A little more talk brought Berosos around, albeit with sighs and moans for the fate awaiting him. Onas said:
"I, too, will join, if my wife permit."
Berosos laughed. "That is the Egyptian for you!"
"Whatever uncivilized nations may do," said Onas, "we look upon marriage as a partnership." We paid and rose.
I asked: "Have you a wife, Berosos?"
The Babylonian sighed. "I had, ere my city was by the Macedonians ravaged. In the confusion she vanished, and though her with diligence I sought, no trace did I find. She may have been slain, or sold, or by some lustful soldier carried off."
"Or," said Onas, "she may have run away to escape your lectures. Here we are."
Onas led us into his shop. Instead of taking us straight to his dwelling, on the floor above, he insisted on showing us his stock. There were black onyxes and green chrysophrases and red sardonyxes, which the Egyptian was carving with his tiny drills and burrs for the rings of rich citizens. There were red carbuncles condensed from the urine of lynxes, a thunderstone that had fallen from the sky, and a lodestone from the land of the Hyperboreans.
"Watch," he said, and showed us how the lodestone would pick up an iron nail, then he brought out a fine purple amethyst.
"Wear this and you need never fear drunkenness, such is its mystic power. And here is a piece of genuine amber from the fog-bound North. Watch."
He produced a small feather, rubbed the amber against his sleeve, and then picked up the feather with it as the lodestone had picked up the nail.
"There is more magic in gems than in all your stars," he said. In the dimness of the shop Onas seemed a different man from the bluff, soldierly fellow he was outside. His eyes seemed larger; they seemed to look through Berosos and me to some distant vision.
"Close your eyes," he said, "and face the corner, and I will show you my good stones."
We did as he bade us. We heard him moving and opening things, and then he said: "Turn!"
Onas held a tray, from which gems winked up like the eyes of unknown beasts in a forest night. He held up one pale, colorless stone.
"This," he said, "is the true diamond. It is less beautiful than most gems, because it is so hard that no tool can cut it. However, in magical potency it surpasses all other gems. It gives its wearer the qualities of resistance, stubbornness, unflinching determination, and virtual invulnerability. Comes it from the north of India, from mountains so high they are eternally covered with that—that—what call you it when rain falls frozen, not as hail, but in feathery flakes?"
"Snow?" I said.
"Aye, snow. On these mountains so intense is the cold that water, once frozen, can never be melted again; and this eternal ice we call the diamond."
He told us of his other fine gems—a ruby, an emerald, a fine pearl from the Arabian Sea—and then said: "As my friends, you two would be entitled to a great reduction of price. This green chrysolite, for instance, would make a fine ring gem, preventing fevers, madness, and nocturnal terrors. For you I would cut it for only—"
The spell broke. Berosos and I burst into protests of poverty; we could not think such extravagant baubles; we were young men, our fortunes unmade ...
At last, with a sigh, Onas put away his gems. I said: "At least, old boy, with a stock like that, you're never in danger of starvation. That box you showed us contains a fair estate by itself."
"Say not so," he replied. "What of high interest rates, and the dangers of theft and loss, it is a chancy business. Lucky the year that I end not up in debt to Elavos the Syrian! Come."
He led us up the stairway to an apartment. Here he presented us to a small, slight, dark woman. "My wife, Nembto," he said. Then he spoke to her in his own tongue.
Nembto: "I pleased. You sit. I get lunch."
She hurled a crackling string of Egyptian syllables at Onas, who, though twice her size, quailed. Then she went out. Berosos asked:
"What said she? 'Just wait until I get you alone, you scoundrel'?"
"Not quite," said the Egyptian. "She did chide me a little for not giving her warning and thus letting guests see the house in disorder. Excuse me, friends."
He followed his wife to the kitchen, whence came sounds of spirited argument. When he returned, he said:
"It is all arranged about the soldiering. She balked at first but gave in when I told her that people are paid for this duty. Hold out your cups ..."
The smallest crew to fight a catapult like ours is eight: four cockers, a loader, an aimer, a trigger man, and of course the commander. We also had four extra men to take the place of the fallen, relieve the cockers when they tired, and provide the thews for moving the engine, as it weighed a good fifteen talents.
The six catapults formed a battery under commands of Bias the carpenter. Bias was, like me, a tribesman, respectable but neither rich nor learned; a middle-aged man with the knobby hands and wrinkled neck of a lifelong artisan. The full citizens reserved most of the commissioned ranks to themselves; but, as no gentleman would dirty his hands on a mechanical contrivance like a catapult, they left this post to Bias, who knew more practical engineering than the whole lot of them together.
My squad picked the name Talos for our catapult, after the stone-throwing bronzen man whom the god Hephaistos made for King Minos. The other five engines of the battery became the Eros, Helios, Herakles, Artemis, and Orion.
Three mornings after my visit to the armory, a pair of mules pulled each of the six catapults out through the great gate in the South Wall. We rumbled through the suburbs under a clear blue sky and into the country. The crewmen tramped beside their catapults, with Bias at their head and their servants straggling behind.
We halted at a farm where several haystacks were dotted about a field. The mules were unhitched and led back to graze, while the catapults were levered up to take the rollers from under them.
"Men!" began Bias, squinting at a sheet of papyrus on which he had written notes. "The first rule of the artilleryman is: 'Never get in front of your own piece.' If you're not half-witted, like an artilleryman oughtn't to be, you can figure out why without me telling you.
"The second rule is: 'Never stand inside the radius of the throwing arms.' Sometimes a catapult goes off when you don't expect it, and one of those arms can send your head flying like a hockey ball.
"The third rule is: 'Inspect and adjust your piece before and after every use.' A catapult is as fickle as a woman. Unless you keep it in good humor by adjusting it all the time, it starts casting its missiles every which way, or it breaks down and won't shoot at all, or it flies to pieces and smashes its crew like bugs. The skeins get too tight or chafe against the stress bolts, and they break when the engine is cocked. Or they go slack and lose their tension. The tension changes with the weather; a damp day slackens them, while a dry one makes them taut. They have to be oiled every month to keep them from getting brittle.
"You've got to inspect your piece whether you think it needs it or not. In fact, inspect all the harder when you think it don't need it, on account of that's just when something goes wrong.
"Now, there's two general types of catapult: the flexion type, which has a big bow fastened to the frame, so we get our tension by bending the arms of the bow; and the torsion type, like these here, with two rigid throwing arms passed through torsion skeins. The flexion type we don't use much any more except for scorpions, or when we haven't got the materials or the engineering skill to build the torsion type.
"Catapults of each type can be built in different sizes. We generally call the big ones stone throwers, on account of they shoot balls of stone or brick weighing from ten pounds up to a talent, for distances up to twelve plethra* (*A plethron =100 feet.). In most stone throwers the trough is fixed in position at a slope to give the greatest range. So range can be varied only by pulling the string back different distances before discharge ..."