A Gladiator Dies Only Once (13 page)

Agathinus and Dorotheus looked at each other and shrugged. Margero’s face was as unreadable as a cat’s.

“Do you mean to say that none of you knows the location of Archimedes’s tomb? Is it not general knowledge?”

“Somewhere in the old necropolis outside the city walls, I suppose,” said Agathinus vaguely.

“Not everyone is as preoccupied with their dead ancestors as you Romans,” said Margero.

“But surely the tomb of a man as great as Archimedes should be regarded as a shrine.” Cicero suddenly stiffened. His eyes flashed. His jaw quivered. “Eureka! I have found it!” He was suddenly so animated that we all gave a start, even the heavy-lidded Margero. “Gordianus the Finder, it was the Fates who brought us two Romans together here in Syracuse! I have a purpose here, and so have you.”

“What are you talking about, Cicero?”

“What do you say to a bit of employment? You shall locate the lost tomb of Archimedes for me—if it still exists—and I shall restore it to its former glory! It shall be the crowning achievement of my year in Sicily. Brilliant! Who can doubt it was the Fates who engineered this evening and its outcome, who brought us all together, we two Romans and our new Syracusan friends? Eureka! I feel like Archimedes in the bathing tub.”

“Just don’t go running naked though the streets,” quipped Dorotheus, his round body shaking with mirth.

The evening had come to a natural conclusion, and the three Syracusans made ready to leave. Cicero retired, leaving it to Tiro to show them out and to conduct Eco and me to our beds. At the door, Agathinus lingered behind his departing companions and drew me aside.

“I take it that Cicero is serious about hiring you to go looking for Archimedes’s tomb tomorrow?”

“So it appears. They call me Finder, after all.”

Agathinus pursed his thin lips and studied me with cool, appraising eyes that betrayed a hint of amusement. “You seem to be a decent enough fellow, Gordianus—for a Roman. Ah, yes, don’t deny it—I saw you laughing in silence tonight along with us, while your countryman lectured us about Hiero and Archimedes. As if we were schoolboys, indeed! As if he were the native Syracusan, not us! But as I say, you seem decent enough. Shall I do you a favor and tell you where to find the tomb?”

“You know?”

“It’s not exactly common knowledge, but yes, I know where it is.”

“Yet you didn’t tell Cicero.”

“Never! I think you know why. The know-it-all! From what I’ve heard, he’s more honest than most of the bureaucrats Rome sends us, but still—the gall of the man! But I like you, Gordianus. And I like your son; I liked the way he laughed at Dorotheus’s awful jokes. Shall I show you where to find the tomb of Archimedes? Then you can show it to Cicero, or not, as you please—and charge him a stiff fee for your services, I hope.”

I smiled. “I appreciate the favor, Agathinus. Where exactly is the tomb?”

“In the old necropolis outside the Achradina Gate, about a hundred paces north of the road. There are a lot of old monuments there; it’s a bit of a maze. My father showed me the tomb when I was a boy. The inscriptions of the theorems had largely worn away, but I remember the geometrical sculptures quite vividly. The necropolis has fallen into neglect, I’m afraid. The monuments are all overgrown.” He thought for a moment. “It’s hard to give exact directions. It would be easier simply to show you. Can you meet me outside the gate tomorrow morning?”

“You’re a busy man, Agathinus. I don’t want to impose on you.”

“It’s no imposition, so long as we do it first thing in the morning. Meet me an hour after dawn.”

I nodded, and Agathinus departed.

“How did the dinner go?” asked Tiro as he showed us to our room. “I know that Eco didn’t think much of the evening.” He mimicked Eco yawning. Meanwhile Eco, yawning for real, tumbled backward onto a sleeping couch that looked infinitely more comfortable than the vermin-ridden mats at the inn where we had been staying.

“An evening is never too dull if it ends with a full stomach, a roof over my head, and the prospect of gainful employment.” I said. “As for the company, Dorotheus is likable enough, if a bit loud. And Agathinus appears to be an alright fellow.”

“Rather dour-looking.”

“I think he just has a very dry sense of humor.”

“And the poet?”

“Margero was clearly in no mood to recite poetry. He seemed to be rather preoccupied. There was something going on between him and Agathinus . . .”

