The Gryphon's Skull

“I was thinking the same thing,” Menedemos answered. “It would be a nuisance. Trying to figure out a course when we can't see more than a couple of stadia isn't easy. It'd slow us down, too, if the sail got soaked.”

“The men might not mind, not after rowing all day in the hot sun,” his cousin said. “Cool weather's more comfortable.”

“At first, maybe,” Menedemos said. “But it's easy to take a chill when you come off your stint at the oars, and to cramp up, too. Rain's no fun when you haven't any way to keep it off your head.”

They left Paros almost as early as he'd hoped they would. As soon as they were out of the harbor, he ordered the sail lowered from the yard. The freshening breeze thrummed in the rigging. The mast creaked in its socket as that breeze filled the sail and pulled on it. The merchant galley ran before the wind till she slid through the channel between Paros and Oliaros, the smaller island to the southwest.

“I've heard there's a cave full of spikes of rock sticking up from the floor and down from the ceiling on Oliaros,” Sostratos said. “That's the sort of thing I'd like to see.”

“Why?” Menedemos asked. At his orders, the sailors swung the yard so that it stretched back from the port bow to take best advantage of the wind.

“Why?” Sostratos echoed. “It might be pretty. It would certainly be interesting. And they say some men Alexander the Great was after hid out there for a while.”

“Do they?” Menedemos lifted his right hand off the steering-oar tiller to wag a forefinger at his cousin. “You're always going on about how 'they say' all sorts of things, and most of the time what 'they say' turns out to be nothing but a pack of nonsense. So why do you believe 'them' now?”

“There's supposed to be some writing inside the cave,” Sostratos answered, “but I guess you're right—that doesn't have to mean anything. People could have written it in the years since Alexander died.”

“Why would they?” Menedemos asked. “To draw visitors to these caves? If you ask me, anybody who wanted to go crawling through them would have to be daft.” He gave Sostratos a meaningful look.

Having been on the receiving end of a lot of those looks, Sostratos ignored this one. “Maybe,” he said, “though you'd need more than scratchings on a stalactite to get anyone to come to Oliaros. You'd need divinities born there, the way Delos has Apollo and Artemis.”

Menedemos, who was much more conventionally religious than his cousin, bit down on that like a man unexpectedly biting down on an olive pit. By the way Sostratos said it, the god and goddess might not actually have been born on Delos, but the Delians might have claimed they were for no better reason than to draw people to the island and separate them from their silver. Menedemos didn't ask if he did mean that, for fear he would say yes. He did ask, “What other reason would somebody have for writing something that wasn't true?”

“Perhaps just for the sake of fame,” Sostratos replied. “You know, like that madman who burned down the temple back before the Peloponnesian War. He did it just so he'd be remembered forever. Herodotos found out what his name was—and then didn't put it in his history,”

“Euge!”

Menedemos exclaimed. The more he thought about it, the more elegant he reckoned that revenge.

Several small islands lay south of Naxos, on the way to Amorgos. They were like Telos, over by Rhodes; they had villages, not poleis, and a few people scratched out a living in their hinterland. They drew steadily nearer as the Aphrodite glided east. So did the clouds the rising breeze brought down from the north.

Those clouds covered the sun. The day went from bright to gloomy. Before long, rain started pattering down, light at first but then increasing. A little rain made a sail perform better, holding more of the wind than the weave of the linen could by itself. More than a little, and the sail got heavy and saggy. Menedemos could only try to wring as much advantage from what was going on as he could.

He'd known visibility would shrink in case of rain. The islands ahead disappeared in the veils of masking water falling from the sky. So did Kos, to the south of them, and so did Naxos itself. Menedemos sent sharp-eyed Aristeidas up onto the foredeck to look out for unexpected trouble. In a while, I'll send a leadsman up there with him to take soundings, too, he thought.

He hadn't got round to giving the order for that before he found himself in unexpected trouble of his own. Polemaios made his ponderous way back to the poop deck and stomped up to Menedemos. “How dare you place a man up there to spy on my wife?” he demanded.