"When I sent you that message, I was afraid Hieron meant to tie you to something in your contract," Delia went on. "I was wrong. I shouldn't have said anything to your slave. It was simply that he was there, and I had the opportunity. I hope it didn't alarm you." She shot him another sideways glance.
He was frowning. "King Hieron isn't going to tie me to anything in my contract?" he asked.
She took a deep breath. The least she could do to atone for her own disloyalty would be to reassure him about Hieron. "He's not going to give you a salaried position as a royal engineer at all. He thinks you'd like it better if he simply pays you well for what you do. He said that any job he gave you you'd come to regard as a prison. So, you see, I was quite wrong, and shouldn't have said anything. I should have known Hieron wouldn't do anything… unjust." Guilt at her own behavior added warmth to her tone.
"But I thought…" he began- then stopped. The frown was deepening. "I don't understand. What does the king want of me?"
"You must know you're exceptional," she said. "As an engineer, I mean."
The frown did not lighten. "I'm better at mathematics."
She thought of the ship gliding along the slipway, and laughed. "You must be very exceptional at that, then! The whole city is talking about your demonstration."
That was true: Agathon had reported it. The whole city was talking about the man who had moved a ship single-handed, and adding that the same man was now building astounding catapults for the defense of Syracuse. The threatened citizens comforted themselves with the thought of Archimedes' skill.
Archimedes made an impatient gesture with one hand. "There's nothing new about pulleys! But I've done some things in mathematics that nobody else has done before." He chewed on a thumb.
"What?" she asked.
He looked at her hopefully. "Do you know anything about geometry?"
She hesitated uncomfortably. "I can keep household accounts."
He shook his head. "That's arithmetic."
"Are they so different?"
He looked at her. She was already beginning to be annoyed when she realized that it was not a look of disgust at her stupidity, still less the condescending don't-trouble-your-pretty-head-about-that look that Leptines the Regent gave her far too often. It was a look that might have come from a stammerer confronted with an urgent need to speak: a passionate longing to be understood and the hopeless knowledge that he would not be. "Arithmetic is a natural system," he said. "But geometry is something the god of the philosophers invented to design the world. Rome, Carthage, Syracuse- we're all that"- he snapped his fingers- "to geometry. Oh gods, it's a divine and beautiful thing!"
She studied his face, the line of the cheekbones and the brightness of the eyes. She recognized remotely that it was this "divine thing" which had attracted her to him- or rather, its reflection in music. Utterly pure and inhumanly precise, it enlarged the world simply by existing. And she wanted, she had always wanted, more than her own world was willing to offer her.
"The gods have given you a great gift, then," she said, torn between admiration and envy.
"Yes," he replied, seriously and without hesitation. Then he went on, embarrassed, "You should get someone to teach it to you. I'd offer to, but I wouldn't be any good. I have tried teaching- my father used to get me to help with his students. But the students said I confused them." His hands tightened on his knees at the memory of his father's patience with those students, and the recollection of the previous day's prescribed offerings at his father's tomb. He did not want to think of his father; he had been immersing himself in catapults precisely so that he wouldn't have to think of his father, and now that the subject had come up, he leaped away from it. "I didn't mean to bore you, lady. But I'm sorry, I don't understand why you asked me here just to tell me that your brother intends to deal with me fairly. Did he send you?"
She looked at him wide-eyed, then blushed. "No," she said.
"Then I don't understand…" he began- then suddenly, looking at her, he did. She sat there, watching him, her eyes frightened and her cheeks ashamed, but the lift of her head a determined challenge. Hieron had not sent her; she had come, alone and heavily cloaked, to meet him in secret. He had not wondered at that, and he should have. The liking he'd felt for her, casual, expecting nothing, crystallized all at once into a shape with edges sharp enough to wound.
"I'm sorry," he said, awed by it, and afraid now. "I was stupid. I…"
He could not think what to say, and they looked at each other, both now blushing furiously. In the back of his mind echoed the warnings: "You were lucky you confined yourself to flutes!" "May the gods forbid that there should be anything between you and the king's sister!" What would a tyrant do to a man who seduced his sister?
What would the sister do if he refused her? Old stories swirled about his mind: Bellerophon, Hippolytos, falsely accused of rape by the queens they had rejected. Looking at Delia, he did not believe a word of it- and yet, this whole situation was unbelievable, and the stories were there, whether he credited them or not.
"You mustn't think I mean to betray my brother's trust," she said, with a sudden fierce determination. "Hieron has never treated me with anything except kindness, and I would never dishonor…" She stopped, knowing that she had already betrayed her brother's trust, already taken the first step to dishonoring the house. Only a small step, so far, but this meeting had done nothing to convince her heart of its folly: quite the reverse. "It's only that I wanted to know you better," she went on, more uncertainly- and suddenly saw that she was treating him even more disgracefully than she was treating Hieron. Even as much as she'd done already could injure him, devastate his career, and blast his reputation. The king treated him with great kindness, and he responded by trying to seduce the king's sister! Seduction was a crime, and she was asking him to risk the penalties without even a seducer's reward. Shameless, selfish, heartless! She turned away, in an absolute misery of shame, shame on all sides, and pulled her veil forward to hide the hot tears that were bursting from her eyes.
He looked at her for a moment- the tears, the confusion- and forgot, as he kept forgetting, that she was the sister of the king. He caught one of her clenched hands, and she looked back at him, her face wet and red and hopeless. The only natural thing to do seemed to be to kiss her, so he did. It was like finding the ratio, solving the puzzle, or coming home. A flurry of notes fell perfectly upon the beat, and two pitches blended into harmony.
She broke away first, pushed him back with the heel of her hand, wrapped her arms around herself and tried to separate the chaos she was feeling into coherent emotions. "Oh, gods!" she cried frantically.
"I'm sorry," he lied awkwardly: he was not sorry at all. He was enormously pleased and flattered; he was frightened and wished himself out of this- and underneath it all, complicating everything, he was enchanted by Delia, clever, witty, proud, determined girl, with such beautiful black eyes and a wonderful neat warm body whose imprint still tingled against his own. He didn't just want to go to bed with her; he wanted to sit up in bed with her afterward, talking and laughing and playing the flute. Like a new theorem, the range of possibilities ramified away from her, a ladder of inevitable connections: if and then all the way down to the final conclusive this is what was to be proved.