"A hundred and sixty?" asked Philyra suspiciously. "He told me a hundred."
Marcus shrugged and grinned again. "You expect him to keep track of money?"
This time she did not smile. Instead, she gave him a cool, assessing stare. "You were keeping track of it for him, were you?"
For a moment, he didn't understand. Then his face darkened. "I haven't taken a copper of it!" he declared indignantly. "You can ask him."
"If he wasn't keeping track of it, what good would that do?"
Philyra, watching his face, saw the anger in it suddenly dwindle into sullen impassivity. It was as though something else drained out with it- a sense of freedom, an identity. She suddenly regretted her suspicion. And yet- eighteen hundred and eighty drachmae! She didn't see how such a huge sum of money could have just vanished. Her vague, dreamy brother was easy prey for any cheat.
"I never took a copper of his money," Marcus repeated sourly. "You can ask him."
Bitterly, he remembered how he and his master had returned to Alexandria from making water-snails in the Delta. When the riverboat docked, Archimedes had leaped off and gone straight to the Museum, leaving Marcus to take the luggage back to their lodgings. The luggage- and the box containing eighteen hundred and eighty drachmae. A lot of money. Enough to buy Marcus passage on a ship back to Italy, and to pay for a pair of oxen, some sheep, and a year's rent on a little farm once he got there. He'd been painfully aware, as he trudged along with the heavy chest, how easy it would be to get away. It wouldn't even have been as though he were leaving his master stranded: Archimedes could always have gone back and made a few more water-snails. In the end what held him back was not the honesty on which he had always prided himself, but despair. The events that had enslaved him- the lost battle, the dead men- were still there, ineradicable and absolute. He could not go home, and there seemed little point in going anywhere else. His slavery, which until then he had always thought of as something imposed upon him contrary to his true nature, suddenly revealed itself as the inescapable condition on which he held his life.
He recognized now that he was putting off the girl with a slave's defense- My master hasn't complained, so you have no right to- and he stood up angrily, swept up the water-snail, and carried it back to its basket. Philyra followed him, her expression still a mixture of suspicion and apology. "Maybe I will ask him," she said.
"You do that," growled Marcus, tipping the last of the water out of the snail onto the dirt of the yard.
"In the meantime," said Philyra, drawing herself up, "take all the dirty things out of the chest and put them ready for washing. Just leave the other things in it, for my brother to sort out."
"Yes, mistress," said Marcus bitterly. He turned his back on her and ostentatiously began to put the snail away. But he sensed it when she left, and turned to watch her. She walked with a straight, stiff step, back straight and head with its knot of untidy hair held high, and she went directly to the room at the end of the courtyard where her father was dying. His resentment vanished, leaving only sadness. Her father was ill, her mother undoubtedly distracted by caring for him. She was trying hard to be a prudent and sensible guardian of the house and not a burden upon it: if he'd been free he would have applauded her for it. She was young and ignorant. It was not her fault he was a slave.
Archimedes stumbled downstairs a few minutes later. He was dressed in the new tunic, which, unbelted and crooked, he contrived to make almost as disreputable as the one he'd taken off the day before. He blinked at the heap of dirty laundry beside the chest as though it were the fragments of something that had broken and he were trying to work out what.
"I told your sister not to unpack the chest herself, because it had presents in it," said Marcus quickly. "The presents are still there."
"Oh," said Archimedes, but as though the words hadn't registered.
He looked, Marcus thought, even vaguer and more preoccupied than usual. "Do you want to take the presents out and give them to your family?" he suggested pointedly. "Your sister's in a hurry to shift the chest."
"Oh," said Archimedes again. He came over and stared into the chest. Marcus had already sorted the presents into one corner: a jar of myrrh for Arata, a lute for Philyra, and a box full of ivory tiles for Phidias.
