The Seven Hills (12 page)

Zeno protested.

"Part of that resurgence is taking place right now, in
Alexandria. And it may well prove to be the most important
part. Think of Alexander. His empire did not outlast his final breath, but he spread Greek culture throughout the world. These soldierly oafs may soon be forgotten, but it may be that they have, all unwitting, changed the nature of
philosophy, which is a far greater wonder than any conquest. Come along. Gabinius will give us letters of introduction to
this Scipio fellow. I know plenty of people in the Museum. You want to be a great historian? We'll be at the center of history!"

"A walking ship?" Selene looked from one Ro
man to the other. Their expressions seemed earnest. "I
can see that I have stayed away from the Museum too long.
Does a ship that walks have some advantage over the more familiar sort that sails or is rowed?" She hoped for some equally ironic response, but they seemed to consider her
question seriously. Irony, she had learned, was a subtlety beyond the ken of the Romans. And as for humor—she almost
shuddered—what struck the Romans as funny struck most people with horror.

"It doesn't exactly walk," Marcus Scipio said. "In fact, it
is more of a rotary motion, rather hard to describe, really—"

"Perhaps," Flaccus said, "a demonstration is in order."
Like Scipio, Flaccus was a senator, one with a more literary
bent than his friend. The other Romans considered Flaccus
lazy and lacking in martial vigor. Only a Roman would have considered him so. With her own eyes Selene had on one oc
casion seen him kill four enemies with six swift strokes of his short sword. Marcus had upbraided him for the two wasted strokes.

"Yes," she sighed, "a demonstration." The philosophers
of the Archimedean school, who had risen from obscurity to preeminence with the arrival of the Romans, dearly loved to
show off their new toys.

They trooped from the palace and entered the huge royal
litter, which carried them the short distance down to the royal harbor. Since her last visit, a new ship had arrived. It
certainly looked strange, with the bizarre addition of wheels
to its sides, but how such a thing could walk escaped her.
She saw also that it was equipped with the new, single steer
ing oar mounted at the extreme end of the stern, instead of the pair pivoted at its sides in the familiar fashion.

At the wharf they descended from the litter and boarded
the ship by way of its extra-long gangplank. The addition of
the huge side wheels meant that the ship itself could not di
rectly abut the stone wharf. The main deck of the vessel was as unconventional as the rest. It was very narrow, in order to make room for immense, inboard wheels that corresponded
to those on the outside of the ship. These wheels were hollow frameworks, and they contained men.

"I confess," Selene said, "to utter mystification."

A man in a philosopher s ragged tunic came forward, his
face wreathed in that self-satisfied smile she had come to know so well. He bowed and waited to be addressed.

"Good afternoon, Chilo," said the queen. "What new miracle have you to show me today?"

"As so often, my queen," he said, "there is little new about it. It is a novel application for the common water-raising wheel used in irrigation operations."

"I had noticed the resemblance," she said. "Why one needs irrigation wheels on a ship is not obvious."

"It has to do with our researches into the properties of
energy," he said earnestly. "There is a relationship between
force exerted in one direction and another force, or perhaps the same force, in another direction. We feel that there is a principle—"

"Quite fascinating, I am sure," the queen interrupted. "You must be sure to tell me all about it when you have it all figured out. In the meantime, if you could just show me how wheels benefit a ship?"

"Of course, Majesty, of course. Well, the outer structure is not precisely a wheel. I have termed it a 'rotary oar.' You see the boards protruding from its perimeter? These are paddles, and they perform the same function as a conventional oar, except that they work in a vertical plane, instead of the horizontal, or, rather the elliptical-horizontal plane of an oar."

"Chilo," Scipio said, "why not just get it moving? The principle of the thing will be instantly appreciable to Her Majesty then."

"I suppose so," Chilo said, disappointed.

"Now he'll sulk," Selene said when the philosopher went
off to give his orders to the crew. "There is nothing sadder than a philosopher cheated of a chance to lecture."

Among the ship's petty officers there was a barking of or
ders and a popping of whips, and a piper began to play a rhythmic tune on his double flute. Within the inboard wheels, men began climbing rungs as if ascending a ladder. The outboard wheels started to turn, churning the water. The ship commenced a slow movement. It drew away from
the wharf and moved out into the harbor amid a great creak
ing of machinery.

"You see," Chilo explained, "the vertical motion of the slaves climbing is transformed into the rotary motion of the inboard wheel turning. This is in turn transmitted to the
outboard wheel, causing the paddles to push against the wa
ter, propelling the ship forward. By turning around and
climbing the rear of the wheel, the slaves can cause the ship
to move backward. Direction can be controlled by causing one wheel to move more slowly than the other, and the steering oar can be used for minor corrections. By working the wheels in opposite directions, the ship can spin quickly on its axis."

"Very ingenious," the queen allowed. "But oared ships can do all these things, and have for centuries. What is the advantage of these wheels?"

"There are several," Marcus Scipio informed her. "In the
first place, you need far fewer slaves to turn these wheels than to man oars. A ship this size would require at least three hundred, with plenty of relief rowers. Thirty or forty
slaves are all you need to man these wheels. They eat far less
and that makes for longer voyages."

"And," said Flaccus, "rowers must be highly skilled.
They are expensive and are not replaced easily. Totally, unskilled slaves and convicts can turn these wheels. Nothing is
required except for a sound pair of legs."

"They can't be deaf," Marcus pointed out. "They have to be able to hear the flute."

Flaccus nodded. "That is true."

