agreed. “A bite of mullet's worth a bellyful of cheese any day.” He knew a hungry man would say no such thing, but he enjoyed the luxury of a full belly. He ate an olive and spat the pit into the sea.

Diokles pointed into the southern sky, a little west of the meridian. “There's Zeus' wandering star,” he said.

“Where?” Sostratos said, and then, “Ah. There. Now I see it. I wonder if it's true, as the Babylonians say, that the motions of the stars foretell everything we do.”

“How can anyone know something like that?” Menedemos said. “Me, I want to think I do things because I want to do them, not because some star says I must.”

“Yes, I want to believe the same thing,” his cousin said. “But is it really true, or do I want to believe it because the stars say I should want to?”

Diokles grunted and refilled his wine cup. The oarmaster said, “That kind of talk makes my head ache.”

“What do the Babylonians have to say about twins?” Menedemos asked. “They're born at the same time, and sometimes they're like each other, but other sets are as different as eggs and elephants. By the stars, they should all be just alike, shouldn't they?”

“That's true.” Sostratos beamed at him. “Very logical, in fact. I wonder if any philosophers have ever thought about what that means. When we get to Athens, I hope I remember to ask.”

Twilight deepened. More stars came out. Menedemos spotted Kronos' wandering star, dimmer and yellower than that of Zeus, not far above the eastern horizon. Pointing to it, he said, “I know what that star foretells: not long after I see it, I'll go to sleep.”

“Amazing,” Sostratos said. “I was born half a year before you, but it means the very same thing for me.” They both laughed.

The Aphrodite rocked gently on the sea. Menedemos took the motion altogether for granted. It wasn't enough to bother his cousin, who was more sensitive to such things. They lay down side by side on the poop deck. Diokles went forward to sleep on a rower's bench.

When Menedemos woke, morning twilight had replaced that of the evening. He yawned and stretched and watches stars fade from the sky, as he'd watched them come out the night before. High up in the air, a gull screeched.

He got to his feet and tasted the wind, then dipped his head in satisfaction. It hadn't swung during the night, nor had it died. Up toward the bow, one early-rising sailor spoke to another: “Doesn't look like we'll have to pull too hard today,”

“Good,” the second sailor answered.

Sostratos stayed asleep till the men started hauling in the anchors. Then he looked about in bleary confusion. “Hail, slugabed,” Menedemos said.

“Oh. Hail.” Sostratos looked around some more, rubbed his eyes, and got to his feet. As he did, he wet a finger to test the wind. What he found brought a smile to his face and eagerness to his voice. “Do you think we'll be able to slide between Andros and Euboia this afternoon?”

“Maybe.” Menedemos shook a stern finger at his cousin. “But even if we do, we've got another day's sail after that before we put in at Peiraieus.”

“I know. I know.” Sostratos waved impatiently. “But we're so close now, I can all but taste Athens.”

Menedemos pursed his lips as if he were tasting, too. “Rocks and dirt and a little bit of hemlock, left over from Sokrates. Splash it with oil and it's not so bad.”

“Splash you with oil and you're still an idiot,” Sostratos said, doing his best not to splutter.

After a bow and a wave for his cousin, Menedemos raised his voice to call out to the sailors: “Eat your breakfast, lads, and then we'll be away. As long as the gods are kind enough to give us the breeze we need, we'd be fools and worse than fools if we didn't make the most of it.”

Down came the sail from the yard. A gust of wind filled it almost at once. The mast creaked as it took up the strain. At Menedemos' shouted instructions, the men swung the yard from the starboard bow back to take best advantage of the breeze. The Aphrodite slid through the light chop, graceful as a tunny.

Flying fish sprang out of the water. So did dolphins, which leapt far higher and more gracefully. Menedemos tossed a barley roll into the Aegean. The merchant galley's boat had hardly passed it before a dolphin snapped it up. The sailors murmured in delighted approval. A couple of them clapped their hands. “Good for you, skipper,” Diokles said. “There's good luck.”

No less superstitious than any other seafaring man, Menedemos dipped his head. “Good luck for the dolphin, too,” he said. “If it hadn't been in just the right spot, a sea bird would have got there first.”

Sure enough, a small gull with a black head that had been swooping toward the roll pulled up with an angry screech: “Ayeea!” A moment later, a tern plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak.

“Between the dolphin and the bird, they've got sitos and opson,” Menedemos said.

Instead of laughing at his little joke, Sostratos tossed his head. “For dolphins and terns, fish are sitos: they're what they have to have. When you gave them the barley roll, that was opson for them, even though it would be sitos for us.”

Diokles clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Here I've been going to sea almost as long as you've been alive, young sir, and I never once thought of it like that. You've got an odd way of looking at the world—an interesting way,” he hastened to add.

“A left-handed way,” Menedemos said, which wasn't a compliment.

They didn't have the sea to themselves but for wild things that day. A few fishing boats were out on the wide water east of the Kyklades. When their crews saw the Aphrodite approaching, they lowered their sails and made for first Tenos and then, in the afternoon, Andros as fast as they could go. One of the crews cut a net free to be able to flee the faster.

