Agathon gave his sour smile. "You said you wanted to see any letters to Archimedes that came from Alexandria," he remarked. "One came yesterday. I had the customs official divert it." He pulled a small, thin-bladed knife out of his belt and began warming the end in the lamp flame.
Hieron looked down to the bottom of the sheaf, found the relevant letter, and handed it to him. He and Agathon had been in the habit of intercepting other people's letters long before he became king, and if he'd ever had any tremors of conscience over it, they had long since faded.
Agathon carefully slid the hot knife between the parchment and the wax of the seal, then handed the letter to the king with a bow. Hieron sat back and read it. Reading aloud was the usual custom of the age, but Hieron, to his slave's disappointment, read almost silently, barely moving his lips.
Conon son of Nikias of Samos to Archimedes son of Phidias of Syracuse sends greetings.
Dearest [Alpha]…
Hieron frowned slightly: "Dearest Alpha." Had the writer chosen that form of address because it was the first letter of Archimedes' name- or because it was the number one?
Dearest Alpha, you've been gone less than a month, and I swear by Delian Apollo it seems years, and empty years, too, with nothing but wet afternoons in them. I never hear a flute but I think of you, and there's not one person who's had anything remotely intelligent to say about tangents of conic sections ever since you went away. Diodotos was blathering on about hyperbolae the other day, and I told him what you'd said about the ratio, and he swelled up like a frog and asked me to prove it. And of course, I couldn't, though I gave him a list of propositions instead. He came back later saying he'd proved one, but he hadn't. I'll tell you more about that later.
The main thing I want to say is, I have a job at the Museum, and you can have one too! In fact, it's thanks to you that I now have my perch in the Muses' bird cage. The king has been investing in the most enormous engineering works at Arsinoitis, and when he went up to have a look at them, apparently the first thing he saw was a water-snail. "What is it?" asked the king. "By Zeus, I never saw anything like it in my life!" And shortly afterward, Kallimachos…
The poet? wondered Hieron. The head of the Library of Alexandria?
… Kallimachos himself came knocking at my door in a great sweat and said, "You're a friend of Archimedes of Syracuse- where is he? The king wants to meet him." So I told him you'd gone back to Syracuse, and he swore by Hades and the Lady of the Crossroads (and several other divinities I wasn't sure about; poets can't even swear like other people these days) and took me to meet the king instead. Ptolemy was amazingly civil to me, and gave me dinner, and we talked. Kallimachos was there, too, but he just sat and picked his fingernails and made eyes at the slave boys. The man's incapable of talking about anything but literature and boys. The king, though, knows quite a lot of mathematics- you know Euclid was his tutor. He said it was quite true about Euclid saying there was no royal road to geometry, he was there at the time. And he was very interested when I told him about eclipses, and asked me when the next one would be. That's nothing to do with what I'm writing you about, though. After we'd talked for a bit, and I'd told him some more about you (you can believe I sang your praises, Alpha!), he said he wished he'd known it sooner, and he asked me to write to you and invite you to come back and take a job at the Museum, with a big salary and everything. Then he offered me a job too (Diodotos is perfectly green about that) but it's you he really wants. I think it's really engineering he's after- he kept telling me how wonderful the water-snail is, and when I showed him my dioptra he wanted to buy it, and laughed and said he didn't blame me when I said I'd sooner sell my house and the cloak off my back. I warned him, though, that you weren't interested in doing any more water-snails, and he said that was fine. I know you like making machines if it isn't the same thing all the time and it doesn't interfere with geometry. Write to him, or to me if you prefer, and he'll send you the letters of authorization at once. Please, Alpha, come back quick! Why be poor in Syracuse when you can be rich in Alexandria? You could bring your family here if you're worried about them. It's much safer, anyway, with none of your garlic-eating barbarian armies about. As for me, I am pining away in your absence, or I would be if I didn't keep eating Dora's cakes to console myself. The Museum banquets are on a Homeric scale, too.
The proposition Diodotos says he proved is this…
There followed several pages of abstruse geometrical reasoning, which Hieron skipped. He read the warm farewell at the close, and the still warmer hope that the writer would see the recipient "soon, by Hera and all the immortals!" Then he refolded the letter and set it down with a sigh.
"Well?" asked Agathon.
"King Ptolemy is offering him the Museum," said the king resignedly.
Agathon picked the letter up and squinted at it. "It's not the royal seal," he observed.
"No," agreed Hieron. "The offer comes through a friend- a close friend, from the sound of it. But I don't think there's any doubt that it's genuine. Ptolemy was evidently much impressed by an irrigation device. I'll have to ask Archimedes how it works." He waved a hand at the letter. "You'd better seal that up again and return it."
"You don't want it to go missing?"
Hieron shook his head glumly. "He'd realize. I just want to see the reply." He turned back to his other letters. They were mostly business notes from within the city, but one caught his eye. He held up a hand to check Agathon just before the door-keeper left. "Note from Archimedes himself," he said; then, glancing through it, "He says the three-talenter will be ready in another three days, and he invites me to stop at his house on my way back to the city after the test-firing, either for dinner or simply for wine and cakes."
"He wants something," said Agathon flatly.
"Good!" replied Hieron. "He can have it." He tapped the invitation against his desk. "That other letter- delay it, until I've seen what he wants. Tell whoever was taking it to say it was mislaid or forgotten about until he came to clear the ship."
Agathon looked at his master dubiously. "Don't you think you're spending more on this man than he deserves?"
Hieron gave him an exasperated look. "Aristion," he said, "think a minute. I was toying earlier with the idea of a naval assault on Messana. If I wanted to do that, I would need to lash ships together and build artillery platforms- each stable for the weight of catapult or they'd come to bits when the shooting started. And I would need counters to the Messanan harbor defenses, which means I'd need somebody to reckon their distance and strength before we reached them. Then I'd need siege ladders- and they'd have to be the right height or we'd have a lot of men dead for nothing. I'd need battering rams that were strong enough to do the job and light enough to move in quickly. In other words, the whole success or failure of such a raid would depend upon my engineer. Now, Kallippos is good, but I wouldn't gamble my whole fleet on his getting it right. With Archimedes, it would be no gamble. Top-quality engineering can make the difference between victory and defeat. No, I do not think I am spending too much on it."
"Oh," said Agathon, abashed.
"You and Philistis," Hieron went on, smiling, "don't like Archimedes because you think he's been disrespectful to me."
"And he has been!" said Agathon warmly. "The other morning-"
"Aristion! If somebody came and arrested you, I'd be disrespectful!"
Agathon, who had not thought of it this way, grunted sourly.
"He has, in fact, treated me exactly as I would wish. And he told me I was a parabola. I think that's the most unusual compliment I've ever been given. I might have it engraved upon my tomb."