The Sand-Reckoner

by Gillian Bradshaw

  "I don't know," said Marcus helplessly. "It's been a long time since I was in Rome. Yes, probably. The Aemilii and the Claudii were always allies, always pressing for conquests to the south."

  Hieron nodded. "Even if the next general isn't an Aemilius or a Claudius, the chances are I won't know what faction he does represent, and even if I do, there'll be little enough for me to work on. I don't understand Romans. For example, I didn't expect to get the Echetlans for nothing. Greeks would have asked money for them: honor is a fine thing, but so are ransoms. With Greeks I know where I am. Romans are more difficult- and yet I must understand, if I'm to find a safe passage to peace for Syracuse. So you see"- he came away from the door and crouched to meet Marcus' stare eye to eye- "a Hellenized Roman, such as yourself, is potentially very useful to me."

  "Useful as what?" asked Marcus harshly.

  "Not as a spy, so put it out of your head! Agathon said you were so bad at lying it was pitiable, and he was right. No. You're different from the rest; your Hellenism isn't just a gloss. Your sympathies are genuinely divided between us and your own people. Uncomfortable for you, no doubt, but if we can get peace, or even a solid truce, invaluable to me. You could explain your own people to me, and help me make them understand us. This is what I would like you to do. Go back to your own people, get a feel for them again, wait till Syracuse is out of this war- and I pray to all the gods I can get her out soon! — and then come back here. I would give you a job as Latin interpreter, at once, at whatever salary you think is right. We are going to be dealing with your people for many years to come, and we need to understand them."

  Marcus stared at him for another moment, his face hot. Then he said. "I would like that very much, lord. Only I don't know that I will be alive tomorrow."

  Hieron sighed. "That, of course, is the problem. I wish you had been a bit less forthright with the consul. I wish I dared keep you here- but I worked quite hard to expose Claudius, and too much depends on it to allow him a chance to cover himself. But listen- keep what I have said in mind, and if you can, lie. I do not mind in the least if you say I threatened you or maltreated you to make you speak as you did. If cursing Syracuse will keep you alive, curse her. The gods laugh at forced oaths. It would not be treachery."

  "I will try," whispered Marcus, "but…"

  From the courtyard came a sound of trumpets, and then the sweet notes of an aulos and the beat of marching feet. The other prisoners were arriving, and it would soon be time to go.

  Hieron sighed again, then added, in a very low voice, "Try. And if you fail- I have a gift for you."

  He reached into a fold of his cloak and brought out a small, fat flask of black-glazed pottery. It was about the size of a child's fist, and it had been stoppered with a piece of wood shoved into a fragment of rag. He offered it to Marcus in silence, and Marcus took it slowly, with hands that were suddenly cold.

  "It takes about half an hour to work," said the king. "A third of the contents will dull pain, if it's merely a question of flogging or beating. If it's death, drink it all."

  "Lord," said Marcus, "you have twice showed me mercy, and I am grateful."

  Hieron shook his head angrily. "I spared you because I wished to make use of you, and this mercy is one I pray to the gods you will not need. Do you have somewhere to hide it? Good. Then I wish you joy, Marcus Valerius, and I hope that we will meet again."

  Marcus swallowed and nodded, then said, "Tell Archimedes and his household that I pray for the safety of Syracuse. And thank you."

  Hieron touched his shoulder lightly, then rose resolutely and strode from the room.

  Marcus set the flask carefully in the flute case, in the space normally occupied by the reeds. He was down to his last reed, and he wondered if he would need a new one. He closed the case and thrust it through his belt.

  When he went down into the courtyard, he found that the guards from the quarry had brought along his little bundle of luggage. He slung it over his shoulder and took his place in the line with the other prisoners, who were laughing joyfully over their release. The gates of the Euryalus were opened, the flute struck up the march, and he descended from Syracuse to the Roman camp below.

  15

  The Romans did not assault Syracuse again that summer. After the exchange of prisoners, they returned to Messana, where the troops spent the winter while Appius Claudius went home to Rome.

