The Gryphon's Skull Read online

  “Very nice, as usual,” Sostratos said.

  “Thank you, young sir,” Diokles replied. As toikharkhos, Sostratos outranked him, and was of course the son of one of the Aphrodite's owners. But Sostratos would never be a seaman to match the oar-master, and they both knew it. Differences in status and skill made for politeness on both sides.

  A couple of round ships—ordinary merchantmen—and a shark-shaped hull that looked as if it would make a hemiolia were abuilding in the dockyard not far away. One of the round ships was nearly done; carpenters were affixing stiffening ribs to the already completed outer shell of planking. Other men drove bronze spikes through the planking from the outside to secure it to the ribs. The bang of their hammers filled the whole town.

  Up on the hills above seaside Kaunos, the gray stone fortress of Imbros squatted and brooded. The soldiers in the fortress served one-eyed Antigonos, who had overrun all of Karia three years before. Kaunos still proclaimed itself to be free and autonomous. In these days of clashing marshals, though, many towns' claims to freedom and autonomy had a distinctly hollow ring.

  While Sostratos eyed the dockyards and the bills and mused on world affairs, Menedemos briskly went ahead with what needed doing. Like a lot of Hellenes, he carried small change in his mouth, between his cheek and his teeth. He spat an obolos into the palm of his hand. “You know who the Rhodian proxenos is, don't you?” he asked a man standing on the pier who wasn't busy securing the Aphrodite.

  “Certainly: Kissidas son of Alexias, the olive merchant,” the Kaunian replied.

  “That's right.” Menedemos tossed the little silver coin to the local. He gave the fellow the name of the ship, his own name, and Sostratos'. “Ask him if he's able to put my cousin and me up for the night. I'll give you another obolos when you come back with his answer,”

  “You've got a bargain, pal.” The man stuck the obolos into his own mouth and trotted away.

  He came back a quarter of an hour later with a big-bellied bald man whose bare scalp was as shiny as if he'd rubbed it with olive oil. Menedemos gave the messenger the second obolos, which disappeared as the first one had. The bald man said, “Hail. I'm Kissidas. Which of you is which?”

  “I'm Sostratos,” Sostratos answered. Menedemos also named himself.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Kissidas said, though he didn't sound particularly pleased. That worried Sostratos: what was a proxenos for, if not to help citizens of the polis he represented in his own home town? The olive dealer went on, “You'll want lodging, you say?” No, he didn't sound pleased at all.

  “If you'd be so kind,” Sostratos replied, wondering if Kissidas bore a grudge against his father or Menedemos’. Neither of the younger men had set eyes on the proxenos before. Menedemos has never tried seducing his wife, Sostratos thought tartly.

  “I suppose I can get away with it,” Kissidas said. “But Hipparkhos— he's Antigonos' garrison commander—doesn't much like Rhodians. He's made it hard to keep up the proxeny, he really has.”

  “We're glad you have kept it up, best one.” Sostratos meant every word of that. Neither a buggy, noisy, crowded inn nor sleeping on the hard planks of the poop deck much appealed to him. “And what has old One-Eye's officer got against Rhodians?”

  “What would you expect?” Kissidas answered. “He thinks your polls leans toward Ptolemaios.”

  That held a good deal of truth. Considering how much Egyptian grain went through Rhodes for transshipment all over the Aegean, Sostratos' city had to stay friendly with Ptolemaios. Nonetheless, Sostratos spoke the technical truth when he said, “That's foolish. We're neutral. We have to stay neutral, or somebody would gobble us up for leaning to the other side.”

  “My cousin's right,” Menedemos said. He and Sostratos might squabble with each other, but they presented a united front to the world. Menedemos went on, “We even built some ships for Antigonos two or three years ago. How does that make us lean toward Ptolemaios?”

  “You don't need to persuade me, friends,” Kissidas said, “and you won't persuade Hipparkhos, for his mind's made up.”

  “Will you have trouble with him because you're taking us in?” Sostratos asked.

  “I hope not,” the proxenos answered bleakly. “But whether I do or don't, it's my duty to help Rhodians here, the same as it's the duty of the Kaunian proxenos in Rhodes to help men from this city there. Come along with me, best ones, and use my home as your own as long as you're in Kaunos.”