“Poor frightened fools,” Menedemos said. “That'll cost them a good bit of silver or a good bit of time to make good, and we didn't want anything to do with them.”

“We ought to paint a legend on the side of the ship: I AM NOT A PIRATE,” Sostratos said.

“And how long would it be before a pirate painted the same thing on his hemiolia?” Menedemos returned.

Sostratos screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue in a Gorgon's grimace. “That's a horrible thought,”

“Are you telling me Fm wrong, though?” Menedemos asked. His cousin tossed his head. Menedemos' smile held slightly grudging approval. One thing Sostratos was, without a doubt: an honest man.

As the sun sank toward the rough horizon to the west, Sostratos pointed toward the channel between Andros and Cape Geraistos, the southernmost part of Euboia. “There it is. We can get through before nightfall.”

“We can get through, yes,” Menedemos said. “But we can't get very far past the channel if we go through now. When morning comes, we'd be sitting out in the open for anyone to spot. If we stay out here on the open Aegean till morning, though, we can dash between the islands and round Cape Sounion before nightfall tomorrow. How does that sound?”

Sostratos didn't look happy, but he didn't say no. He just sighed, made a pushing motion, and turned away. After a moment, Menedemos realized he was miming Sisyphos' eternal torment. Every time the wicked man got his boulder up near the top of the hill, it would slip away and roll to the bottom again.

“It's not so bad as that,” Menedemos said.

“No, it isn't,” Sostratos said. “It's worse.”

Diokles spoke up: “Whether we go through now or in the morning, I'd serve out weapons first. You never can tell.”

“That's a good idea,” Menedemos said. “I wish it weren't, but it is.” He rubbed his chin as he thought. “I do believe I'm going to bring us up a little farther north before we anchor for the night. That way, I can run straight before the wind in the morning, and we'll slide through as fast as may be.”

“Very nice,” the keleustes said. “You're right as can be—the sooner we're through there, the better.”

The sun was just on the point of setting when Menedemos ordered the anchors into the sea. Sostratos still looked glum. “Cheer up,” Menedemos told him. “See? We're even aimed the right way now.” Sure enough, he'd swung the Aphrodite around so her bow pointed southwest, straight toward the gap between the islands—and toward the mainland of Attica beyond.

His cousin sighed. “I know it, my dear. But it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not going to be content till it does.”

Or even after that, Menedemos thought. The ideal world Sostratos built up in his mind sometimes made him have trouble accepting reality and its imperfections. Menedemos didn't twit him about it, though; the akatos was too crowded a place to make arguments worse.

Bread and olive oil, cheese and olives, rough red wine: a sailor's supper at sea. Not even a taste of mullet to savor tonight; the men hadn't caught anything much above sprat size. Menedemos shrugged. I'll eat better when we get to Athens, he thought.

“Another night on the planks,” Sostratos said as they stretched out side by side on the poop deck. “I won't be sorry to sleep in a bed again.”

There, Menedemos thought he could jab without making his cousin angry, and he did: “Back in Miletos, you weren't doing much in the way of sleeping when you ended up in that hetaira's bed.”

Sostratos snorted. “You're a fine one to talk.”

“Who, me?” Menedemos did his best to sound innocent. “I didn't do anything much in Miletos.”

“No, not in Miletos,” Sostratos said darkly.

Menedemos made some other protest, but only deep, heavy, even breathing answered him. Before very long, he fell asleep, too. He woke somewhere in the middle of the night, wondering why he had. Then he realized the Aphrodite's, motion had changed. The swells from out of the north remained, but the wind-driven chop had eased. He muttered something or other under his breath, wrapped his himation tighter around himself, and went back to sleep.

But when he woke the next morning, he wasn't surprised to find that the wind had died even though he hardly remembered rousing before. Catching his eye, Diokles mimed rowing motions. Menedemos dipped his head to the oarmaster.

“All I have to say is, it's a good thing we're not a round ship,” Sostratos declared after Menedemos woke him and he realized they were becalmed. “If we were a round ship that had to lie here on the sea so close to Athens with no way to get any closer, I do believe I'd scream.”

“I believe you'd scream, too,” Menedemos said. His cousin gave him a dirty look. He went on, “But, since we go about as fast with oars as we do with the sail, you can save your screams till you need to throw them at your fellow philosophers.”

“I'm not much of a philosopher,” Sostratos said sadly. “I haven't got enough leisure.”

“You're doing something useful, which is more than a lot of those windbags can say for themselves,” Menedemos replied. His cousin looked shocked. Before Sostratos could rush to philosophy's defense, Menedemos added, “Eat your breakfast and then do one more useful thing: help me hand out weapons to the crew,”

Like most merchant galleys—and, for that matter, like most pirate ships—the Aphrodite carried a motley assortment of arms: perhaps a dozen swords (Sostratos belted his on), a handful of peltasts' light shields, some javelins and pikes, hatchets, a couple of ripping hooks, iron crowbars, knives. Menedemos set his bow and a quiver of arrows where he could grab them in a hurry. Or, more likely, where Sostratos or somebody else can get his hands on them, he thought. I'll he busy steering the ship.