“I think I can explain that,” offered Tiro.

“You weren’t in the room.”

“No, but I was in the kitchen, soaking up local gossip from the slaves. Agathinus and Dorotheus are Margero’s patrons, you see; every poet needs patrons if he’s to eat. But lately there’s been a chill between Agathinus and Margero.”

“A chill?”

“Jealousy. It seems they’re both paying court to the same pretty boy down at the gymnasium.”

“I see.” The two were rivals in love, then. Margero was younger and more handsome than Agathinus, and could compose love poems; but Agathinus had the attractions of money and power. Clearly, the two of them had not yet fallen out completely—Margero still depended on Agathinus for patronage, Agathinus still used the poet as an ornament—but there was friction between them. “Any other interesting gossip from the kitchen slaves?”

“Only that Agathinus and Dorotheus just received payment for their largest shipment ever of imported goods from the East. Some people say that they’re now the richest men in Syracuse.”

“No wonder Cicero was advised to make friends with them.”

“Do you need anything else before you retire?” asked Tiro, lowering his voice. Eco, not even undressed, was already softly snoring on his couch.

“Something to read, perhaps?”

“There are some scrolls in the room that Cicero uses for an office . . .”

I ended the night curled under a coverlet on my couch, puzzling by lamplight over a musty old scroll of the works of Archimedes, amazed at his genius. Here were such wonders as a method for determining the surface area of a sphere, explained so lucidly that even I could almost understand it. At length I came upon the proposition which had resulted from the problem of the gold crown:

Proposed: A solid heavier than a fluid will, if placed in it, descend to the bottom of the fluid, and the solid will, when weighed in the fluid, be lighter than its true weight by the weight of the fluid.

Yes, well, that much was obvious, of course. I read on.

Let A be a solid heavier than the same volume of fluid, and let (G + H) represent its weight, while G represents the weight of the same volume of the fluid . . .

This was not quite so clear, and I was getting drowsy. Cicero’s explanation had been easier to follow. I pressed on.

Take a solid B lighter than the same volume of the fluid, and such that the weight of B is G, while the weight of the same volume of the fluid is (G + H). Let A and B be now combined into one solid and immersed. Then, since (A + B) will be of the same weight as the same volume of fluid, both weights being equal to (G + H) + G, it follows that. . .

I gave a great yawn, put aside the scroll, and extinguished the lamp. Alas, it was all Greek to me.

The next morning, at daybreak, I roused Eco, grabbed a handful of bread from the pantry, and the two of us set out for the Achradina Gate.

The stretch of road outside the walls was just as Agathinus had described it, with a great maze of tombs on either side, all overgrown with brambles and vines. It was an unsettling place, even in the pale morning light, with an air of decay and desolation. Some of the stone monuments were as large as small temples. Others were simple stelae set in the earth, and many of these were no longer upright but had been knocked this way and that. Crumbling sculptural reliefs depicted funeral garlands and horses’ heads, the traditional symbols of life’s brief flowering and the speedy passage toward death. Some of the monuments were decorated with the faces of the dead, worn so smooth by time that they were as bland and featureless as the statues of the Cyclades.

Agathinus was nowhere to be seen. “Perhaps we’re early,” I said. Eco, full of energy, began nosing about the monuments, peering at the worn reliefs, looking for pathways into the thicket. “Don’t go getting lost,” I told him, but he might as well have been deaf as well as mute. He was soon out of sight.

I waited, but Agathinus did not appear. It was possible that he had arrived before us and lacked the patience to wait, or that his business had kept him from coming. There was also the chance that he had changed his mind about helping me, decent enough fellow for a Roman though I might be.

I tried to remember his description of the tomb’s location. On the north side, he had said, about a hundred paces from the road, and decorated with sculptures of geometrical shapes. Surely it couldn’t be that hard to find.

I began nosing about as Eco had done, looking for ways into the thicket. I found his tracks and followed them into a sort of tunnel through the thorns and woody vines that choked the pathways between the monuments. I moved deeper and deeper into a strange world of shadowy foliage and cold, dank stone covered with lichen and moss. Dead leaves rustled underfoot. Whenever the pathway branched I tried to follow Ecc’s footsteps and called out his name to let him know that I was behind him. I soon realized that finding Archimedes’s tomb would not be such a simple task after all. I considered turning and retracing my steps back to the road. Agathinus might have arrived, and be waiting for me.