  Before leaving the Aphrodite, Menedemos made sure Diokles would keep at least half a dozen sailors aboard her. “Wouldn't do to come back and find half our cargo had grown legs and walked off, now would it?” Menedemos said.

  “Not hardly, skipper, especially when we haven't got any peafowl along with us this spring,” Diokles said.

  “We haven't got 'em, and we—or I, anyhow—don't miss 'em, either,” Sostratos said. He'd had to care for the birds till they sold the last of them in Syracuse, and hadn't enjoyed the experience. As far as raucous, stupid bipeds go, they're even worse than sailors, he thought—a bit of fluff he wisely didn't pass on to the oarmaster.

  “Come along, my friends,” Kissidas repeated, more urgently than before: maybe he didn't want to be seen hanging around a Rhodian ship. Would informers denounce him to Antigonos' garrison commander? As Sostratos went up the gangplank onto the quay, he thanked Fortune and the other gods that Rhodes really was free and autonomous, and that Rhodians didn't have to worry about such nonsense.

  As far as the look of both buildings and people went, Kaunos might have been a purely Hellenic city. The temples were older and plainer than those of Rhodes, but built in the same style. Houses showed the world only blank fronts, some whitewashed, and red tile roofs, as they would have back home. All the signs were in Greek, Men wore thigh-length chitons; a few wrapped hitmatia over the tunics. Women's chitons reached their ankles. If prosperous or prominent women came out in public, they wore hats and veils against the prying eyes of men.

  “Just thinking about what might be under those wrappings builds a fire under you, doesn't it?” Menedemos murmured after one such woman walked by.

  “Under you, maybe,” Sostratos said. His cousin laughed at him.

  As Sostratos walked along the narrow, muddy, winding streets, he realized the Karians who shared Kaunos with the Hellenes also made their presence felt. Though they were hellenized as far as dress went, more of their men wore beards than was true at Rhodes—the fad for shaving hadn't caught on among them. Some of them wore short, curved swords on their belts, too: outlandish weapons to a Hellene's eye. And, even if they didn't write their own language, they did speak it—a gurgling tongue that meant nothing to Sostratos.

  “Tell me,” he said to Kissidas, suddenly curious, “do men and women and even children here in Kaunos sometimes get large drinking parties together for friends of about the same age?”

  The Rhodian proxenos stopped in his tracks and gave him an odd look. “Why, yes,” he answered. “But how could you know that?

  You've never been here before, I don't believe, and that's not the custom anywhere else in Karia.”

  “I've heard it said, and I wondered if it was true,” Sostratos answered. Explaining he'd stumbled across it in the history of Herodotos was likely to spawn as many questions as it answered, so he didn't bother.

  When they got to the olive merchant's home, a slave greeted Kissidas in bad Greek before barring the door after him and his guests. Kissidas led the two Rhodians across the rather bare courtyard to the andron. The slave brought a jar of wine, another of water, a mixing bowl, and three cups to the men's room. “Supper soon,” he said, mixing wine and water in the bowl and filling the cups from it.

  “To what shall we drink?” Sostratos asked. “To peace among the marshals?”

  “That would be wonderful. It would also be too much to hope for,” Kissidas said bleakly. He lifted his own cup. “Here is a prayer the gods may hear: to staying out from underfoot when the mar
shals clash!” He drank. So did Menedemos. And so did Sostratos. The proxenos' toast summed up his own hope for Rhodes.

  Menedemos raised his cup, too. “To making a profit while we stay out from underfoot!” They all drank again. Warmth spread outward from Sostratos' belly. He guessed the mix was one part wine to two of water, a little stronger than usual.

  Kissidas said, “I can have couches brought if you like, gentlemen, but I usually dine sitting unless I'm giving a real symposion.”

  “Don't trouble yourself, best one,” Sostratos said at once. “You're doing us the kindness of putting us up. We don't want to disrupt your household any more than we must.”

  “Good of you. Kind of you.” The wine seemed to hit Kissidas even harder than it hit Sostratos. “My dear fellow, some people imagine that staying at a proxenos' house means they own the place.” He rolled his eyes. “The stories I could tell you ...” After another cup of wine, he started telling those stories. Sostratos heard a good one about a long-winded Rhodian of his father's generation whom he already disliked, a pleasure sweeter than most.

