The other two watched him a moment. Then Dionysios looked at Straton and raised his eyebrows.
Straton's answering look was glum.
"What's the matter?" asked the captain.
"I think I may have lost a bet," replied the soldier.
Dionysios looked at him, looked at the now deeply absorbed Archimedes, guessed the general nature of the bet- and laughed. "Never mind!" he said consolingly. "Your loss will be the city's gain- and they have flute girls in this place who could make you forget far worse griefs than that." He clapped his hands, and the waiter, who had been standing impatiently outside the door, entered to carry out the dishes and usher the flute girls in.
In the house near the lion fountain, Philyra was waiting up for her brother. Phidias in his sickroom fell early into a restless slumber; Arata settled on a mattress on the floor beside her husband, where she would wake easily if he needed her during the night. The slaves went to the hot upper room they shared at the back of the house. But Philyra went into the courtyard with the wide-necked lute her brother had given her, sat down on the bench beside the door, and began tentatively to pluck the strings.
Lutes were comparatively new instruments to the Greeks, unknown before the conquests of Alexander the Great. Philyra had seen them before, but never held one: one of her own was the best present she'd ever been given. This one was marvelously beautiful, with a round body of polished rosewood and a neck inlaid with shell. It had a deep, sweet tone, too.
Philyra plucked each of the eight strings in turn, then, with a breathless thrill, stopped them near the top of the neck and plucked them again. She was an accomplished player on the kithara, and knew how to raise the pitch of a string by stopping it on the crossboard with her finger- but for kitharists, such fingering was a virtuoso exercise and its use was limited. The lute promised a whole new dimension to music.
The whole family had always been musical. For as long as Philyra could remember, Arata and Phidias had played together almost every evening, he on the kithara, she on the lyre. Archimedes, as he grew older, had usually joined them on the auloi- the soft-voiced woodwind flutes that were played in pairs- and when Philyra in turn learned an instrument, she too had joined in the concerts. Sometimes the family had played for hours, late into the night, one offering a melody which the others would take up, alter, and pass back. It had often seemed to Philyra that music was an ideal world, that all the best things in the real world were there, but clearer, stronger, more poignant. There was her mother's steadiness, maintaining the balance and rhythm of their common life; there were her father's dreamy gentleness and his sudden tumultuous excitements. And there was her brother, not vague, as he so often was when you spoke to him, but fearfully, ruthlessly precise, and so deep and complicated that she had often struggled to follow him- though in the end he had always resolved his musical knots into an affectionate simplicity. When he left for Alexandria she had tried to play the auloi for a bit, because the strings had sounded so bereft without the flutes' voice to wind among them. But in the end she had gone back to her lyre and kithara. There was something disreputable about a girl playing the flute- and anyway, nobody could play like Medion.
She had missed him. She'd been angry that he hadn't come home when he was supposed to, and bitterly angry when their father fell ill- but now that he was back, the anger was already melting away. She hoped that he would soon return from his drink with the soldier, so that they could play some music together.
She experimented with the lute for perhaps an hour, then, tired by the intense concentration, put it away in her room and came back with her old kithara instead. Easily she plucked out a slow, soft tune with her left hand, while her right struck an occasional ripple of accompaniment with the plectrum.
"Remember once," sang Philyra, her low voice blending with the strings,
"Remember when,
I told you this holy word?
'The hour is fair, but fleet is the hour,
The hour outraces the swiftest bird.'
Look! It's scattered to earth, your flower."
She was very good, thought Marcus, standing at his window and listening to her. But that was no surprise. She'd played well before he left, and she'd had three years to get better.
Behind him, Chrestos was curled up on the pallet they shared, while Sosibia and her daughter shared another bed behind a curtain. But he could not sleep, so he stood there, gazing into the darkness of the courtyard below, and listening to the music.
When he had first entered the household, he had found the nightly concerts disturbing. In his own home there had not been much music. His mother had sung sometimes while she worked, and he and his brother had sung in the fields, but apart from that, music had been something one paid others to perform. He had bought some whenever he had money, because he loved it; now he could not afford it, and had it all the time, for nothing. At first he had resented his own pleasure in it: surely it degraded him that he enjoyed any aspect of his slavery? But he'd got used to music, accustomed to having it around, sensitive to its patterns and undertones. He'd almost forgotten what life was like without it.
Philyra sang on, her voice rising clear and sweet into the dark, old songs from the countryside, new songs from the royal courts, love songs and hymns to the gods. Marcus stood silently at the window, listening and watching the stars above the rooftops of Syracuse. After a while she stopped singing and simply played, passing the tune from right hand to left and back again, and he sat down against the bedroom wall, but kept listening, wondering why this ripple of notes should say so many things more than any human tongue.
At last Philyra stopped, yawned, and sat silent, her kithara upon her lap. Marcus stood up hurriedly, so that he could watch her go- but she did not. He understood then that the music had simply been to amuse herself while she waited for her brother to come home. He hesitated, nervous of approaching her. But what harm would it do for a household slave to advise her to go to bed? He turned from the window, crept out of the room- silently, so as not to disturb Sosibia- and down the stairs.
"Mistress?" he called, stepping out into the courtyard, and even in the dark he saw how she jumped.
"What do you want?" she called, guilt from her suspicions of him adding sharpness to her tone.
Marcus stopped a few feet away, faceless in the dark. "Mistress, don't wait up all night," he said gently. "Your brother may not be back for hours yet."
She made an exasperated noise. "He's bound to be back soon! He's been gone hours already."
"Probably he's treating this man to an evening's entertainment. That means he may not be back until after midnight. There's no reason for you to wait up. I'll open the door for him when he comes."
Night hid Philyra's frown, but not the suspicion in her voice when she said, "He never used to go out drinking until after midnight!"
Innocent! thought Marcus affectionately. To expect that he'd keep the same hours after three years on his own in a famously luxurious city! "He was often out late in Alexandria," he told her. "And tonight he'll have to go along with whatever the other fellow wants, to be sure of his help. It's probably a good sign that he's late: means there's something on offer."
For a moment, Philyra said nothing. She told herself that Marcus was implying that her brother had picked up expensive habits in Alexandria, and that this was exactly what Marcus would say, to account for the missing money. "What was he doing out late in Alexandria?" she asked at last, in a brittle voice. Truth or lies, she didn't really want to know, but it was unfair to go on suspecting Marcus without knowing what he had to say.
But Marcus answered at once, and mildly, "Nothing you need to worry about, mistress. He had a pack of friends, and they'd sit about drinking and talking and… making music, half the night. When there wasn't a lecture on next day, they'd see the sun up."