Then I heard a strange, twisted cry that was not quite a scream, but rather the noise a mute boy might make if he tried to scream.

Eco!

I rushed toward the noise, but was confounded by the branching maze and the echo of his cry among the stone tombs. “Cry out again, Eco! Cry out until I find you!”

The noise echoed from a different direction. I wheeled about, banged my head against the projecting corner of a monument, and cursed. I reached up to wipe the sweat from my eyes and realized I was bleeding. Eco cried out again. I followed, stumbling over creeping vines and dodging crooked stelae.

Suddenly, above a tangle of thorns, I glimpsed the upper part of what could only be the tomb of Archimedes. Surmounting a tall square column chiseled with faded inscriptions in Greek was a sphere, and surmounting the sphere, balanced on its round edge, was a solid cylinder. These two forms were the concrete representation of one of the principles I had encountered in my reading the night before—but all such thoughts fled from my mind as I found a way through the thicket and stepped into a small clearing before the tomb.

In front of the column there were several other geometrical sculptures. Upon one of them, a cube almost as tall as he was, stood Eco, his eyes wide with alarm. Next to the cube and equally as tall was a slender cone that came to a very sharp point. The point was dark with blood. Impaled on the cone, face-up, long, spindly limbs splayed in agony, was the lifeless body of Agathinus. His upside-down features were frozen in a rictus of pain and shock.

“You found him like this?”

Eco nodded.

How had such a thing happened? Agathinus must have been standing on the cube where Eco now stood, and somehow fallen backward onto the point. I flinched, picturing it. The force of his fall had pushed his body halfway down the cone. But why should he have been standing on the cube at all? The faded inscriptions on the column could as easily be read from the ground. And how could he have been so careless as to fall in such a dangerous spot?

Unless someone had pushed him.

I thought of a triangle, not of the sort which Archimedes studied, but with properties just as predictable—a triangle made not of abstract lines but of the powerful forces that link mortal to mortal.

I told Eco to stop gawking and get down from the cube.

Given the circumstances of our discovery, and the fact that we were strangers in Syracuse, Eco and I might very well fall under suspicion ourselves if it was decided that Agathinus had been murdered. I thought it best to report what I had seen to Cicero, to let him handle reporting the death to the appropriate provincial magistrate, and then to book passage for Rome and have as little to do with the matter as possible.

“But Gordianus,” Cicero protested, “this sort of thing is your specialty. And if I understand you correctly, Agathinus was there to meet you, and to do you a favor—though it seems he could as easily have shown the tomb to me instead. Do you feel no obligation to discover the truth?”

Cicero is a master at playing on a man’s honor. I resisted. “Are you hiring me to investigate his death?”

“Gordianus—always money! Paying you for such a service would hardly be my responsibility, but I’m sure I can persuade the local Roman magistrate to do so. I might point out that your participation would also remove you from suspicion. Well?” He raised an eyebrow.

There was no debating logic with Cicero. “I’ll do it.”

“Good! First, someone will have to inform his friends and family. Dealing with a widow takes a certain finesse—I’ll handle that. I leave it to you to deliver the sad news to his partner, Dorotheus.”

“And Margero?”

“Ah yes, I suppose the poet will want to compose some funeral verses in praise of his dead patron.”

Unless, I thought, Margero had been the author of Agathinus’s death.

Margero’s place was a small but respectable house in the heart of the city. I rapped upon the door politely with my foot and was shown by a slave through a modest atrium into a modest garden. After a long wait, Margero appeared wearing a rumpled robe. The ringlets across his forehead were in disarray and his eyes were puffy with sleep.

“It’s close to midday,” I said. “Do all poets sleep this late?”

“They do if they’ve drunk as much as I did last night.”

“I didn’t notice you drinking any more than the rest of us.”

“What makes you think I stopped drinking after I left?”

“You had a late night, then?”

“What business is that of yours, Roman?”

“One of your patrons is dead.”

In the span of a heartbeat several emotions crossed his handsome features, beginning with what might have been surprise and a flicker of hope, and ending with a grimace that might have been no more than a symptom of his hangover. “Dorotheus?”