Zenodotos looked at the water-snail and fell in love- and that shows sense, because the water-snail is the most amazing machine Archimedes ever built, the most amazing machine I've ever seen in my life. Zenodotos instantly ordered eight of the things at thirty drachmae apiece. He agreed to supply us with all the equipment and the labor we needed to make them, as well as our keep while we were working and the traveling expenses to and from his estate.'
'So we went up to his estate and set to work. When we got the first water-snail finished, people started coming around to have a look at it. Now in Egypt they've been irrigating since the creation of the world. They thought they knew everything there is to know about raising water- but nobody had ever seen anything like a water-snail. And everybody- I tell you, everybody- who had a bit of land in the Delta wanted one. I put the price up to forty drachmae, then to sixty, then to eighty: it made no difference. People still queued up to buy. And then, of course, the rich men in the queue didn't want to wait. They started coming up to me and slipping me a drachma and saying, 'See that your master does my order first.' That is where I got my money: selling the shavings of Archimedes' ingenuity.'
'If it was so profitable, why aren't you still building water-snails?' asked Straton skeptically.
'Archimedes got bored with them,' Marcus replied at once. 'He always loses interest in his machines once he's got them working. He'd rather spend his time drawing circles- or, excuse me, cuboids. Of course, other people started making water-snails too, copying them from ours as well as they could. But still, everyone knew it was Archimedes' invention, and we were everyone's first choice of builder. We could have made a fortune, we could have! Instead, as soon as my master could afford to do geometry again, he found an enterprising fellow who was willing to pay a hundred drachmae for the design, handed our order book over to him, and went back to Alexandria to draw circles. I tell you, I could weep when I think of it. But listen! That's what happened the last time Archimedes applied himself to making machines. Now he's going to do it again. I'll bet on him against any engineer King Hieron ever heard of. You taking the bet?'
'Can I see this water-snail?'
Marcus grinned. 'Certainly.' Then, as the soldier moved toward the wicker basket, he added, 'But I charge two obols for a demonstration.'
Straton stopped in annoyance, one hand on the basket's lashings. 'Your master lets you do that?'
'He lets me look after the money,' said Marcus coolly. 'Weren't you listening?'
Straton studied the slave a moment, then laughed. 'All right!' he exclaimed. 'I'm sorry I laughed at your master and insulted your loyalty. You're a good slave.'
'I am not!' declared Marcus fiercely. 'I'm freeborn, and not slave enough to forget it. But I'm honest. You taking that bet or not?'
'Twenty drachmae to a stater? Your master to be offered his predecessor's job within six months?'
'That's right.'
Straton considered. It was an interesting bet. And despite what the slave had said, he thought he'd win. The slave was, after all, loyal to his master, and the master hadn't looked all that impressive to Straton. Ten to one was good odds. 'All right,' he agreed. 'I'll take it.'
Archimedes himself appeared as they were shaking hands on it. He was holding a torch, which flickered brightly in the growing dark, and a small boy followed him leading a donkey. Straton gave his new acquaintance the look of appraisal normally reserved for racehorses, and was reassured. No, this tall and gangling young man in a dirty linen tunic and shabby cloak did not look like a formidable genius. He was much in need of a haircut, a shave, and a bath, one knee was covered with blood while the other was dirty, and his face had a vague and vacant expression. The Egyptian stater, thought Straton, was pretty safe.
They loaded the chest on the donkey- the donkey was unhappy about it- and confirmed that they would meet next day. Archimedes handed the torch to Marcus, and the little party clip-clopped off down the road.
'What were you shaking hands about?' Archimedes asked his slave as they turned to climb the hill to the other side of the Achradina.
Marcus gave a self-satisfied smile. 'I made a bet with that soldier. Going to get back that stater you gave him.'
Archimedes looked at him with concern. 'I hope you don't lose your money.'
'Don't worry,' said Marcus, 'I won't.'
2
The Achradina was an old quarter. The first Greeks to colonize Syracuse had settled on the promontory of Ortygia, and Ortygia- a grand region of temples and public buildings prudently fortified and garrisoned- was still the seat of the government. The Achradina had formed early, though, when the houses and shops of the growing city overflowed the crowded citadel and sprawled messily along the shore. When the city grew again, in wealth and power, the New Town had been laid out inland for the rich, while the Tyche quarter, a straggle of buildings along the road north, had become the place of settlement for the poor. The Achradina belonged to the old middle class. Narrow-streeted and dirty, bordered by the walls which guarded the city from attack by sea, it was the heart of Syracuse- dark, crooked, and full of secret delights.
Archimedes crossed it joyfully. A city-state customarily inspired in her citizens the most intense and passionate sense of patriotism and civic pride, and though Archimedes had always been something of a misfit in his own city, still every dusty cross-roads seemed to him to be shining with the glory of Syracuse. Each step, too, took him closer to home. Eagerly he marked off each familiar landmark: the small park with its bedraggled plane trees; the baker's shop around the corner where the family had bought its bread; the public fountain with its statue of a lion, which had supplied water for the household. A scent of herbs and roast meat wafted from the cookshop down the road, where he'd often run to fetch an evening meal if for some reason one hadn't been prepared at home. Nikomachos' house; Euphanes the Butcher's shop, with his house on top of it… and finally, there it was. Archimedes stopped in the street and gazed in silence at the front of featureless mud brick and the weathered wood of the single door. His chest began to hurt and his eyes stung. At one time this house had defined what was meant by a house. It had been the only house that mattered, the center of the universe, that container for everything that was important in his small world. And it was still true that all the people he loved most were behind that door.
He wished they lived in Alexandria.
Marcus raised the torch and likewise gazed at the house, remembering the first time he'd seen it, when Phidias had led him back from the slave market in chains. Not home, he reminded himself fiercely, though uncertain why he was denying the joy that hovered at the edge of his awareness. Just the house where I am a slave. For a moment he remembered his own home in the hills of central Italy, his own parents. He shoved them quickly from his mind: probably dead now, anyway. Some of the bricks on Phidias' house were crumbling, he noted, and the roof needed retiling. Not surprising. He himself had been the only man in the household, unless you counted the masters, and you couldn't count them, not when it came to retiling roofs. The place must have been running down. He had work ahead of him.
Gelon the Baker's son, who'd come to look after his father's donkey, shuffled his feet and asked, 'Is this it?'
They unloaded the donkey, set the chest down, and sent the baker's son home with his father's beast, handing the child the torch to light his way. In the soft summer darkness Archimedes took a deep breath and knocked upon the door.
There was a long silence. Archimedes knocked again, and at last the door cracked open and a woman peered anxiously out, the lines in her worn face deeply shadowed in the light of the lamp she held. 'Sosibia!' cried Archimedes, breaking into an enormous smile, and the housekeeper gaped, then screamed, 'Medion!' — the diminutive ending of his proper name, his family nickname, which he hadn't heard for three years.
The reunion was as noisy and as joyful as anything Archimedes had pictured to himself. His mother, Arata, came running and flung her arms around him. His sister, Philyra, seized him as soon as his mother let go. 'You've grown up!' he told her, and held her at arms length to admire her. She had been thirteen when he left: now sixteen and a young woman, she had not, in fact, changed much. Still straight and thin, gawky and bright-eyed, with her unruly brown hair pulled into a knot behind her head. She knocked his hands away so she could hug him.
