sounding board with a fiercely possessive tenderness. She looked at her brother and breathed, 'Medion!' — half in protest, half in adoration. But Archimedes was not looking at her.
Phidias had slowly levered himself to a sitting position to accept his own present. He took the ivory box in his trembling hands and studied the picture on the lid. 'Apollo and the sweet Muses,' he observed softly. 'Which one is Urania?'
Archimedes indicated her silently. Urania, Muse of Astronomy, stood at Apollo's elbow, pointing at something which lay on the low table in front of the god- the puzzle, probably. Her diaphanous draperies were identical to those of her eight sisters, but she was distinguishable from them by her crown of stars.
Phidias smiled. 'Next to the god,' he said quietly. 'Just where she should be.' He looked up at his son, his yellowed eyes still full of his smile- looked in the luxurious confidence that here at last he would be understood. 'She's beautiful, isn't she?' he asked.
'Yes,' whispered Archimedes, the expected understanding going through him in a warm flood. 'Yes, she is.'
3
Archimedes kept to his agreement to meet the guardsman Straton by the naval quay that evening.
The rest of the family had accepted his decision not to follow his father's career as calmly as Philyra had. Arata, in fact, was relieved to find him searching for any work: she'd worried that he might not appreciate the necessity of earning money. She fussed about to ensure that he looked an aspiring royal engineer, and sent him off bathed and barbered and dressed in his new tunic and cloak. He tried to avoid the cloak- too hot for June! — but his mother draped it firmly about his shoulders. 'It looks distinguished,' she told him, 'and you need to impress this man.'
'He's only a soldier!' Archimedes protested. 'He's just going to tell me who I should really talk to!'
'Even so!' Arata declared. 'If he's impressed, he'll pass that on to his superior.'
She wanted to send Marcus with him, too: a gentleman ought to have a slave in attendance. Archimedes was nervous, though, that they might meet the Tarentine mercenary Philonides again. He explained to his mother and sister what had happened at the docks.
Philyra listened to the account with indignant astonishment. She glanced at Marcus' impassive face, remembering the bruise on his side. 'That's outrageous!' she exclaimed angrily. 'We have a right to keep our own slave! You should have taken that stupid mercenary to a magistrate, and complained.'
Archimedes just shrugged. 'I wouldn't threaten a mercenary!' he said with feeling. 'And courts are chancy places, especially with a war on. I don't know what sort of Italian Marcus is- do you?'
Philyra glanced at Marcus again, startled this time. She had never connected him in her mind with the great new power to the north. Yes, she'd known he was Italian, but there had always been wars in Italy, and in each war some prisoners always ended up in the Syracusan slave market. It had always been enough to call them simply 'Italian' and assume that slavery had absorbed all the differences between them.
'Well, what sort of Italian are you?' she demanded bluntly.
Marcus' face was carefully blank. 'I'm not a Roman,' he muttered. 'Roman citizens are never slaves.' Then he added, in embarrassment, 'Mistress.'
'It doesn't matter what sort he is,' said Arata resignedly. 'If the question were raised in a court, we'd have endless trouble trying to prove anything at all. Better to avoid courts if we can.' She clapped her hands and jerked her head at Marcus. He retreated back into the house, relieved.
Archimedes started for the door, but Arata caught his arm and drew him aside before he reached it. In a voice too low for the slaves to overhear she said, 'My dear, have you given any thought as to whether we should sell Marcus?'
'No, of course not!' said Archimedes, surprised. 'We don't have to sell him just because he's Italian!'
'Not that,' whispered Arata, gesturing for him to keep his voice down. 'We don't need four slaves, especially since your father sold the vineyard, and we can't afford to feed them. If we don't sell Marcus, it will have to be Chrestos. We couldn't sell Sosibia, not after so many years, and little Agatha- it wouldn't be right, my dear.'
Archimedes hunched his shoulders unhappily. He understood now. His mother wanted him to start looking for a good buyer for one of the slaves right away. The decision about who to sell and where was his to make- because it would not be right to throw this sort of decision onto his father, not now, and the women lacked any authority in law.
He did not want to sell anybody. Marcus would hate to be sold, he thought absently. He would really hate it, no matter who the buyer. He liked Marcus, relied on Marcus: he could not possibly inflict such a humiliation upon him. But Chrestos- he could remember holding Chrestos as a newborn baby. How could he take money for a member of his family? Money wasn't worth it. He hated to think about money at the best of times.
'There's no hurry!' he protested at last. 'The money I brought back from Alexandria will last us for a month or two, and after that, anything could happen. There's a lot of money in engineering. We could all become rich! It would be stupid to sell people if we don't need to.'
Arata sighed. Some people might get rich from engineering, but she did not believe her son ever would. He was too unworldly, too softhearted. Like his father. She couldn't even complain at it: it was a quality she loved in them. She did not like postponing hard decisions, though, especially in such uncertain times. 'If we wait until we're hungry,' she pointed out quietly, 'we'll have to take the first buyer that comes along. If we sell now we can choose a good home for him.'
Archimedes squirmed uncomfortably. 'Can't we at least wait to see if I get this job?' he pleaded.
His mother sighed again, resignedly this time. She did not want to sell any of the household slaves, either, and it was true they had a month or so of grace. She nodded, and her son gave a sigh of relief.
Philyra, who had hung in the doorway listening to this, went back into the courtyard of the house. Marcus was there, taking down his master's laundry. Philyra studied him for a minute, wondering, for the first time, what he had been before he was a slave. She had no clear memories of the time before he came to the household: he had always been there.
Earlier in the day she had indeed mentioned her suspicions of him to her brother. Archimedes had dismissed them at once. 'Marcus?' he'd said. 'Oh no! He thinks slaves who steal deserve the whip, not the stick, and he prides himself on his honesty. No, no, I'd trust Marcus with a fortune.' Now he had backed that confidence with a refusal even to contemplate selling the slave.
But the problem was, he had trusted Marcus with a fortune, and she still couldn't imagine how that fortune could have disappeared in a year without dishonesty from someone. Archimedes' confidence merely made her feel guilty about her own suspicions.
The slave felt her eyes on him and turned toward her, his arms full of laundry, his face mild and inquiring. She noticed, as though for the first time, the crooked identation where his nose had been broken, and she wondered how that had happened, and when. 'What sort of Italian are you?' she asked him again.
He let out a long slow breath, looking away from her. 'Mistress…' he began, then gave a helpless jerk of one hand, flapping linen. 'Mistress, I'm a slave, your brother's. You know that's true. Anything else I said might be a lie.'
She gazed at him soberly. 'When did you break your nose?'
He set his armful of laundry carefully down on an overturned washtub and turned back to the line for the last item. 'Long time ago, mistress. Before I came to Sicily.'
A soldier had broken it, during the first year of his slavery. He'd resisted the man's attempt to bugger him, and had been beaten senseless because of it. When he woke up, it was to find himself lying at the feet of the Campanian slave merchant who'd sold him to the soldier, and the soldier and slaver arguing about whether the soldier was due his money back. 'Look what you've done to his face!' the slaver had complained. 'Who's going to want him now?' Marcus had lain there, mouth full of blood, aching in every muscle, and hoped that nobody was going to want him now, because he didn't think he'd be able to resist so fiercely again; he'd give in, and make a whore of himself. He had been seventeen.
'Was it in battle?' asked Philyra.
