The Gryphon's Skull Read online

  The Gryphon’s Skull

  H. N. Turteltaub

  The Gryphon’s Skull is dedicated to Jack Horner, whose Dinosaur Lives gave me the idea for it. I owe him special thanks for the pleasure of his conversation, and for his patience with my questions about Protoceratops skulls. Any errors, of course, are purely my own.

  A NOTE ON WEIGHTS, MEASURES, AND MONEY

  I have, as best I could, used in this novel the weights, measures, and coinages my characters would have used and encountered in their journey. Here are some approximate equivalents (precise values would have varied from city to city, further complicating things):

  1 digit = 3/4 inch 12 khalkoi = 1 obolos

  4 digits = 1 palm 6 oboloi = 1 drakhma

  6 palms = 1 cubit 100 drakhmai = 1 mina (about 1 pound of silver)

  1 cubit = 1 1/2 feet 60 minai = 1 talent

  1 plethron = 100 feet

  1 stadion = 600 feet

  As noted, these are all approximate. As a measure of how widely they could vary, the talent in Athens was about 57 pounds, while that of Aigina, less than thirty miles away, was about 83 pounds.

  Map

  1

  Spring. Never in all his twenty-six years had Menedemos been so glad to see the sailing season come round again. Not that winter in Rhodes was harsh. Menedemos had never seen snow fall here, nor had his father. Even so ...

  His fingers caressed the steering-oar tillers of the merchant galley Aphrodite as they might have stroked a lover's skin. His cousin Sostratos stood on the akatos' poop deck with him. Sostratos was a few months older and most of a head taller, but Menedemos captained the ship. His cousin served as toikharkhos, keeping track of the Aphrodite and of what they would bring in and spend on their trading run. Sostratos had a splendid head for numbers. People, now, people gave him a good deal more trouble.

  From the quay at which the Aphrodite was tied up, Menedemos' father called, “Be careful. By the gods, be extra careful.”

  “I will, Father,” Menedemos said dutifully. One of the reasons he was so glad to escape Rhodes was that that meant escaping Philo-demos. Living in the same house with him through the winter had been harder this year than in any other Menedemos could remember. His father had long been convinced he couldn't do anything right.

  As if to prove as much, Philodemos called, “Listen to your cousin. Sostratos has the beginnings of good sense.”

  Menedemos clipped his head, as Hellenes did to show assent. He shot Sostratos a hooded glance. Sostratos had the decency to look embarrassed at such praise from the older generation.

  Sostratos' father, Lysistratos, stood alongside Philodemos. He was a good deal more easygoing than his older brother. But he too said, “You're going to have to watch yourselves every single place you go.”

  “We will.” Even Sostratos let a little exasperation show, and he got on with his father far better than Menedemos did with his.

  But Lysistratos persisted: “Not just pirates these days, you know. Since Ptolemaios and Antigonos started fighting again last year, there'll be more war galleys on the sea than a dog has fleas. Some of those whoresons are just pirates in bigger, faster, stronger ships.”

  “Yes, Uncle Lysistratos,” Menedemos said patiently. “But if we don't go out and trade, the family goes hungry.”

  “Well, that's true,” Lysistratos admitted.

  “Watch out for the silk merchants on Kos,” Philodemos warned. “They'll gouge you if you give them half a chance—-even a quarter of a chance. They think they've got the world by the short hairs because you can't buy silk anywhere else.”

  They have a point, too, Menedemos thought. Aloud, he said, “We'll do our best. We did all right with them last year, remember. And we've got crimson dye aboard. They always pay well for that.”

  His father gave more advice. In a low voice, Sostratos said, “If we keep listening to them, we'll never sail.”

  “Isn't that the truth?” Menedemos whispered back. He raised his voice to call out to the crew: “Rowers to the benches! Diokles, come up to the stern, if you please.”

  “Right you are, skipper,” Diokles answered. The keleustes was in his early forties, his skin tanned and leathery from endless summers at sea. He mounted from the undecked waist of the akatos to the poop. His bare feet were sure and quiet as he came up the steps to the raised platform at the stern. Seamen didn't wear shoes aboard ship—and few of them bothered with shoes ashore, either.

