The Cryphon's Skull by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780345515650
Publisher: DELREY
Published: 2009-04-08T06:00:00+00:00

Menedemos scowled at the Koan carpenter. “What do you mean, you can't do anything for the ?” he demanded,

“What I said,” the Koan answered. “I usually mean what I say. We're all too busy repairing Ptolemaios' warships and transports to have any time left over to deal with a merchant galley.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do till you find the time?” Menedemos said. “Hang myself?”

“It's all the same to me,” the carpenter told him. The fellow picked up his mallet and drove home a treenail, joining a tenon and the plank into which it was inserted. Then he reached for another peg.

Muttering, Menedemos walked away. It was either that or snatch the mallet out of the Koan's hand and brain him with it. But that wouldn't do any good, either: it wouldn't get the man to work for him, which was what he needed.

In the harbor of Halikarnassos, carpenters were probably just as busy repairing Antigonos' war galleys. That also did Menedemos no good. He looked northeast, toward the city on the Karian mainland. A plume of smoke marked any city at any time; smoke was a distinctive city smell, along with baking bread and the less pleasant odors of dung and unwashed humanity. But a great cloud of black smoke rose from Halikarnassos now. Did it come from inside the place, or had the defenders managed to fire a palisade Ptolemaios' men had run up? From this distance, Menedemos couldn't tell.

He hoped Halikarnassos fell, and fell quickly. His reasons were entirely selfish. If Ptolemaios' ships weren't constantly limping back to the harbor of Kos with sprung timbers or smashed stemposts or out-and-out holes from stones thrown by engines, the carpenters here wouldn't be working on them at all hours of the day—and, sometimes, by torchlight at night. They would have a chance to fix the .

But Ptolemaios had hoped to seize the town by surprise. That hadn't worked. Now his men had to settle down to besiege it, which could take a long time. Troy took Agamemnon and Odysseus and the rest of the Akhaioi ten years, Menedemos thought, and wished he hadn't.

Things would go faster than that nowadays. 's hexameters said nothing of catapults that flung javelins or stone balls weighing thirty minai or more. 's hexameters, as a matter of fact, said next to nothing about siege warfare itself, even though the Iliad was about the siege of Troy. Alexander's army could probably have stormed Hektor's city in ten days, not ten years. Menedemos paused to scratch his head at that thought. Agamemnon and Akhilleus and the Aiantes and Diomedes and the rest might have been heroes, some of them the sons of gods, but they hadn't known a lot of things modern soldiers took for granted.

had admired Akhilleus. He'd taken a copy of the Iliad with him on his campaigns in the trackless east. Had he ever realized his men could have thrashed the warriors who'd sailed the black ships to Troy? Menedemos doubted it.

The next thing that went through his mind was, I can't tell Sostratos about this.

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