The Gryphon's Skull

Sounion, as far as Sostratos was concerned, remained as unprepossessing as it had been the last time the Aphrodite put in there, a few days earlier. Now, at least, the ship didn't need to be cleansed of pollution (unless adultery counts, he thought), and they had no dead or dying aboard. The setting sun sent gold and orange and crimson ripples across the sea as the akatos' anchors splashed down into the water.

A boat rowed out from the hamlet toward the merchant galley. Sostratos had seen the man at the oars before, but not his passenger, a dapper fellow who looked out of place in Sounion. The dapper man hailed the ship: “Ahoy, there! Who are you, and where are you bound?”

“We're the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes, and we're heading home,” Sostratos replied.

“Told you so,” said the man at the oars in the small boat.

The dapper man ignored him. “Will you take a passenger to Kos?” he called.

“That depends,” Sostratos said.

“Ah, yes.” The dapper man dipped his head and grinned. “It always does, doesn't it? Well, what's your fare?”

Sostratos considered. This fellow plainly didn't belong here, which meant that, for one reason or another, he had some urgent need to go east. And so the only question was, how much to charge him? Sostratos thought of Euxenides of Phaselis, and how much they'd squeezed out of him for a much shorter trip. Bracing himself for either a scream of fury or a furious haggle, he named the most outrageous price he could think of: “Fifty drakhmai.”

But the dapper man in the boat didn't scream. He didn't even blink. He just dipped his head and said, “Done. You sail in the morning, don't you?”

Behind Sostratos, Menedemos muttered, “By the dog of Egypt!” Sostratos couldn't tell whether that was praise for him or astonishment that the dapper fellow—the new passenger, he was now— hadn't screamed blue murder. Some of both, maybe. As for Sostratos himself, he had the feeling he could have asked for a whole mina, not just a half, and he would have got the same instant agreement.

He had to make himself remember the man's question. “That's right,” he said. “You pay half then, half when we get there.”

“I know how it's done,” the dapper man said impatiently. “I'll have my own food and wine, too.”

“All right.” Sostratos knew he sounded a little dazed, but couldn't help it. He had to make himself come out with one more question: “And, ah, your name is. . . ?”

“You can call me Dionysios son of Herakleitos,” the man answered. “I'll be aboard early enough to suit you, I promise.” He spoke to the local at the oars, who took him back to Sounion.

Sostratos stared after him. “Well, well,” Menedemos said. “Isn't that interesting?”

“I wonder what he's running from,” Sostratos said. “Nothing right here in town, surely, or he'd have asked to spend the night on the foredeck. Something back in Athens, I suppose. He looks like an Athenian—sounds like one, too.”

“I wonder who he is,” Menedemos said.

“Dionysios son of Herakl—” Sostratos began.

His cousin tossed his head. “He said we could call him that. He didn't say it was his name.” Sostratos thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He prided himself on noticing such things, but he'd missed that one. Menedemos went on, “He strung a couple of the most ordinary names in the world together, is what he did. He might have been Odysseus telling Polyphemos the Cyclops to call him Nobody.”

“Trust you to haul Homer into it somehow,” Sostratos said, but he had to admit the comparison was apt. And then his own wits, stunned since Dionysios so casually agreed to that ridiculous fare, started to work again. “He wants to go to Kos.”

“He said so,” Menedemos agreed. After a moment, he snapped his fingers. “And staying on Kos—”

“Is Ptolemaios,” Sostratos finished for him, not wanting to hear his own thought hijacked. “I wonder if he's some sort of envoy from Demetrios of Phaleron here in Attica, or from Kassandros, or if he's one of Ptolemaios' spies.”

“I'd bet on the last,” Menedemos said. “Ptolemaios has all the money in the world, so why should his spies have to quarrel about fares?”

“That makes sense,” Sostratos said. “Of course, just because it makes sense doesn't have to mean it's true. I'll tell you something else.” He waited for Menedemos to raise a questioning eyebrow, then continued, “Whatever he is, we won't find out from him.”

“Well, my dear, if you think I'm going to argue about that, you're mad as a maenad,” Menedemos said.

Dionysios son of Herakleitos—or whatever his real name was— proved as good as his word. He hailed the Aphrodite so early the next morning, some of her sailors were still asleep. Carrying a leather sack big enough to hold food and wine and the few belongings a traveling man needed, he scrambled up from the local's rowboat into the low waist of the merchant galley.

“Hail,” he said as Sostratos came up to him.

“Good day,” Sostratos replied.