There were people here, too, but she noticed only one of them: a tall young man who crouched by the fountain's edge, intently regarding a collection of sticks which floated upon the surface. He was dressed in black, and his hair was cut short in mourning. She guessed that his cloak was quite a good one, since it looked heavy, but it was patched with dust and he was at that moment treading the hem into the mud. The water cast wavering reflections upon his long-boned face. He felt her gaze on him and looked up sharply. His eyes, she thought, catching her breath, were the color of honey.
Archimedes smiled delightedly and stood up. His cloak was at once pulled off by the trodden edge and collapsed about his feet, half in the water and half in the mud. "Oh, Zeus!" he exclaimed, and stood there gazing at it helplessly. His black tunic was even dustier than the cloak had been.
He had guessed that she was the one who sent that note, even though it was unsigned. I wish you well: she had sent the same message through Marcus. All through that day, working in the catapult workshop on the hundred-pounder, he had contemplated this meeting with a thrill of excitement. He had brought the cloak along that morning out of a desire to look dignified; he had been astonished to find it so shabby and dusty-looking after a day spent on the workshop floor. Now it was utterly disreputable, he looked a fool, and the king's beautiful sister was watching him from under a white linen veil, her dark eyes astonished.
Then Delia laughed. He did not like being laughed at, but for a laugh like that he would have put on a mask and gone into comic mimes. He grinned ruefully, picked up the cloak, and wrung out the damp end. "Excuse me," he said. He thought of adding, "I didn't mean to undress in front of you," but this was both so highly inappropriate and so close to what he would like to do that it threw him into confusion and made his face hot.
"Good health to you," she said politely.
"Good health!" he replied. He tried to brush the crumpled cloak straight, then gave up and simply folded it up and put it over his shoulders: his gesture toward dignity had gone wrong, so there seemed no point in persisting with it. Too hot for a cloak, anyway. "I, umm…" he began.
"Shh!" she said urgently, glancing at the miscellaneous citizens who were relaxing beside the fountain. "Can we go somewhere quieter?"
She walked rapidly away from the fountain, and he followed her. There were people everywhere, and they ended up making a complete circuit of the small garden before settling for a comparatively quiet spot under a grapevine in the shadow of the city wall. There were no benches, but Archimedes spread out his cloak on the ground and sat on the damp end himself. It could hardly get any muddier, after all. Delia sat down beside him nervously, pulling her own cloak forward again, and looking at her hands upon her doubled knees. She had worked out her excuse for the meeting. She had sent him a warning through his slave, and she was certain that the slave must have delivered it even after she told him not to. "I… wanted to speak to you," she said breathlessly. "I needed to explain." She swallowed, and risked a sideways glance at him.
He nodded: he had assumed that that was what she wanted. She had warned him to be careful of his contract. The king had not, in fact, offered him a contract- but it was only four days since his father's death, and it wouldn't have been appropriate to enter into business with him in the period of deepest mourning. Hieron had put in an appearance at Phidias' funeral, but he had made no reference either to engineering posts or to the money Archimedes had refused. So Delia had come to follow her warning with some advice. Archimedes was happy to think that she was his supporter in her brother's house. He had played with the delightful possibility that her feelings might be warmer than that, but he had dismissed the notion as wildly implausible.
"When I sent you that message, I was afraid Hieron meant to tie you to something in your contract," Delia went on. "I was wrong. I shouldn't have said anything to your slave. It was simply that he was there, and I had the opportunity. I hope it didn't alarm you." She shot him another sideways glance.
He was frowning. "King Hieron isn't going to tie me to anything in my contract?" he asked.
She took a deep breath. The least she could do to atone for her own disloyalty would be to reassure him about Hieron. "He's not going to give you a salaried position as a royal engineer at all. He thinks you'd like it better if he simply pays you well for what you do. He said that any job he gave you you'd come to regard as a prison. So, you see, I was quite wrong, and shouldn't have said anything. I should have known Hieron wouldn't do anything… unjust." Guilt at her own behavior added warmth to her tone.