He shrugged. Odds were, this was nothing but a waste of time. Even if a pirate chieftain did make a run at the Aphrodite, a show of strength would probably make him choose a different victim. But if you didn't treat what might lie ahead as if it were real, you wouldn't be ready on the off chance it turned out so.

“Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” Diokles called, and beat out the stroke with his mallet and bronze square. As the channel between Arados and Euboia drew near, he looked back over his shoulder at Menedemos and asked, “Will you want to put a man at every oar for the dash through the strait?”

The oarmaster acted as if the Aphrodite might be sailing straight into danger. Menedemos didn't see how he could do anything less. He dipped his head. “Yes, let's,” he said, “We haven't had to do much of that kind of thing this sailing season. Let's see how well they handle it.”

“Good enough.” Diokles ordered the rowers to the rowing benches. Menedemos sent Aristeidas up to the foredeck to keep an eye out for pirates as the akatos passed each promontory. If we're going to do this, we'll do it the best way we know how, he thought.

His own gaze kept swinging from north to south, from one island to the other, as the merchant galley sped down the channel. Diokles had hardly set a hotter pace when they were trying to escape the Roman trireme the summer before. The men will be glad to ease off once we're through, Menedemos thought. But then, just when he'd started to think they'd safely made the passage, Aristeidas pointed to port and shouted, “A ship! A ship!”

“A pestilence!” Mencdernos exclaimed as the vessel emerged fromthe concealment of a headland on the northern coast of Andros and raced toward the Aphrodite.

“What do we do now?” Sostratos said. “Maybe we should have tried coming through yesterday afternoon.”

“Bastard was probably lurking here then, too,” Menedemos said. “There aren't many honest uses for a hemiolia, anyhow.” The two-banked galley was short and lean and one of the swiftest things afloat. Her crew had already taken down the mast and stowed it abaft of the permanent rowing benches of the upper bank.

“Turn towards 'em and try and scare 'em off?” Diokles asked.

“That's what I'm going to do,” Menedemos answered. “They can't have a crew much bigger than ours, so why would they want to mix it up?” He swung the Aphrodite into a tight turn toward the hemiolia. “Up the stroke, if you please.”

“Right you are, skipper.” The keleustes smote the bronze square more quickly still, shouting, “Come on, boys! Put your backs into it! Let's make that polluted vulture run for his nest!”

“I hope he will run,” Sostratos said quietly.

“So do I,” Menedemos answered. The hemiolia gave no sign of sheering off. Its rowers worked their oars at least as smoothly as those of the Aphrodite. The men whose benches had been taken up to give room to stow the mast and yard now stood by the gunwale, ready—or acting ready—to swarm aboard the merchant galley.

“Do you want me to take your bow, the way I did on the run up to Khalkis?” Sostratos asked.

“Yes, go ahead; duck under the tillers and do that,” Menedemos told him. “Then go forward. Use your own judgment about when to start shooting. Aim for their officers if you see the chance.”

“I understand.” His cousin got the bow and the quiver, then hurried up between the two rows of panting, sweating rowers toward the foredeck. The men who powered the Aphrodite couldn't see what was going on, which was true of the rowers in every sea fight since before the Trojan War. As far as the ship went, the rowers were just tools. Menedemos and Diokles had to get the best use from them.

On came the hemiolia. “Doesn't look like those whoresons want to quit at all, does it?” the oarmaster said.

“No,” Menedemos said unhappily. He was unhappy; he'd taken the Aphrodite closer to Andros than to Euboia because he'd worriedmore about pirates on the southern coast of the latter island. That meant this pirate ship hadn't had to go so far to close with the akatos. More unhappily still, Menedemos went on, “We couldn't very well have run away. A hemiolia will run down any other kind of ship on the sea.”

Diokles didn't argue. That was so obviously true, no one could argue. Most pirates, though, didn't reckon a fight with the large crew of another galley likely to be profitable. If this captain proved an exception . . .

Menedemos picked a spot not far aft of the hemiolia's bow where he hoped to drive home his ram. The other skipper, the man handling the pirate ship's steering oars, would be picking his target on the Aphrodite. “Go on,” Menedemos muttered. “Run for home, crows take you.”

Aristeidas sang out: “They're shooting!”

Sure enough, arrows arced through the air toward the Aphrodite. The first shots splashed into the sea well short of the ship. Archers always started shooting too soon. No, almost always—Sostratos stood calmly on the small foredeck, a shaft nocked but the bow not yet drawn. If anyone could wait till he had the chance to make his missiles count, Menedemos' cousin was the man.

