The Sand-Reckoner

by Gillian Bradshaw

  "I can't let you take this in," said the guards' leader regretfully. "We have Roman prisoners in this quarry. I can't risk something like this falling into their hands."

  "Romans?" asked Marcus, tension giving his voice a strained note that passed well as surprise. "Here? Well, bad luck to them!"

  "You're an Italian, aren't you?" said the guards' leader.

  "A Samnite," agreed Marcus. "And a slave because of Rome. But a Syracusan for the last thirteen years. What's the king going to do with these Romans, then?"

  The guards shrugged. "He wants them for something," said the leader. "They get the best of food and the king's own doctor is attending their wounded. He's in there now, in fact."

  "With some guards?" asked Marcus.

  "Of course!" exclaimed the young guardsman, shocked at the thought of the king's own doctor going unguarded among enemies. "There's a half-file of us here."

  Marcus grunted. "Well, bad luck to the Romans anyway!" he said. "Can I go in and check the quarry, even if I can't take samples? I may be able to tell straight off that the stone's no good for my master's catapult."

  "Of course," said the guards' leader, smiling. "Your master's welcome to any help we can give his catapult. Good health to him!" And he gestured to his men to unlock the gate.

  The youngest guardsman accompanied Marcus into the quarry. The eastern part of the quarry floor was still in shadow, but the morning sun shone warmly on an empty expanse of stone. "Where are the Romans?" asked Marcus.

  The guardsman gestured toward the north face of the cliff, where a collection of sheds nestled under an overhang. "In there," he said disgustedly. "Nice and comfortable, out of the sun."

  Marcus scrutinized the sheds. There were three of them: long, low, windowless buildings which had probably been set up to house a slave workforce when the quarry was in use. He could make out guards on the doors. "You've only got two people on each shed!" he objected.

  "All we need," replied the guardsman. "Most of the Romans are wounded, and we've put leg irons on the rest. All the men on the sheds have to do is let prisoners up to use the latrines. If you want to look round, I'll just tell them who you are, so they don't bother you." He crunched off across the quarry floor to explain Marcus's presence to the other guards.

  Marcus made his way slowly about the perimeter of the quarry, ostentatiously examining the spoil heaps and occasionally picking up a chunk of limestone and putting it in his sack. When he was finally approaching the sheds, he was relieved to see the king's doctor come out of the nearest, accompanied by three guards.

  The doctor noticed him, recognized him, and came over to ask what he was doing; Marcus explained. The doctor sighed and shook his head sadly. "At times I wish catapults had never been invented!" he exclaimed. "The injuries they produce- but it's for the good of the city. I wish you joy!"

  Marcus waited until the man was well on his way back to the gate, then walked slowly up to the shed. The guards were at the far end and were not watching him, but his stomach was so tight that he thought he would be sick. He reached the wooden wall and leaned against it, trembling. There was a gap in the rough planking; he set his eye to it and gazed in.

  The only light inside was what shone through the many gaps in the uneven walls, and it took a little while for his eyes to adjust. The building had a dirt floor, and in winter would have been cold and drafty, but it was comfortable enough for the Syracusan summer. About thirty men were within it, some of them lying very still on straw mattresses on the ground, but some, in leg irons, gathered together in little knots, talking or playing dice. Marcus made his way silently along the space between the cliff and the back of the shed, shielding his eyes from the light to preserve their adjustment to the dimness and checking each prisoner in turn, but it was soon clear that none of them was Gaius.

  He waited until both the guards at the shed door were facing into the building, watching the prisoners, then glided out from behind the wall of the first shed and crept on to the next. He found another gap in the planks and peered through it.

  He spotted Gaius at once, about halfway along the shed and on his own side of it, lying on his back on a mattress with his injured arm across his chest. Marcus made his way noiselessly along the side of the shed toward his brother. He could hear the guards at the door beyond talking, and his skin prickled with tension. He told himself that even if they did notice him, he could explain himself by saying he was simply curious to see the prisoners. But his skin prickled anyway. It was not really the guards he was afraid of.