  All forty of the akatos' oars were manned fast enough to keep Menedemos from complaining. More than half of the rowers had gone west to Great Hellas and the towns of the Italian barbarians the year before. Almost all of them had pulled an oar in a Rhodian warship at one time or another. They weren't a raw crew, and wouldn't need much beating in to work well together—so Menedemos hoped, at any rate.

  He glanced over to the quay to make sure no lines still secured the Aphrodite. Sure enough, they'd all been taken aboard. He knew that, but was glad he'd checked all the same. Trying to row away while still tied up? His father would never have let him live it down. Neither would anyone else.

  Having satisfied himself, he dipped his head to Diokles.

  “Good enough.” As always aboard ship, the oarmaster carried a little mallet with an iron head and a bronze square dangling from a chain. He used them to beat out the stroke. All eyes went to him when he raised the bronze square. He grinned at the rowers as he cocked his right arm, then brought the mallet forward. As metal clanged on metal, he began to call the stroke, too: “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!”

  The oars rose and fell, rose and fell. The Aphrodite glided away from the pier, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Sostratos waved back toward his father. Grudgingly, Menedemos looked back over his shoulder and lifted one hand from the steering oar to wave at Philodemos in turn. A little to his surprise, his father waved back. But is he waving because he's sorry to see me go, or because he's glad?

  Rhodes boasted no fewer than five harbors, but only the great harbor and the naval harbor just northwest of it were warded from wind and weather with manmade moles. The great harbor's opening onto the Aegean was only a couple of plethra across—not even a bowshot. Menedemos steered toward the middle of the channel.

  “Rhyppapai!” Diokles called. He smote the bronze square again. “Rhyppapai!” He set a stately pace. What point to wearing out the rowers at the beginning of the voyage? And what point to embarrassing them by pushing them up to a quick stroke and having them make mistakes under the critical eyes of every wharf rat in Rhodes? After all, the only reason Menedemos put a full complement on the oars was for show. Once out of the harbor, the merchant galley would either sail or amble along with eight or ten rowers on a side unless she had to flee or fight.

  Menedemos tasted the motion of the sea through the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands on the steering oars. Here in the protected harbor, the water was almost glassy smooth. Even so, no one could ever mistake it for the staid solidity of dry land. “Almost like riding a woman, isn't it?” Menedemos said to Sostratos.

  His cousin plucked at his beard. They weren't fashionable for young men these days—Menedemos and most of the sailors were clean-shaven—but Sostratos had never been one to care much for fashion. “Trust you to come up with that particular comparison,” he said at last.

  “I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about,” Menedemos replied with a chuckle.

  Sostratos snorted. “It's plain you're no Persian, at any rate.”

  “Persian? I should hope not,” Menedemos said. “What are you talking about, anyhow? You pull the strangest things out from under your hat.”

  “Herodotos says Persians learn three things when they're growing up,” Sostratos said: “to ride,
to shoot, and to tell the truth.”

  “Oh,” Menedemos said. “Well, to the crows with you, O cousin of mine.” They both laughed. What Menedemos didn't tell Sostratos was that he was glad to be leaving Rhodes not because of what he had done this winter but because of what he hadn't—a sizable departure from his norm.

  His cousin knew nothing of that. No one but Menedemos knew of the passion he'd conceived for his father's young second wife— unless Baukis herself had some inkling of it. But whatever he thought, whatever he felt, he hadn't done anything about it, and the strain of doing nothing had made living with his father even harder than it would have been otherwise.

  He would have known blindfolded the instant when the Aphrodite glided out between the fortified moles that sheltered the great harbor and onto the open waters of the Aegean. The akatos' motion changed inside the space of a heartbeat. Real waves—not big ones, but waves nonetheless, driven by a brisk northerly breeze—slapped her bow and foamed over the three-finned bronze ram she carried there. She began to pitch, going up and down, up and down, under Menedemos' feet.

  “Now we're really on the sea!” he said happily.