A shaft thudded into the stempost, a couple of cubits from Sostratos' head. That seemed to spur him into action. He thrust the bow forward on a stiff left arm, drew the string back to his ear as the Persians had taught Hellenes to do, and let fly. No one aboard the onrushing hemiolia fell, so Menedemos supposed he missed. He pulled another arrow from the quiver and shot again.

This time, Menedemos heard the howl of pain across the narrowing gap. “Eugef he called. “Well shot!”

A moment later, one of the Aphrodites rowers let out a similar howl and clutched at his shoulder. He lost the stroke; his oar fouled that of the man behind him. The merchant galley tried to swerve. Menedemos worked the steering oars to keep it pointed at the pirate ship. “Clear that oar!” Diokles shouted. A couple of sailors who weren't rowing pulled it inboard.

More arrows struck the akatos' planking. The pirates had several archers, the Aphrodite only Sostratos. Several shafts whistled past him as they tried to bring him down. None bit. As coolly as if exercising at a gymnasion, he kept shooting back. Another pirate wailed. He fell into the sea with a splash.

“Oh, very well shot!” Menedemos exclaimed.

“They aren't pulling away,” Dioldes said.

“I see that,” Menedemos answered. “Let's see if we can take out their portside oars and cripple them.”

“Same trick we pulled on the trireme, eh?” After a moment's thought, the oarmaster dipped his head. “Worth a try. Safer than ramming, that's certain.”

Another sailor on the Aphrodite—not a man pulling an oar— screeched and crumpled, clutching his leg. The hemiolia was terrifyingly close now, her oars rising and falling, rising and falling in smooth unison. Seeing how well the pirates rowed worried Menedemos. With a crew like that and a fast, fast ship, their skipper could make plans of his own. If he swerved at the last instant. . .

“Portside oars—in!” Diokles bellowed. At the same time, the pirate ship's keleustes roared out an order of his own. And, at the same time as the Aphrodite's, portside rowers brought their oars inboard, so did the hemiolia's. Neither hull crushed the other ship's oars beneath it; neither set of rowers had arms broken and shoulders dislocated as oars flew out of control.

But the men who would have sat at the rear of the hemiolia's upper bank of oars had none to serve once the ship's mast was stowed. As the two ships passed close enough to spit from one to the other, several of them flung grappling hooks at the Aphrodite.

“Cut those lines! Cut them, by the gods!” Menedemos shouted.

Suddenly locked together in an embrace of anything but love, the two galleys pivoted around a common axis. The Aphrodite's sailors frantically hacked at the ropes attached to the grapples, while the pirates hauled on those lines and drew the ships closer together yet.

With wild cries that hardly sounded like Greek at all, the first pirates leaped across three or four cubits of open water and onto the merchant galley.

Sostratos shot one last arrow at the shouting men aboard the hemiolia, then set down Menedemos' bow, yanked his sword from the scabbard, and rushed to join the fight in the waist of the Aphrodite, “Dung-eating, temple-robbing whoresons!” he screamed, and swung the sword in an arc of iron at a pirate who was kicking a sailor in the face.

The blade bit between neck and shoulder. Blood spurted. It stank like hot iron. The pirate let out a horrible screech. He whirled toward Sostratos, who stabbed him in the belly. The fellow crumpled. Sostratos stepped on him to get at the next foe.

Madness in a very small space—that was how Sostratos remembered the fight afterwards. The Aphrodite's crew by itself crowded the akatos. Having twice as many men aboard the ship meant, in essence, that no one had room for anything but seizing the closest foe and trying to kill him. Even telling who was friend and who foe wasn't easy; one of the Aphrodite's sailors almost brained Sostratos with a belaying pin.

“Aphrodite!” he shouted over and over. “Aphro—oof!” A pirate who'd lost whatever weapon he carried punched him in the belly. He folded up, then made himself straighten, more by sheer force of will than anything else. If I go down, they'll trample me to death, he thought.

He grabbed at the nearest man to steady himself. It was another pirate: the fellow had a big gold hoop in each ear, wearing his wealth thus instead of in rings. Sostratos didn't have room to use his sword—hanging on to it was hard enough. But his left hand was free. He took hold of one of those rings and yanked with all his strength. The ring tore free. The pirate roared in pain. The earring remained on Sostratos' index finger.

Well, I just made a profit on the day, he thought: the first foolish thing that popped into his head. Now I have to see if I live long enough to enjoy it. That, unfortunately, made more sense.

When the press cleared a little, he traded sword strokes with another pirate. It was nothing like practice in the gymnasion. The Aphrodite pitched and rolled underfoot as the waves and the surge of men, now here, now there, made her rock. Sailors and pirates ah1 around were pushing and shoving and shouting and cursing. Sostratos worried about a knife in the back almost as much as he did about the blade with which the fellow in front of him was trying to drink his life.

The pirate, who wore a crestless bronze helmet, a sword belt, and nothing else, had ferocity but no great skill. He beat Sostratos' sword aside when the Rhodian thrust at his chest. Sostratos' next blow, though, took him in the side of the head. That helm kept his skull unsplit, but he staggered even so. Sostratos sprang forward and pushed with all his strength. Arms flailing, the pirate went over the rail and fell into the Aegean.