  When he had reached Gaius he knelt in silence for several minutes, inches away behind the thin planking, watching through a crack. Gaius was awake, his eyes open and staring darkly at the ceiling. His tunic was loose about his waist, and his chest was wrapped in bandages.

  Marcus tapped lightly on the wall. Gaius' head turned slowly, and their eyes met.

  Gaius sat up, bracing himself against the wall, trying to see more of his brother than showed through the crack. "Marcus?" he whispered. "Is it really you?"

  "Yes," whispered Marcus. He was trembling again. The Latin word, sic, tasted strange in his mouth. For a long time he had spoken Latin only in his dreams, and to use it now made him feel that he was dreaming still.

  "Marcus!" repeated Gaius. "I thought you were dead. I thought you died at Asculum!" On his right, his neighbor looked around at the raised voice, though the man on his left was asleep.

  "Softly!" hissed Marcus. "Don't look at me; the guards may notice. Just sit with your back to me and keep your voice down. Right. Now, I've got some things for you-"

  "What are you doing here?" whispered Gaius, sitting stiffly against the wall with his back to his brother. "What are you doing alive?"

  "Being a slave," replied Marcus flatly. The man to Gaius' right was still listening, he noticed. He was not looking any more than Gaius was, but the expression on his face showed that he was listening intently. He was a lean, thin, dark man with something dangerous-looking about him; his head was bandaged, but he didn't seem to be otherwise injured, and his feet were imprisoned in irons.

  "How?" demanded Gaius in a furious whisper. "Nobody was enslaved at Asculum! King Pyrrhus returned all his prisoners without ransom."

  "He returned all his Roman prisoners," Marcus corrected him. "The other Italians were offered for ransom, and if nobody ransomed them, they were sold. There were a couple thousand people enslaved, Gaius. Not 'nobody' by any…" He found he could not remember the Latin for "reckoning" and fumbled to a halt.

  "No Romans!" Gaius pointed out angrily.

  "One at least," said Marcus bitterly. "Gaius, don't be stupid. If nobody told you what happened, you must have guessed. I deserted my post in battle. I was frightened, and I ran."

  Gaius gave a jerk of pain. Roman did not desert their posts. A Roman who did would be beaten to death by his comrades. Even at Asculum, where the legions had tasted defeat at the hands of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, most of the Roman troops had been so afraid of the punishment for flight that they resisted to the death, and made Pyrrhus' victory so expensive that it cost him his campaign.

  "Our square broke," said Marcus bluntly, "and most of the men died. I knew that the survivors would list me as one of the ones who ran. So after the battle I said I was just an allied Latin, or a Sabine or a Marsian, or anything except a Roman. I wasn't returned, and of course nobody ransomed me. I was sold to a Campanian, a vulture who was following the war about picking up scraps, and he sold me to a private citizen here in Syracuse."

  "Oh, gods and goddesses!" whispered Gaius.

  "It's what I chose," said Marcus in a harsh voice. "I wanted to live."

  There was a long, wretched silence, a silence fully as bad as anything Marcus had imagined beforehand. There was nothing either of them could say. He had preferred life as a slave to death as a Roman, and for that there was neither condolence nor excuse.

  "How are things at home?" he asked at last.

  "Mother died eight years
ago," said Gaius. "Valeria married Lucius Hortensius and has three daughters. The old man's still in charge at the farm, though his chest is bad." He hesitated, then added quietly, "I won't tell him you're alive."

  There was another silence. Marcus thought of his mother dead, his sister married, his father… his father would not learn of his disgrace. Good, good, good; the thought of the old man's rage still made him cringe inside. He wished that it were his father who was dead, that he could have gone back to his mother- and was ashamed of the thought.

  "Thank you," he said finally. "I've come to help you. I've brought you some things."

  "Can you help me get out?"

  It was exactly what Marcus had expected his brother to say, and he sighed. "You're better off where you are, Gaius! The king"- he used the Greek title- "wanted prisoners, and that means he wants an exchange for something. You'll be safest staying here until you're exchanged. And your arm's broken, isn't it?"

  "My arm and my collarbone," said Gaius flatly. "And three of my ribs. Can you help me escape?"

  "Was it a catapult?" asked Marcus unhappily. It seemed ridiculously important to know whether it was his own master's contrivance which had injured his brother.

