1In the days after the great teachers of Athens had gone through the Last Door, a young king came down out of the north and took the world.
2His name was Alexander. He took it in ten years, from the Greek sea to the rivers of India. Then he lay down with a fever in Babylon and did not get up. He was thirty-two years old, and he had not said who should have the world after him.
3So his captains cut it up like a carcass. Each took a joint and called himself a king, and they fought over the joints for forty years. Listen. This is a book of crowns. You will meet many of them. Watch what each one could move, and what it could not.
4One of the captains was named Ptolemy. He took Egypt, which was the fattest joint. In time the dead king's body lay there too, in its coffin, in a new city on the sea. Alexander had marked that city out on a bare shore and had never seen one house of it. It was called Alexandria.
5Now there was in Athens a boy named Lykos, who was eleven years old and belonged to another man. He did not know his father. His mother had been sold north when he was small. He swept floors, and he carried a lamp in front of his master at night, and that was the whole of what he was for.
6His master was Demetrius, of the harbour town of Phaleron. Demetrius had been a great man. As a youth he had sat in the school where Aristotle walked and taught. Later he had ruled Athens for ten years on behalf of a northern king, and the city had put up statues of him, hundreds of them, in bronze.
7Then the wind changed, as it does for men who rule on behalf of kings. Another captain sailed in with a fleet. Demetrius ran. The city pulled down his statues in one day and melted them, and it is said that some were made into pots for the night.
8He had wandered for years after that. Now he was no longer young, and Ptolemy of Egypt had sent for him. So in the spring he took ship from Greece, with a few servants, a few chests of silver, and one long chest of cedar wood that he would not let out of his sight.
9Lykos had been told to sleep beside the cedar chest. He supposed it held gold. He put his ear to it once and heard nothing. He lifted one end and it was heavy, but not heavy like gold.
10On the sixth day out, south of Crete, the sky went the colour of a bruise. The sailors stopped singing. The captain looked at the west and said a word that Lykos had been beaten for saying.
11The storm came on them before dark. The sea stood up in hills. The ship climbed each one and fell off the far side, and each time she fell the water came over her like a wall coming down. Men tied themselves to the mast. The steering oar broke the arm of the man who held it.
12In the middle of the night the captain crawled along the deck to Demetrius and shouted in his ear. She was too low in the water. She was taking the sea over both sides. Everything heavy had to go, and it had to go now.
13They threw the wine over first, jar after jar. They threw the spare anchor. Then the captain put his hand on the cedar chest.
14"Not that," said Demetrius.
15"It is the heaviest thing aboard after you," said the captain.
16Demetrius did not argue. He dragged out his chests of silver, the cups and the plates and the coined money that were all he had left of ten years of ruling Athens. He and his servants pushed them to the rail, and he tipped them over with his own hands. Lykos saw the silver go down white in the black water. It was gone before the next wave.
17"Now she is lighter," said Demetrius. "Leave the cedar."
18The captain stared at him as at a madman. But there was no time, and the ship did ride a little higher. He crawled away.
19Near dawn the worst wave came. It broke clean across the deck and tore away a length of the rail, and the ropes that held the cedar chest parted like threads. The chest began to slide. It slid toward the gap in the rail, slowly at first, as the deck leaned.
20Lykos did not think. He had been told to stay by the chest, and he was a boy who did what he was told. He threw himself on it. He got one arm through its rope handle and his other arm around a stump of the broken rail, and the chest went over the edge and hung there, and he hung between.
21The sea came up to his chest and went down again. The rope cut into his arm to the bone. He heard himself screaming and could not stop, and he did not let go. He never could say why. Perhaps only because no one had ever before trusted him with anything.
22Then there were hands in his hair and on his belt. They hauled him in, and the chest with him, and Demetrius himself lashed it down with his own cloak torn in strips.
23When the sun came up, the wind was dropping. Lykos lay on the wet boards with his arm bound up. Demetrius opened the chest to see what the sea had done.
24There was no gold in it. There were rolls of reed-paper packed in wax cloth, row on row, with small tags of writing. That was all.
25"Paper," said Lykos. He was too tired to be afraid of speaking. "You threw the silver in the sea for paper."
26"Silver I can get again," said Demetrius. "A king will give it to me, and another king will take it away. I have had both done to me." He lifted out one roll and looked along its edge for wet. "These men are dead. They will not say it twice."
27Lykos did not understand him. But he looked at the scar the rope was making on his arm, and he thought: then I am the one who held it.
28They came to Egypt on the eleventh day. In those years there was no tall tower of fire to bring ships in, for that was built after. There was a low island, and rocks, and fishermen's lights, and behind them a city so new that half of it was still string and pegs.
29King Ptolemy was an old soldier with a broken nose. He had seen Babylon and he wanted his city to be more than a barracks beside a tomb. Demetrius told him what Athens had that Egypt had not. So the king built a house beside his palace and gave it to the Muses. It had a covered walk, and a hall where learned men ate at his cost, and rooms with shelves. The first thing set on the first shelf was the cedar chest.
