“I should know that.” Sostratos thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “A pestilence! I do know that.” He snapped his fingers, then suddenly grinned. “Xenophanes of Kolophon, that's who it was.”
“Euge!” Damonax exclaimed. “Very well done indeed, in fact. I couldn't have come up with the name if you'd given me to Antigonos' nastiest torturer.”
Phelles came back with a wooden tray on which he carried a bowl of olives and two cups of wine. He set them down on the bench by the gryphon's skull. Seeing no wine for himself, Arlissos took the tray from Phelles' startled hands. “Here, my friend,” Sostratos' slave said, “let me carry this to the kitchen for you.” Sostratos popped an olive into his mouth to hide a smile. If Arlissos didn't end up with a snack, he would be surprised.
Damonax pointed to the back-projecting horn. “Pity this bit seems broken off. I wonder what the beast would have looked like when it was alive.”
“Not so pretty as gryphons are supposed to be, I suspect,” Sostratos said. “And what do you make of its teeth?”
“I didn't pay any attention to them,” Damonax confessed. As Sostratos had in the market square at Kaunos, the other Rhodian picked up the skull and turned it over for a closer look. When he put it down on the bench again, his face was thoughtful. “Doesn't have much in the way of fangs, does it?”
“I thought the same thing,” Sostratos said. “How is it supposed to guard the gold at the edge of the world and fight off thieves?”
“With its claws, perhaps,” Damonax suggested, and Sostratos dipped his head—that was a good idea, and it hadn't occurred to him. The older man looked from him to the gryphon's skull and back again, “Tell me, best one, now that you've got this remarkable thing here, what did you have in mind doing with it? Are you going to keep it at your house and tell stories about it the rest of your life?”
“No, by Zeus!” Sostratos exclaimed.
“Ah.” Damonax looked wise. “Then you'll want to sell it, I expect.” Try as he would, he couldn't keep a slightly dismissive tone from his voice. No matter what he says, he really does look down on traders, Sostratos realized. Smoothly, Damonax went on, “I could give you a good price for it myself, as a matter of fact.”
So you can keep it here and tell your own stories about it, Sostratos thought. He tossed his head. “I was going to take it to Athens, to let the philosophers at the Lykeion and the Academy examine it.”
As if he hadn't spoken, Damonax said, “How does two minai sound?”
“Two hundred drakhmai?” Sostratos tried hard not to show how startled he was. Menedemos, he was certain, would have sold the gryphon's skull on the spot, and spent the next year bragging about the profit he'd squeezed from worthless, ugly bones.
Damonax must have taken astonishment for rejection, for he said, “Well, if you won't take two, what about three?”
Part of Sostratos, the part that made him a pretty good merchant, wondered how high Damonax would go to buy the skull. The other part, the part that valued knowledge for its own sake, quailed in horror. Gods be praised my family is well enough off that I don't have to sell it for the first decent offer that comes along.
“You're very kind,” he said, by which he meant, You're very greedy, “but I really do intend to take it to Athens. I'd be on my way there now if my ship hadn't had to bring the Rhodian proxenos and his kin here from Kaunos.”
“Four minai?” Damonax said hopefully. Sostratos tossed his head again. Damonax sighed. “You're serious about going to Athens, aren't you?”
“Yes, of course I am,” Sostratos replied.
“Isn't that interesting? And here I thought someone who traded things for money would trade anything for money.” Damonax didn't seem to think Sostratos might take that for an insult: the older man hadn't quite called him a whore, but he'd come close. Damonax continued, “You never did explain why you had to get the Rhodian proxenos out of Kaunos.”
“Didn't I?” Thinking back, Sostratos realized he hadn't. He told the other man about Ptolemaios' descent on Lykia.
“Ah—that was news to me,” Damonax said. “Are you sure you won't reconsider my offer? I wish you luck getting to Athens from here. As soon as the word spreads, the Aegean will be full of war galleys. How much will Ptolemaios and Antigonos' sailors care about a gryphon's skull?”
Sostratos grimaced. Ptolemaios' fleet was based on Kos, while Antigonos' navy sailed from ports on the Ionian islands farther north and on the mainland of Anatolia. Damonax was bound to be right: those ships would clash, Sostratos said, “We're free. We're autonomous. We're neutral. No one's ships have any business interfering with us.”
“Certainly, that's how we Rhodians feel.” Damonax was polite as the ideal landed gentleman, too. That didn't keep him from asking the next obvious question: “Do you think the marshals' captains, or the pirates they hire to do their scouting and raiding, will agree with us?”
“I can't answer that,” Sostratos answered, in lieu of saying, Not a chance they will. But he went on, “The Aphrodite will try to get to Athens, though.”
“You are a stiff-necked fellow, aren't you?” Damonax said. “Suppose I were to give you six minai for that skull?”
“I didn't bring it here to try to sell it to you.” Sostratos raised his voice: “Arlissos! Where have you gone and disappeared to?”
When the Karian slave emerged, his cheeks were full as a dormouse's. “Are we leaving already?” he asked in disappointed tones around a mouthful of something or other.
“I'm afraid we must.” Sostratos pointed to the gryphon's skull. “Wrap the sailcloth around that, and let's get's going.” He wanted to get out of there as fast as he could. Damonax had shown even more interest in the skull than he'd expected, and not of the sort he'd looked for. If the gentleman farmer suddenly called out half a dozen hulking slaves . . . If that idea hadn't yet occurred to Damonax, Sostratos thought it wise to leave before it did.
“Are you sure I can't persuade you to let me take that skull off your hands?” Damonax said. “I offered a good price: six minai is a lot of money.”
“I know, O best one,” Sostratos answered. “But I want to take it to Athens. And who knows? I may do better there.”
He didn't believe it for a moment. By Damonax's expression, neither did he. But the older man didn't try to keep Sostratos from leaving, and no burly slaves appeared to rape away the gryphon's skull. Once out in the street again, Sostratos breathed a long sigh of relief. He and Arlissos hadn't gone more than a few steps back toward his own house before the slave asked, “Did he really say he'd give you six hundred drakhmai for these miserable old bones?”
“Yes, that's what he said.” Sostratos dipped his head.
“And you turned him down}” Arlissos sounded disbelieving. He sounded more than disbelieving; he sounded as if he'd just witnessed a prodigy. “By Zeus Labraundeus, master, I don't think you'd turn down six hundred drakhmai for me?
He might well have been right. Karian slaves were cheap and easy to come by in Rhodes, while the gryphon's skull was—and, Sostratos was convinced, would remain—unique. Instead of saying so straight out, Sostratos tried a joke: “Well, Arlissos, you have to understand: it eats a lot less than you do.”
“Six hundred drakhmai,” Arlissos said; Sostratos wondered if the slave had even heard him. “Six hundred drakhmai, and he said no.” He looked down at the shrouded skull and spoke to it as if they were equals in more than price: “Hellenes are crazy, old bone, you know that?”