The Gryphon's Skull

Sostratos was more than a little pleased with himself. He'd got the Kaunian wool merchant up to twenty-two drakhmai a jar for six jars of crimson dye. Anything over eighteen drakhmai the jar was profit, so he'd done pretty well. Now that the wool merchant had gone off to get the silver—one mina, thirty-two drakhmai, said the calculating part of Sostratos' mind that rarely rested—he wanted a moment in which he could relax and be proud of himself.

He wanted one, but he didn't get it. From halfway across the agora, Menedemos started waving and whistling and generally acting the fool. “Oe, Sostratos!” he called. “Come here!”

“What is it?” Sostratos shouted back. He doubted whether anything in Kaunos' market square was worth getting excited about.

His cousin, though, evidently disagreed with him, “Come here,” his cousin repeated. “You've got to take a look at this.”

“Take a look at what?” Sostratos asked irritably. Menedemos didn't answer. He just waved and called again. Muttering under his breath, Sostratos went over to see what besides a pretty girl could get his cousin in such an uproar.

When he got to the flimsy stall by which his cousin was standing, Menedemos pointed dramatically and said, “There!”

Sostratos stared. Staring didn't tell him what he needed to know, so he asked the question he had to ask: “What is that thing?”

“A gryphon's skull,” Menedemos and the local merchant answered together. They might have come from the chorus in a revived tragedy of Euripides'.

“A gryphon's skull?” Sostratos echoed, as if he couldn't believe his ears. As a matter of fact, he couldn't, “But... I always thought— everyone always thought—gryphons weren't real. Herodotos puts them at the end of the world with the one-eyed Arimaspioi and other unlikelihoods.”

“This skull comes from the end of the world,” Menedemos said, and told Sostratos what the Kaunian had told him. Before Sostratos could say anything, his cousin added, “And if that's not a gryphon's skull, my dear, I'd like you to tell me what it is.”

“I . . don't know.” Sostratos squatted beside the extraordinary skull—it was definitely the skull of some sort of beast, whether gryphon or not—for a closer look. After a moment, Menedemos crouched down beside him. “What have you come across here?” Sostratos asked his cousin,

“I already told you,” Menedemos said. “You didn't want to believe me, that's all.”

“Do you blame me?” Sostratos said. Menedemos only shrugged.

The skull itself said nothing at all, of course. It only lay on the muddy ground in the middle of Kaunos' agora and stared back at Sostratos out of large, empty eye sockets. The skull itself was impressively large, too: perhaps two cubits long, and almost a cubit and a half wide at the broadest point, though it narrowed at the front to a curved beak almost like that of an eagle. Growing astonishment and awe prickled through Sostratos; gryphons were supposed to have just that sort of beak.

Unlike an eagle's, though, this beak held teeth. Sostratos tilted the skull for a better look. He would have expected fangs to put a lion's to shame, but these flat-topped, square teeth looked more like a cow's or a goat's. “Isn't that interesting?” Sostratos murmured. “No matter what we've heard, the gryphon may graze instead of killing,”

“What makes you say that?” Menedemos asked.

“Its teeth,” Sostratos answered, and explained his reasoning. Menedemos pursed his lips as he thought, then dipped his head in agreement.

“You're a clever fellow,” the Kaunian merchant said. “That never would have occurred to me.”

“A clever fellow, eh?” Sostratos tossed his head. “If I'm so clever, why did I never imagine . . . this?” He reached out and rested his palm on the skull's projecting, beaky snout. The feel of it surprised him anew; it was cooler and heavier, more solid, than he'd expected from old bone. “It might almost be stone under my ringers,” he said, and glanced toward Menedemos. “You don't suppose some sculptor—”

“No.” His cousin cut him off. “That's impossible, best one, and you know it as well as I do. Who could have imagined such a thing, let alone carved it? Those teeth are teeth. A man would break his heart and go blind trying to shape them. And the broken horn that sticks up and back from the skull? Don't be absurd.”

Sostratos sighed. He would have loved to tell Menedemos he was wrong, but couldn't. “You have me, I'm afraid.”

He straightened, picked up the skull—It weighed about a third of a talent, he guessed—and turned it all the way over, wondering if the underside would tell him anything the top hadn't. On closer inspection, he discovered the teeth weren't quite so much like a cow's as he'd first thought. But he still couldn't imagine the gryphon eating meat with them.

Menedemos pointed to some reddish dirt clinging to the bottom of the skull. “There. You see? It's not carved. It's been buried underground for a long time.”