A passage led through a colonnade from the first garden into a second one. A fountain decorated with carved nymphs stood under a grape arbor, and there were roses flowering. On the edge of the fountain sat the flute player: a girl a year or two older than Philyra. Her black hair was caught up in a silver net, and she was wearing a rose- colored tunic fastened with a silver belt. But her hairnet was disarranged by the leather strap most aulists wore to support their cheeks during a long session, and she was so intent on her playing that she didn't notice Archimedes' arrival: she was a real aulist, not a decorative one. He wondered who she was. By her dress she was rich, but she was too young to be the king's wife and too old to be his daughter. Somebody's concubine, he decided. He coughed to attract her attention.
She lowered the aulos and frowned at him, irritated by the interruption. Her eyes were very black. In a moment, he thought, she'd tell him to go back to the public part of the house.
'It doesn't work,' said Archimedes quickly. 'But if you take your baritone aulos and set it to the Dorian mode, you can get the right effect if you avoid the B-flat.'
Interest replaced the irritation in her eyes. She picked up a second aulos from the rim of the fountain beside her: it was an alto. 'My other one's this,' she said.
'Then set that to the Lydian mode and the tenor to the Dorian! But Lydian doesn't mix with Hypolydian, part- finger it as you will. When I tried it, I sounded even worse than you did.'
She grinned. 'Thank you for the compliment! Dorian's better?'
'Try it!'
'I will!' The girl shifted the slide on her tenor aulos, setting the instrument to the Dorian mode. She set the alto to the Lydian, raised both, and began to play the Euripides variation again. Her eyebrows rose; she played on to the end of the piece, shifting from one aulos to the other, from one mode to its neighbor, scattering the notes, bittersweet and sad. When she finished she set the flutes down and looked at him in surprised triumph. 'You're right!' she exclaimed, and they grinned at each other.
Then she wiped the mouthpieces and asked, 'Are you a professional?'
'What? Oh, flute player. No. I'm a mathematician.' Then he bit his lip and corrected himself. 'Engineer. I'm to see the regent about building some catapults.'
'Catapults!' she exclaimed. 'I wouldn't have expected someone who makes machines to be musical.'
He shrugged. 'Actually, it's a help. You have to tune them by ear.'
'Catapults?'
'Mm, the strings. If a catapult's two sets of strings are out of tune with each other, the machine will shoot crooked when you come to fire it.'
She laughed. 'What do you do to tune them? Pluck them and tighten the key, like a lyre?'
'Exactly! Except you twist the strings, not the key. You have to use a windlass and wedges.'
'I like that! The stringed instruments: lyre, kithara, harp, luteand catapult. I suppose big ones have a low pitch, and small ones a high pitch?' He nodded, and she laughed again. 'Somebody should write a catapult chorus,' she declared. 'For scorpions, ten-pounders, and thirty-pounders.' She raised the auloi to her mouth again and piped a mad dance on three widely separated notes.
Archimedes grinned. 'A friend of mine is trying to build an air-powered catapult,' he said. 'It could play the flute part. But I'm afraid that all it does is go bang, very loudly, so maybe it should be percussion.'
'Oh, no!' she exclaimed, lowering her auloi and putting a hand over her mouth. 'An air-powered catapult? Where was this, Alexandria?'
He laughed in surprise. 'Yes!'
'It would be! They'll do anything in Alexandria. Since you've been there, tell me: I heard somebody there has built a machine which allows you to play thirty auloi simultaneously. Do you know-'
But Archimedes had broken into delighted laughter. 'That's Ktesibios!' he exclaimed. 'The same friend who's making the air-powered catapult. He calls the instrument a water-aulos. I helped him with it!'
The girl pulled off her cheek strap and put her instrument down. Her hair, disturbed from its net, dropped black curls around her face. 'Does it work?' she demanded. 'The- the multiple aulos, I mean. I don't see how it possibly can!'
'It's not really thirty auloi,' Archimedes told her. 'It's thirty pipes, but they only play one note each. Each is a different length, see, like the reeds in a syrinx. To sound them, you press a key which opens a valve in the bottom of the pipe. Air is forced up into the pipe by the pressure of water in a tank underneath. That's why it's called a water-aulos. See, you have this inverted hemisphere submerged in the water, and two tubes which-'
'A water-aulos,' repeated the girl, tasting the new word: hydraulis. 'What does it sound like?'
'More like a syrinx than an aulos. Louder, though, and richer-toned- almost bell-like. It can be heard above a crowd. The Alexandrians put one in the theater. I told Ktesibios he ought to call it a water-syrinx, but he preferred his own name for it.'
'You said you helped to make it?'
'Mostly I just helped Ktesibios tune the pipes. He never actually had any training in music, though he's the most astonishingly ingenious man. He's-'
'Could you build one?'
Archimedes blinked.
'Not now,' said the girl quickly. 'I know there's a war, and it's more important to build catapults. But afterward, if there is an afterward- could you build me a water-aulos?'
Archimedes blinked again. 'I'd love to,' he told her. 'But they're complicated. They-'
'You couldn't?'
'I- not that. They take a long time to build. I couldn't afford to do one cheap. Ktesibios charged sixteen hundred drachmae for his.'
The girl did not look at all disappointed. 'My brother likes music,' she said. 'And he loves ingenious machines. I'm sure he'd be willing to pay sixteen hundred drachmae for a water-aulos if you could make one.'
'Your brother?' asked Archimedes, with a sudden horrible feeling that he knew who this was.
'Ah,' she said, and her straight black brows came down. 'You didn't realize. King Hieron.'
'No,' he said, feeling numb, 'I didn't realize.' He studied her a moment: the silver belt, the fine tunic. But he could not concentrate on the expensive clothes. His eyes kept sliding back to her round face with its black curls and brilliant dark eyes, and her strong musician's hands. He added accusingly, 'You don't look old enough.'
'He's my half brother, actually,' she said. All the animation had left her face and voice, and she sounded the bored aristocrat. 'He was almost grown up when our father married my mother.'
King Hieron was a bastard, the result of a wealthy Syracusan's youthful indiscretion: all Syracuse knew that. Archimedes guessed that this girl must be the rich man's legitimate daughter. She was not of his class at all. He shouldn't really be here, in the private part of the house, talking to her. Syracuse allowed women more freedom than many other Greek cities, but still, it was grossly improper for a young man to slip into any private house and chat with the owner's unmarried sister, unintroduced and unsupervised, and this girl was the daughter of a nobleman and sister of a king. But he pulled his stained cloak straight and told himself defiantly that he was a democrat. 'I can build a water-aulos,' he declared. 'If your brother's willing to pay for it, I'd love to build you one. I prefer wind instruments to stringed ones anyway.'
At this she smiled again, a long slow grin, and he knew he'd said the right thing, and grinned back. 'What's your name?' she asked.
He had just opened his mouth to reply when the answer was shouted at him- 'Archimedes son of Phidias!' — in a tone of shocked disapproval. He and the girl turned together, and found four men bearing down on them. One was Dionysios, one the exalted doorkeeper, one a middle-aged workman, and the fourth, from his purple cloak, had to be the regent Leptines.
4
Archimedes stood staring at the regent stupidly, his mouth still open. The girl, however, was unalarmed. 'Good health, Father!' she exclaimed, smiling at Leptines. 'This gentleman plays the aulos. He was telling me a way to play the intermediate notes.'
