mostly been of the open-field sort, and he had rarely resorted to engines.
Then came the Successors. These men had no new land to conquer, but they fought interminably among themselves over the carcass of Alexander's empire. This consisted primarily of seizing each other's ports, fortresses and capital cities. Such warfare called for engines, and to this endeavor the Successors brought the same mania for size and complexity that they brought to building.
Most notable of these was Demetrius Poliorcetes, 'the Besieger,' son of Antigonus One-Eye and the greatest military hobbyist of all time. He designed some of the strangest and certainly the largest engines of war ever conceived. He mounted storming towers on yoked ships for assaulting harbor walls. He built towers a hundred feet high equipped with dozens of catapults and completely plated with iron.
Others were not far behind. Dionysus, tyrant of Syracuse, had formed a sort of academy of military arts where the best engineers worked on engines and new designs of warship and new types of weapons and armor.
All this military experimentation had come to an end with the ascendancy of Rome. We beat them all because we knew that the ultimate weapon is the Roman legionary and the organization of the Roman legion. With them, even mediocre generals turn in victory after victory with monotonous regularity. An inspired general like (even now I hate to admit it) Caesar could accomplish marvels. And the Successors cared only about fighting. It was all they were good for. Romans value law and sound rule. But somebody believed that this inevitable tide of Roman rule could be reversed, and they thought that possession of some magic weapon would give them victory over the invincible legions.
There followed a lengthy text, with drawings, of the various engines, including the fanciful monsters of Demetrius. A final section concerned the defenses designed for Syracuse by the great Archimedes. The incendiary reflectors were mentioned, although there was no description of them. The ship-lifting crane Iphicrates had ridiculed was not mentioned. That, apparently, was an invention of later tale-tellers. There was a cranelike device made to swing out over the harbor and drop heavy weights upon the attacking ships, smashing through deck and hull to sink them. Perhaps that was the origin of the story.
When I was finished, the light was dim and my pitcher was almost empty. It had been fascinating reading, but it had not explained some things. I still did not know why the murderer had taken the scroll. Surely he knew there was at least one copy, and doubtless there were others in other lands. Might Iphicrates have written in the original? That seemed unlikely. The Librarians would have regarded it as a desecration. The text and drawings would have been extremely useful to a captain of engineers with a city or a fort to besiege, but I saw nothing in the book that would convince even the most gullible would-be conqueror that here was something that would tip the balance against the might of Rome. There had to be more, and it had to be in the original manuscript of Biton, dedicated to Attalus more than a century before.
Chapter VII
By lamplight, I dressed in the hunting garments Hermes had found in the well-stocked embassy wardrobe. The tunic was a dark rust-red, with twin stripes of olive green running from the shoulders to the hem. The high boots of red leather were elegantly topped with spotted serval skin, with the dainty paws dangling over the shins. It made a dashing outfit, and I was sorry that Julia wouldn't have the opportunity to see me wearing it.
Hermes awaited me outside my door and followed me as I left the embassy. He was loaded with our other gear: short hunting spears, a roll of two cloaks, a satchel of travel food and an enormous wineskin.
'I won't have to carry this far, will I?' he groused.
'Hermes, how would you ever manage in the legions? Do you know what a soldier has to carry?'
'What of it?' he said. 'The legions are for citizens. And I'll bet you never had to carry much. You were an officer.'
'To answer your question, we are going to do most of our journeying by boat.'
Even so, it was a long walk. The city was all but deserted so early. As we passed the Macedonian barracks, there was enough light to discern that, as I had predicted, the war machine was nowhere to be seen. We went to the Canopic Way and took it almost the whole length of the city until we reached the canal that cuts through the Rakhotis from north to south, connecting the Kibotos Harbor to the Nile canal and Lake Mareotis.
We stopped at the bridge over the canal and He set down his burden, puffing away. I descended the stair by the bridge to the broad pavement that ran the length of the canal. It was crowded with boats and rafts, mostly those of farmers bringing produce to the city markets. Along one section I found a line of travel barges. The bargemen sat in their craft. At my approach a dockside foreman came to my, eying my attire.
'You wish to go hunting, sir? Not far from here can be found lion, gazelle, oryx:'
'What I shall hunt I have not yet decided,' I told the man. 'Is there a boatman here who took the philosopher Iphicrates of Chios on his monthly expeditions?'
The man looked puzzled, but he turned and addressed the bargemen in Egyptian. One man stood and stepped off his craft. He exchanged a few words with the foreman, who turned back to me.
'This man took Iphicrates out three times.'
'Tell him I want to go where Iphicrates went.' There was a bit more talk and we agreed upon a price. Hermes and the bargeman transferred our gear into the little vessel while I made myself comfortable in the prow. The man went to the stern and picked up his pole. Soon we were off, drifting silently by the awakening city.
The bargeman was a typical Egyptian of the riverine sort. He had short, bowed legs and had probably seldom ventured onto land in his life. His command of Greek was uncertain and he had not a word of Latin. He poled his craft along with quiet serenity, looking like a picture on a wall.
Soon we were in the tunnel that passed through the lake wall, its great double portcullis raised for the day.
The bulk of the canal traffic was coming into the city at that hour. There was very little leaving it. We passed the entrance to the Nile canal and headed toward the lake.
I turned and called out to the bargeman.
'Didn't Iphicrates go to the Nile to measure its rise and fall, and to examine the shores?' I wasn't sure he understood the whole question, but he understood enough.
'He went to the lake,' he said. Soon we were on the quiet waters of Lake Mareotis.
Its shores were low and marshy, lined with papyrus. The reeds were alive with waterfowl, wild ducks and geese and gulls, herons and the occasional wading ibis. We passed wallows where hippos disported themselves, their smiling mouths and comically wiggling ears belying their essentially hostile and ill-tempered nature. Hermes's eyes grew round when he saw these huge, wild beasts so close.
'Will they attack us?' he asked.
'They never scared you before,' I said.
'We were on a bigger boat then. Those things could swallow us with one gulp.'
'If they were so inclined. But they eat grass. As long as we stay clear of them, they won't bother us. Now that'-I pointed at something that looked like a floating log-'will definitely eat you, should you fall in.' As if hearing me, the thing turned and regarded us with a glistening eye. Hermes grew paler.
'Why don't they exterminate those monsters?' he said.
'Crocodiles are sacred to the god Sobek. They mummify them and put them in temple crypts.'
'Egyptians! Is there anything they don't worship and make into mummies?'
'Slaves,' I told him. 'There is no god of slaves.'
'Or Romans either, I'll bet,' was his rejoinder.
We drifted eastward in the direction of the delta until the sun was nearly noon-high. Then we came around a low headland to a place where a stone dock protruded into the water. The bargeman turned the nose of his craft toward the wharf.
'What is this?' I asked him.
'This is where the man from the Museum went.'
In the distance I could see a large house amid tilled fields.
'Whose estate is this?'
