The Gryphon's Skull

“Do you really think so?” Sostratos said. Even at sunset and the beginning of twilight, his eyes gleamed. Ob, dear, Menedemos thought. I've found an argument that interests him. Will I get any sleep tonight? Sostratos went on, “How do you know that till you've examined them?”

Trying to head him off, Menedemos chuckled and said, “You sound like you come straight out of Sokrates' thinking-shop in the Clouds.”

That didn't work. He should have known it wouldn't. Sostratos said, “You know what I think of Aristophanes for that.”

They'd argued over the play before. With a small sigh, Menedemos dipped his head. “Yes, I do.” He tried again, this time by pointing into the eastern sky; “There's Zeus' wandering star,” He poked his cousin in the ribs with an elbow. “And what else could it possibly be but Zeus' wandering star?”

“I don't know,” Sostratos admitted, “but we can't get close enough to examine it, so how can we be sure?” He sent Menedemos a sly look. “Maybe Ikaros could have given you a better answer.”

“The same as he would have about the sun? Look what he got for flying too close to that.” Menedemos mimed falling from a great height, then toppled onto the sand in lieu of splashing into the sea.

“You're impossible.” But Sostratos was laughing in spite of himself.

A sailor with a pole in his hand came up to Menedemos and said, “Doesn't seem like there are any turtle eggs on this beach.”

“Oh, well.” Menedemos shrugged. “We've got enough bread and oil and olives and cheese for sitos and a sort of opson, and enough water to mix with the wine. For one night ashore here, that'll do well enough.” Up the beach from the Aphrodite, the men fed bits of dry shrubs to a couple of fires they'd got going. Menedemos didn't think the night would be very cold, but fires always made a place more comfortable. And then someone with a bronze hook and a line hauled a fish out of the sea. Before long, it was cooking over one of those fires.

Back home on Rhodes, Menedemos would have turned up his nose at such a meager supper. Out on a trading journey, he ate with good appetite. He was spitting an olive pit onto the sand when Sostratos came up to him and asked, “Where will we head for tomorrow?”

“Naxos, I think,” Menedemos answered. “I don't know whether we'll get there—that's got to be something like five hundred stadia— but we can put in there the next morning if we don't.”

“Have we got enough water aboard for another day at sea?” he asked.

Menedemos dipped his head. “For one more day, yes. For two . . . I wouldn't want to push it. But we can fill up when we get into port there. Naxos is the best watered of the Kyklades.”

“That's true,” Sostratos agreed. “It's certainly not a dried-up husk like Lebinthos here.”

With a shrug, Menedemos said, “If this place had a couple of springs, it would just be another pirates' roost. It's out in the sea by itself, but close enough to the other islands to hunt from. The way things are, though, the bastards can't linger here.”

Sostratos sighed. “I suppose you're right, my dear. Too bad we have to worry about things like that.”

“I didn't say it wasn't,” Menedemos replied. “Now I'm going to finish eating and then go to sleep.”

He wondered if he would have to be blunter than that; Sostratos didn't always take a hint. But his cousin said, “All right,” and found his own place on the sand to lie down. Menedemos wrapped himself in his himation: the day's warmth was seeping out of the air faster than he'd expected. Next thing he knew, morning twilight brightened the eastern sky.

A brisk breeze from out of the northeast sent the Aphrodite bounding across the waves. Even before noon, Sostratos said, “I think we will make Naxos by nightfall.”

“If this wind holds, we will,” Menedemos agreed. The wind tousled his hair—and Sostratos’, too. It thrummed in the rigging and filled the sail. The rowers rested at their oars. A breeze like this pushed the merchant galley along as well as they could have.

Sostratos finally had his sea legs. The Aphrodite's pitching and rolling had left him queasy at the start of the sailing season. Now he didn't even notice them till he realized he would have noticed them before. He wondered if that realization would bring back the queasiness, but it didn't. He was over it for another year.

Naxos crawled up over the western horizon, central mountain first and then the rest of the island. Its polis lay in the northwest, beyond the northernmost headland. The Aphrodite rounded the headland and dropped down toward the port with the sun at least an hour away from setting. Menedemos took his hands off the steering oars long enough to clap them together. “That's one of the nicest day's runs I've ever made,” he said.

“Euge, O best one,” Sostratos said agreeably. “And now here we are, in a place where all sorts of interesting things used to happen.”