  "Yes, of course it was," replied Gaius impatiently. "May the gods destroy it!"

  "What size?"

  Gaius started to glance around, then remembered that he should not do this and leaned his head back against the wall. "Marcus, all I noticed was that it hit me! There were catapult stones everywhere, and some of them were enormous. Why does it matter?"

  Marcus didn't reply. "I've brought you some money," he said instead. "If you put your left hand up against this crack I'll pass it through. Your guards will probably buy things for you, for a cut. It's twenty-three drachmae."

  "Twenty-three!" exclaimed Gaius in a strangled voice. "How did you- Marcus, your master will notice it's missing!"

  Marcus remembered suddenly how scarce silver coin was in Rome, remembered with a shock how his family had bartered for almost everything, and used the heavy bronze as for almost everything else. When he was sixteen, twenty-three drachmae would have seemed a fortune. It was plain that to Gaius it still did.

  "It's my own money," said Marcus. "I've never stolen yet, though I will if I must to help you. This isn't as much as you think- a month's wages for a soldier. But it may be useful."

  Gauis set his hand against the crack, and Marcus fed the coins through. "What are these?" whispered Gaius, watching the silver fall into his palm. "They're… strange."

  "They're Egyptian," replied Marcus. "We spent a few years in Alexandria. Don't worry- they're the same weight as Syracusan, and people here will take them."

  Gaius said nothing, only stared at the silver, and Marcus remembered a time when Alexandria had been remote as the moon. It had ceased to seem that even before he visited it. At Syracuse one met ships from all over the Greek-speaking world, and he had grown used to the idea of traveling even before he'd traveled himself. But in central Italy people hadn't traveled much. Gaius had never traveledexcept, of course, with the army. He had enrolled in the legions for the Pyrrhic War, and had presumably gone home to the family farm afterward, enrolling again for the Sicilian campaign. Marcus was oppressed by confusion and disquiet. It was quite wrong that he, a slave and coward, should feel superior to his elder brother.

  "I have a saw and a knife as well," Marcus said, the confusion adding to the harshness in his voice. "And a coil of rope, but I think they're better left out here. If you decide you want them, I'll hide them." He did not really want to help Gaius escape- he sincerely believed that his brother was safest where he was- and yet he could not refuse to help. Besides, he could be wrong. The prisoners might yet be executed, or murdered by a Syracusan mob furious at some Rome atrocity.

  "How did you get in here?" asked Gaius. "How did you get the guards to allow you to bring in saws and ropes?"

  "They didn't know I had 'em," replied Marcus. "Though they did take my hammer and chisel. I told them I was on an errand for my master. They know my master, so they let me through. I told them I'm Samnite, too, so that they wouldn't suspect me of wanting to help. Now, listen. I can invent another errand and come again if you need me, but if I do it too much, someone will start to suspect. So it's better if I don't come again soon, and I need to know now: are you going to try to escape?"

  "Can you pass the saw in?" interrupted the man on Gaius's right.

  "Who are you?" demanded Marcus.

  "Quintus Fabius," replied the other. "Friend and tentmate of your brother. He's not going to get out without someone to help him."

  "You're safer staying where you are!" warned Marcus.

  "We'll get out if we can," said Gaius. "I don't care to find out what the tyrant of Syracuse wants prisoners for."

  "There's nothing wrong with King Hieron," said Marcus. "He's cleverer than a fox and more slippery than an eel, but he's not cruel."

  "He's a Sicilian tyrant!" protested Gaius in astonishment. "He cooks his enemies alive in a bronze bull!"

  Marcus gaped. "Don't be ridiculous!" he exclaimed, recovering a little. "He's never put a single citizen to death, let alone cooked one alive. It was Phalaris of Akragas who had the bull- a man who lived centuries ago and in another city."

  There was a bewildered silence, and then Gaius said, "I heard that Hiero"- he used the Latin form of the name- "had a hundred of the wives and children of his enemies impaled on stakes."

  Marcus realized that his brother had undoubtedly heard dozens of stories of Syracusan atrocities. The Mamertini would have told some when they asked for Roman help, and more would have sprung up among the legions as they prepared for war. The Senate must have known the tales were false, but had said nothing.