"But I thought…" he began- then stopped. The frown was deepening. "I don't understand. What does the king want of me?"
"You must know you're exceptional," she said. "As an engineer, I mean."
The frown did not lighten. "I'm better at mathematics."
She thought of the ship gliding along the slipway, and laughed. "You must be very exceptional at that, then! The whole city is talking about your demonstration."
That was true: Agathon had reported it. The whole city was talking about the man who had moved a ship single-handed, and adding that the same man was now building astounding catapults for the defense of Syracuse. The threatened citizens comforted themselves with the thought of Archimedes' skill.
Archimedes made an impatient gesture with one hand. "There's nothing new about pulleys! But I've done some things in mathematics that nobody else has done before." He chewed on a thumb.
"What?" she asked.
He looked at her hopefully. "Do you know anything about geometry?"
She hesitated uncomfortably. "I can keep household accounts."
He shook his head. "That's arithmetic."
"Are they so different?"
He looked at her. She was already beginning to be annoyed when she realized that it was not a look of disgust at her stupidity, still less the condescending don't-trouble-your-pretty-head-about-that look that Leptines the Regent gave her far too often. It was a look that might have come from a stammerer confronted with an urgent need to speak: a passionate longing to be understood and the hopeless knowledge that he would not be. "Arithmetic is a natural system," he said. "But geometry is something the god of the philosophers invented to design the world. Rome, Carthage, Syracuse- we're all that"- he snapped his fingers- "to geometry. Oh gods, it's a divine and beautiful thing!"
She studied his face, the line of the cheekbones and the brightness of the eyes. She recognized remotely that it was this "divine thing" which had attracted her to him- or rather, its reflection in music. Utterly pure and inhumanly precise, it enlarged the world simply by existing. And she wanted, she had always wanted, more than her own world was willing to offer her.
"The gods have given you a great gift, then," she said, torn between admiration and envy.
"Yes," he replied, seriously and without hesitation. Then he went on, embarrassed, "You should get someone to teach it to you. I'd offer to, but I wouldn't be any good. I have tried teaching- my father used to get me to help with his students. But the students said I confused them." His hands tightened on his knees at the memory of his father's patience with those students, and the recollection of the previous day's prescribed offerings at his father's tomb. He did not want to think of his father; he had been immersing himself in catapults precisely so that he wouldn't have to think of his father, and now that the subject had come up, he leaped away from it. "I didn't mean to bore you, lady. But I'm sorry, I don't understand why you asked me here just to tell me that your brother intends to deal with me fairly. Did he send you?"
She looked at him wide-eyed, then blushed. "No," she said.
"Then I don't understand…" he began- then suddenly, looking at her, he did. She sat there, watching him, her eyes frightened and her cheeks ashamed, but the lift of her head a determined challenge. Hieron had not sent her; she had come, alone and heavily cloaked, to meet him in secret. He had not wondered at that, and he should have. The liking he'd felt for her, casual, expecting nothin
g, crystallized all at once into a shape with edges sharp enough to wound.
"I'm sorry," he said, awed by it, and afraid now. "I was stupid. I…"
He could not think what to say, and they looked at each other, both now blushing furiously. In the back of his mind echoed the warnings: "You were lucky you confined yourself to flutes!" "May the gods forbid that there should be anything between you and the king's sister!" What would a tyrant do to a man who seduced his sister?
What would the sister do if he refused her? Old stories swirled about his mind: Bellerophon, Hippolytos, falsely accused of rape by the queens they had rejected. Looking at Delia, he did not believe a word of it- and yet, this whole situation was unbelievable, and the stories were there, whether he credited them or not.