Archimedes bent over and picked up the box. Like its contents, it was of ivory, and it had been decorated with a picture of the god Apollo and the nine Muses, sketched with a fine red line. He remembered looking at it in the shop, assembling the pieces of the puzzle, and smiling as he imagined his father's delight in doing the same. Phidias would not play with the puzzle now. He was too tired, too ill, too busy dying. One more puzzle abandoned- and there had been many, many other puzzles Phidias had been too busy and too tired to solve during the course of his life. He had needed to earn money for the household, bread for the children. He had needed to be a citizen, a husband, a father before he could be a mathematician and astronomer. Archimedes had profited from it. Now he numbly regarded the empty half of himself, an unpayable debt passed on.
Marcus saw his face fall slack and empty, like the face of an idiot, and was concerned. He touched his master's elbow. "You can still give it to him, sir," he said. "It's a good present for an invalid."
Archimedes began to cry soundlessly. He raised his head and stared blindly at Marcus. "He's dying."
"So I was told," replied Marcus evenly.
"I should have come back last year."
That was what Marcus had said at the time. Now he shrugged and said only, "You're back now. Sir, he dies after a good life, with all his family about him. No man can ask the gods for more."
"He lived on scraps all his life!" Archimedes replied fiercely. "Bits and pieces, hours snatched here and there, nothing! Oh, Apollo! Pegasus, hitched to a plow! Why should the soul have wings, if it's never allowed to fly?"
This made no sense whatever to Marcus. "Sir!" he said sharply. "Bear it like a man!"
Archimedes gave him a look of astonished incomprehension, as though Marcus had addressed him in some unidentifiable foreign tongue. But he stopped crying and wiped his face on his bare arm. He glanced at the door at the far end of the courtyard, then sighed and walked toward it, the box in his hand. Marcus picked up the jar of perfume and the lute and followed him.
Arata and Philyra were both in the sickroom, finishing the work of preparing the invalid for the day. When Philyra saw the lute in Marcus' hands her face went utterly still, but her eyes awoke into a sudden intense life. Archimedes glanced back at his slave and jerked his head, and Marcus bowed and handed the jar of myrrh to Arata, then bowed again and offered the lute to Philyra. Her face flushed as she took it, and her hands curved over the sounding board with a fiercely possessive tenderness. She looked at her brother and breathed, "Medion!" — half in protest, half in adoration. But Archimedes was not looking at her.
Phidias had slowly levered himself to a sitting position to accept his own present. He took the ivory box in his trembling hands and studied the picture on the lid. "Apollo and the sweet Muses," he observed softly. "Which one is Urania?"
Archimedes indicated her silently. Urania, Muse of Astronomy, stood at Apollo's elbow, pointing at something which lay on the low table in front of the god- the puzzle, probably. Her diaphanous draperies were identical to those of her eight sisters, but she was distinguishable from them by her crown of stars.
Phidias smiled. "Next to the god," he said quietly. "Just where she should be." He looked up at his son, his yellowed eyes still full of his smile- looked in the luxurious confidence that here at last he would be understood. "She's beautiful, isn't she?" he asked.
"Yes," whispered Archimedes, the expected understanding going through him in a warm flood. "Yes, she is."
3
Archimedes kept to his agreement to meet the guardsman Straton by the naval quay that evening.
The rest of the family had accepted his decision not to follow his father's career as calmly as Philyra had. Arata,
in fact, was relieved to find him searching for any work: she'd worried that he might not appreciate the necessity of earning money. She fussed about to ensure that he looked an aspiring royal engineer, and sent him off bathed and barbered and dressed in his new tunic and cloak. He tried to avoid the cloak- too hot for June! — but his mother draped it firmly about his shoulders. "It looks distinguished," she told him, "and you need to impress this man."
"He's only a soldier!" Archimedes protested. "He's just going to tell me who I should really talk to!"
"Even so!" Arata declared. "If he's impressed, he'll pass that on to his superior."
She wanted to send Marcus with him, too: a gentleman ought to have a slave in attendance. Archimedes was nervous, though, that they might meet the Tarentine mercenary Philonides again. He explained to his mother and sister what had happened at the docks.
Philyra listened to the account with indignant astonishment. She glanced at Marcus' impassive face, remembering the bruise on his side. "That's outrageous!" she exclaimed angrily. "We have a right to keep our own slave! You should have taken that stupid mercenary to a magistrate, and complained."