  "You heard a brazen-faced liar," snapped Marcus in disgust. "A stinking bandit who wanted an excuse for his own crimes."

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "Gaius, I live here! I've met Hieron, been to his house! If anything remotely similar had happened, I'd know about it. King Hieron has never killed or injured any citizen- which is more than the people you've come to Sicily to help can say!"

  "You've gone very Greek," said Fabius quietly.

  "I don't have to have gone Greek to say that the Mamertini are a tribe of bandits!" replied Marcus heatedly. "We put our own people to death for doing what they did- but you've come to fight and die for that bunch of filthy Campanian murderers." He stopped himself, swallowed a lump of anger, and went on, more moderately, "But what I meant to say is, if you think you need to escape because King Hieron's likely to harm you, think again. You'll be well treated until he exchanges you. Things are likely to be much worse if you try to escape than if you stay where you are."

  "I mean to escape anyway," said Gaius, "if I can."

  Marcus sighed again: it was no more than he'd expected. "I can probably manage to get two out of the city," he said, "but no more."

  "Can you pass us the saw?" asked Fabius.

  Marcus passed in the saw, though he had to take the handle off to get it to fit through the crack. Fabius tucked it under his mattress.

  "With this and your knife and rope we can get out," he said. "Hide them under a rock beside this plank. You wouldn't happen to have noticed how many guards there are, and where they're posted?"

  "Half a file," said Marcus. "Six on the gate, two on each of the sheds. Presumably the other six are on the wall, though I didn't see them when I came in. Don't even think of going up the cliff: it overhangs. The spoil heap by the west edge of the wall is probably your best chance: it's high, and it's overgrown pretty thickly and can give you cover while you wait for a sentry to turn his back. If you get out, come to our house, and I'll get you out of the city. All I ask is that you wait at least three nights first. If you come at once, somebody's bound to remember that I was here, and know where to look for you: a few days will give them a chance to forget. And Gaius needs the time to recover his strength, anyway."

  He gave
careful instructions on how to find the house. "The brick on the left side of the doorframe about halfway up is crumbled," he finished. "You can't mistake it. I'll find an excuse to sleep down in the courtyard, starting in three nights' time, and if you come at night I'll let you in secretly. If you don't come- and I tell you again, I think you'd do better to stay where you are! — I'll come back in ten days with some more money."

  "Whose house is it?" asked Fabius.

  "You're not to ask for it!" said Marcus. "That would give everything away."

  "I just want to know," said Fabius. "Who's this master of yours that all the guards know, who goes to visit the king?"

  "His name's Archimedes," admitted Marcus. "He's an engineer."

  "The catapult maker!" said Gaius, turning his head to stare through the crack.

  "Don't look!" growled Marcus. "Yes, he makes catapults."

  "They were telling us about him at the fort. They showed us one of the catapults and said he was building an even bigger one."

  Marcus said nothing.

  "They said that the next one would be the biggest catapult in the world. They said it was bound to work, because his catapults always work. They said it was no use hoping to take Syracuse by storm, because Syracuse has the greatest engineer in the world. He's your master?"

  "If you come to his house," Marcus said suddenly, between his teeth, "you're not to harm him. You have to swear that to me."

  Silence. "It would be better for Rome if a man like that were dead," said Fabius slowly.

  "You're not coming into the house unless you swear not to harm him," said Marcus. "I'm not having anyone in that house hurt."

  Again, silence. "He's treated you well?" asked Gaius at last, with a mixture of bewilderment and shame. Marcus should never have been in the position where it mattered how a master treated him.

  "Oh, may I perish!" muttered Marcus. "He trusts me. And- and he ought to exist. Someone like that- there aren't any others like that, not even in Alexandria. He can do anything- make water flow uphill, move a ship single-handed, tell you how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe. It's not better for anybody when a man like that is dead. It means that there are a lot of things which the human race could do once and suddenly can't anymore." He stopped, utterly sick with confusion. He felt suddenly that he must have died without noticing: the Marcus who had run away at Asculum would never have thought the sort of things that were in his mind now.