The Gryphon's Skull

The blunt question made one of the women up on the foredeck begin to wail. But Kissidas tossed his head. “I don't think so. Now that I'm gone from Kaunos, he'll just go on about his business. He suspected me because I was Rhodian proxenos, not because I was myself, if you know what I mean.” He paused, then snarled a curse. “But I'll bet he steals my groves and my oil press, the son of a whore.”

“If Ptolemaios really is coming west through Lykia, nobody who backs Antigonos will have long to enjoy them,” Sostratos said.

“That's true.” Kissidas brightened. He asked, “How long a sail is it to Rhodes? Do you know, I've never been to your polis, even though I've represented her in Kaunos for years. I've never been farther away than the edge of my groves.”

“If the wind holds, we should be in the harbor in the early afternoon,” Menedemos answered. “Even if the wind doesn't hold, we'll make it before nightfall. I'll put men at the oars to make sure we do, in case you're wrong and Hipparkhos does try to come after us.”

The Rhodian proxenos—now, the exile—bowed. “From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for rescuing me and mine.”

“My pleasure,” Menedemos replied. Then mischief glinted in his eyes. In a voice only Sostratos and Diokles could hear, he murmured, “From the heart of my bottom, you're welcome.”

Diokles guffawed. Sostratos snorted and gave his cousin a severe look. “You really have read too much Aristophanes for your own

“There's no such thing as too much Aristophanes,” Menedemos said.

Before Sostratos could rise to that—and he would have, as surely as a tunny would rise to the anchovy impaled on a fisherman's hook—Kissidas called back to the poop in plaintive tones: “Excuse me, gentlemen, but does this boat always jerk and sway so?” He followed the question with a gulp audible all the way from the fore-deck.

“He hasn't got any stomach at all, has he?” Menedemos muttered.

“No,” Sostratos said. He sometimes got sick in what most sailors reckoned moderate seas, but this light pitching didn't bother him in the least. “Good thing it is only a day's journey.” To a seasick man, of course, only was the wrong word; the voyage would seem to last forever.

His cousin must have been thinking along the same lines, for he spoke up urgently: “If you have to heave, O best one, in the name of the gods lean out over the rail before you do.”

“Good thing we've got a following breeze,” Diokles said with wry amusement. “Otherwise, you'd have to explain the difference between leeward and windward—if he didn't find out by getting it blown back into his face.”

Menedemos laughed the callous laugh of a man with a bronze stomach. “One lesson like that and you remember forever.”

Well before noon, Kissidas and one of the women of his household bent over the rail, puking. From his post at the steering oars, Menedemos avidly stared forward. “Trying to see what she looks like without her veil?” Sostratos asked, his voice dry.

“Well, of course,” his cousin answered. “How often do you get the chance to look at a respectable woman unveiled? Unwrapped, you might say?”

“You might,” Sostratos said as another spasm of vomiting wracked the woman. “Tell me, though, my dear—if she came back here right now and wanted to give you a kiss, how would you like that?”

Menedemos started to say something, then checked himself. “Mm, maybe not right now.” But he kept looking ahead. After a moment, he gave a dismissive shrug. “Besides, she's not very pretty. She must have brought a fat dowry.”

The familiar bulk of the island of Rhodes swelled in the south, dead ahead. Sostratos said, “We will get in not long after noon.”

“So we will,” Menedemos replied.

Sostratos gave him a curious look. “Aren't you glad to be able to spend a couple of extra days at home?”

“No,” Menedemos said. Goodness, Sostratos thought as his cousin steered the akatos south without another word and with his face as set and hard as iron. His quarrel with his father must he worse than I thought.

“OöP!” Diokles called, and the rowers rested at their oars. Sailors tossed lines to a couple of longshoremen, who made the Aphrodite fast to one of the quays in the great harbor of Rhodes.

“What are you doing here?” one of the longshoremen asked, looping the coarse flax rope round a post. “Nobody thought you'd be back till fall. Get in trouble up in Kaunos?” He leered at die merchant galley, and at Menedemos in particular.