He would have no company on his visits to it, either; none. He would be alone- as his father had been, these three years past. With a spasm of fresh pain, he supposed that Fate was just.
Then he remembered the war. In Alexandria it had been hard to believe in it; here in Syracuse it loomed larger, far more threatening. Lines from an old song wandered through his mind:
Let none of humankind ever once say what chance tomorrow will bring, nor, seeing a happy man, that contentment will stay for, swift as a dragonfly's wing swifter again comes change.
"You get dressed," ordered Philyra, patting his hand. "I'll go talk to Marcus about getting your other things washed."
Marcus was taking a bath when Philyra found him. Private houses did not generally have bathrooms, and bathhouses in that age were for citizens only: Marcus was washing in the courtyard with a sponge and a bucket. It was not uncommon for even the free men of a household to walk about naked indoors, and a slave's nudity was nothing to worry about, but Philyra hung back awkwardly, waiting at the foot of the stairs until Marcus had finished. She felt uncomfortable about him. She too was aware that one of the household slaves would probably be sold, and she was hoping that one would be Marcus. She had always sided with Sosibia in the household feud, and regarded Marcus as an awkward barbarian. Besides, after a three-year absence he felt like a stranger. She could contemplate selling him; she couldn't bear the thought of inflicting that fate on any of the others. She noticed now that though Marcus had a shocking bruise on his left side, and though he was just as flea-bitten as her brother, he looked sleek and fit. That would mean a good price, but still her lips narrowed with disapproval. Marcus had been sent to Alexandria to look after Archimedes, but had returned glowing with health, while his master's ribs were like a washboard.
An inconvenient fair-mindedness, however, reminded her that Archimedes had always been thin, and Marcus sturdy. And when Archimedes was doing geometry he would forget to eat unless you set his food on top of the abacus- and sometimes even then he'd simply move it out of the way and carry on calculating. It was probably unfair to blame Marcus too much for the state his master had come home in.
Marcus poured the remains of the bucket of water over his head, shook himself, and picked up his tunic. Philyra pushed herself out of the doorway into the sunny courtyard. "Marcus!" she said sharply. "Where's my brother's luggage?"
Marcus jumped and pulled his tunic hastily over his head before replying. He felt as awkward with Philyra as she with him. She'd been a schoolgirl when he'd left the house; now she was a young woman. "There," he said, indicating the chest in the corner of the yard. "But I wouldn't open it, mistress."
"Why not?" she demanded. "I can't believe the things in it are clean! It's going to be a good drying day." Indeed, the air was already hot: anything washed now would be dry well before the evening.
He shrugged. "It has presents in it," he said. "One of them is for you." His eyes lingered momentarily on the front of her tunic. She became aware of how it was clinging, and hitched it up, reddening.
"But I just told him I was going to see to his things!" she protested. "And he didn't say anything about presents."
Marcus snorted. "Would you expect him to think of a thing like that?"
No, she wouldn't. Archimedes probably remembered the presents, and must know that they were in the same chest as the clothes. But he would not put the two things together, and know that it would spoil her surprise if she opened the chest. She made an exasperated noise, Marcus grinned, and something swung into balance between them: they were both members of the same household, both aware of the tastes and foibles of the same small collection of people.
"There's no hurry, is there?" he asked.
There was not, not really. She just wanted everything to be settled: her brother indisputably home, in his own room as he should be, with the chest reduced from traveling chest to clothes chest. She walked over to the luggage and glared at it resentfully. "What's in the basket?" she asked.
"The famous water-snail," replied Marcus, grinning again. "We can unpack that, if you like." He went over to the chest and began to untie the rope.
"Won't he want to show it to me himself?" she asked doubtfully.
"No," replied Marcus, undoing another knot. Suddenly he wanted very much to show her the water-snail, to impress her. "We made thirty-two of the things in Egypt, and he's sick of the sight of them. But it's an amazing machine. Here, let me show you!" He drew the rope off the basket, hauling the coils under the chest. Philyra leaned against the courtyard wall with her arms crossed, trying to look uninterested, though in fact she was acutely curious. Marcus was sharply aware of the way her stance cast one thin hip into linen-hung relief. Too thin, he told himself- like her father and her brotherbut somehow prettier than such an angular girl should be. Perhaps it was the brightness of her eyes. Not that it had any bearing on him: he was as much her brother's property as the machine he was unpacking. Still, where was the harm in showing a pretty girl a machine?
He untied the knot that secured the basket's lid, opened the basket, and lifted out from a nest of straw a wooden cylinder. It was about a cubit long- the distance from a man's elbow to his fingertipsand the outside was made of planks bound, barrel-like, with iron hoops. The interior held a complicated structure smeared with pitch. A stand was fixed to the cylinder's core with a pin, so that the whole thing could turn like a wheel.
"The Egyptians usually lift water with a machine called a water-drum," said Marcus, turning the cylinder in his hands. "A sort of wheel with eight buckets around the rim. A full-sized one moves a lot of water, but it's heavy to turn- it needs a couple of men to shift it. Your brother started off with one of them, and finished up with this. The real machines we built were bigger, of course- they stood about as tall as a man- but otherwise they were exactly like this. As you can see, this still has eight inlets"- he showed her the eight openings in the cylinder's base- "but they're not buckets. They're tubes." He stuck a finger into one, and she saw that it was indeed a kind of tube, and that it ran up around the core at an angle. "They coil right around the cylinder several times and come out here, at the top." He slapped the top edge of the cylinder, which was identical to the bottom. "Each one is a bit like a snail shell, which is why it's called a snail. They're made of strips of willow, stuck onto the core with pitch and closed over with planks. I don't know how he fixed on the angle they spiral at, but it's very important: a lot of the people who tried to copy it got it wrong, and then it didn't work. Now, what you do to work it…" Marcus glanced about, fixed on a large amphora of water sitting in the corner of the courtyard, and hurried over to it, holding the water-snail. He set the machine down, fetched the bucket he'd used for his bath, and poured some water from the amphora into the bucket. Then he set the bucket in a dip in the courtyard, balancing it with some loose stones so that it stood at an angle on its side, and placed a laundry footboard before it to make a platform. "It has to sit at an angle," he explained to Philyra. "The exact angle is important, too- that's another thing people who copied it used to get wrong. This one is right if the stand's straight." He set the foot of the water-snail in the water of the bucket and the head on the platform. "Now all you have to do is turn it." He gestured for her to oblige.
Philyra hitched the hem of her tunic away from her feet and crouched down beside him. She put one hand on the wooden cylinder and began to turn it slowly; it revolved easily on its stand. Water ran into the tubes at the foot of the snail. She kept turning, and presently water ran out of snail's head. She kept turning the machine gently, watching it: water ran in, ran down the tubes, and…