'Don't live in the past, Falco.'

'What does that mean?'

'Grumio's obsessed – and he's wrong.' I seemed to have tapped some old professional disagreement he had had with Grumio. 'You can't bid at auction for humour. That's all gone. Oh maybe once there was a golden age of comedy when material was sacrosanct and a clown could earn a fortune raffling off his great-great-grandfather's precious scroll of antique pornography and musty puns. But nowadays you need a new script every day. Satire has to be as fresh as a barrel of winkles. Yesterday's tired quips won't get you a titter on today's cosmopolitan stage.'

'So if you inherited a collection of old jokes,' I put to him, 'you'd just toss it away?' Feeling I might be on to something, struggled to remember details of my earlier conversation with Grumio. 'Are you telling me I shouldn't believe all that wonderful rhetoric your tentmate exudes about the ancient hereditary trade of the jester? The professional laughter-man, valued according to his stock in trade? The old stories, which can be sold when in dire straits?'

'Crap!' Tranio cried.

'Not witty, but succinct.'

'Falco, what good have his family connections done him? Myself, I've had more success relying on a sharp brain and a five-year apprenticeship doing the warm-ups in Nero's Circus before gladiatorial shows.'

'You think you're better than him?'

'I know it, Falco. He could be as good as he wants, but he'll need to stop whining about the decline in stage standards, accept what's really wanted, and forget that his father and grandfather could survive on a few poor stories, a farmyard impression, and some trick juggling. Dear gods, all those terrible lines about funny foreigners: Why do Roman roads run perfectly straight?' Tranio quipped harshly, mimicking every stand-up comedian who had ever made me wince. 'To stop Thracian foodsellers setting up hot-and-cold foodstalls on the corners! And then the unsubtle innuendoes: What did the vestal virgin say to the eunuch?'

It sounded a good one, but he was cut short by the need to yank at his camel as it tried to dash off sideways across the road. I refrained from admitting my low taste by asking for the punch line.

Our route had been tilting slightly downhill, and now up ahead we could make out the abrupt break in the dry landscape that heralds Damascus, the oasis that hangs at the edge of the wilderness like a prosperous port on the rim of a vast infertile sea. On all sides we could see more traffic converging on this ancient honey-pot. Any moment now either Grumio would trot up to join his supposed friend or Tranio would be leaving me.

It was time to apply blatant leverage. 'Going back to Heliodorus. You thought he was an untalented stylus-pusher with less flair than an old pine log. So why were you and Grumio so thick with him that you let the bastard encumber you with horrific gambling debts?'

I had struck a nerve. The only problem was to deduce which nerve it was.

'Who told you that, Falco?' Tranio's face looked paler under the lank fall of hair that tumbled forwards over his clever, dark eyes. His voice was dark too, with a dangerous mood that was hard to interpret.

'Common knowledge.'

'Common lies!' From being pale he suddenly flushed a raw colour, like a man with desperate marsh fever. 'We hardly ever played with him for money. Dicing with Heliodorus was a fool's game!' It almost sounded as if the clowns knew that he had cheated. 'We gambled for trifles, casual forfeits, that's all.'

'Why are you losing your temper then?' I asked quietly.

He was so furious that at last he overcame his camel's perversity. Tearing at its mouth with a rough hand on the bridle, he forced the animal to turn and galloped off to the back of the caravan.

Chapter LIII

Damascus claimed to be the oldest inhabited city in the world. It would take somebody with a very long memory to disprove the claim. As Tranio said, who wants to live that long? Besides, the evidence was clear enough. Damascus had been working its wicked systems for centuries, and knew all the tricks. Its money-changers were notorious. It possessed more liars, embezzlers and thieves amongst the stone-framed market stalls that packed its colourful grid of streets than any city I had ever visited. It was outstandingly famous and prosperous. Its colourful citizens practised an astonishing variety of villainy. As a Roman I felt quite at home.

This was the last city on our route through the Decapolis, and it had to be the jewel of the collection. Like Canatha, its position was remote from the rest, though here the isolation was simply a matter of long distance rather than atmosphere. This was no huddled bastion facing acres of wilderness -even though there were deserts in several directions. Damascus simply throbbed with power, commerce and self-assurance.

It had the normal Decapolis features. Established in a flourishing oasis where the River Abana dashed out through a gorge in the long mountain range, the stout city walls and their protecting towers were themselves encircled for a wide area by water meadows. On the site of an ancient citadel within the city stood a modest Roman camp. An aqueduct brought water for both public baths and private homes. As the terminus of the old, jealously guarded Nabataean trade route from the Red Sea and also a major crossroads, it was well supplied with markets and caravanserai. As a Greek city it had town planning and democratic institutions. As a Roman acquisition it had a lavish civic building programme, which centred on a grandiose plan to convert the local cult precinct into a huge sanctuary of Jupiter that would be set in a grotesquely oversized enclosure overloaded with colonnades, arches and monumental gates.

We entered town from the east by the Gate of the Sun. Immediately the hubbub hit us. Coming out of the desert, the cries of rapacious street sellers and the racket of banter and barter were a shock. Of all the cities we had visited this bore the closest resemblance to the setting of a lively Greek play, a place where babies might be given away or treasure stolen, runaway slaves lurked behind every pillar, and prostitutes rarely survived to retirement age. Here, without doubt, sophisticated wives would berate their enfeebled husbands for not coming good in bed. Wayward sons bamboozled doddering fathers. Dutiful daughters were a rarity. Anyone passing for a priestess was likely to have had a first career preparing virgins for deflowerment by off-duty soldiers in a damp quayside brothel, and anyone who openly admitted to being a madam was best avoided hastily in case she turned out to be your long-lost grandmother.

From the Gate of the Sun to the Gate of Jupiter at the opposite end of town ran the Via Recta, a street some surveyor with a sense of humour had once had named 'Straight'. An embarrassing thoroughfare. Not exactly the place to hire a quiet room for a week of contemplative soul-searching. It ought to have been a stately axis of the city, yet singularly lacked grandeur. In Roman terms it was a Decumanus Maximus, though one that took several demeaning wiggles around hillocks and inconvenient old buildings. It was a foundation line in what should have been a classical Greek street grid. But Hippodamnus of Miletus, who laid down the principles of gracious town planning, would have chucked up his dinner in disgust if faced with this.

It was chaotic too, and characterised by a forest of columns that held up cloth awnings. In the turgid heat that soon built up beneath the heavy roofing as the sun climbed, official traders worked from solidly constructed lock-ups. Numerous illegal stalls were also crammed in, spilling in unsupervised rows across most of the width of the street. A Roman aedile would have become apoplectic. Controlling the irreverent mayhem would be impossible. Traffic ground to a standstill soon after dawn. People stopped for long conversations, planting themselves immovably in the road.