II.2 The Hand of Iron
The sea, that morning, was becoming again what the Romans knew how to do better than anyone else in the world: a surface measured out in oar-strokes, tamed by discipline, obedient to those who furrow it in great numbers, together, at a single rhythm.
Sixty quinqueremes moved against the walls of Achradina — the wall is lapped by the tide1 —, those the sea has kissed from time out of mind. sexaginta quinqueremibus Marcellus oppugnabat2: with sixty quinqueremes Marcellus assailed them, a Roman would write, many years later, reading the dispatches of the siege; πεντήρεις ἔχων ἑξήκοντα παντοδαπῶν ὅπλων καὶ βελῶν πλήρεις3: having sixty quinqueremes filled with arms and missiles of every kind, a Greek would write, reading the same events from another shore. Two tongues, two centuries between their authors, and the same exact number: sixty. It was perhaps the only thing, in all that war, about which no one could have lied.
On one of those ships was a man who had spent the winter building, with his own hands, the machine that now hoisted him toward the city: a raised bridge, suspended upon eight ships lashed one to another4, tall as a tower, called a sambuca for a vague resemblance to the stringed instrument: an almost gentle name, he thought, for a contrivance made expressly to breach a wall. He was proud of it. He had counted the cables, tested the pins, slept little. This was Roman engineering: solid, visible, provable by the hand that touches it.
Then the stones began to fall.
Not from any one point — and this was the first terror, even before the weight of the stones. From the whole length of the wall at once, as if the rock itself had resolved to hate them: darts of every kind and boulders of monstrous bulk, coming down with a whistle and an incredible swiftness5. A foot-soldier two paces from the engineer vanished beneath a mass no one had seen depart: he was there, and then he was a dark stain on the bridge. The ranks opened, closed again, fell into confusion. It was not the fear of battle — that they knew, that they had drilled, to that they had grown callous. It was another fear: not knowing from where the blow comes.
For upon that wall, at that moment, there was no army. There was, though no Roman could have known it, a single old man seated on a stool — unicus spectator caeli siderumque6, sole spectator of the sky and the stars, a historian would one day write who at Rome was not yet born, but an inventor and contriver still more marvellous of engines and machines of war7. The walls of Syracuse run over unequal hills, high on one side, low and open on the other; and for each stretch, according to what the place required, that man had armed them with machines of every kind8. The engineer could not know this. He saw only the wall, and the wall seemed alive.
The boldest ships had pressed in too close, believing that beneath the range of the great catapults there was shelter: too close for the huge stones to find the space to gather speed. But Archimedes had foreseen even that. He had opened the wall from bottom to top with close-set holes nearly a cubit wide9, and from those holes with small scorpions they struck the enemy from a hiding-place10, short contrivances, for the distances the great ones could not reach. A Greek who wrote of that same war would have called them, with a single word more exact than any description, invisible to the enemy11.
But it was the hand that broke the men.
A beam upon a pivot leaned out from the top of the walls, and a hand of iron fastened to a stout chain12 came down upon the prow of the ship next to the engineer's. It seized her. There was no struggle: the ship, which weighed as much as a hundred men and their cargo, lifted by the prow, found herself standing upright on her stern13, like a dog taken by the scruff. The men aboard fell one upon another toward the stern, screaming, clutching at oars that were no longer of any use. Often a ship, lifted into the air off the sea, would spin this way and that as it hung: a spectacle to make one shudder14, for those who watched from afar, and still more for those inside it. Then, all at once the hand would open, and the ship would fall as though from the wall itself15 and the waves beat upon her so16 that even when she came down upright, she took on water by the whole broadside.
The engineer had built machines all his life. He knew what a pulley was, a windlass, a counterweight. And yet he watched that hand open and close upon the water, take and release, take and release, with the same indifference with which a child plays with a crab on the shore — and he could not think of it as a machine. He thought: a hand. He thought: someone, up there, who chooses.
Toward midday it was his sambuca's turn. An enormous boulder, of the weight of ten talents17, passed close by it, raising a wall of water that blinded them all for an instant. Then a second. Then a third, that struck full on: the base of the tower crumbled, the joints sprang open, the eight ships lashed together parted like the fingers of a hand that opens. Marcellus, from the command deck, ordered the retreat before anyone could ask it of him: and so the assault from the sea was mocked, and every hope turned to trying, with all their strength, from the land18.
Mocked. The engineer turned that word over in his mind, returning to shore upon the wreckage of his winter's work, and understood that this was the true wound. Not the dead — the dead were counted, mourned, buried according to the rite. It was having been, for a whole afternoon, a matter of derision to someone who had not even looked them in the face.
They tried by night, hoping that in the dark, and up close, where the ropes of the great engines had no room to gather momentum, the man of the wall would be at last as blind as they. But that man — the engineer thought of him so now, a man, no longer a demon, which made him no less terrible — had foreseen this too, long before it was needed. They drew near believing themselves unseen. They were not. The stones began again to fall, almost vertical this time, as though they came from the sky and not from men; the arrows issued from every point of the wall at once. They withdrew. And as they withdrew, the blows pursued them for the whole length of the flight, until the ships collided with one another in the dark, without anyone having been able to answer a single blow.
θεομαχοῦσιν ἐῴκεσαν οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι19 — the Romans seemed to be fighting against the gods: so a Greek would write of that night, some time after. The engineer knew no Greek. But had it been translated for him, he would have found no word more exact.
Marcellus made a jest of it, when he returned among his officers — for commanders too, when the fear is too great to be spoken, dress it in mockery. He said, laughing, that Archimedes drew the sea-water with their ships as with so many cups, and his sambucas, taken to the lash, had gone to ruin covered in shame, as though banished from every truce20. They laughed, the officers. The engineer laughed too, a little. But that night, stretched out on the deck, he could not rid his eyes of that hand opening and closing upon the water: a single one, and yet multiplied along the whole wall, as if one single being had a hundred arms and moved them all together, with a single will. A name, for such a thing, must surely exist. He did not yet know it — and did not know that the one to speak it, before long, would be Marcellus himself.
In the weeks that followed, discipline — that solid thing by which Rome won her wars — began to crack in a way no manual foresaw. It took only a little rope or a rod of wood seen jutting above the wall21 for them all to cry out the same name together, like a signal, and turn their backs and flee22. Not an order. Not a trumpet. A name, shouted, and whole files of legionaries turning and running, their shields still raised against an enemy that had never shown its face.
The engineer, who had built machines all his life and believed he knew what machines were, learned that summer a thing no record would ever register: that the discipline of an army is not broken by the force of the blow it takes, but by the impossibility of answering the one who strikes it. Rome knew how to conquer everything that could be looked in the face. She did not yet know — had not yet learned it, not at this price — what to do with an enemy that was only a hand; and behind the hand, invisible as his own scorpions, an old man who went on, beneath the stones and the shouting, thinking in circles.