The Siege of Syracuse

by Dan Armstrong

  I helped carry leftover dry goods back to the pantry that night. On my second trip, I heard a faint mewing in the corner of the room. I climbed over a couple of sacks of barley, and though the light was poor, found Plato curled up between the wall and the bags of barley. He didn’t look so good. I took one of the oil lamps off the wall and brought it over to where he was lying. I could see that he’d taken a bad bite on his hindquarters.

  I lifted him from the floor just as Agathe, also carrying leftovers, came down the stairs. She quickly appraised the situation. “That cat might make a good addition to tomorrow’s stew.”

  “He’s not dead,” I said defensively.

  “Not yet,” Agathe sneered. “Bring him over here where I can finish him off.”

  I laid him gently on the big table in the center of the pantry. Agathe placed the oil lamp beside him, then delicately probed the wound. It was deep and there were bits of grass and dirt in it.

  “Get some water,” ordered Agathe. “There’s a half-filled pot by the hearth that’s still warm.”

  I ran outside to get the pot, then raced back to the pantry and placed it on the table beside the cat. Agathe, despite her sharp edges, did have compassion. She used the water and a linen towel to clean the wound. Plato put up no resistance. She pulled a bone needle from her hair and drew a thread from the linen towel. I held Plato while Agathe stitched the wound closed.

  When Agathe was done, I put Plato on a towel and lifted him in my arms. “Thank you, Agathe. This cat means a lot to me.”

  Agathe shook her head. “I don’t know who’d want a cat, anyway.” She turned and walked away as if she’d done nothing.

  I carried Plato up to my bedroom and made a place for him at the end of my cot. He wasn’t there when I woke up the next morning.

  CHAPTER 20

  One morning Archimedes asked me to retrieve the canvas-covered frame I’d recently completed—and a candle. A wooden board, almost the same size as the frame, was already out on the workbench. The board had three holes bored in it. The holes were arranged in a line lengthwise, each one about the diameter of my little finger.

  Archimedes stood the board on edge across the middle of our longest workbench, using four mud bricks to hold it upright. On one side of the wooden partition he placed the candle. On the other side was the canvas covered frame, also supported edgewise by bricks. He took care to ensure the plane of the canvas was parallel to the plane of the wooden partition. Archimedes lit the candle and asked me to close all the window shutters.

  I proceeded around the room, closing and securing the wooden shutters. They fit well, but didn’t shut out all of the light. Heavy maroon drapes hung on the walls. They were used in the winter to eliminate drafts and keep the warmth in. Archimedes asked me to draw these drapes across the windows and the door. The room became entirely dark except for the candle burning on the workbench.

  “Tell me what you see, Timon,” asked Archimedes.

  The most striking thing, other than the halo of light hovering around the candle’s flame, was that there were three blurry round spots of light on the canvas screen, all in a line. “It looks like the light from the candle is going through those three holes in the wooden partition and projecting three dots of light on the canvas.”

  “This reveals a fundamental characteristic of light.” It wasn’t a question, but the way Archimedes said it suggested that I should tell him what that characteristic was.

  I had never seen a demonstration like this before and wasn’t really sure what Archimedes was asking. When I didn’t have a response, he said, “Move the wooden partition closer to the candle.”

  I did as he asked, sliding the partition and its bricks closer to the candle. This also meant that I was moving the partition farther from the canvas screen. The spots of light on the screen became slightly larger and the two outside spots moved farther out from the center.

  “Now move the partition toward the canvas.”

  I did this. The spots of light on the screen grew smaller and the outside spots moved in toward the center.

  “Slide it slowly back and forth. Watch the spots of light. What are you seeing?”

  Now it was obvious. The candlelight was projected in three perfectly straight lines through the holes to the canvas screen. “The light is traveling in straight lines,” I said.

  Archimedes smiled. “And obeys all the laws of geometry. This is one of the most basic and profound insights of all. Light is a substance that we can study with geometry. We call it optics.”

  Archimedes asked me to retrieve two more candles. He placed one on either side of the first candle so that they formed a line parallel to the plane of the wooden partition. Then he had me fill the two outside holes in the partition with lumps of wax, leaving only the hole in the center. He lit the other two candles with the first. “Does what you see now substantiate what we saw before?”

  The situation had been reversed. There were now three candles and one hole. But there were still three spots of light on the canvas. “I’m not sure.”

  He snuffed the candle on the right as I looked at it. “What do you see?”

  “The spot of light that was on the left side of the canvas is gone.”

  He snuffed the candle on the left. The spot of light on the right side of the canvas vanished. The spot in the center was the only one that remained. “What does this make you think, Timon?”

  “The flames projected on the canvas are in the reverse order of the candles. I don’t know why this happens, but I can see that the light from the remaining candle travels in a straight line through the hole in the partition to the screen.”

  Archimedes relit the two candles. He asked me to move the candle on the right closer to the candle in the middle.

  As I did this, the spot of light on the left of the screen moved closer to the middle. Then he asked me to move the candle on the right away from the middle candle. The spot on the left moved farther to the left.

  Archimedes had me move the left candle in the same way. This time it was the right spot on the canvas that moved.

