•

I left this awkward tableau and kicked my heels along the shore. I was thinking about Pertinax and Barnabas. I was thinking about Crispus. I was wondering why I had started to feel that Crispus and Barnabas had me constantly struggling at some tangent to the truth…

After that, I was thinking about other things, irrelevant to work.

I hunched irritably on the tideline, playing with a desiccated dogfish eggcase, until I gradually began to feel like Odysseus in Polyphemus' cave: a huge single eye was watching me balefully.

It was painted on a ship. Scarlet and black, with the shameless elongation of a painted Egyptian god; there was presumably a matching one around the vessel's haughty prow but she lay sideways to shore, so without a tame dolphin to tow me out behind there was no way I could check. She was riding at anchor, safely beyond the reach of holiday-makers' curiosity. Apart from reeking of the kind of happy affluence that loves to be viewed by wide sectors of the public while supposedly enjoying its privacy, she was not the kind of precious toy to be brought in and belted against the ratty bales of straw which formed a rough-and-ready bump rail on the Oplontis mooring stage.

Whoever designed this nautical beauty had a statement to make. There was money written all over his ship. She was forty feet of blatant artistry. She had a short, single bank of red ochre oars which were perfectly aligned at rest, dark sails, a mainmast for her square rig plus a second for a foresail, and lines so suave they hurt. Somehow the shipwright had managed to combine a slim keel like a warship with enough cabin and deck space to make life aboard a pleasure for the financier who possessed the stupendous capital that had created her.

At a slight shift of the incoming evening breeze, the gilding on her duck tail stern and her masthead goddess flashed restlessly. There was a nippy little bumboat trailing behind in a perfectly matching rig-identical steering paddles, identical toy sail, and the same painted eye. While I gawped, the bumboat was pulled closer and after some distant activity I watched it set off shorewards, sculled at a fast and elegant pace.

Cheered by this happy accident, I walked onto the landing stage and waited my chance to introduce myself to what I was convinced would be the Crispus menage.

•

There were two tykes aboard: a lean, wide-awake sailor standing astern to row, plus a substantial chunk of bellypork taking his ease in the prow. I hung about, ready to make myself useful catching their mooring rope. The oarsman touched; I gripped the bumboat's prow; the passenger stepped out; then the deckhand pushed off at once. I tried not to feel superfluous.

The man who landed wore soft doeskin boots with copper half-moons jingling on their thongs. I had heard the sailor call him Bassus. Bassus clearly thought a lot of himself. He was the type of mighty transit barrel who rolls through life clearing a wide swath. And why not? Far too many feeble whingers with all the dye bled out of their characters skulk on the sidelines of existence hoping no one will notice them.

We walked towards the beach. I weighed him up. He probably kept a bankbox in all the great ports from Alexandria to Carthage and Massilia to Antioch, but like a wary seaman he always carried sufficient good gold on his person to bribe his way out of seizure by pirates or tangling with small-town officials when he went ashore. He had earrings, and a nose stud, and enough amulets to ward off the Great Plague of Athens. His Sun God medallion would have caved in the chest of a lesser man.

He was not even the captain. The whip through his belt told me this was merely the bosun-the overseer who striped the hide of any oarsman on the Isis who upset her tranquil motion by catching a crab. He had the silent confidence of a man whose bulk can dominate a tavern from the moment he enters it, but who knows the first officer on a sleek lugger like the Isis never needs to cause a fuss. If this was just the bosun, Aufidius Crispus the owner probably thought himself foster brother to the gods.

'You've come from the Isis!' I commented, giving the ship an admiring eye but not bothering to annoy him with the obvious statement that she was a superb rig. Bassus condescended to flick me a glance. 'I need to see Crispus. Chance of a word?'

'He's not aboard.' Short and sweet.

'I know better than to believe that!'

'Believe what you like,' he returned indifferently.

We walked up the beach, as far as the road. I broached him again, 'I've a letter to deliver to Crispus-'

Bassus shrugged. He held out his hand. 'Give it to me if you like.'

'That's too easy to be true!' (Besides, I had left the Emperor's letter upstairs at the inn, when I changed my clothes.)

The bosun, who had been fairly passive so far, finally formed an opinion of me. It was unfavourable. He did not bother to say so. He simply suggested that I should get out of his way, which, being an accommodating type, was what I did.

•

While Bassus was disappearing over the horizon, I strode up to Larius and instructed him to find Petronius as quickly as he could. Without waiting, I retraced my steps to the edge of the sea where I stared out again at the tantalizing prospect of Aufidius Crispus' ship.

I have to admit, this was one occasion when being a non-swimmer became slightly inconvenient.

The beach at Oplontis was the usual litter of dank seaweed, broken amphorae, snaggles of stiffened fishing net and scarves left behind by girls who were intent on other things. Wasps homed in on half-gnawed melon rind. Walkers risked deadly hazards from rusty daggers and dress brooches. There was the usual left boot which always looks just your size and perfect, but when you trudge across to have a look has half its sole missing. If people managed to fend off the cynical urchins touting overpriced fishing trips, a jellyfish that was not as dead as it was pretending would sting them instead.

Now it was early evening. A subtle diminution in the brash daytime light, an imperceptible cooling of that glorious heat, and shadows which suddenly ran out to ridiculous lengths were giving the atmosphere a magical tinge; it almost made being at the seaside acceptable. People who were tired of working stopped. Families who were tired of quarrelling left. Tiny dogs stopped terrorizing mastiffs and settled for raping any bitches they could manage to climb onto, afterwards running round in glorious circles to celebrate their productivity.

I looked back towards our inn. Larius had loped off to find Petronius, and Ollia was gone too, along with her briny swain. The beach lay unusually empty. Apart from the dogs and me, a party of off-duty shop boys were making a lot of noise with a shuttlecock while their girlfriends dragged together driftwood for a barbecue fire. The fishermen who were normally cluttering the place had either sailed off with their lanterns to raid tuna shoals after dark, or had not yet returned from their more lucrative trade running tourists out to look at the rock on Capreae from which Emperor Tiberius had thrown people who offended him. All they left for me was a single skiff, upended above the tideline, growing silvery in the sun.