  He was not reelected. Reports of the army's many causes of dissatisfaction with him had been circulating widely throughout Rome by the time he returned, and he was received coldly, without honors and without thanks. Neither of the new consuls elected in January belonged to the Claudian faction.

  The two legions in Sicily, however, were considered to be insufficient for the gravity of the situation there, and another six specially strengthened legions were enrolled. In the spring both consuls set out for Sicily with their huge armies, and when they landed at Messana, they proclaimed favorable terms for any Sicilian city that would abandon Syracuse. At this all of the dependencies of Syracuse, all her friends and allies on the island, fell away.

  In early summer the forty-thousand-strong Roman army arrived at Syracuse itself and laid siege to the city, ringing it about by land with a bank, ditch, and wall of earth and timber. Greek engineers from the subject cities of Tarentum and Croton constructed siege machineswheeled towers with ladders, grapples, and catapults mounted in them, and the thick-roofed, open-floored wheeled carts called tortoises, which protected massive battering rams. In the middle of the summer the besiegers tried to take Syracuse by storm.

  They failed utterly. Over the previous summer, Hieron had been calling upon Syracusan allies for supplies- grain to feed the citizens during a siege, wood and iron and hair to shape weapons for her defenses- and Egypt and Rhodes, Corinth and Cyrene had responded. The new season had found the city more impregnable than ever. Extra ditches had been dug about the walls, inside the range of the defending catapults, so that the attackers had to wheel their cumbersome siege machines down steep slopes, then up, then down again, all the while suffering the bombardment of the Syracusan catapults. And that bombardment was of a strength such as the Romans' Italiot engineers had never imagined. Immense stones smashed the tortoises and toppled the siege towers. Men who tried to right them fell under a rain of bolts, and incendiaries smashed into the damaged machines and set them ablaze. The rams never got anywhere near the walls, but were crushed like beetles on the slopes of the Epipolae, and abandoned when the attackers fled. Hundreds of Romans injured or trapped in the wreck of the machines were taken prisoner by the Syracusans; hundreds more were killed.

  Manius Valerius Maximus, the senior Roman consul, conferring with his colleague and his senior advisers after the assault, had one of the Syracusan catapult stones rolled into his tent for their consideration. It weighed over two hundred pounds. The Romans regarded it with horrified wonder.

  "I'd heard," said the Tarentine chief engineer in awe, "that Archimedes of Syracuse, King Hieron's engineer, could build three-talenters. I thought the stories were exaggerating."

  "It seems they fell short of the mark," said Valerius Maximus. "Like our own assault."

  The Tarentine had no ideas for countering Syracusan artillery, and was, in fact, fearful that a man who could build three-talenters might have worse things in store for any siege engine that did succeed in getting close to the walls. The Romans considered the possibility of blockading the city and concluded that it was pointless even to try: they had no fleet apart from the few Italiot vessels and the transports which had brought them across the straits, while the Syracusans possessed eighty decked warships to defend their shipping. The number was certain: the Syracusans had proudly displayed the fleet to their Roman prisoners the summer before.

  Even more worrying, from the Roman point of view, was the news that General Hanno, the Carthaginian commander in Sicily, had been recalled to Africa, tried by the Carthaginian Senate, and sentenced to death by crucifixion for his in
action. There were rumors that Carthage was now recruiting mercenaries and intended to press the war in earnest.

  "We must have peace with Hieron of Syracuse," concluded Maximus. "Carthage is the main enemy, but we cannot fight the Carthaginians with Syracuse hostile at our backs. And it seems that we can't subdue Syracuse by force. Carthage has given Syracuse no support since the war began. Perhaps Hieron will be willing to abandon his alliance."

  No one had any objection to this change of policy. The rumors of Syracusan atrocities no longer found wide acceptance: the Roman prisoners released the previous year had had nothing but praise for King Hieron.

  The following morning, Maximus sent a herald to Syracuse to ask King Hieron for a parley. The king at once agreed, and Roman consul and Greek monarch met on the plain below the fort of the Euryalus. Maximus was surprised to find Hieron so pleasant and reasonable a man; Appius Claudius had led him to expect a cunning and belligerent monster.