"You mustn't think I mean to betray my brother's trust," she said, with a sudden fierce determination. "Hieron has never treated me with anything except kindness, and I would never dishonor…" She stopped, knowing that she had already betrayed her brother's trust, already taken the first step to dishonoring the house. Only a small step, so far, but this meeting had done nothing to convince her heart of its folly: quite the reverse. "It's only that I wanted to know you better," she went on, more uncertainly- and suddenly saw that she was treating him even more disgracefully than she was treating Hieron. Even as much as she'd done already could injure him, devastate his career, and blast his reputation. The king treated him with great kindness, and he responded by trying to seduce the king's sister! Seduction was a crime, and she was asking him to risk the penalties without even a seducer's reward. Shameless, selfish, heartless! She turned away, in an absolute misery of shame, shame on all sides, and pulled her veil forward to hide the hot tears that were bursting from her eyes.
He looked at her for a moment- the tears, the confusion- and forgot, as he kept forgetting, that she was the sister of the king. He caught one of her clenched hands, and she looked back at him, her face wet and red and hopeless. The only natural thing to do seemed to be to kiss her, so he did. It was like finding the ratio, solving the puzzle, or coming home. A flurry of notes fell perfectly upon the beat, and two pitches blended into harmony.
She broke away first, pushed him back with the heel of her hand, wrapped her arms around herself and tried to separate the chaos she was feeling into coherent emotions. "Oh, gods!" she cried frantically.
"I'm sorry," he lied awkwardly: he was not sorry at all. He was enormously pleased and flattered; he was frightened and wished himself out of this- and underneath it all, complicating everything, he was enchanted by Delia, clever, witty, proud, determined girl, with such beautiful black eyes and a wonderful neat warm body whose imprint still tingled against his own. He didn't just want to go to bed with her; he wanted to sit up in bed with her afterward, talking and laughing and playing the flute. Like a new theorem, the range of possibilities ramified away from her, a ladder of inevitable connections: if and then all the way down to the final conclusive this is what was to be proved.
Only most of those possibilities were bad. After a moment he added doubtfully, "Do you really think it's wise that we should know each other better?"
"No," she said, half laughing, half sobbing. "I think it would be very stupid."
Only, only, said something in her blood, only I want to. I want you to kiss me again, I want to touch your face and run my fingers through your hair, your eyes are like honey, did you know? Ruin to you, and shame to Hieron. No.
"I thought this would convince me I didn't want to," she admitted miserably, "but it hasn't."
He sighed. No, she was no Phaedra, and he was no Hippolytos. He remembered the song he had been humming when he went to her door after finishing the Welcomer, beseeching Aphrodite to bring him this girl's love. The goddess had heard him, it seemed. Laughter-loving, they called Aphrodite, but her sense of humor tended to the black. He wished his father were alive. Not that he could have told Phidias about this- gods, no! — but at least then he wouldn't be burdened with this aching loss in the heart, this urge to find comfort. "Then what do we do?" he asked, and recognized even as he spoke that leaving the choice to her was fatally weak. Only it was perfectly clear to him what they ought to do, and it wasn't what he wanted to do at all.
She had always prided herself on her strength of mind. She might not be gracious and regal, like her sister-in-law; she might not be modest and charming, like the girls who had shared her lessons. But she had strength of mind. "We should do what's wise," she said firmlyand instantly regretted it. She looked at him and saw that he regretted it, too. She reached over and touched the side of his face, and at once he kissed her again, which was what she wanted and was not wise.
When she left the garden shortly afterward, they had resolutely made no arrangements to meet again. And yet already her mind was reflecting on how easy it would be, and already she suspected that wisdom would not prevail.
The Romans arrived before the gates of Syracuse only eight days later- twelve days after Phidias' funeral.