Archimedes just shrugged. "I wouldn't threaten a mercenary!" he said with feeling. "And courts are chancy places, especially with a war on. I don't know what sort of Italian Marcus is- do you?"
Philyra glanced at Marcus again, startled this time. She had never connected him in her mind with the great new power to the north. Yes, she'd known he was Italian, but there had always been wars in Italy, and in each war some prisoners always ended up in the Syracusan slave market. It had always been enough to call them simply "Italian" and assume that slavery had absorbed all the differences between them.
"Well, what sort of Italian are you?" she demanded bluntly.
Marcus' face was carefully blank. "I'm not a Roman," he muttered. "Roman citizens are never slaves." Then he added, in embarrassment, "Mistress."
"It doesn't matter what sort he is," said Arata resignedly. "If the question were raised in a court, we'd have endless trouble trying to prove anything at all. Better to avoid courts if we can." She clapped her hands and jerked her head at Marcus. He retreated back into the house, relieved.
Archimedes started for the door, but Arata caught his arm and drew him aside before he reached it. In a voice too low for the slaves to overhear she said, "My dear, have you given any thought as to whether we should sell Marcus?"
"No, of course not!" said Archimedes, surprised. "We don't have to sell him just because he's Italian!"
"Not that," whispered Arata, gesturing for him to keep his voice down. "We don't need four slaves, especially since your father sold the vineyard, and we can't afford to feed them. If we don't sell Marcus, it will have to be Chrestos. We couldn't sell Sosibia, not after so many years, and little Agatha- it wouldn't be right, my dear."
Archimedes hunched his shoulders unhappily. He understood now. His mother wanted him to start looking for a good buyer for one of the slaves right away. The decision about who to sell and where was his to make- because it would not be right to throw this sort of decision onto his father, not now, and the women lacked any authority in law.
He did not want to sell anybody. Marcus would hate to be sold, he thought absently. He would really hate it, no matter who the buyer. He liked Marcus, relied on Marcus: he could not possibly inflict such a humiliation upon him. But Chrestos- he could remember holding Chrestos as a newborn baby. How could he take money for a member of his family? Money wasn't worth it. He hated to think about money at the best of times.
"There's no hurry!" he protested at last. "The money I brought back from Alexandria will last us for a month or two, and after that, anything could happen. There's a lot of money in engineering. We could all become rich! It would be stupid to sell people if we don't need to."
Arata sighed. Some people might get rich from engineering, but she did not believe her son ever would. He was too unworldly, too softhearted. Like his father. She couldn't even complain at it: it was a quality she loved in them. She did not like postponing hard decisions, though, especially in such uncertain times. "If we wait until we're hungry," she pointed out quietly, "we'll have to take the first buyer that comes along. If we sell now we can choose a good home for him."
Archimedes squirmed uncomfortably. "Can't we at least wait to see if I get this job?" he pleaded.
His mother sighed again, resignedly this time. She did not want to sell any of the household slaves, either, and it was true they had a month or so of grace. She nodded, and her son gave a sigh of relief.
Philyra, who had hung in the doorway listening to this, went back into the courtyard of the house. Marcus was there, taking down his master's laundry. Philyra studied him for a minute, wondering, for the first time, what he had been before he was a slave. She had no clear memories of the time before he came to the household: he had always been there.
Earlier in the day she had indeed mentioned her suspicions of him to her brother. Archimedes had dismissed them at once. "Marcus?" he'd said. "Oh no! He thinks slaves who steal deserve the whip, not the stick, and he prides himself on his honesty. No, no, I'd trust Marcus with a fortune." Now he had backed that confidence with a refusal even to contemplate selling the slave.
But the problem was, he had trusted Marcus with a fortune, and she still couldn't imagine how that fortune could have disappeared in a year without dishonesty from someone. Archimedes' confidence merely made her feel guilty about her own suspicions.
The slave felt her eyes on him and turned toward her, his arms full of laundry, his face mild and inquiring. She noticed, as though for the first time, the crooked identation where his nose had been broken, and she wondered how that had happened, and when. "What sort of Italian are you?" she asked him again.
