1Now hear of the old man of Syracuse, and of the soldier who met him.
2In the west a new power was rising, a city of farmers and soldiers on the river Tiber. It was called Rome. In those days Rome was fighting for its life against Carthage, the city of ships across the sea, and every town between them had to choose a side.
3Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, chose Carthage. So Rome sent a general named Marcellus with an army and sixty warships to take it.
4In that army was a soldier named Titus, a ploughman's son from the Sabine hills. He was twenty. He could not read. He could march thirty miles with sixty pounds on his back and dig a ditch at the end of it. He was a good soldier, which means that he did what the man beside him did, and did it well.
5The man beside him was Decimus, from the same village. They had stolen pears together as boys. They had sworn the soldier's oath on the same day.
6Marcellus thought to take Syracuse in five days. He had not been told about the old man.
7His name was Archimedes. He was past seventy, a kinsman and friend of the old king of that city. As a young man he had studied in Alexandria, and he wrote all his life to the scholars there. One of those he wrote to was Eratosthenes, who had measured the earth. He cared for nothing but the truths of shape and number. He would forget to eat.
8But his king had once asked him to turn a little of that knowledge into engines for the walls, in case of need. He had done it, as a man does a favour, and thought little of it. Now the need had come.
9The Roman ships rowed in toward the sea wall with ladders ready. Then the wall began to throw things. Stones as heavy as ten men came over, from engines that no one could see, and they did not miss. Ships were stove in like eggs.
10The ships that came in close, under the reach of the stones, met something worse. Great beams swung out over the wall. From the beams dropped iron claws on chains. A claw would catch a ship by the prow and haul it up, up, until it stood on its stern with its men spilling off it. Then the claw let go.
11Titus was in the third ship. Decimus was in the second. Titus watched the second ship rise out of the sea, streaming water, and hang there with its oars waving like the legs of a beetle. He saw his friend clinging to a bench. Then the ship fell. It went under whole, and what came up was planks.
12It went the same on the land side. After some weeks the Romans were so shaken that if a bit of rope or a stick of timber showed above the wall, the men cried out that the old man was aiming something at them, and they ran.
13Marcellus was a hard man but not a stupid one, and he laughed at himself. He said that he was fighting a geometer who sat at ease by the sea and threw his ships about like cups at a party. He gave up the assault. He settled down to starve the city.
14It took two years. For two years Titus sat in the lines outside Syracuse, and ate bad grain, and watched men die of the camp sickness. In the ranks they called him the Wizard. Titus thought of him each night before sleep. He thought of a beetle's legs waving. He made himself a promise about the Wizard.
15In the third year there was a festival in the city, and the guards on one stretch of wall drank deep. The Romans went up by night with ladders, as quiet as cats. By sunrise they held the high part of the town. It is told that Marcellus looked down from there on that great and beautiful city, in the last morning of its freedom, and wept. He knew what his soldiers would do to it.
16Then he let them do it. That is what generals did. But he gave one order above all others. The geometer was not to be touched. He was to be found and brought to the general with honour.
17The order went out. It did not reach everyone. On such a day orders do not.
18Titus went down into the city with his sword out and two years in his heart. Around him men were running into houses and coming out with silver. There was smoke. There was screaming. He went through a gate into a quiet courtyard, looking for whatever there was.
19There was an old man.
20He sat on the ground in the sun, in a plain tunic, with a wide tray of sand before him. He had drawn something in it. He was looking at the drawing with his whole body, the way a hunting dog looks at a bush. The city was falling around him and he had not noticed.
21"Up," said Titus. "On your feet. You are coming to the general."
22The old man did not look up. He lifted one hand, palm out. Any child knows that gesture in any tongue. Wait. Not now. He said some words in Greek. Titus had no Greek. It sounded as though he was asking for something, or guarding something. He put his hand down over the edge of the tray, as a man shields a candle.
23Titus stepped forward, and his shadow fell across the sand, and his boot came down on the edge of the drawing.
24Then the old man looked up. He was angry. He was not afraid, not at all, and that was the thing Titus could not bear. Two years. Decimus. And this old Greek sat in the dirt and looked at a Roman soldier as at a goat that had wandered into his garden.
25What Titus did then took less time than it takes to tell. Afterward he stood with his sword in his hand and the old man lay across the tray. The drawing was spoiled.
26A centurion came running through the gate with a squad behind him. He stopped. His face went white under the soot.
27"What have you done?" he said. "That is Archimedes. That is the one the general wants alive."
28Titus looked at him. "Who?"
29"The engines, you fool. The claws. That is the man who made them."
30So Titus had kept his promise, and killed the Wizard. He waited for the gladness to come. He looked down at an old man with sand in his beard, and it did not come. It never did come, though he waited for it for years.
31When they told Marcellus, he turned his face away. He would not have the killer brought before him. He said the man was unclean. He sought out the dead man's family, and he honoured them, and he saw the old man buried as he had wished. Over the grave they set a stone, and on the stone was carved a ball fitted inside a drum. Of all that Archimedes had found, that figure was the thing he was proudest of.
