The Gryphon's Skull

Kleiteles led Sostratos and Menedemos back to the guest rooms. “Good night,” he said. He doused one of the torches burning in the courtyard in the fountain and carried the other one upstairs. Darkness abruptly descended. Sostratos had to grope for the latch.

To his relief, a lamp was burning inside. The proxenos' slave woman lay on the bed waiting for him. “Hail,” she said, yawning. “You spent so long in the andron, I almost fell asleep.”

Sostratos didn't want to apologize to a slave, but he didn't want a quarrel, either. Trying to avoid both, he asked, “How are you tonight, Thestylis?”

“Sleepy, like I told you,” she answered. But she added, “It's nice that you remember my name,” and smiled at him. The smile was probably mercenary. Still, he preferred it to a scowl,

“I don't think I'll forget you,” he said. He remembered all the women he'd bedded. He remembered all sorts of things, but Thestylis didn't need to know that.

Her smile softened. “What a sweet thing to say,” she told him. “Nobody ever told me anything like that before. Most men, it's just, 'Take off your clothes and bend over,' and they never even find out what your name is, let alone remember it.” The light from the lamp suddenly sparkled off tears in her eyes.

“Don't cry,” Sostratos said.

“I didn't think somebody being kind could hurt so much,” she mumbled, and buried her face in the cloth covering the mattress. A muffled sob rose.

“Don't cry,” Sostratos repeated. He got down on the bed beside her and awkwardly patted her hair. Even as he did so, he wondered if her tears were a ploy to pry an extra obolos or two out of him. Anyone who dealt with slaves had to make such calculations. Slaves, he knew perfectly well, made calculations of their own about free men.

She sobbed again, and made as if to push him away. “Now see what you made me do,” she said, as if her tears were his fault. Maybe, in a way, they were.

“If you want to go back up to the women's quarters tonight, that's all right,” he said. Why not? He was tired, and she'd be there tomorrow. And so would he, because he still didn't know when a ship's carpenter would be able to work on the Aphrodite—or when Menedemos would get so fed up, he'd have some of the sailors make repairs that might at least carry the merchant galley to another, less crowded, polis.

Thestylis twisted. Now he could see her face, and the alarm on it. She tossed her head. “I don't dare do that,” she said. “Who knows what Kleiteles would do to me?” More tears slid down her face, leaving bright tracks in the lamplight.

He leaned over and kissed her. If she'd pushed him away then, he would have lain down beside her and gone to sleep. But her arms went around him. His hand closed on her breast through the wool of her long chiton. She sighed, deep in her throat, and squeezed him tighter. Again, he wondered if she really meant it. But with his own excitement rising, he didn't much care. He reached under the hem of her tunic, his hand sliding up the smooth flesh of her thigh to the secret place between her legs. The flesh there was smooth, too; she'd singed away the hair with a lamp.

Before long, her tunic and his both lay on the floor. He kissed her breasts. She sighed again as her nipples grew stiff to his caresses. He grew stiff, too, and took her hand and set it on his manhood. She stroked him, easing his foreskin back.

“Here,” he said. “Ride me like a racehorse.”

“All right.” She straddled him. He held his erection as she impaled herself on him. As she began to move, he squeezed her breasts and leaned up to tease their tips with his tongue. “Ah,” she said softly, and moved faster.

At the end, she threw back her head and made a little mewling cry. By the way she squeezed him inside herself, he thought her pleasure real. His hands clutched her meaty backside as his seed shot into her.

She toppled down onto him, all warm and soft and sweaty, as he was sweaty, too. But then, even when he might have started a second round, she scrambled off, took the chamber pot out from under the bed, and squatted over it, her legs splayed wide apart. A wet plop and a muttered, “Well, that's most of it,” said what she was doing.

“I'll give you half a drakhma,” Sostratos said. “You don't need to tell Kleiteles you got it from me.”

“Thank you, sir,” Thestylis said, reaching for her tunic. “You are a kind man. Some people, you might as well be a piece of meat, for all they care about what you feel.” It wasn't a complaint about men's treatment of women worthy of those Euripides had put in the mouths of his female characters, but sounded heartfelt even so.

“Don't put the chamber pot away,” Sostratos said. After using it, he put on his chiton, too. Thestylis would be lying beside him if he wanted that second round in the morning. Meanwhile .. . Meanwhile, he yawned and lay down. No need to wrap himself in his himation on a warm summer night. “Blow out the lamp.”

She did, then got into bed in the dark. Sostratos patted her, yawned again, and fell asleep.