The Gryphon's Skull

A couple of groans answered him. He didn't laugh. He'd done his share of drinking, too. The thick ropes thudded down into the waist of the Aphrodite. Sailors who weren't rowing coiled them and got them out of the way.

“Back oars!” Diokles called, and struck the bronze square with the mallet. “Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!” Menedemos slid one steering-oar tiller in toward him, the other out, swinging the Aphrodite around till her bow pointed north. A round ship that had been lying at anchor a couple of plethra away from the pier sculled toward the spot the merchant galley had vacated. With Ptolemaios' fleet here, Kos' harbor remained badly overcrowded.

Just for a moment, the sun peeked through the dark clouds, highlighting the Karian headland north of Kos on which Halikarnassos and, farther west, the smaller town of Myndos lay. The yellow stubble of harvested grainfields and the grayish green leaves of olive groves seemed particularly bright against the gloomy background of the sky. Sostratos hoped that shaft of sunlight meant the weather would clear, but the clouds rolled in again, and color drained out of the landscape.

Menedemos took the Aphrodite up the channel between Myndos and the island of Kalymnos to the west. When the akatos came abreast of Myndos, Sostratos pointed toward the town and said, “Look! Antigonos has war galleys patrolling there, too.”

“So would I, in his place,” Menedemos answered. He blinked a couple of times, a comical expression.

“What's that about?” Sostratos asked.

“Raindrop just hit me in the eye,” Menedemos said. He rubbed his nose. “There's another one.”

A moment later, one hit Sostratos in the knee, another on the forearm, and a third gave him a wet kiss on the left ear. A couple of sailors exclaimed. “Here comes the storm, sure enough,” Sostratos said.

The Aphrodite's sail was already up against the yard, for she was heading straight into the wind. After those first few scattered drops, the rain came down hard, far harder than it had in the Kyklades. “Very late in the year for one like this,” Menedemos said. Sostratos could hardly hear him; raindrops were drumming down on the planking of the poop deck and hissing into the sea.

“It is, isn't it?” Sostratos said. “I hope all the leather sacks are sound. Otherwise, we're liable to have some water-damaged silk.”

“You look water-damaged yourself,” Menedemos said. “It's dripping out of your beard.”

“How can you tell, the way it's coming down out of the sky?” Sostratos replied.

Instead of answering directly, Menedemos raised his voice to a shout: “Aristeidas, go forward!” The sailor waved and hurried up to the foredeck, “Polemaios can't complain about him this time,” Menedemos said.

“No,” Sostratos agreed, “but how much good will he do with the rain coming down like this? I can hardly see him up there, and he's only—what?—thirty or thirty-five cubits away.”

“He's the best set of eyes we've got,” Menedemos said. “I can't do any more than that.”

Sostratos dipped his head. “I wasn't arguing.” Pie pulled off his chiton and threw it down onto the deck. In the warm rain, going naked was more comfortable than wet wool squelching against his skin. He looked back toward the Aphrodite's boat, which she towed by a line tied to the sternpost. “I wonder if you'll need to put a man with a pot in there to bail.”

“It is coming down, isn't it?” Menedemos said. An unspoken thought flashed between them: I wonder if we'll need to start bailing out the ship.

Sostratos knew he hadn't expected weather this nasty, and his cousin couldn't have, either, or he wouldn't have set out from Kos. Menedemos quickly changed the subject; “Take the steering oars for a moment, would you? I want to get out of my tunic, too.”

“Of course, my dear.” Sostratos seized the steering-oar tillers with alacrity. Menedemos usually had charge of them all the way through the voyage. Sostratos didn't have to do any steering past holding the merchant galley on her course. Even so, the strength of the sea shot up his arms, informing his whole body. It's like holding a conversation with Poseidon himself, he thought.

Menedemos' soggy chiton splatted onto the planks of the deck beside his own. “That's better,” his cousin said. “Thanks. I'll get back where I belong now.”

“All right,” Sostratos said, though his tone suggested it was anything but.

Laughing, Menedemos said, “You want to hang on for a while, do you? Well, I can't say that I blame you. It's like making love to the sea, isn't it?”

That wasn't the comparison Sostratos had thought of, but it wasn't a bad one. And it suits my cousin, too, he thought. “May I stay for a bit?” he asked.

“Why not?” Menedemos said, laughing still. But then he grew more serious: “Probably not the worst thing in the world for you to know what to do.”