30Lykos was sent to sweep there. That is how he came to the room of the sand.
31In that room worked a quiet man named Euclid. Little is known of him, and he would have liked it so. He was neither young nor old. He owned almost nothing. He spoke gently to the boy who swept, and that was rare enough for Lykos to notice.
32Euclid's work was done on a wide tray of fine sand. He drew on it with a rod and a cord, and each morning the boy's task was to smooth away yesterday's drawing. Lykos began to look at what he rubbed out.
33He saw that the man was not drawing pictures. He was gathering. In many cities, over two hundred years, the Greeks had found out truths about lines and circles and corners. The truths lay scattered, in a letter here and a lost roll there, some proved and some only believed. Euclid was setting them in one row, so that each stood on the ones before it. And at the bottom he put a handful of beginnings so plain that no one could doubt them.
34One night, alone with his lamp and his broom, Lykos took up the cord. He had watched the first drawing forty times. He pegged a line in the sand. He swept a circle from one end of it and a circle from the other, and where the two circles crossed he made a mark. He joined the mark to both ends.
35It was a figure with three sides. He looked at it a long time. Then the hair rose on his neck, for he saw that the three sides had to be the same length. It was not that they looked the same. They could not be otherwise. Each one was the reach of the same cord.
36"Who showed you that?" Euclid was standing in the door.
37Lykos dropped the cord. A slave who touched his master's tools was whipped. "No one, sir."
38"Then how do you know the sides are equal?"
39The boy told him, stammering. Euclid heard him to the end. Then he said, "That is the first one. There are several hundred after it. Sweep it out and do it again tomorrow. I will give you the second when you are sure of the first."
40After that Lykos swept the sand in the morning and drew in it at night. No one had told him he could think. He found it was like finding a room in a house he had lived in all his life.
41In the autumn the king came to the room of the sand.
42He came with guards and with courtiers in fine wool, and the room was suddenly full of perfume and iron. Ptolemy had heard that this study of lines was the gate to all the others, and he wanted it. But he had a kingdom to hold and three wars to mind. He looked at the rolls already written, and he asked whether there was not a shorter way in for a king.
43Euclid answered him plainly. It is told that he said the road into this country was the same for a king as for anyone, and no one had built a king's road there. He said it without rudeness. He said it as a man tells you how far it is to the next well.
44The courtiers did not like it. One of them, a young lord with rings, laughed. "A king has not the leisure of a sweeper," he said. "Shall the lord of Egypt crawl in the sand like that boy?"
45"That boy can do the first of them," said Euclid. "Lykos. Come and show the king."
46Lykos came out of his corner with his knees shaking. He knelt at the tray. He pegged the line. He swept the two circles and made the mark and joined it, and he said in a small voice why the three sides were equal, each to each.
47The king watched with his thick arms folded. He had killed men with those arms. He said, "And if I say they are not equal?"
48The room went still. The young lord smiled. Lykos felt the old scar on his arm burn like the rope. He knew what he was. A word from that broken-nosed man and he would be carried out and no one would ask where.
49He also knew what he had seen in the sand.
50"Then the cord will still say it, lord," he whispered. "I am sorry. I cannot make it say another thing. You can try it."
51No one breathed. Then the old king grunted, and got down on his knees, which cracked. He took the cord out of the slave's hand. He laid it along one side, and the second, and the third. He did it twice.
52He stayed there on his knees a moment, looking at the figure. Then he laughed, a short bark, like a man hit in a place he had not guarded.
53"I have taken walled cities that gave way easier than this," he said. "Here is a thing in my own kingdom that does not care that I am the king." He stood, and beat the sand from his robe. "Good. I am tired of things that tell me what I wish to hear."
54He turned to Demetrius. "Buy books," he said. "Send to every city. Buy them, borrow them, copy them. I want everything that has been written down by men who knew something. Put it in this house." And he went out, and the perfume and the iron went with him.
55That was the beginning of the great library of Alexandria. It would hold more books than had ever been in one place under the sky.
56Demetrius did not die happy. When the old king died, he backed the wrong son for the crown, and the right son sent him away up the river to end his days. The wind changed for him one last time. But he had thrown his silver into the sea and kept the cedar chest, and of all the things he did, that is the one that is remembered.
57Euclid finished his row of truths. It filled thirteen rolls. Kings had nothing to do with it and no king's seal was on it. A child in any land can begin at the first line and walk to the last, and no one can stop that child with a sword, or hurry that child with gold.
58As for Lykos, Euclid asked for him, and Demetrius freed him with a word. He copied in that house for fifty years. When he was old, the young ones would ask about the white scar that ran around his arm like a bracelet.
59"A king would have paid a great deal for what I know," he would say. "It was not for sale, so he had to kneel for it, the same as me. That is the only time I ever saw a king and a sweeper the same height."
60The ember had crossed the sea in a cedar chest. Now hear how a crown learned its own size, far to the east, on a field beside a river.