  “So we are.” Sostratos sounded less delighted. The merchant galley's motion remained quite mild, but Menedemos' cousin had an uncertain stomach till he got back his sea legs at the start of each new sailing season. Menedemos thanked the gods that that affliction didn't trouble him.

  The chop made the Aphrodite's timbers creak. Menedemos cocked his head and smiled at the familiar sound. The mortises and tenons and treenails that held plank to plank hadn't taken any strain since the akatos came back from Great Hellas the autumn before. Indeed, she'd been beached all winter, for all the world as if she were a warship, to let her dry out. She would be uncommonly fast for a while, till the pine got waterlogged again.

  Fishing boats bobbed on the swells. Seeing the Aphrodite out-bound from the harbor at Rhodes, they knew the galley was no pirate ship. A couple of fishermen even waved at her. Menedemos lifted his right hand from the steering oar to wave back. He loved eating fish— what Hellene didn't?—but nothing could have made him catch them for a living. Endless labor, poor reward . . . He tossed his head: no, anything but that.

  Diokles said, “Pity the wind's straight in our face. Otherwise, we could lower the sail from the yard and give the rowers a rest.”

  “It usually blows out of the north at this season of the year,” Menedemos answered, and the oarmaster dipped his head in agreement. Menedemos went on, “But I will take half the men off the oars now. We'll make Kaunos by sundown without hurrying.”

  “We'd better,” Diokles said. He left off clanging his mallet on bronze and called out, “Oop!” The rowers rested at their oars. The akatos eased to a halt. Diokles went on, “Starting from the bow, every other man take a rest.” The rowers coming off hauled in their long, dripping oars and stowed them atop medium-sized jars of crimson dye; small, round pots of ink; and oiled-leather sacks full of papyrus from Egypt. “Rhyppapai!” the keleustes sang out. “Rhyppapai!” The men left on the oars went back to work. The Aphrodite began to move again, not with the speed she'd shown before but still well enough to suit Menedemos.

  “We'll practice tactics for a sea fight a good deal on this cruise,” he told the crew. “Never can tell when we'll need them. Except right around Rhodes, pirates are thick as flies round a dead goat.”

  No one grumbled. Anybody who went to sea knew he told the truth. Sostratos said, “If anybody besides our polis cared about keeping those vultures off the water ...” He clicked his tongue between his teeth.

  “But no one does.” Menedemos called to one of the sailors who'd just stopped rowing: “Aristeidas! Go up to the foredeck and keep an eye on things. You're the best lookout we've got.”

  “Right, captain,” the young sailor answered, and hurried forward. He'd proved on the Aphrodites last voyage how sharp his eyes were. Menedemos wanted a pair of good eyes looking out for pirates. The mountainous seaside district of Lykia lay just east of Kaunos, and, as far as he or any other Rhodian could tell, piracy was the Lykians' chief national industry. Any headland might shelter a long, lean, fifty-oared pentekonter or a hemiolia—shorter than a pentekonter because its oars were on two banks rather than one but even swifter, the pirate ship par excellence—lying in wait to rush out and capture a prize. Spotting a raider in good time might make the difference between staying free and going up on the auction block, naked and manacled, in some second-rate slave market.

  Menedemos' eye went from the sea to the Karian coastline ahead. Mist and distance—Kaunos lay about two hundred fifty stadia north and slightly east of Rhodes—shrouded his view, but his mind's eye supplied the details he couldn't yet make out. As in Lykia, the mountains of Karia rose swiftly from the sea. The lower slopes would show the green and gold of ripening crops at this season of the year. Farther up grew cypress and juniper and even a few precious cedars. Woodcutters who went up into the mountains after the timber shipwrights had to have might face not only wolves and bears but lions as well.

  When he thought of lions, he naturally thought of Homer, too, and murmured a few lines from the eighteenth book of the Iliad:

  “ 'With them Peleus' son began endless lamentation,

  Setting his murderous hands on his comrade's breast.

  He groaned again and again, like a well-maned lion

  From whom a man who hunts deer has taken its cubs

  From the thick woods. It, coming later, is grieved.

