"You take care. Even Zeus himself had a narrow escape,' Helena teased him. "Cronus, his father, who used to be king of the heavens, had been warned that a son of his would depose him. Every time a child was born, he ate it. After she bore Zeus, his mother had to hide the baby, disguised as a stone, hung between heaven and earth where Cronus would not find him and gobble him up.'

Cornelius covered his ears and ran off, squealing.

That grisly tale brought my attention back to the Hill of Cronus, where Marcella Caesia had died, with her body laid out under the stars, until her stubborn father came at last and found her. A Roman parent, more caring of his daughter than the average mythical Greek.

Gloomily I wondered what was happening to Julia Junilla and Sosia Favonia back in Rome. My mother-in-law kept a quiet house. I was fairly sure the noble Julia would not issue any challenge to the gods at a pot-luck picnic. Her cook would be spoiling my daughters with treats – our worst problem would be bringing them back to normality when we returned home.

XV

We were running out of options. We were low on food too. Helena had told the doorman we would skip having meals from his sister. She had put together a scratch supper with purchases from site vendors. There was bread, and some vine leaf parcels, with the remains of our Roman sausage.

"I need to have meat!' Young Glaucus complained, ranting that Milo of Croton, the most famous Olympic athlete of all time, had eaten twenty pounds of meat and twenty pounds of bread a day, washed down with eighteen pints of wine. "Milo trained by carrying a calf on his shoulders. As it grew day by day and week by week into a full-size ox, the effect was like cumulative weight training. In the end, he ate the whole ox in a single sitting.'

"We are not lugging a bull calf around with us, Glaucus, even if you volunteer to carry him. Anyway, Milo of Croton was a wrestler. Anyone can tell from your pretty face that you are not.'

"Pentathlon,' Glaucus disabused me. "Discus, javelin, long jump, foot race – and wrestling.'

"So how come your beautiful physiognomy has never been ruined?'

"It's three out of five. First athlete to win three events, wins overall. Remaining trials are cancelled. I try to come through in the early bouts, so I won't have to wrestle.' He gave a slow grin. "Or when the opponent looks like a crusher or a gouger, I always concede.'

"But secretly,' demanded Gaius, "are you a crack crusher yourself?'

"Not really,' said Glaucus.

Then he went out to hang around the many shrines in the Altis, hoping for a sacrifice in process. Even when the hundred oxen were slaughtered at the Games, only the legs, tails and guts were carried up the steps on the Altar of Zeus. The body steaks were used to feed the crowd.

Before he left, Glaucus said, "Falco, the killer of Valeria is probably an athlete, yes? Assume he chose a sport he knew. only a pentathlete

would use the jumping weights. Long-jumping only happens in the pentathlon.'

"Thanks, Glaucus. I agree he is most likely an athlete – is now, or has been in the past. A pentathlete would fit neatly, but life isn't like that. I think he could be anyone familiar with the palaestra – boxer, wrestler, even a pankration fighter. It's depressing. I don't fancy trying to interrogate every hardened Olympic champion, in case one of them kills girls.'

"All the current champions will have gone on the circuit,' Glaucus reminded me.

"How many Games on the circuit, Glaucus?'

He grinned. "Well, the big four are the Pan-Hellenics. Olympia, Delphi, Nemea and the Isthmus, which don't happen every year. The Panathenaic in Athens is annual. Add in all the other cities – well, you are looking at about fifty, Falco.'

Oh, easy then!

Helena Justina slept peacefully that night. I remembered how last night, when she kept creeping out to be ill after the oregano hotpot, I had woken once to an unexpectedly empty bed. I sat up in alarm, my heart pounding. At that moment I knew all too well how Tullius Statianus must have felt – assuming he did have some feelings for Valeria – alone in his campbed, when she never came home.

The vine leaf parcels went through me like a rat down a drain. It was my turn to be groaning and drenched in sweat all night. My turn too, as I lay tossing and waiting for the next agonising onslaught, to wonder why anybody ever wanted to travel.

I was not the only one awake. The sound of crying drew me to the boys' room. By moonlight through an open shutter, I saw a piteous spectacle. Cornelius was sobbing his heart out, overwhelmed by homesickness. He had never even left Rome before, and had had no real concept of how long we would be travelling. I sat on the bed to console him, and next thing I was trapped there by the hefty, tear-stained eleven-year-old, who had fallen fast asleep.

I dragged my arm from under him and straightened him out so he wouldn't fall off the narrow mattress if he flailed around. I covered him up with a thin blanket for comfort, then tortured myself again with sentimental thoughts of Julia and Favonia back in Rome. Who was tending my little ones, if they cried in the night?

Settle down, Falco. They were safe. They had four old slave

nursemaids who had looked after their mother once, their noble grandma, their doting grandpa, and if all else failed each of my materially spoiled darlings would be tucked up in bed with a whole row of dolls and miniature animals.

Somewhere in the Altis an owl hooted. My stomach emitted a lugubrious glug. I sat still, using the time before my next bout of suffering to think. Diarrhoea can be the informer's friend.

I could see the dim shapes of Gaius (snoring) and Glaucus (breathing the slow measure of the fit) in two other narrow beds. Had the Leonidaion been more crowded, perhaps all of us would have had to share a room. We had made our resources stretch to two rooms. Seeking economy, Helena and I had Albia in with us, which rather inhibited marital affection. We put up with that – or found ways around it. All our accommodation was on an upper storey, or I might have closed the shutter even in the boys' room to keep out thieves and amorous gods disguised as silver moonbeams.

Now I started wondering about sleeping arrangements among the Seven Sights Travel group, at least when they were not camping. According to the list Aulus left us, the group contained a family of four; well, they might bunk up together. Then there were three couples, of whom one was the newly-weds and another seemed to be eloping adulterers; both of those pairs would presumably be anxious for privacy. Completing the group were four – no, five – single people. one female and four male, including Volcasius, the weird one, with whom nobody would ever want to share. Some would have brought slaves, whom the snobbish Aulus had not bothered to list. It could mean that when they stayed at an inn, Phineus had to find them nine rooms, not to mention whatever he wanted for himself, their drivers, and any run-arounds (who must exist, though Aulus had not listed them either.

That meant, either Phineus routed them on main roads, where there might be good, Roman-style mansios – official or semi-official travel lodges with high standards of accommodation and stabling – or else this misfit party of wealthy innocents would find themselves lumped together in all sorts of combinations. On the boat over, they would have been lucky to find even one cabin. Arriving at Olympia, to be faced with just a couple of large tents for the whole group, must have been their first big, bad experience on this trip. For some of them, a serious shock. And they had then been forced to stay camped out on the riverbank for weeks, while Valeria's death was investigated.