He let out a long slow breath, looking away from her. "Mistress…" he began, then gave a helpless jerk of one hand, flapping linen. "Mistress, I'm a slave, your brother's. You know that's true. Anything else I said might be a lie."
She gazed at him soberly. "When did you break your nose?"
He set his armful of laundry carefully down on an overturned washtub and turned back to the line for the last item. "Long time ago, mistress. Before I came to Sicily."
A soldier had broken it, during the first year of his slavery. He'd resisted the man's attempt to bugger him, and had been beaten senseless because of it. When he woke up, it was to find himself lying at the feet of the Campanian slave merchant who'd sold him to the soldier, and the soldier and slaver arguing about whether the soldier was due his money back. "Look what you've done to his face!" the slaver had complained. "Who's going to want him now?" Marcus had lain there, mouth full of blood, aching in every muscle, and hoped that nobody was going to want him now, because he didn't think he'd be able to resist so fiercely again; he'd give in, and make a whore of himself. He had been seventeen.
"Was it in battle?" asked Philyra.
Marcus shook his head. He folded the last tunic, set it down on top of the others, then picked the pile up. "Just a fight."
"But you were in a battle. You were enslaved after a battle."
"Yes," he agreed, meeting her eyes. "I was in a battle. We lost."
Philyra was silent a moment, thinking of the war to the north, and of the precariousness of the freedom of Syracuse. She shook her head, and Marcus took the gesture as dismissal. He gave a nod and set off upstairs with his pile of clean dry clothes.
It was dusk when Archimedes arrived at the sea gate. if the tarentine had indeed shared straton's shift, he'd taken himself elsewhere, and Straton was alone, leaning against the inside of the city wall, shield forced half over his chest, one leg resting on his slanted spear. He unfolded himself when he saw Archimedes and tipped his shield onto his back again. "There you are!" he said with relief. "When I asked around about your question, my captain got interested. He says they do need more engineers, for the army and the city both. He wants to talk to you. He's waiting for us at the Arethusa. Th
at all right?"
Archimedes blinked and mentally thanked his mother for her fussing over the cloak. "F-fine!" he stammered hastily. Straton's captain was presumably the man in charge of the garrison of Syracuse while the rest of the army was away. He could, if he wanted, ensure that Archimedes was offered a job.
The Arethusa proved to be an inn on the promontory of Ortygia, near the freshwater spring of that name. Archimedes was not familiar with it- he had rarely ventured onto the citadel- but he noticed as they approached that it was a good inn. The building was large, faced with stone, and had probably been converted from an upper-class mansion. Its sign, which had some artistic pretensions, depicted the nymph Arethusa, spirit of the spring and patroness of the city, reclining among the reeds with the citadel of Ortygia in the background. Archimedes eyed her shapely nudity, and decided that yes, the inn probably did rent female company as well as sell food. He fingered the coins in his purse resignedly. The evening was clearly not going to be cheap, and he knew that he would be paying. He could not complain: treating Straton's captain to an evening's entertainment would oblige the man to be helpful.
Straton clumped into the inn's main room, spear over his shoulder, and gave his name to an obsequious waiter. Archimedes glanced warily at the painting of carousing centaurs on the wall and the silver-chased hanging lamps, and added another three obols to the likely bill. The waiter smirked and bobbed and led them to one of the inn's small private dining rooms. A short wiry man in his early thirties was already seated on the single couch, nibbling at a dish of olives; he rose politely when Archimedes and Straton appeared. Straton saluted; Archimedes extended his hand.
The captain smiled and shook hands. "You're the engineer?" he asked. "I'm Dionysios son of Chairephon, captain of the garrison of the Ortygia. I've already ordered- I hope that's all right?"
Dionysios was not wearing armor, though a red officer's cloak hung over the back of his couch and a sheathed sword over the arm. When Straton hesitated awkwardly in the doorway, his superior grinned at him. "We're both off duty, man," he said. "Make yourself comfortable."
The Sand-Reckoner Page 5