  The negotiations went on for three days. Once she had entered a struggle, Rome was not in the habit of accepting anything short of her enemy's total surrender, and however generous she might otherwise be to the defeated, she always required that her new "ally" supply troops to fight for Rome. This was precisely the condition Hieron rejected most emphatically. If Syracusans were to fight and die, they would do it on behalf of their own city, not for foreigners. Syracuse would remain sovereign and independent, or she would remain at war. She could not hope to win, but, on the other hand, the Romans couldn't hope to reduce her and couldn't afford to ignore her. Rome at last, reluctantly, yielded and concluded a treaty such as she had never made before.

  Rome not only recognized the independence of Syracuse but also granted the city the right to govern eastern Sicily from Tauromenium, just south of Messana, as far as Helorus on the southern point of the island- in fact, to keep all the territory she had held before the war began, including all the cities which had recently yielded to Rome. All this land was guaranteed exempt from war- which included immunity from attacks by Rome's deplorable allies, the Mamertini. Syracuse, for her part, agreed to provide the Romans with supplies for a campaign against the Carthaginians in Sicily, and to pay a war indemnity of a hundred talents of silver, the payments to be spread over twenty-five years. The latest batch of Roman prisoners were returned without ransom.

  The treaty was formally concluded with an exchange of oaths and sacrifices offered to the gods. And its conclusion was celebrated on both sides, with feasting and heartfelt relief. Rome could now concentrate on Carthage, and Syracuse had steered her way through the channel to peace.

  When the Romans were dismantling their siege works in preparation for their return to Messana, two men of the second legion went to their tribune and asked permission to go into the city to pay a debt. Since one of them was a centurion of the legion and the other his second-in-command, permission was granted. So Quintus Fabius and Gaius Valerius walked slowly up the long road to the city they had left by night the year before.

  It was an August morning, and around them the land baked in the summer sun. The open fields were loud with cicadas, the road white with dust. Fabius tapped his centurion's vine-stem stick unhappily against his thigh as he walked: he had not wanted to come, but Gaius needed an interpreter. He was obliged to Gaius, in an ill-defined, guilty sort of way. He had caused Gaius grief. Fabius' promotions had come rapidly over the past year, and he had taken advantage of them to haul Gaius up through the ranks after him, out of the same obscure sense of obligation.

  They reached the Epipolae gate of the fort of the Euryalus, where the Syracusan guardsmen eyed them with suspicion. Fabius explained their errand in his clumsy Greek, and they were allowed to pass, though they were required to leave their arms at the gate. One of the guards escorted them into the city: the peace was still very new, and they were not trusted, least of all at the house to which they were bound.

  They crossed the limestone scrubland of the plateau, passed the huts of the Tyche quarter, and descended from the heights into the marble grace of the New Town. They both glanced at the cliff which towered over the theater to their left, the edge of the plateau where the quarries were situated. But their escort led them through the New Town and into the citadel of the Ortygia.

  The house they were looking for lay on the north side of the Ortygia, not far from the sea wall. It was a large house, and had been repainted not long before: the front was a crisp pattern of red and white, unfaded by sun and unmarked by dust. The guardsman from the Euryalus knocked upon the pristine door.

  Gaius Valerius stood on the sunny doorstep, listening to the guardsman explaining and a boy doorkeeper answering doubtfully, all in the rapid musical language which he could not understand. He had been eager for this meeting, but now that it was almost upon him, he wondered why he bothered. Because of Marcus. What good would it do Marcus? What good would it do anyone? Still, he clutched the small package he had brought with him and asked Fabius, "What's the delay?"

  "The slave says his master's working, and doesn't like to be disturbed when he's working," replied Fabius. He interpolated a comment into the flow of conversation between the slave boy and the guardsman, and both turned to look at him. The slave blinked, then shrugged, and stood back, opening the door for all three of them.

  "What did you say?" asked Gaius, stepping into a cool marble hall.

  "That we only wanted to return his master's property," said Fabius.