  At Kissidas' wave, his house slave set a three-legged round table in front of each chair. The sitos—the main part of the meal—the slave fetched in was wheat bread, still warm from the oven. The opson—the relish that accompanied it—consisted of plates of small squids fried in olive oil till they were golden brown.

  Like any mannerly person, Sostratos ate sitos with his left hand, opson with his right, and was careful to eat more bread than squid. As Menedemos popped a squid into his mouth with the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, he inclined his head to Kissidas and said, “You'll make an opsophagos out of me with a supper like this.”

  Not wanting to be taken for someone who ate opson at the expense of sitos helped keep Sostratos mannerly. He dipped his head to show his host he agreed with Menedemos' comment. Actually, he thought his cousin was exaggerating for politeness' sake. The squids were good—like most Hellenes, Sostratos was very fond of seafood— but nothing exceptional.

  “You're too kind,” Kissidas said. “I forgot to ask before: what have you got aboard? With an akatos, I wouldn't expect you to be carrying grain or timber or cheap wine or oil.”

  “No, the Aphrodite's not a bulk hauler, though she's carried grain before,” Menedemos said. “We've got perfume from Rhodian roses, and some of the finest crimson dye to come out of Phoenicia since Alexander sacked Tyre twenty years ago.”

  “And papyrus out of Egypt, and pots of first-quality ink from Rhodes,” Sostratos added.

  “A few other odds and ends, too: things for men who aren't satisfied with the everyday,” Menedemos said.

  “The luxury trade, sure enough—I knew it as soon as I saw your ship,” Kissidas said. “And what do you hope to get here? This isn't a town with a lot of luxuries to sell; we make our living from our crops, and from the timber and mines in the mountains.”

  Sostratos and Menedemos shrugged in such perfect unison, they might have been actors on the comic stage. “We'll go into the agora tomorrow and see what your traders have,” Sostratos said. “And we'll gladly sell for silver, too. Plenty of that in these parts, if we can pry it out of people.”

  “I wish you the best of luck,” Kissidas said. “But Antigonos squeezes us pretty hard. He—” He broke off as the house slave came in to light lamps and torches, and didn't resume till the man had left the andron. Even afterwards, he kept the conversation innocuous for a while. He had to be worrying about informers.

  Menedemos, if Sostratos knew his cousin, had to be thinking about taking one of Kissidas' slave girls to bed. But no women showed themselves, and the fellow who took Sostratos and Menedemos out of the andron led them to a pair of beds in one crowded room. The lamp flickering on the table between the two didn't throw much light, but did shed enough to show Menedemos' expression. It was so eloquent, Sostratos snickered.

  “Oh, shut up,” Menedemos told him. “You're not a pretty girl.”

  “I'm not even an ugly girl,” Sostratos agreed, “though I suppose I would be, were I a girl.”

  “That old-fashioned beard you wear certainly wouldn't help,” Menedemos said.

  Sostratos snorted. “Things could be worse. We could be lying there on the planks of the poop deck.” He pulled his chiton off over his head, wrapped himself in his himation, and lay down. Menedemos did the same. Both bed frames creaked as the leather lashings supporting the wool-stuffed mattresses sagged under the men's weight. Menedemos blew out the lamp. The room plunged into blackness. Sostratos fell asleep almost at once.

  When Menedemos woke up in the Rhodian proxenos' guest bedchamber, he needed a moment to remember where he was. His cousin's snores from the other bed soon gave him a hint. Gray morning twilight was leaking through the wooden shutters over the window. Outside, not very far away, a jackdaw started screeching: “Chak! Chak! Chak!”

  The bird's racket made Sostratos' snores falter. He tried to wrap the himation around his head and sleep through the noise, but had no luck. When he muttered something unpleasant and sat up, Menedemos said, “Good day.”

  “Not too bad,” Sostratos answered around a yawn. “Is our host awake?”

  “I haven't heard anything stirring except for that jackdaw.” Menedemos reached down and felt around under the bed till he found the chamber pot. He stood up to use it, then passed it to Sostratos—Kissidas' hospitality hadn't extended to one for each guest.