Nimble as a mountain goat, another pirate leaped from the Aphrodite back to his own ship with a leather sack under his arm. He'd had all the fighting he wanted, but he'd managed to get away with some loot. Absurdly, that outraged Sostratos. “Come back here, you wide-arsed thief!” he yelled. The pirate paid no attention, and probably didn't even hear.

Then another pirate sprang back to the hemiolia, and another, and another, some with plunder, some without. “See, boys?” Menedemos roared in a great voice. “They can't lick us, and they cursed well know it. lo for the Aphrodite'.”

“Io! The Aphroditel” Sostratos' heart leaped as he took up the cry. He hadn't seen his cousin in the press of fighting, and hearing his voice was a great relief. Seeing the pirates beginning to flee the merchant galley was an even greater one.

Now the pirates were the ones who hacked and chopped at the lines tethering their ship to the akatos. Now they were the ones who pushed the hemiolia away from the Aphrodite with poles and oars. A couple of them retrieved the bows they'd left behind and started shooting into the merchant galley as the rest rowed away from a quarry that had proved tougher than they expected.

Sostratos rushed up to the Aphrodite's foredeck, which had seen almost no fighting. Menedemos' bow and the quiver of arrows lay there undisturbed. Sostratos snatched them up again and shot back at the pirates. He was rewarded when their oarmaster screamed and crumpled with an arrow in his thigh. The Rhodian aimed a couple of shafts at the man handling the hemiolia's steering oars, who he thought was the captain. They went wide, though, and the man stayed at his station.

The hemiolia limped off. Not all its oars were manned, not any more. Sostratos wondered if Menedemos would order a pursuit. But his cousin was otherwise occupied: he stooped over a fallen pirate in the waist of the Aphrodite. The pirate raised a hand for mercy. Slowly and deliberately, Menedemos drove his sword into the man's body. Blood glistened on the blade as he straightened up. “Throw this carrion into the sea,” he told the closest sailors, his voice cold as a Thracian winter.

That thrust hadn't killed the raider. He was still groaning and feebly writhing as the sailors lifted him and flung him over the side. Splash! The groans abruptly ceased.

Another pirate was already dead, his head smashed like a broken pot. The sailors threw his body out of the Aphrodite, too. Looking back toward the stern, Sostratos saw several men gathered around another body. One of them looked up and caught his eye. “It's Dorimakhos,” the fellow said, and tossed his head to add without words that the sailor wouldn't be getting up again. “Took a javelin through the throat, poor beggar.”

Menedemos made his way forward. Blood splashed his tunic and his hide, but he seemed hale. Looking down at himself, Sostratos found his own tunic similarly stained. He also found he had a cut on his calf he hadn't even noticed. Now that he knew it was there, it began to hurt.

“Hail,” Menedemos said. “You fought well.”

“We all did,” Sostratos answered. “Otherwise, we wouldn't have driven them off. Are you all right?”

His cousin shrugged. “Scratches, bruises. I'll be fine in a couple of days. This was the worst I got.” He held out his left hand, which bore a ragged, nasty wound.

“Is that a bite?” Sostratos asked. Menedemos dipped his head. “Pour wine on it,” Sostratos told him. “That's the best thing I know to keep wounds from festering, and bites are liable to. I'm no Hippokrates, but I know that much.”

“I wish we had Hippokrates aboard now, or any other physician we could get our hands on,” Menedemos said. “You probably know more than most of us—and the men will think you do even if you don't. Come help sew 'em up and bandage 'em. We've got plenty of wine to splash on our hurts, anyhow.”

Along with Menedemos and Diokles, Sostratos did what he could, suturing and bandaging arms and legs and scalps. He splashed on wine with a liberal hand. The sailors howled at the sting. The needle and thread he used were coarse ones made for sewing sailcloth, but they went through flesh well enough. “Hold still,” he told Teleutas, who had a gash just below his knee.

“You try holding still with somebody stabbing you,” Teleutas retorted.

“Do you want to keep bleeding?” Sostratos asked.

Teleutas tossed his head. “No, but I don't want to keep getting hurt, either.”

Impatiently, Sostratos said, “You don't have that choice. You can bleed, or you can let me sew up this wound and then bandage it. I won't take long, and you'll stop getting hurt any more as soon as I'm done.”

“All right. Go on,” Teleutas said, but he jerked and cursed every time Sostratos drove the needle through his flesh. And he complained more when Sostratos wrapped sailcloth around the wound and made it fast with a sloppy knot: “Call that a bandage? I've seen real physicians bind up wounds, by the gods. They make a bandage worth looking at, all nice and neat and fancy. This? Pheu!” He screwed up his face as he made the disgusted noise.

“I'm so sorry,” Sostratos said with icy irony. “If you like, I'll take it off, tear out the stitches, and start over.”