  The boy walked ahead of them, along a colonnade which enclosed a garden, green and cool after the hot streets, then through a narrow passage, past another, kitchen, garden, and into a workroom which might have been part of another house entirely. The floor was packed clay, and the walls were stacked high with timbers. In the center of the room stood a sinister-looking box more than half the height of a man, formed of wood and lined with lead; sitting on a corner of it was a basin with two large neat holes in it, and scattered about it were oddments of leather, wood, and bone and a blacksmith's bellows. Whatever the device was, however, it had been abandoned, and the only person in the room was a young man who crouched on a low stool not far from it, gazing intently into a box of pale sand and sucking on the hinge of a set of compasses. Gaius had never actually seen his face before, though he had once heard him play the flute, but he knew at once who it was. The magician who could number the sands and make water run uphill, Syracuse's extra army, his brother's onetime master.

  "Sir," said the slave boy, with great respect. He had been purchased only the winter before, and he was in awe of his new master.

  Archimedes lifted one hand in a wait-a-minute gesture and did not take his gaze off the pattern in the sand.

  The boy looked at the visitors and shrugged helplessly.

  Gaius cleared his throat, then called out, "Archimedes?"

  Archimedes made an indistinct reply around the compasses- then suddenly stiffened. His head jerked up, a smile of delight on his face. For a moment Gaius found himself meeting a pair of bright brown eyes that sought his own eagerly- and then the delight faded, and the eyes became puzzled.

  "Oh," said Archimedes. He got to his feet, glanced down at his interrupted calculation, then back at the visitors, questioningly now.

  "Excuse us," said Fabius stiffly. "I am Quintus Fabius, a centurion of the second legion; this is Gaius Valerius. We are come to speak to Archimedes son of Phidias."

  "You're Marcus' brother!" Archimedes exclaimed, looking at the second man. He could see the family resemblance now, in the wide shoulders and the stubborn line of the jaw, though Gaius Valerius was slighter and fairer than his brother. "You are welcome to my house, and good health to you! When you called my name I thought for a moment it was Marcus. You sound just like him."

  Gaius just stared. Fabius turned to his companion and translated, which took Archimedes aback: he had somehow expected Marcus' brother to know Greek.

  Gaius nodded, then stepped forward and held out a long slim box wrapped in black cloth. "I came to return t
his," he said quietly. "I think it was yours."

  Archimedes stared at the box, recognizing the shape, and knowing with cold sick grief that something he had hoped would not happen had happened, and happened long before. He did not take the box, even when the translation was finished and Gaius took another step toward him, offering it again.

  "Marcus is dead," he said flatly, looking up from the shrouded flute case to meet the eyes of Marcus' brother.

  There was no need for translation. Gaius nodded.

  Archimedes took the flute case and sat down on his stool. He pulled at the knots that secured the wrapping, then bit the cords and broke them. He unwrapped the case, opened it, and took out his tenor aulos. The wood was dry to the touch, and the slide, when he moved it, squeaked stiffly. A cracked reed was still fixed to the mouthpiece, and the tarnished clamp had left a green stain upon its dry gray side. He unfastened the clamp and pulled the reed out, then began rubbing the mouthpiece clean on the cloth the case had been shrouded in. His hands knew what they were doing; his heart was bemused and numb.

  "I don't play," said Gaius. "And I did not want it to stay silent forever."

  Archimedes nodded. He spat on the mouthpiece and rubbed it again, then set the instrument down in his lap. He wiped his face with a bare arm, and realized at that that he was crying. He looked back at Gaius. "Your brother was an extraordinary man," he said. "A man of great integrity. I had hoped that he was still alive."

  Gaius' face convulsed with pain. "He died last year, the day after your people returned him. Appius Claudius had him sentenced to the fustuarium."

  Fabius hesitated over the last word, unable to translate it. "To the beating to death," he supplied eventually.

  "Hieron told me that Marcus had offended the consul," said Archimedes wretchedly. "He said that he spoke to Marcus before he sent him back, and urged him to tell whatever lies would save his life. But Marcus was never any good at lying."