  “Does this continue to support the idea that light travels in straight lines?”

  “Yes, but the movement of the spots is the opposite of what one expects,” I replied. “They act on diagonals.”

  Archimedes smiled. “Much as an image is reversed in a mirror, light passing through a small hole is reversed on the screen—and it’s all geometry.”

  Archimedes told me to open the curtains and the window shutters. It was a sunny day and the room filled with light.

  Archimedes blew out the candles, then went over to the workbench and opened a drawer. He withdrew the small ivory box I’d seen him take from the drawer several times before. He removed the box’s lid, and I came up close to look. Inside was the clear crystal disk I’d seen him inspect so closely. It was about the size of my palm, as thick as three copper coins in the center, and tapered off to a thin edge around its circumference—like a big lentil.

  “Not only does light travel in straight lines, Timon, it can be bent.” He held the crystal by its edges between his forefinger and thumb, and stretching out his arm, used it to intercept the sunlight coming through the east window. He turned the clear disk so that its surface was perpendicular to the direction of the sunlight and, as if by magic, caused a spot of light to appear and move across the workbench. With very deliberate positioning of the disk, moving it forward and back, he stilled the spot of light and drew it to an increasingly smaller diameter. When the dot of light became a point, smoke began to rise from the wooden surface. The wood turned black and flared up with a small transparent flame—just as suggested by Aristophanes in his play The Clouds.

  “A burning glass,” I said, having heard about such a thing from my father, but never having seen one.

  “Very good, Timon. But it’s more than that.” He handed the crystal to me. “Look at the surface of the workbench through the crystal.”

  I leaned over the wo
rkbench and peered down at its surface through the disk. At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. But as I moved the disk up and down, focusing the image, I saw that I was looking at the grain of the wood—so magnified I didn’t recognize what it was. “The image in the crystal is larger than what is actually here,” I said, moving the disk aside to look at the wooden surface.

  “The crystal is bending the light, in this case, causing it to diverge and make the image larger. Again it’s all geometry and optics.”

  I nodded my head in amazement. Something about it seemed so simple, but something about it also seemed like magic.

  “I’ve learned to use the crystal lens to help me read and do detail work,” he said. “But I’ve never let anyone see me using it—other than you. I’m only telling you now because you will be working with me, and it will be necessary for you to understand as much of the science as you can. You have impressed me today, Timon. You have a sense for this—more than I expected. I’m going to ask you to do some work for me that will be new to you and very demanding. But you must never speak of this work to anyone. You must promise me that.”

  “You have my word,” I answered, excited by the prospect of doing something more than deliver food, copy letters, and empty slop buckets—something secret and utterly fantastic!

  I went down to the kitchen that evening to retrieve our dinner. Two slaves were tending the fires and another was cleaning pots. No one else was there. I looked in the garden then headed to the pantry. I could hear them talking in low voices before I reached the bottom of the stairs. Hektor, Lavinia, and Agathe were huddled around Eurydice in the middle of the shadowy room. My first thought was that she’d had another untoward encounter with Hieronymus. His wild nights and shameless actions had gotten so bad that the chambermaids were afraid to be around him.

  I edged up behind Hektor in time to hear Lavinia ask, “Are you absolutely certain?”

  Eurydice nodded her head. “It—it—it’s b—b—been more than two m—m—months,” she stammered tearfully, then bowed her head, softly adding, “I—I—I n—never m—m—miss my d—da—day of—of cl—cl—cleansing—never.”

  Lavinia wrapped her arms around Eurydice to comfort her. Hektor cursed under his breath, then turned to see me standing there mouth agape. “What do you want?” he demanded.

  “Is Eurydice all right?”

  Lavinia looked up. “She’s with child, Timon.”

  “With the monster’s child.” Hektor stomped off to the far side of the pantry to refill his cup with wine.

  “The king’s child?” I whispered to Lavinia.

  “Yes,” hissed Agathe, “and quite a good way to squeeze some coin out of the royal family.”

  Across the room Hektor cursed. “She’d be better off disposing of that child before it sees the light of day.”

  This reduced Eurydice to a stuttering frenzy. She absolutely couldn’t kill her child.

  “Then what will you do with it?” asked Lavinia.

  “By the gods, Lavinia, that child must be born,” snapped Agathe. “With that bloodline? Eurydice, this child could be your ticket out of slavery. Especially if it’s a boy.”

  Hektor had had enough. He tossed back his cup of wine and came striding across the room. “Right. A ticket to some place worse—connected to Hieronymus for life.”

  Eurydice began to cry. Lavinia led her away from the others.

  Hektor shook his head and cursed at the ceiling. “The heavens can only guess what I would put in that boy’s dinner tonight if I were in the royal kitchen.”

  “What was that, cook?” The captain of the guard, Tacitus Maso, clumped down the stairs and strode into the pantry wearing a full set of armor and a short sword on his hip. He was unusually tall with a long, severe face. “Threats against the king are punishable by death.”

  Hektor shrank to half his size. “Yes, Captain, of course. I was only thinking of a special sauce for the blue fin tuna that came in with the latest catch.”

