will blow your corsair out of the water if it comes to fetch the mirror.”
“An interesting problem you should apply your mind to, if you want to save your son’s life. Remember, Ethan, our fate is your own.”
Aurora hired a carriage that took us to Syracuse in style, all of us pretending to be on holiday during the European peace. Harry came along as my son, with me widowed should anyone ask. Osiris was our “servant,” a limping ogre vowing quietly to hurt Horus should I voice a wrong opinion or fail to endorse their latest skulduggery. Dragut was Aurora’s manservant and bodyguard, lest I be tempted to try to strangle the girl. Fortunately, our tight little contingent of domestic bliss was able to leave her slobbering mastiff behind. I hoped Sokar choked on a sailor’s femur by the time we got back.
We were to search the city for clues and then rendezvous with more of the pirates in that ruined ancient fort of Euryalus, Greek for “nail head.” This castle, reputedly designed by Archimedes himself, had nonetheless fallen to the Romans in record time, which made me wonder again if the mirror was simple myth. But how to explain the peculiar mural at Akrotiri, on Thira?
The new Italian city of Syracuse had long since buried the ancient Greek one, and there was little sign on Ortygia that Archimedes had ever walked there. One clue of continuity, however, was built into the city’s cathedral on the central piazza. The duomo had a baroque facade, erected after one of the periodic earthquakes that ravaged Sicily, but its sidewalls incorporated the pillars of an ancient Greek temple to Athena. It was a pragmatic recycling of faith and architecture that reminded me how new beliefs entwine with old.
“It’s said that the gold of her statue would catch the morning sun and serve as a beacon to sailors when they were miles out to sea,” a waiter told us on the piazza as I kept trying to keep Horus in his chair instead of crawling around on the pavement. I don’t know how mothers keep track of their scamps. “While our duomo is closed in, the Greek temple was open to the air.”
“Maybe that’s where Archimedes got his idea for his mirrors,” I theorized.
“What mirror, Papa?”
“The brightest mirror in the world. That’s what we’re looking for!”
His little face beamed with delight. Aurora looked bored, her halfhearted attempts at acting matronly reminding me of a folktale witch who’d just as soon pop a child into the oven.
To be playing the English squire with Aurora, Dragut, and Osiris was more than a little bizarre. I supped with a woman I loathed. She was absolutely imperturbable to my hostility and gloom, acting as if ours was the most natural reunion in the world. She knew this annoyed me, and enjoyed the annoyance. Hamidou searched me periodically to ensure I carried no weapon, and made certain I was aware of Cuvier’s dueling weapons in his own belt lest I try something rash. Osiris loomed over Harry. Cain and Abel had a cheerier partnership.
At least propriety required that Aurora and I have separate rooms, given that we didn’t pretend to be married. Otherwise I was forced to fake fond union; there was no question of escape. “Your son’s fate rests with our success or failure,” Aurora said quietly over glasses of port in the evening, after little Harry had been packed off to bed in my room, Osiris standing guard like a golem in a nightmare. “Find the mirror, or condemn your family.”
“All we had is an old map showing the city. It proves nothing.”
“Then think! Where would the Greeks or Romans hide it? Where would the Templars find it? How has it been hidden for two thousand years?”
I sighed. “Well, Archimedes got the idea from the Atlanteans, perhaps, or whoever it was that lived behind the mirror’s protection on Thira. Maybe the Greeks even found a mirror already ancient, ten thousand years old, and brought it to Syracuse. Who knows? But the Romans adopted every military idea they could find, and would have taken that one if it had worked—unless Archimedes hid it away.”
“The Roman commander claimed the scholar’s death was an accident,” Dragut said, “an impulse by a common soldier who didn’t recognize the famous Greek. But maybe the mathematician really died for not telling them where the mirror was.”
“It could have been melted down. Or thrown into the sea.”
“Not destroyed,” Aurora insisted, “or the Templars would never have been interested. Think like Archimedes, Ethan! You know more than you’re telling us. The Romans had an army to find it. What did they miss?”
“How the devil should I know?”
“Because your son’s life depends on it.”
“You think it helps when you keep threatening my innocent child?”
“You’re the obstinate one, not me. I’ve asked for partnership since our beginning.”
I sighed. “And now you have your wish.”
She smiled, cold as an iceberg. “Exactly.”
I actually had an idea. Above the city were the old Greek theater and the Roman arena, half buried now. I remembered a horseshoe shape on the map; could that refer to the old amphitheater? And then there was that angled line from the old Greek fort to a cross on the island of Ortygia. This meant something to the men who’d drawn it.
There were also stone quarries from which the ancient city had been built. We hired a schoolteacher for information and were told that invading Athenians had been imprisoned there, many dying a ghastly death from hunger, exposure, and thirst. These limestone cliffs above the city were also riddled with caves. It was no place for a two-year-old, so I reluctantly agreed that Osiris could keep my lad occupied playing with the ducks at the Fountain of Arethusa, a freshwater spring that emerged near the edge of the sea in Ortygia. The ancient pool had been abandoned as a watering hole and recolonized by birds that Harry squealed at every time we passed. The ducks made up for his instinctual distrust of Osiris.
The rest of us purchased lanterns and explored the quarries as if enthralled by ancient atrocities: there’s something ghoulish about tourism. The grottoes were pleasant escape from the heat of summer, the quarry pits shady from orange groves and musical from the trilling of birds. I kept my eye out for obvious burial places or hiding spots, but it seemed to me this was the first place any invader would look. We separated to make the task go faster, Dragut satisfied by now that I intended to cooperate to safeguard Harry. I explored one quarry cave after another, each as empty as those rooms on Thira. There were no murals, either.
By midday I’d wearied of the task and took a break. I was trying an orange in the high grass under the cliff walls, wondering where the mirror might really be, when a sound crept into my depressed consciousness. Music like songbirds, I realized, but this was human, an ethereal melody that seemed to be floating off the cliffs. A woman was singing with a voice of angels, and the sweetness shook me out of my lethargy. Here was grace embodied by sound, sweet deliverance from my depressing captivity and this ancient quarry prison. I had to discover who the source of such loveliness was!
I made my way toward a towering cave in white cliffs shaped like a gigantic pointed ear, its opening a good hundred feet high. This was the entrance to a deep cavern with a flat, sandy floor, and it was from there that the haunting aria came from. The sound was amplified by the walls, giving it a depth like a heavenly choir. The song was Italian, a strain from an opera.
I walked in, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. What magic in a woman’s voice, given the right place! Yes, there she was in the rear of this excavation, lost in reverie, her voice lifted like an offering. Who could it be? And so I stealthily advanced, she turned, and…
It was Aurora.
I stopped, confused. The idea such music could come from my archenemy had somehow never occurred to me, nor the notion that she’d ever sung in her entire twisted life. Yet there she was, a little flushed, lips parted, eyes alight, and I was suddenly jolted with memory of my initial attraction to her on the Canadian frontier. She had an overpowering, bewitching beauty, a sexual power that swamped the senses and blinded the mind. I still hated and feared her, but I still wanted her, too—and silently cursed myself for it.
There was a moment of silence. Then:
“I don’t often sing, but the acoustics were irresistible.”
“You surprise me again, Aurora.”
“We don’t know each other, Ethan, not really. Everything went badly too quickly in America. But we could.”
“You killed my lover, Namida.”
“You killed my brother. People die, Ethan, for all kinds of causes. But the quest for knowledge is eternal.
