“News?” With the one word, Menedemos' cousin had done a better job of snaring the man in the rowboat than he had himself with his whole long list of what the Aphrodite carried. “Tell it, man!” the local exclaimed. “Polemaios Polemaios' son is dead,” Sostratos said. “When he went to Kos, he tried to raise a rebellion against Ptolemaios, and the lord of Egypt made him drink hemlock. We were there when it happened.” As usual, he said nothing about taking Polemaios to Kos, or about watching Antigonos' nephew die. What he did say was plenty. “Polemaios dead?” the Sounian echoed. “You're sure?” Menedemos and Sostratos solemnly dipped their heads. “That is news!” the man said, and started rowing back to shore as fast as he could go. “We could have just told him that, and he wouldn't have worried about anything else,” Menedemos said. He yawned. After the desperate day, those two cups of wine were hitting him hard. As the stars shone down on the merchant galley, he stretched out on the poop deck and dove into sleep like a dolphin diving into the sea. However worn he was, he did not pass a restful night. Rhodippos woke him—woke the whole crew—two or three times with cries of rage and dread as the wounded, feverish sailor battled demons only he could see. By the time the sun followed rosy-fingered dawn up out of the sea to the east, the man was moaning almost continuously. Menedemos pulled the stopper from a fresh amphora of wine. “Last night this made me sleepy,” he said as he dipped some out. “Now I hope it'll wake me up.” He added water to the wine and drank. “Get me some, too, please,” Sostratos said. “Poor fellow,” he added around a yawn. “It's not his fault.” “Fault doesn't matter.” Menedemos was yawning, too. His head felt filled with sand. Most of the sailors were awake, too, though a couple snored on despite Rhodippos' ravings. Menedemos envied them their exhaustion. Sostratos said, “We need to see about one burial—two soon—and about getting the ship cleansed of pollution.” Menedemos envied him, too, for being able to concentrate on what they had to do when he was as weary as everyone else. Despite Dorimakhos' corpse, they used the akatos' boat to go ashore. For an obolos, an old man pointed them toward the burial ground outside Sounion, and toward the gravedigger's house. “You'll be the Rhodians,” that worthy said when they knocked on his door. Gossip, as usual, had wasted no time. “You lost someone in your fight with the pirates?” “We lost one man, and we're losing another,” Menedemos answered. “Will you stay here till he dies?” the gravedigger asked. Menedemos and Sostratos looked at each other. Sostratos sighed and shrugged. Menedemos dipped his head. So did the gravedigger. “Three drakhmai, then, for two graves,” he said. Sostratos gave him three Rhodian coins. He took them without a murmur, though they were lighter than Athenian owls. Menedemos asked, “Who's the chief priest at Poseidon's temple here? We'd like him to purify our ship.” “That would be Theagenes,” the gravedigger replied. As the two Rhodians walked toward the temple, Menedemos asked, “Where do we go from here?”
Вы читаете The Gryphon's Skull
