own world was willing to offer her.
'The gods have given you a great gift, then,' she said, torn between admiration and envy.
'Yes,' he replied, seriously and without hesitation. Then he went on, embarrassed, 'You should get someone to teach it to you. I'd offer to, but I wouldn't be any good. I have tried teaching- my father used to get me to help with his students. But the students said I confused them.' His hands tightened on his knees at the memory of his father's patience with those students, and the recollection of the previous day's prescribed offerings at his father's tomb. He did not want to think of his father; he had been immersing himself in catapults precisely so that he wouldn't have to think of his father, and now that the subject had come up, he leaped away from it. 'I didn't mean to bore you, lady. But I'm sorry, I don't understand why you asked me here just to tell me that your brother intends to deal with me fairly. Did he send you?'
She looked at him wide-eyed, then blushed. 'No,' she said.
'Then I don't understand…' he began- then suddenly, looking at her, he did. She sat there, watching him, her eyes frightened and her cheeks ashamed, but the lift of her head a determined challenge. Hieron had not sent her; she had come, alone and heavily cloaked, to meet him in secret. He had not wondered at that, and he should have. The liking he'd felt for her, casual, expecting nothing, crystallized all at once into a shape with edges sharp enough to wound.
'I'm sorry,' he said, awed by it, and afraid now. 'I was stupid. I…'
He could not think what to say, and they looked at each other, both now blushing furiously. In the back of his mind echoed the warnings: 'You were lucky you confined yourself to flutes!' 'May the gods forbid that there should be anything between you and the king's sister!' What would a tyrant do to a man who seduced his sister?
What would the sister do if he refused her? Old stories swirled about his mind: Bellerophon, Hippolytos, falsely accused of rape by the queens they had rejected. Looking at Delia, he did not believe a word of it- and yet, this whole situation was unbelievable, and the stories were there, whether he credited them or not.
'You mustn't think I mean to betray my brother's trust,' she said, with a sudden fierce determination. 'Hieron has never treated me with anything except kindness, and I would never dishonor…' She stopped, knowing that she had already betrayed her brother's trust, already taken the first step to dishonoring the house. Only a small step, so far, but this meeting had done nothing to convince her heart of its folly: quite the reverse. 'It's only that I wanted to know you better,' she went on, more uncertainly- and suddenly saw that she was treating him even more disgracefully than she was treating Hieron. Even as much as she'd done already could injure him, devastate his career, and blast his reputation. The king treated him with great kindness, and he responded by trying to seduce the king's sister! Seduction was a crime, and she was asking him to risk the penalties without even a seducer's reward. Shameless, selfish, heartless! She turned away, in an absolute misery of shame, shame on all sides, and pulled her veil forward to hide the hot tears that were bursting from her eyes.
He looked at her for a moment- the tears, the confusion- and forgot, as he kept forgetting, that she was the sister of the king. He caught one of her clenched hands, and she looked back at him, her face wet and red and hopeless. The only natural thing to do seemed to be to kiss her, so he did. It was like finding the ratio, solving the puzzle, or coming home. A flurry of notes fell perfectly upon the beat, and two pitches blended into harmony.
She broke away first, pushed him back with the heel of her hand, wrapped her arms around herself and tried to separate the chaos she was feeling into coherent emotions. 'Oh, gods!' she cried frantically.
'I'm sorry,' he lied awkwardly: he was not sorry at all. He was enormously pleased and flattered; he was frightened and wished himself out of this- and underneath it all, complicating everything, he was enchanted by Delia, clever, witty, proud, determined girl, with such beautiful black eyes and a wonderful neat warm body whose imprint still tingled against his own. He didn't just want to go to bed with her; he wanted to sit up in bed with her afterward, talking and laughing and playing the flute. Like a new theorem, the range of possibilities ramified away from her, a ladder of inevitable connections: if and then all the way down to the final conclusive this is what was to be proved.
Only most of those possibilities were bad. After a moment he added doubtfully, 'Do you really think it's wise that we should know each other better?'