"If a wheel is damaged in battle," Selene pointed out, "it wouldn't be easy to replace, not like a damaged oar."

"This vessel is a prototype built to test the design," Chilo said. "For a warship, the wheels will have armored cowlings.
Only the part that actually touches the water need be exposed." He looked at her expectantly.

"Very well," she said at last, "you may proceed with this
project. What is the next phase?"

"Trials on the open sea, Your Majesty," Chilo told her. "These can proceed immediately, with this experimental
vessel. Upon successful conclusion, a full-sized armed and
manned warship will be built and tested. If all goes well, as
I am sure it will, a flotilla will be constructed and deployed."

"The ultimate test will be battle," Scipio said. "If the
wheeled ships prove to be more effective in battle, as well as cheaper and less wasteful of manpower, then we will convert
entirely to the new system."

"Your Senate may be displeased to hear of it," she said,
smiling. "I hear that they are even now building a fleet on the old model, and taking a great deal of trouble to train rowers."

"They'll adapt," he said. "We are an adaptable people."

That evening the two Romans dined with the queen on a palace terrace overlooking the beautiful little royal harbor with its jewel-like artificial island. Just to the west, they could see the huge double harbor of Alexandria, divided by the immense Heptastadion Bridge connecting the Pharos to the.mainland. On the eastern end of Pharos towered the incomparable lighthouse.

All this, Selene thought, was hers. Alexandria, the most glorious city in the world. And this city was only the crowning gem among her possessions. She owned all of Egypt, from the Delta, which contained the richest farmlands in the world, all the way down the immense river and beyond the quarries near the First Cataract, where the mar
ket of the Elephantine Island received all the exotic goods of
the continent to the south, such as the ivory that gave the island its name, wonderful feathers and the pelts of beautiful animals, and the animals themselves: lions, cheetahs, apes, birds. There were woods for tree-poor Egypt, dye-
stuffs, spices and endless coffles of black slaves from the interior to work the farms and quarries of Egypt and to be sold
abroad, where they commanded high prices for their exotic
looks, so different from common, pale-skinned slaves.

She was the richest as well as the most powerful woman
in the world.
But,
she thought,
it means nothing, because I owe
it all to these Romans.
They had saved her from political impotence as sister-wife to a reigning boy, and probable death
at the hands of his corrupt ministers, once she had fulfilled her duty by delivering a royal heir. These Romans, by their arrogant intervention and surprising political sophistication, had eliminated those ministers by manipulating the Alexandrian mob. Their nation's reoccupation of Italy and invasion of Sicily had forced Hasdrubal to break off the Carthaginian assault on Alexandria, and now she sat on the throne of Egypt, her brother banished to an obscure wing of the palace.

She knew better than to be grateful. The Romans did nothing out of disinterested goodwill. Everything they did was calculated to advance the cause of Rome. First came their almost obsessive need to conquer, humiliate and destroy Carthage, as Carthage had once all but obliterated Rome. And after that?

This required careful thought. It was by no means certain that Rome could even win a single battle with Carthage, once Hamilcar mobilized his full might against them. Should Rome be defeated, or even suffer a setback, her position would prove far more secure than it now was. She would have leverage to use, positioning herself in a place of power as the most desirable ally for either nation.
Should the present war be long and costly and end in an un
easy peace, she would be safe. Neither contender could afford to allow the other to have the matchless wealth of Egypt at its disposal.

But should Carthage prove victorious? That, too, might be to her advantage. The Romans would be certain to make
the war costly. Even in victory, Carthage would be exhausted and close to ruin. Reoccupation and restoration of its posses
sions in Sicily and Italy would distract and drain Carthage
for many years to come, while she consolidated her position
and made new alliances. Parthia was the growing power to the east, and Syria might well see the advantage of an al
liance with Egypt. If Antiochus was too stubborn to reverse
his policy, there were time-honored methods for putting a more suitable heir on the throne without resorting to war.

But what if, against all expectation, Rome should win?
They had the martial energy of her own Macedonian ances
tors, those unbeatable warriors who in the reigns of only two kings had gone from control of an impoverished near-
barbarian nation to lords of the old Persian Empire, masters of the world from Greece to India. If the Romans lacked any
single leader with the tactical brilliance of Alexander, they seemed to have a great many commanders with widely differing methods, from the conventional, by-the-book generals who were reducing Sicily so methodically, to her own Marcus Scipio with his love of military machines and his preference for using foreign troops and sparing Roman legionaries for better things, to the dashing Titus Norbanus who now bid fair to become the glorious new Xenophon of his generation. The Senate would decide which general to send to take care of which situation, and this was a military advantage no other nation had ever. had.

Rome, she thought, might well conquer the world, as Alexander had once almost conquered the world. Alexander's empire had not outlived the conqueror himself, immediately splitting into minor empires controlled by his generals, who swiftly fell to battling among themselves.

Her own ancestor, Ptolemy, had seized Egypt as his share. Rome, she was certain, would not allow such a thing. Its outlandish republican government seemed chaotic, but it worked and it had staying power. Their unbelievable rise from beggar nation to northern empire was proof enough of that.

So what to do in the event of Roman victory? Selene was
of Greek-Macedonian descent, without a drop of native blood in her veins. But after more than two hundred years the Ptolemies had Nile water in their veins and their flesh was the soil of Egypt. They combined the qualities of the Two Lands with those of Greece. Domination by Rome
would simply call for patience, and patience was an ancient
Egyptian specialty.

"Your Majesty," Scipio said, breaking into her thoughts, "I have to address a disturbing report I've received."