“You try and touch that leg again, and I'll make you sorry for it,” the sailor said. “I just want a proper job done.”

“It's the best I can do,” Sostratos told him. He knew Teleutas had a point. Real physicians made their bandages as neat and elaborate as they could, some to the point of showing off. He went on, “Just because it isn't neat doesn't mean it won't do the job.”

“That's what you say.” Teleutas pointed up to the yard. “If you were talking about the rigging, would you say the same thing? Not likely! You'd be screaming your head off to get all the lines shipshape.”

Sostratos' ears burned. So much for the men thinking I know more about doctoring than they do. Of course, Teleutas complained and malingered at any excuse or none. Even so, Sostratos would have wished for a little more gratitude.

Another sailor did thank him, very politely, when he bandaged a stab wound in the man's belly. He sniffed the wound as he applied the bandage. It wasn't very wide, and wasn't bleeding nearly so much as Teleutas', but he did get a faint whiff of dung. He said nothing to the sailor, and held his face steady till he'd finished the job. Then he went looking for Menedemos.

“Why so grim?” his cousin asked as he dealt with a wound much like Teleutas’. The sailor he was helping didn't snarl at him or criticize his inartistic bandages; the man just seemed glad to have the cut dealt with.

But Sostratos, though he noticed that, had too much on his mind really to envy Menedemos' luck. He said, “I'm afraid Rhodippos is going to die,”

“Oimoi!” Menedemos exclaimed in dismay. “Why do you say so? He didn't seem that badly hurt. I saw him.”

“His gut's pierced,” Sostratos answered. “Such men almost always die of fever. Remember that sailor last summer, after the Roman archer shot him from their trireme as we went past?”

Menedemos drummed his fingers on his right thigh. His hands were bloody. Looking down, Sostratos saw his own were, too. Voice troubled, his cousin said, “Yes, I do. Well, here's hoping you're wrong, that's all.”

“Here's hoping indeed,” Sostratos said. “I'm not a physician—if you don't believe me, ask Teleutas. But I do remember what I've seen and what I've heard.”

“I know,” Menedemos said. “You remember everything, as far as I can tell.”

“I wish I did,” Sostratos said.

“If you don't, you come closer than anyone else I know,” Menedemos said. “I know we're lucky to have come off even as well as we did, but all the same, ...” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We've got a lot of men hurt.”

“Most of them should get better,” Sostratos said.

“Gods grant it be so,” Menedemos said. “If it is so, I'll give As-klepios a sheep at his temple on Kos if we put in there on the way home, or back on Rhodes if we don't.” He glanced up toward the heavens, as if hoping to catch sight of the god of healing listening.

Sostratos wasn't sure a sacrifice would do any good, but he wasn't sure it wouldn't, either. Even Sokrales, when he was dying, remembered he owed Asklepios a cock, he thought.

“At least the whoresons didn't try to wreck our rigging, the way they would have if we were a round ship,” Menedemos said: maybe that glance heavenward had in fact been aimed at the yard.

“Not much point to it with a galley,” Sostratos said. “We can still row perfectly well, and we could even if the sail came down. Of course,” he added, “they might not have thought of that. One often doesn't think of everything in the middle of a fight.”

A sailor limped up to them with the broken shaft of an arrow sticking out of his calf. “Will you draw this polluted thing for me?” he said through clenched teeth. “I tried pulling it out, but it hurt too cursed much for me to do the job myself.”

“A good thing you stopped,” Sostratos said. “The point's barbed; you would have hurt yourself worse if you'd kept on.” He bent and felt the wound.

“Well, how will you get it out, then?” the man asked after a yelp of pain.

“We'll have to push it through,” Sostratos answered, “either that or cut down to the point. Where it is, I think pushing it through is a better bet—it's only a digit or two from coming out already.”

The sailor looked fearfully to Menedemos. The captain of the Aphroditedipped his head. “My cousin's likely right, Alkiphron,” he said. “Here—sit down on a bench and stretch out your leg. He'll hold it and I'll push the arrow through and bandage it up. It'll be over before you know it.” To Sostratos, he added a quick, low-voiced aside: “Make sure you hang on tight.”

“I will,” Sostratos promised as Alkiphron eased himself down to a rower's bench. He bent beside the sailor and grasped his leg above and below the wound. “Try to keep as still as you can,” he told him.

“I'll do that,” Alkiphron said.

Menedemos took hold of the protruding shaft. Alkiphron gasped and tensed. Menedemos gave him a broad, friendly smile. “Are you ready?” he asked. Before the wounded man could answer—and before he could tense himself any more—Menedemos pushed the arrow through.

Alkiphron shrieked. He tried to jerk his leg away. Sostratos couldn't quite stop the motion, but kept it small. The blood-smeared bronze point burst through the sailor's skin. “There,” Sostratos said soothingly as Menedemos drew the shaft out after it. “Now it's over.”

“You took it like a hero,” Menedemos added, wrapping several thicknesses of sailcloth around the wound. He had a knack for saying things that made men feel better. It's probably the knack that makes him such a fine seducer, Sostratos thought. Whatever it was, he wished he had more of it himself.