Archimedes had spent most of the intervening time making catapults. He had been in and out of the workshop even while he was preparing the demonstration; after the funeral he immersed himself in the work. He did not want to think about his father or his own future, still less about the net he was falling into with Delia. She'd sent him a note arranging a second meeting, and he'd told himself that he should not go, and had of course been there early. They had walked from the fountain of Arethusa to a quiet public square near the temple of Apollo, where they had sat down to play the flute- she'd brought her flutes. And they'd kissed, of course. It was innocent and very sweet, all of it, and he had no notion what was going to come of it, though he suspected nothing good. If he spent every waking moment thinking about catapults, he didn't have to worry.
The workshop hadn't been quiet before, but during those twelve days it was frantic. Extra workmen were drafted in from the army to help hammer and saw, and the catapults were assembled almost as fast they could be designed- two of them simultaneously, one by Archimedes and one by Eudaimon. The old catapult engineer had been sullen and resentful since the Welcomer passed its trial, but he gave way at every point of conflict and devoted himself to copying what Archimedes had designed: a one-talenter like the Welcomer and two hundred-pounders. Archimedes periodically went and checked that the dimensions of the copies were correct, and was rewarded with ten drachmae for every copy completed.
Kallippos, as chief engineer, had overall responsibility for the defenses of the city. This seemed to mean principally that he ordered buttressing or parapets for the walls and directed where catapults were to be sited. The copy of the Welcomer and two of the hundred-pounders went to the Euryalus fort, and another hundred-pounder to the south gate, overlooking the marshes. When Archimedes started the two-talenter, Kallippos came to see how big it really was, with a view to determining where he could put it. In fact, the machine was not as large as its designer had initially feared; the increase needed in the size of the bore was only five finger-breadths, giving a proportional increase of a quarter all round.
"We could put it almost anywhere," said Kallippos, scrutinizing the thirty-six-foot stock, which lay in the center of the workshop floor. "In the Hexapylon, for example, on the floor underneath the Welcomer."
"We could call it 'Good Health,' " suggested the workman Elymos slyly. "As in 'Welcome to Syracuse!' " He punched a palm. " 'Good health to you!' " Another resounding smack!
The other workmen laughed, and Kallippos smiled. "And the three-talenter could be called 'Wish You Joy'?" he asked Archimedes.
Archimedes blinked: he'd been trying to picture whether the catapult would fit on the floor beneath the Welcomer. "I suppose so," he said. "But look, I, um, think it will need a bigger platform. Not for the machine itself, but for the men operating it. The yard there is low, and even though the platform's on ground level you still have to climb a few steps to reach it. The, um, ammunition will be heavy, and they'll have to have a hoist to raise
it. They'll need a space to stand while they lift it, and then…" He hesitated, then glanced around, found a stick, and squatted down to sketch on the dirt floor the things the catapult operators would need.
Kallippos watched intently, then squatted down next to him and began saying things like "The main roof support's about here," and "You can't put the crane on the roof- too exposed under fire." After a little while, the workmen went back to work around the two engineers; the engineers issued a few furious orders about not stepping on the sketches, then gave up, retreated to a quieter part of the workshop, and began chalking their plans upon the wall. Hoists gave way to arcs of fire and outworks. When the chief engineer finally departed, he shook Archimedes' hand warmly and declared, "I'll see to it." And when Archimedes accompanied the completed two-talenter to the Hexapylon, he found most of his suggested modifications in place.
That was the day the Romans arrived. The wagon with the catapult drew up at the fort to find the garrison buzzing with excited apprehension: a messenger had just galloped up to announce that a large Roman army was only a few hours' march away.
There had been some news of the enemy since Hieron's return to the city. Shortly after the Syracusans had left Messana, the Romans had sallied out from the city to attack the remaining, Carthaginian, besiegers. The Carthaginians, like the Syracusans, had managed to beat off the attack- and, like the Syracusans, had decided to withdraw afterward, unwilling to continue the siege without support from their allies. For a little while the Romans had remained in Messana, apparently debating whether to go after the Carthaginians or the Syracusans. When they at last made up their minds, they marched due south toward Syracuse.
The Sand-Reckoner Page 20
