The Gryphon's Skull

Sostratos and Menedemos looked at each other. Sostratos could think of nothing he wanted less. What he wanted was to get to Athens as fast as he could. But what he wanted and what was expedient were liable to be two different things. “Thank you,” he said. “That's very kind.”

He'd made the right choice. He saw that at once, by the way Aristarkhos relaxed. The officer turned to Euxenides, saying, “Come on, let's get you back to the barracks before it's too dark for us to see where we're going.” They walked down the quay together.

“Just what I want—a day in Knidos' market square,” Menedemos said. “It would take a special miracle from Zeus to make enough to pay the whole crew an extra day's wages.” He reached up and set a hand on Sostratos' shoulder. “And I'm sure you're even happier about the layover than I am.”

“Oh, of course.” Sostratos' sounded even glummer than his cousin had. But then he brightened. “You never can tell what we might find, though. Who would have thought we'd come across the gryphon's skull in Kaunos?”

“Yes, who would?” Menedemos' tone suggested he would have been just as well pleased never to have set eyes on it. He sighed. “We couldn't even hope to find the Rhodian proxenos' house without a torchbearer now. Do you feel like going to an inn, or will the poop deck do for the night?”

“The poop deck is fine, as far as I'm concerned,” Sostratos said. “Nothing but bugs and noise and thieves at an inn.”

“Not quite nothing,” his cousin observed.

“We've got wine here, and I'm not so mad for girls that I've got to have one the instant I come into a port,” Sostratos replied.

“Well, I don't have

to have one, either,” Menedemos said in tones of affronted dignity. Sostratos smiled to himself. That gibe had gone home. Menedemos stripped off his chiton, crumpled it up, and set it on the deck to serve for a pillow. He wrapped himself in his himation and lay down. Sostratos did the same.

There was room on the deck for Diokles, too. But the keleustes perched on a rower's bench and leaned against the Aphrodite’s side planking, as he usually did when spending a night aboard ship. He'd got into the habit years earlier, when he still pulled an oar, and he'd never been able to get out of it.

Sostratos peered up into the night sky. Aphrodite's wandering star, brightest of them all, blazed in the west, following the sun down toward the horizon. That of Zeus, less brilliant but able to travel all around the heavenly sphere, shone low in the east. Distant music from the double flute and voices raised in song argued that more than a few people preferred revelry and wenching to this almost Lakedaimonian simplicity. To the crows with them, he thought, and fell asleep.

Menedemos was anything but enthusiastic about spending a day in Knidos' agora hawking the Aphrodite's goods. “Not your fault,” he said to Sostratos as they set up their little display of dye and perfume and papyrus and ink. “You couldn't afford to make that Aristarkhos angry at us. But even so ...”

“Even so,” Sostratos agreed mournfully. “I want to go on to Athens.”

He sounded like a small boy who wanted a sweet and was about to throw a tantrum because his pedagogue wouldn't buy one for him. Menedemos chuckled. If there were thinking-brothels like the thinking-shop Aristophanes had given Sokrates in his Clouds, nothing would have kept Sostratos aboard the Aphrodite the night before. He'd practically boasted about not caring whether he got laid, but he would have been gone like a dart from a catapult if he'd seen a chance to argue about the whichness of what.

“We'll go through the motions,” Menedemos said. “Then we can prowl the market square for a while, and then we'll head back to the ship.”

“Fair enough.” But Sostratos heaved a sigh. “We could be most of the way to Kos by now.” He exaggerated, but not by a great deal; the island lay less than half a day's journey north and west of Knidos.

Local merchants started crying the virtues of their olives and onions and drinking cups and wool cloth. And, not too far away, a couple of bearded Phoenicians in ankle-length linen robes and brim-less caps called out, “Balsam! Fine balsam! The finest incense and medicine the gods ever made!”

Hearing that, Sostratos perked up. “We ought to see what sort of bargain we can strike with them, A mina of balsam goes for two minai of silver.”

“You're right,” Menedemos said. “We'll have time to dicker, I expect. It won't move fast in a little town like this.”

But they'd hardly begun singing the praises of their own goods before a man with the careful, forward-leaning walk of the shortsighted came up to them and said, “You'd be the Rhodians who got in last night?”

“That's right, best one,” Menedemos answered. “What can we do for you?”

“Papyrus,” the fellow answered. That surprised Menedemos. The man went on, “Aristarkhos said you had papyrus.”