  “Miserable noisy bird,” Sostratos said. “If I could see it instead of just listening to it, I'd try to drown it in here.” He set down the pot.

  Menedemos shrugged on his tunic. “Let's find the kitchen and seen if we can get some bread and oil and olives, or maybe an onion. Kissidas' slaves will be up, whether he is himself or not. Then we can go back to the Aphrodite, get some sailors to haul things for us, and see what kind of luck we have in the agora.”

  “And what the Kaunians are selling,” Sostratos said.

  “And what the Kaunians are selling,” Menedemos agreed. “Never can tell what you'll find in a place like this: things from the town, things from the rest of Karia—and, no matter what Kissidas says, things from the other end of the world. Ever since Alexander kicked the Persian Empire open for us Hellenes, we've come across all sorts of strange things we'd hardly known about before. Peafowl, for instance.”

  “They were nothing but trouble,” Sostratos said.

  “Not quite nothing—we turned 'em into silver.” Menedemos waited to see what sort of argument his cousin would give him about that. When Sostratos didn't argue, Menedemos concluded he'd made his point. He went off toward Kissidas' kitchen in a good mood; he didn't win arguments from Sostratos every day.

  Kissidas himself came into the kitchen just as Menedemos and Sostratos were finishing their breakfasts. “You boys are up early,” he said as he tore a chunk from a loaf of last night's bread.

  “We've got a lot to do today,” Menedemos said. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we'll get it done.” He was always full of driving energy on the sea, less often on land—when he wasn't chasing some woman or other. But this morning he wished he could do everything at once. “Haven't you finished yet, Sostratos?”

  Sostratos spat a last olive pit onto the rammed-earth floor. “I have now. I thought you were just my cousin and my captain, not my master.”

  “Shows what you know. Come on, let's get moving.” He swept Sostratos along in his wake, as the Aphrodite brought her boat along in her wake with the tow rope. Over his shoulder, he called back to Kissidas: “We'll see you in the evening, best one. Wish us luck.”

  “I do, not that I think you'll need too much,” the olive merchant answered. “Men who push as hard as you do make their own luck.”

  Menedemos hardly heard him; he was hustling Sostratos out the front door to Kissidas house. Only then did he hesitate. “Now—to find the harbor.” Kaunos' streets did not run on a neat grid. In fact, they ran on no pattern known to geometry. This was an old town,
unlike modern Rhodes, which had gone up only a century before, and whose streets went at right angles to one another.

  “As long as we go east, we're fine,” Sostratos said. “The shadows will tell us which way that is.”

  “Good enough.” Menedemos laughed. “I usually steer by the sun out on the sea, not here on land. But you're right—it should work.”

  And it did. Menedemos wasn't so sure he'd be able to find Kissidas' house again, but the rising sun did lead him to the harbor and to the Aphrodite. A few sailors aboard the merchant galley were still snoring on the rowers' benches, leaning up against the planking of the ship's side. More were up and about but moving with the slow care of men who'd had too much wine the night before.

  Diokles, predictably, was both awake and undamaged. “Hail, skipper,” he boomed, making several men wince. “I was hoping you'd get here about now. Plenty of things to do today.”

  “That's right,” Menedemos agreed. “Pick me six or eight men to haul jars of dye and perfume and pots of ink and a couple of these sacks of papyrus to the agora. Don't choose any of the fellows who stayed on the ship last night—they're entitled to their fun today.”

  “Right you are.” The keleustes told off several sailors. They grumbled—they wouldn't have been free Hellenes if they hadn't—but they did as they were told. Leading their little procession, Menedemos and Sostratos headed back into Kaunos from the harbor district.

  Menedemos had to ask how to get to the agora: no steering by the sun there. The first man he asked babbled at him in Karian, which he didn't understand. The next plainly followed Greek, but made a production of having to think things over till Menedemos handed him an obolos. Once he'd popped the little coin into his mouth, he gave quick, clear directions that also proved accurate. Menedemos silently thanked the gods; he'd known lots of quick, clear directions that had the sole flaw of not taking him where he needed to go.