  Tacitus stood in the center of the pantry. The staff was frozen in place around him. He appraised Hektor with disdain. “Should the king become ill in any way, I know where I’ll come first. Now get to work. I have a hundred hungry soldiers out there waiting for a meal.” He turned on his heels and headed back up the stairs.

  All of us quickly filed out of the pantry to the kitchen. I heard Lavinia say under her breath, “Thank the gods he didn’t hear what we were talking about.”

  Agathe followed with a sneer. “We don’t know that he didn’t.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The next day Archimedes gave me a particularly long and difficult letter to copy. I worked on it for two full days. The morning of the third day, as I was sitting down to finish the letter, I noticed what looked to be a short piece of string on the desk. I picked it up and took it to the window to inspect it more closely in the sunlight. As I stared at this furry little remnant between my fingers, I realized that it was the tail of a rodent, most likely a mouse. I looked around for Plato. He was across the room, sitting in a streak of sunlight on the floor, licking his paws. The wound on his hip was still very visible. He looked up at me, eyes wide and yellow, deep with animal wisdom. When he saw that I had discovered his trophy, he returned to his cleaning. I believe he considered the leftover from his meal an acknowledgment of some sort, a thank you for saving him from the dogs.

  I had nearly completed the copying when Archimedes called me to his desk and asked me to run an errand. He wanted four bronze ingots from the blacksmith on Via Intermuralis. Along with payment for the bronze and a note to leave Achradina, he gave me one copper to spend on myself. Knowing the ingots would be heavy, I decided to make a detour to the Tyche market before going to the blacksmith.

  I was on the plateau, not far from the market, when an angry mob came surging up Via Intermuralis from behind me. I pressed against the buildings along the road to let them pass. As they stormed by, yelling and shouting, I caught wind of what had set them off. Just as Laius had predicted, Thraso had been executed for plotting the assassination of King Hieronymus. The mob was openly calling this an outrage and screaming for justice.

  While I stood back against the wall, watching the crowd surge into the market, a squadron of soldiers on horseback galloped up Via Intermuralis. When the soldiers caught up with the mob, they began swinging wooden clubs at anyone they could reach, scattering the demonstrators, overturning carts, and dashing market stalls to pieces. People ran in all directions, some simply frightened, others battered and bleeding. It reminded me of the political demonstrations I had seen in Croton and foreshadowed worse things to come.

  I remained where I was for quite some time as the commotion moved deeper into the market. I decided that maybe it wasn’t such a good day to go to the market and that it would be safer to go straight to the blacksmith. Then I thought of Moira and her grandfather and took off at a run into the market. I was well behind the soldiers and the mob, which was so dispersed now that the demonstration was essentially over. I followed a trail of broken carts and angry vendors, worried that Moira and her grandfather had been caught in the path of destruction.

  I saw her at a distance, well across the market courtyard, and quickened my pace. Moira knelt on the ground, picking up fruit. Her grandfather sat beside her, their booth tipped on its side behind them. I approached them slowly. The old man noticed me first. One of his eyes was swollen and his face was scraped. Moira looked up, scowled at me, and tossed aside a broken melon. “What do you want?” she said as though I were intruding.

  “I—I was passing by,” I stammered. “I was hoping to buy some figs.”

  “Take what you want,” she said angrily. A mixture of smashed fruit and pottery lay strewn on the ground around her.

  “Can I help you?”

  “No!” she snapped, then returned to picking through the debris, tears streaking through the dust on her face.

  I wanted to comfort her somehow, but I had been shaken by her tone of voi
ce. I walked away in bewilderment. Maybe I hadn’t found the friend I had longed for after all.

  It was midafternoon when I completed my errand and hauled the ingots up the tower stairs. Archimedes didn’t even lift his head when I entered. I laid the ingots on the work bench and then sat on my stool, unable to think of anything but the way Moira had spoken to me.

  CHAPTER 22

  Late that afternoon, after a long talk with Plato about my disappointing encounter with Moira, I went down to the kitchen seeking human company. Only Lavinia and Agathe were there. Hektor was out shopping, and the two women were in the early stages of preparing the evening meal. Agathe had a nine-foot conger laid out on the largest of the prep tables. She was slicing the huge black eel into cross sections, which would later be cut into smaller pieces for the fish stew Hektor was serving that night. Lavinia was at the quern, milling wheat into flour for dinner biscuits.

  It was rare for me to be in the kitchen alone with Lavinia and Agathe. I didn’t know it at the time, but Lavinia and Agathe didn’t talk to each other. Apparently they had realized early in their working relationship that they shared a mutual dislike for each other. They bickered over every little chore, every mealtime decision. It drove Hektor to drink—well, I should say to drink more. He was about to fire them both, when they reached an unspoken agreement, literally. They would not talk. That’s why I didn’t notice the problem earlier. It was the lack of something that told the story of Lavinia and Agathe.

  As the pastry chef and the cook’s assistant, they rarely worked together. If they did, they said only what was absolutely necessary. When all of us were talking together, Agathe and Lavinia would take part in the conversation. However, if you listened closely, both engaged as if the words of the other hadn’t been spoken. It was as though the other woman didn’t exist.