  It goes through many valleys, seeking the man by scent

  If it might find him anywhere: for anger most piercing seizes it.' “

  “Why are you going on about lions?” Sostratos asked. Menedemos explained. “Ah,” his cousin said. “Do you have a few lines from Homer that you trot out for everything under the sun?”

  “Not for everything,” Menedemos admitted. “But for most things, if you know the Iliad and the Odyssey, you'll come up with some lines to help you figure out how it all goes together.”

  “But that's something you should do for yourself,” Sostratos said. “You shouldn't need to find your answers in the words of an old blind poet.”

  “Hellenes have been doing it ever since he sang,” Menedemos said.

  “Tell me any of your precious philosophers and historians will last as well.” He was much more conventional—he thought of himself as much more practical—than Sostratos, and enjoyed twitting his cousin, “Why go to Athens to study, the way you did, when most of what you need is right there under your nose?”

  Sostratos exhaled angrily through that nose. “For one thing, a lot of Homer's answers aren't so good as people think they are. And, for another, who says Herodotos and Platon and Thoukydides won't last? Thoukydides wrote his history to be a possession for all time, and I think he did what he set out to do.”

  “Did he?” Menedemos jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I don't know what all he wrote, and I'm not exactly ignorant. But you can take any Hellene from Massalia, on the coast of the Inner Sea way north and west of Great Hellas, and drop him into one of the poleis Alexander founded in India or one of those other countries out beyond Persia, and if he recites the lines I just did, somebody else will know the ones that come next. Go on—tell me I'm wrong.”

  He waited. Sostratos sometimes irked him, but was always painfully honest. And now, with a sigh, Menedemos' cousin said, “Well, I can't do that, and you know it perfectly well. Homer is everywhere, and everybody knows he's everywhere. When you first learn to read, if you do, what do you learn? The Iliad, of course. And even men who don't have their letters know the stories the poet tells.”

  “Thank you.” Menedemos made as if to bow without letting go of the steering oar. “You've just proved my case for me.”

  “No, by the dog of Egypt.” Sostratos tossed his head. “What people think to be true and what is true aren't always the same. If we thought this ship were sailing south, would we end up at Alexandria? Or would we still go
on to Kaunos, regardless of what our opinion was?”

  It was Menedemos' turn to wince. After a moment, he pointed to starboard. “There's a fisherman with a false opinion of us. We're a galley, so he thinks we're pirates, and he's sailing away as fast as he can.”

  Sostratos wagged a finger in his face. “Oh, no, you don't, best one. You can't slide out of the argument that way.” He was, annoyingly, as tenacious as he was honest. “People may believe things because they're true; things aren't true because people believe them.”

  Menedemos pondered that. A dolphin leaped into the air near the Aphrodite, then splashed back into the sea. It was beautiful, but he couldn't point to it and talk about truth. At last, he said, “No wonder they made Sokrates drink hemlock,”

  That, at least, started a different argument.

  With the wind dead against her, the Aphrodite's crew had to row all the way to Kaunos. The akatos got into the town on the coast of Karia late in the afternoon. Sostratos spoke without thinking as they glided past the moles that closed off the harbor and neared a quay: “We won't have time to do any business today.”

  He was angry at himself as soon as the words passed the barrier of his teeth—another phrase from Homer, he thought, and wished he hadn't. He'd stayed away from Menedemos, as well as he could in the cramped confines of the merchant galley, ever since they wrangled about Sokrates. They'd had that quarrel before; Sostratos suspected— no, he was certain—his cousin had trotted it out only to inflame him. The trouble was, it had worked.

  Menedemos answered as if he hadn't noticed Sostratos avoiding him: “You're right, worse luck. But I hope the proxenos will have room for us at his house tonight.”

  “So do I.” Sostratos accepted the tacit truce.

  His cousin pulled in on one steering oar and out on the other, guiding the Aphrodite towards a berth, Diokles' mallet and bronze square got a couple of quick strokes from the rowers. Then the ke-leustes called, “Back oars!” Three or four such strokes killed the ship's momentum and left her motionless beside the quay.