He also noted that Menedemos' bandage was no neater than the ones he'd made himself. Alkiphron didn't seem inclined to be critical. He watched the bandage start to turn red. “That. . . hurt like fire,” he said. “But you're right—it's better now. Thank you both.”

“Glad to do it,” Menedemos said. “I hope it heals clean,”

“It should, too,” Sostratos told the sailor. “It's bleeding freely, and that helps,”

“Take a cup of wine, Alkiphron,” Menedemos said. “That will help build your blood up again.” Sostratos frowned. From what he remembered, Hippokrates and his fellows would have prescribed differently. But Alkiphron looked so pleased at Menedemos' suggestion, Sostratos held his peace. And Menedemos remarked, “I wouldn't mind a cup of wine myself.”

Sostratos thought it over, not that he needed long. “Good idea,” he said. “Splendid idea, in fact. If you put it to the Assembly, it would carry in a flash,”

Neither he nor Menedemos bothered watering the wine they dipped from an amphora, either. As Menedemos sipped, he said, “I don't do this every day”; he had to know they were being immoderate as well as Sostratos did.

Sostratos replied, “Well, my dear, we don't fight off a pirate ship every day, either.”

“No, we don't, and a good thing, too,” Menedemos said. “Most of those abandoned catamites have better sense than to tangle with a ship like ours. And I'm going to make sure our boys do plenty of wineshop bragging, too. Let the word get around: the Aphrodite's a hedgehog, too prickly to quarrel with.”

“That's good. That's very good,” Sostratos said. After a couple of swigs of strong neat wine, it certainly seemed good.

Menedemos drained his cup and filled it again. Catching sight of Sostratos' expression, he grinned. “Don't worry—I still know where Attica lies.”

“You'd better,” Sostratos told him.

“What I wish I knew,” his cousin said, “is how to keep pirates from coming after merchants in the first place. It's not just that no one patrols the sea hard enough, though we Rhodians do what we can. But a pirate in a hemiolia can show his heels to any ship afloat; even a trireme can't always catch a hemiolia. Honest men ought to be able to beat the bastards at their own game.”

“You've said that before,” Sostratos remarked. “What's the answer? “

“To the crows with me if I know. If it were easy, somebody would have thought of it a long time ago, wouldn't you say? But there's got to be one somewhere.”

Sostratos started to ask him why there had to be one, but checked himself. He didn't want to argue, not now. All he wanted to do was take a moment to be glad he remained alive and free and unmaimed. A little wine sloshed out of his cup. He laughed in embarrassment. “I'm not pouring a libation. My hand is shaking.”

“That's a sign you need more wine,” Menedemos said, refilling the cup before Sostratos could protest. His cousin went on, “It's all right to shake a little now, when everything's over. I've done that myself—you start thinking about what might have been. But you did fine when you needed to.”

“I didn't have time to be afraid then.” Sostratos took a pull at the wine and decided not to complain about Menedemos' giving him more.

Menedemos' mind was already moving on to other things: “We'll have to put poor Dorimakhos' body in the boat. You know how the men reel about having a corpse on board ship. And when we do get in to Attica, we'll have to pay a priest to purify the boat—and the Aphrodite.”

“One more thing to take care of.” But Sostratos didn't argue about that, either. The blood spilled aboard the akatos, the deaths she'd seen, left her ritually polluted. After his time in the Lykeion, Sostratos wasn't sure he still believed in such pollutions. But he was sure the sailors, superstitious to a man, did. Cleansing the ship would put them at ease, and so it needed doing.

“I wonder how much the gods-detested pirates managed to steal when they went back aboard their ship,” Menedemos said.

“We'd better find out,” Sostratos replied. “We can't sell what we haven't got any more,”

“You tend to that,” Menedemos said. “You know where everything's supposed to be.”

“Right,” Sostratos said tightly. Every once in a while, he wished he didn't have such a retentive memory. He also wished his cousin didn't take that memory so much for granted. Neither wish seemed likely to come true here.

Menedemos, for a wonder, noticed his glower and asked, “Is something wrong?”

“Never mind,” Sostratos answered. He was as he was, just as Menedemos was as he was. And his cousin did have plenty of other things to do. Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth as he ducked under the poop deck. Being as he was, he found himself taking the other fellow's point of view, which made staying annoyed harder.

He hadn't seen any of the pirates get down under there, but the silver was the first and most important thing he needed to check. A glance told him all the leather sacks were where they had been before the hemiolia dashed out from behind the headland on Andros. He breathed a sigh of relief. After all they'd sold on Miletos, losing their money would have been a dreadful blow.

He came out with care, and felt a certain amount of pride at not banging his head. What next? he wondered. The answer wasn't long in coming: the balsam. It was literally more precious than silver. He knew under which bench it was stowed. When he squatted there, he found it undisturbed.