'No,' she said, half laughing, half sobbing. 'I think it would be very stupid.'
Only, only, said something in her blood, only I want to. I want you to kiss me again, I want to touch your face and run my fingers through your hair, your eyes are like honey, did you know? Ruin to you, and shame to Hieron. No.
'I thought this would convince me I didn't want to,' she admitted miserably, 'but it hasn't.'
He sighed. No, she was no Phaedra, and he was no Hippolytos. He remembered the song he had been humming when he went to her door after finishing the Welcomer, beseeching Aphrodite to bring him this girl's love. The goddess had heard him, it seemed. Laughter-loving, they called Aphrodite, but her sense of humor tended to the black. He wished his father were alive. Not that he could have told Phidias about this- gods, no! — but at least then he wouldn't be burdened with this aching loss in the heart, this urge to find comfort. 'Then what do we do?' he asked, and recognized even as he spoke that leaving the choice to her was fatally weak. Only it was perfectly clear to him what they ought to do, and it wasn't what he wanted to do at all.
She had always prided herself on her strength of mind. She might not be gracious and regal, like her sister- in-law; she might not be modest and charming, like the girls who had shared her lessons. But she had strength of mind. 'We should do what's wise,' she said firmlyand instantly regretted it. She looked at him and saw that he regretted it, too. She reached over and touched the side of his face, and at once he kissed her again, which was what she wanted and was not wise.
When she left the garden shortly afterward, they had resolutely made no arrangements to meet again. And yet already her mind was reflecting on how easy it would be, and already she suspected that wisdom would not prevail.
The Romans arrived before the gates of Syracuse only eight days later- twelve days after Phidias' funeral.
Archimedes had spent most of the intervening time making catapults. He had been in and out of the workshop even while he was preparing the demonstration; after the funeral he immersed himself in the work. He did not want to think about his father or his own future, still less about the net he was falling into with Delia. She'd sent him a note arranging a second meeting, and he'd told himself that he should not go, and had of course been there early. They had walked from the fountain of Arethusa to a quiet public square near the temple of Apollo, where they had sat down to play the flute- she'd brought her flutes. And they'd kissed, of course. It was innocent and very sweet, all of it, and he had no notion what was going to come of it, though he suspected nothing good. If he spent every waking moment thinking about catapults, he didn't have to worry.
The workshop hadn't been quiet before, but during those twelve days it was frantic. Extra workmen were drafted in from the army to help hammer and saw, and the catapults were assembled almost as fast they could be designed- two of them simultaneously, one by Archimedes and one by Eudaimon. The old catapult engineer had been sullen and resentful since the Welcomer passed its trial, but he gave way at every point of conflict and devoted himself to copying what Archimedes had designed: a one-talenter like the Welcomer and two hundred- pounders. Archimedes periodically went and checked that the dimensions of the copies were correct, and was rewarded with ten drachmae for every copy completed.
Kallippos, as chief engineer, had overall responsibility for the defenses of the city. This seemed to mean principally that he ordered buttressing or parapets for the walls and directed where catapults were to be sited. The copy of the Welcomer and two of the hundred-pounders went to the Euryalus fort, and another hundred-pounder to the south gate, overlooking the marshes. When Archimedes started the two-talenter, Kallippos came to see how big it really was, with a view to determining where he could put it. In fact, the machine was not as large as its designer had initially feared; the increase needed in the size of the bore was only five finger-breadths, giving a proportional increase of a quarter all round.
'We could put it almost anywhere,' said Kallippos, scrutinizing the thirty-six-foot stock, which lay in the center of the workshop floor. 'In the Hexapylon, for example, on the floor underneath the Welcomer.'
'We could call it 'Good Health,' ' suggested the workman Elymos slyly. 'As in 'Welcome to Syracuse!' ' He punched a palm. ' 'Good health to you!' ' Another resounding smack!
The other workmen laughed, and Kallippos smiled. 'And the three-talenter could be called 'Wish You Joy'?' he asked Archimedes.
