"It's running uphill!" she exclaimed, shocked. She took her hand off the machine as though it had burned her.
Marcus grinned. "Quick!" he said. "It takes most people a bit longer to realize that. Some need to have it pointed out to them. But it doesn't- not exactly. Watch more closely."
Philyra turned the machine again. Water ran into a tube; as the tube went up, the water ran down, into the spiral, and then along it as it turned on. She laughed delightedly.
Marcus grinned back at her. "It runs downhill all the way up," he said.
"Sometimes," said Philyra, "I think my brother is a mistake of Nature. He shouldn't have been born a human being at all; he should have been an attendant spirit in the workshops of the gods. I suppose a full-sized one of these is very much easier to turn than a water-drum?"
" 'Course it is," agreed Marcus. "You don't need two men; you don't even need one. A child can operate it- because all you have to turn is the snail itself: the water just runs downhill." He sat back on his heels and gazed lovingly at the machine. "We had people queueing up to buy it," he told her. "We could have made a fortune!"
"I thought you did!" Philyra said in surprise. "More in two months than my father earns in a year, my brother said."
Marcus shook his head sadly. "Eighteen hundred eighty drachmae. Enough to pay our debts and live well in Alexandria for a year. But we had orders for another thirty of the machines- at eighty drachmae apiece! — and every expectation of more again. He preferred to do geometry."
Philyra stared at the water-snail and swallowed. She could not imagine eighteen hundred and eighty drachmae all together in one lump; still less could she imagine spending such a sum. The rent from the family's small farm was three hundred drachmae a year- less, now that the vineyard had been sold- and Phidias' teaching had brought in perhaps as much again. The water-snail had earned not just more than her father's salary but three times the household's entire annual income- and Archimedes had spent it all, except for a hundred drachmae.
Marcus understood her sudden silence and wished he'd kept his mouth shut. He shifted uncomfortably. "Alexandria's expensive," he said defensively. "And there was the debt, and the fare back." There'd been a woman, too, who had accounted for quite a lot of the money, but he had no intention of mentioning her to Archimedes' sister. "Your brother wasn't as extravagant as it seems," he finished instead- which was certainly true, given Alexandrian prices, to say nothing of the woman's. "Besides, there's a hundred and sixty drachmae left."
"A hundred and sixty?" asked Philyra suspiciously. "He told me a hundred."
Marcus shrugged and grinned again. "You expect him to keep track of money?"
This time she did not smile. Instead, she gave him a cool, assessing stare. "You were keeping track of it for him, were you?"
For a moment, he didn't understand. Then his face darkened. "I haven't taken a copper of it!" he declared indignantly. "You can ask him."
"If he wasn't keeping track of it, what good would that do?"
Philyra, watching his face, saw the anger in it suddenly dwindle into sullen impassivity. It was as though something else drained out with it- a sense of freedom, an identity. She suddenly regretted her suspicion. And yet- eighteen hundred and eighty drachmae! She didn't see how such a huge sum of money could have just vanished. Her vague, dreamy brother was easy prey for any cheat.
"I never took a copper of his money," Marcus repeated sourly. "You can ask him."
Bitterly, he remembered how he and his master had returned to Alexandria from making water-snails in the Delta. When the riverboat docked, Archimedes had leaped off and gone straight to the Museum, leaving Marcus to take the luggage back to their lodgings. The luggage- and the box containing eighteen hundred and eighty drachmae. A lot of money. Enough to buy Marcus passage on a ship back to Italy, and to pay for a pair of oxen, some sheep, and a year's rent on a little farm once he got there. He'd been painfully aware, as he trudged along with the heavy chest, how easy it would be to get away. It wouldn't even have been as though he were leaving his master stranded: Archimedes could always have gone back and made a few more water-snails. In the end what held him back was not the honesty on which he had always prided himself, but despair. The events that had enslaved him- the lost battle, the dead men- were still there, ineradicable and absolute. He could not go home, and there seemed little point in going anywhere else. His slavery, which until then he had always thought of as something imposed upon him contrary to his true nature, suddenly revealed itself as the inescapable condition on which he held his life.
He recognized now that he was putting off the girl with a slave's defense- My master hasn't complained, so you have no right to- and he stood up angrily, swept up the water-snail, and carried it back to its basket. Philyra followed him, her expression still a mixture of suspicion and apology. "Maybe I will ask him," she said.
"You do that," growled Marcus, tipping the last of the water out of the snail onto the dirt of the yard.
"In the meantime," said Philyra, drawing herself up, "take all the dirty things out of the chest and put them ready for washing. Just leave the other things in it, for my brother to sort out."
"Yes, mistress," said Marcus bitterly. He turned his back on her and ostentatiously began to put the snail away. But he sensed it when she left, and turned to watch her. She walked with a straight, stiff step, back straight and head with its knot of untidy hair held high, and she went directly to the room at the end of the courtyard where her father was dying. His resentment vanished, leaving only sadness. Her father was ill, her mother undoubtedly distracted by caring for him. She was trying hard to be a prudent and sensible guardian of the house and not a burden upon it: if he'd been free he would have applauded her for it. She was young and ignorant. It was not her fault he was a slave.
Archimedes stumbled downstairs a few minutes later. He was dressed in the new tunic, which, unbelted and crooked, he contrived to make almost as disreputable as the one he'd taken off the day before. He blinked at the heap of dirty laundry beside the chest as though it were the fragments of something that had broken and he were trying to work out what.
"I told your sister not to unpack the chest herself, because it had presents in it," said Marcus quickly. "The presents are still there."
"Oh," said Archimedes, but as though the words hadn't registered.
He looked, Marcus thought, even vaguer and more preoccupied than usual. "Do you want to take the presents out and give them to your family?" he suggested pointedly. "Your sister's in a hurry to shift the chest."
"Oh," said Archimedes again. He came over and stared into the chest. Marcus had already sorted the presents into one corner: a jar of myrrh for Arata, a lute for Philyra, and a box full of ivory tiles for Phidias.
Archimedes bent over and picked up the box. Like its contents, it was of ivory, and it had been decorated with a picture of the god Apollo and the nine Muses, sketched with a fine red line. He remembered looking at it in the shop, assembling the pieces of the puzzle, and smiling as he imagined his father's delight in doing the same. Phidias would not play with the puzzle now. He was too tired, too ill, too busy dying. One more puzzle abandoned- and there had been many, many other puzzles Phidias had been too busy and too tired to solve during the course of his life. He had needed to earn money for the household, bread for the children. He had needed to be a citizen, a husband, a father before he could be a mathematician and astronomer. Archimedes had profited from it. Now he numbly regarded the empty half of himself, an unpayable debt passed on.