Now that I've made sure of the money and the balsam, he thought, Menedemos can't blame me if I check the gryphon's skull. He knew exactly where it was (of course I know exactly where it is, went through his mind): port side, stowed under the ninth rower's bench. He hurried forward and stooped as he had to make sure the balsam was where it belonged.

The gryphon's skull wasn't there.

Sostratos straightened. His first, automatic, assumption was that he'd counted benches wrong. He counted them again. This was the ninth. He bent again. Still no trace of the big leather sack that had held the skull. He looked under the eighth, and also under the tenth, on the off chance—the preposterous, ridiculous, utterly unlikely off chance—he'd miscounted benches when stowing the skull. No sign of it under either bench, only what he recalled putting in those places.

Desperation clanging inside his mind, he checked the starboard benches. Maybe you put it over there after all. But he hadn't. The gryphon's skull was gone.

Wild-eyed, Sostratos stared out to sea. The hemiolia was long vanished. With it went a skull that had come from the edge of the world; a skull that, by an accident of fate, had found the perfect owner; a skull that now, by a more malign accident of fate, would never reach the men who might have wrung sense from its strangeness. Gone. Gone with a filthy pirate who surely couldn't write his name, who cared nothing for knowledge, who'd chosen theft and robbery in place of honest work. Gone. Gone forever, past hope of returning.

Sostratos burst into tears.

“What's the matter, young sir?” Diokles asked, “What did the thieving whoresons get?”

“The gryphon's skull,” Sostratos choked out.

“Oh. That thing.” The oarmaster visibly cast about for something to say. At last, brightening, he found it: “Don't fret too much. It wouldn't've brought in all that much cash anyways.”

“Cash?” The word tasted like vomit in Sostratos' mouth. He cursed as foully as he knew how—not with Menedemos' Aristophanic brio, perhaps, but with far more real anger, real hatred, behind the foul language.

Sailors shied away from him. They'd never seen him in such a transport of temper. He'd never known himself in such a fury, either. He would gladly have crucified every pirate ever born and set fire to every forest from which the shipwrights shaped the timbers of their hemioliai and pentekonters.

From the stern, Menedemos called, “What's gone missing?”

He had to say it again: “The gryphon's skull.”

“Oh,” his cousin said. “Is that all?”

“All?” Sostratos howled. More curses burst from him. Still hot as iron in the forge, he finished, “They could have taken anything else on this ship—anything, do you hear me? But no! One of those gods-detested rogues had to steal the single, solitary thing we carried that will—would—matter a hundred years from now.”

Menedemos came forward and set a hand on his shoulder. “Cheer up, my dear. It's not so bad as that.”

“No. It's worse,” Sostratos said.

His cousin tossed his head. “Not really. Just think: right this very minute, you're probably having your revenge.”

“My what?” Sostratos gaped, as if Menedemos had suddenly started speaking Phoenician. “What are you talking about?”

“I'll tell you what,” Menedemos answered. “Suppose you're a pirate. Your captain decides to go after an akatos for a change. 'It'll be a tough fight, sure enough,' he says, 'but think how rich we'll be once we take her.' You manage to board the Aphrodite. Her sailors are all fighting like lions. Somebody stabs you in the leg. Somebody else cuts off half your ear.”

He paused. “Go on,” Sostratos said, in spite of himself.

Grinning, Menedemos did: “Pretty soon, even Antigonos the One-Eyed can see you aren't going to win this scrap. You grab whatever you can—whatever's under that bench there—and you hop back aboard your hemiolia. You have to get away from those fighting madmen on the merchant galley, so you pull your oar till you're ready to drop dead. Somebody slaps a bandage on your ear and sews up your leg. And then, finally, you say, 'All right, let's see what's in this sack. It's big and heavy—it's got to have something worthwhile inside.' And you open it—and there's the gryphon's skull looking back at you, as ugly as it was in the market square in Kaunos. What would you do then?”

Slowly, Sostratos smiled. That was vengeance, of a sort.

But Diokles said, “Me, I'd fling the polluted thing straight into the sea.

That struck Sostratos as horribly likely. In his mind's eye, he could see the pirate staring at the skull. He could hear the fellow cursing, hear his mates laughing. And he could see the blue waters of the Aegean dosing over the gryphon's skull forevermore.

“Think of the knowledge wasted!” he cried.

“Think of the look on that bastard's face when he opens the sack,” Menedemos said.

It was the only consolation Sostratos had. It wasn't enough, wasn't anywhere close to enough. “Better I should have sold the skull to Damonax,” he said bitterly. “What if it sat in his house? Maybe his son or his grandson would have taken it to Athens. Now it's gone.”

“I'm sorry,” Menedemos said, though he still seemed more amused than anything else. He pointed west, toward the distant mainland of Attica. “We still might get to Cape Sounion by sundown.”

“I don't care,” Sostratos said. “What difference does It make now?” He'd hoped his name might live forever. Sostratos the Rhodian, discoverer of. . . He tossed his head. What had he discovered? Thanks to the pirate, nothing at all.