The Gryphon's Skull

He hoped Halikarnassos fell, and fell quickly. His reasons were entirely selfish. If Ptolemaios' ships weren't constantly limping back to the harbor of Kos with sprung timbers or smashed stemposts or out-and-out holes from stones thrown by engines, the carpenters here wouldn't be working on them at all hours of the day—and, sometimes, by torchlight at night. They would have a chance to fix the Aphrodite.

But Ptolemaios had hoped to seize the town by surprise. That hadn't worked. Now his men had to settle down to besiege it, which could take a long time. Troy took Agamemnon and Odysseus and the rest of the Akhaioi ten years, Menedemos thought, and wished he hadn't.

Things would go faster than that nowadays. Homer's hexameters said nothing of catapults that flung javelins or stone balls weighing thirty minai or more. Homer's hexameters, as a matter of fact, said next to nothing about siege warfare itself, even though the Iliad

was about the siege of Troy. Alexander's army could probably have stormed Hektor's city in ten days, not ten years. Menedemos paused to scratch his head at that thought. Agamemnon and Akhilleus and the Aiantes and Diomedes and the rest might have been heroes, some of them the sons of gods, but they hadn't known a lot of things modern soldiers took for granted.

Alexander had admired Akhilleus. He'd taken a copy of the Iliad with him on his campaigns in the trackless east. Had he ever realized his men could have thrashed the warriors who'd sailed the black ships to Troy? Menedemos doubted it.

The next thing that went through his mind was, I can't tell Sostratos about this.

His cousin might shrug and say he'd thought of the same thing years before. If Sostratos hadn't thought of it, though, Menedemos knew he would get no peace till his cousin had squeezed the whey out of every single related possibility. Keeping quiet was a better bet.

His own thoughts returned to the Aphrodite. He didn't want to try making those repairs himself. He wasn't worried about the steering oar; he was confident the amateur carpenters aboard the akatos could fashion a substitute. But the planking at the stern had taken even more damage than he'd thought, with seams sprung, tenons cracked, and mortises broken open for several cubits' distance from the actual point of the collision. He wanted those planks repaired properly. If the merchant galley started taking on seawater halfway across the Aegean . . . He shuddered. Not all ships came home.

I need real carpenters. But I can't get them. So what do I do now? Only one thing I can do: I have to wait till I can get them. That was logical. It made Menedemos hate logic.

He stiffened when a pentekonter that might have come straight out of the Catalogue of Ships glided into the harbor. Such single-banked galleys were the only warships Homer had known. These days, though, they were pirate ships, not naval vessels. No pirate would have been mad enough to raid Kos harbor. And this ship peaceably tied up at a quay and started disgorging hoplites.

An officer rushed up the quay and took charge of the soldiers—or rather, tried to, for they eyed him with contempt veiled as thinly as the most transparent Koan silk might have done. Only after several minutes' talk—and only after the officer pointed back into the city of Kos, as if threatening to call for reinforcements—did the newcomers let him lead them away.

“More of Polemaios' men, I'd say,” Sostratos remarked.

“I'd say you're right,” Menedemos agreed. “They're slipping out of Khalkis a shipload at a time and heading this way.”

His cousin pointed toward the smoke rising from Halikarnassos. “If I were Ptolemaios”—he pronounced the ruler of Egypt's name with care, so Menedemos couldn't doubt which Macedonian he meant—”I'd send Polemaios' men across to the siege. . . and wouldn't it be a shame if they got used up?”

Menedemos didn't need to think about that for very long before dipping his head. “I'd do the same. But Ptolemaios doesn't seem to want to. He's just getting them out of the polis, making them encamp outside the walls. That doesn't seem safe enough to me.”

“Nor to me,” Sostratos said. “If he trusted Polemaios”—he named Antigonos' nephew carefully, too—”that would be one thing. But Polemaios turned on Antigonos, and then he turned on Kassandros, too. Ptolemaios would have to be feebleminded to think the man won't also turn on him the moment he sees a chance.”

“Ptolemaios isn't feebleminded,” Menedemos said. “He's one very sharp fellow.”