32No one punished Titus. He had broken an order he never heard. But the story went through the army, and no man would share his tent. He served out his years. When the long war ended, Rome gave its old soldiers land in the countries they had conquered, and Titus was given a small farm in Sicily, not a day's walk from Syracuse.
33He ploughed there for thirty years. He married a Greek woman of the island and learned enough of her tongue to buy and sell. His sons grew. He never told them. Sometimes on the road he passed near the gate where the grave was, and he looked at the ground between his oxen until he was past.
34One winter night, when he was old and his wife was dead, he sat alone at his fire. The rain was coming down. There was a knock, and at the door stood a boy of twelve or so, leading a mule with a lame foot.
35The boy asked for shelter. Titus let him in. One does not turn a child out in such rain. The boy stabled the mule himself and came and sat by the fire, and from his bag he took a round of cheese and a handful of dried figs, and set them down between them without a word. Titus brought bread and a jug. They ate.
36The boy did not say where he came from, and Titus did not ask. The boy looked at the fire, and at the old sword hanging on its peg above the door, and at the old man's hands.
37When the food was gone, the boy said, "What have you left open?"
38Titus thought he had misheard. The door, perhaps. The stable. "What?"
39The boy did not say it again. He only looked at him, with no blame in the look, and waited, as if it were a plain question that had a plain answer.
40And Titus found that he could not speak. He sat there with his mouth working. He thought of his fields. He had fed some people. He thought of his sons, and that was something. Then he thought of a courtyard in the sun. He thought of a hand raised, palm out. Wait. Not now. What had the old man been about to find? What was in the sand, that a boot had ended? No one would ever know. It was a door, and it had been closed, and Titus had closed it. It could not be opened again by any man living, for the only one who had the key was under a stone by the Agrigentine gate.
41He said nothing. The boy asked nothing more. After a time the boy lay down by the hearth and slept, as the young do.
42Titus sat up all night. Before dawn he must have dozed, for when he raised his head the boy was gone, and the mule, and the rain had stopped. There was half a round of cheese on the hearthstone.
43That day Titus took a billhook and walked to the gate.
44It took him a while to find the grave. Thirty years of bramble had gone over it. He cut his way in. He cleared the stone, and scraped the moss out of the carving with his thumbnail, and stood looking at a ball inside a drum. He did not know what it meant. He had killed a man for a drawing, and here was another drawing, and he could not read this one either.
45There was a schoolmaster in the town, a Greek. Titus went to him with a sack of wheat on his shoulder. He set it down and said, "The old man who made the engines. Did he write anything?"
46The schoolmaster looked at the scarred old Roman in his doorway for a long moment. He said, "He wrote a great deal. Sit down."
47He took a roll from a jar. "This one he wrote for the king's son," he said. "Hear how it begins." And he read, turning it into the farmers' Latin as he went: "There are some, King Gelon, who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude."
48"Sand," said Titus.
49"He says they are wrong. He says the grains can be numbered. Not only the sand of our shore, or of Sicily. He builds a way of naming numbers so great that he can count the grains it would take to fill the whole world, out to the farthest stars. He stands outside the sky to do it, and looks in at all of us, as at a poppy seed. And then he counts."
50Titus sat with his big hands hanging between his knees. He had thought, all those years, that he had killed a maker of claws. He saw now that the claws had been a small thing the old man had done with his left hand, for a friend, and forgotten. This was the man. This one, who stood outside the sky and counted.
51"And the ball in the drum?" he said. "On his stone."
52The schoolmaster showed him. It took many days, for Titus had to begin at the beginning, with the reach of a cord and a figure of three equal sides. He was slow. He was nearly seventy. He came every market day with something on his shoulder, and sat among the children, and was not ashamed. In the end he had it. The ball fills two parts in three of the drum that just holds it. Always, whatever the size. A ball like a pea, a ball like the moon.
53"No one knew that before him," said the schoolmaster. "And no one will ever now find it false."
54Titus went home and thought about that. The old man was dead and what he had been about to find was lost for good. That was true and would stay true. But the ball in the drum had not died in the courtyard. A sword could not get at it. It was in the roll. It was in the schoolmaster, and it was now in a ploughman who could not read.
55He had a granddaughter, seven years old, quick as a bird. He smoothed a patch of earth by the door and gave her a cord and a peg. He taught her the three equal sides. He was a poor teacher. She learned in spite of him, and soon she was asking things he could not answer, and he had to carry more wheat to town.
56Every spring until he died he took the billhook to the gate and cut the brambles back from the stone. He never told anyone why. It did not mend anything. He knew that it did not. But it was the one piece of that day that was still in his hands, and he did it.
57After his death the brambles came back. More than a hundred years on, a young Roman officer named Cicero came to Syracuse asking for the grave. The townspeople told him there was no such thing. He found it himself, by a little column showing above the thorns, with a ball and a drum upon it. He had it cleared.
58Marcellus came home to Rome with the loot of Syracuse carried before him. Four years after the city fell he rode into an ambush and was killed, and few now could tell you one thing he did.
59But the ball still fills two parts in three of the drum.