• • •

On the way home, I bought the Egyptian basket ringed with hippopotami as a gift for Bethesda. I needed something to soften the news that I was leaving Rome. As it turned out, it was a wise choice for a gift, since a reed basket can be thrown across the room and not break.

Unlike her mother, Diana seemed to receive the news with enthusiasm. Anything that might result in the return of Davus was a welcome development. But that night, as I packed a saddlebag with things I would need for the journey, Diana came into the room. She spoke without looking at me.

"I think it's a brave thing you're doing, Papa, going off like this. The countryside must be terribly dangerous."

"No more so than the city these days, I imagine."

She watched me fold a tunic. I did such a poor job that she felt obliged to take it from me and fold it herself.

"Papa, I know that you're doing this for me. Even though… I mean to say, I know that you were never… pleased… by my marriage. Yet now you're willing to…" She fought back sudden tears. "And I worry that I may never see either of you again!"

The folded tunic came undone in her hands. I put my arm around her. She reached up to touch my fingers on her shoulder. "I don't know what's wrong with me, Papa. Every since Davus left…"

"Everyone's nerves are as frayed as a beggar's cloak, Diana. What do you want to bet that Cicero breaks out in tears twice a day?"

She smiled. "I doubt that Caesar does."

"Perhaps not. But Pompey may. There's a picture for you: Davus yawning outside the Great One's tent, and Pompey inside, crying like a baby and tearing his hair."

"Like a scene from Plautus."

"Exactly. Sometimes it helps to think of life as a comedy on a stage, the way the gods must see it."

"The gods can be cruel."

"As often as not."

We were silent for a while. I felt a great sense of peace, standing next to her with my arm around her.

"But Papa," she said quietly, "how will you manage to get Davus from Pompey? If you haven't discovered who killed Numerius, Pompey will never let him go."

"Don't worry. I have a plan."

"Do you? Tell me."

"No, Diana."

She shrugged my arm from her shoulder and stepped away. "Why not, Papa? You used to tell me everything."

"You don't need to know, Diana."

She pursed her lips. "Don't tell me your plan, then, Papa. Perhaps I don't believe you have one."

I took her hands and kissed her forehead. "Oh, I assure you, daughter, I do have a plan." And I did- although using it might mean that I would never come back from Brundisium alive.

PART TWO

XII

Horses were hard to come by. The best had been taken by those who fled the city in the first wave of panic or requisitioned by Pompey's forces. Tiro promised to meet me outside the Capena Gate before dawn the next day with fresh mounts, but what could possibly be left in the stables? I had visions of myself atop a swaybacked nag with knobby joints and a hide worn to leather, but I underestimated Tiro's resourcefulness. I found him waiting for me with Fortex, the bodyguard, both of them mounted. A third horse stood idly by, munching at the grass between two moss-covered funeral shrines alongside the road. All three beasts were as sleek and fit as any rider could wish.

We set out at once. The sun was no more than an intimation of fiery gold not yet cresting the low hills to the east. Patches of darkness lingered like vestiges of Night's trailing shroud. In such uncertain light, there was something eerie about that stretch of road, flanked on either side by so many tombs of the dead.

The Appian Way itself is as smooth as a tabletop, with polygonal paving stones fitted so tightly that not a grain of sand could be passed between them. There is something reassuring about the solid immutability of a Roman road. Meto once told me of venturing on a reconnaissance mission into the wild woods of Gaul. Alien gods seemed to peer from gnarled roots. Lemures flitted among shadows. Unseen creatures scurried amid moldering leaves. Then, in a place where he never expected it, Meto came upon a road built at Caesar's instigation, a gleaming ribbon of stone cutting through the heart of the forest, letting in fresh air and sunlight.

The Appian Way is surrounded not by wilderness but by tombs for miles along either side. Some monuments are large and elaborate, like miniature temples. Others are no more than a simple marker, an upright stone pole with a bit of engraving. Some fresh-scrubbed and beautifully tended, surrounded by flowers and shrubbery. Others have fallen into disrepair, with columns knocked askew and cracked foundations choked by weeds.

Even in broad daylight, there is something melancholy about a trip down the Appian Way. In that tenuous predawn light, where unsettled spirits seemed to lurk in the shadows, the road beneath our feet meant more than Roman order and ingenuity. It was a path by which the living could traverse the city of the dead. Every clop of our horses' hooves against the stones was a note of reassurance that we were just passing through.

We came to the shrine of Publius Clodius, set among those of his ancestors. The last time I had traveled any great length on the Appian Way, it had been to investigate the murder of Clodius. He had been the darling and the hope of the urban rabble. His assassination sparked riots in Rome; a mob with torches made the Senate House his funeral pyre. Desperate for order, the Senate had called on Pompey, and the Great One had used emergency powers to instigate what he called judicial reforms. The result had been the prosecution and exile of a great many powerful men who now saw in Caesar their only hope to ever return. The ruling class was irreparably fragmented, the rabble more disaffected than ever. In hindsight, was the murder of Clodius on the Appian Way the true beginning of civil war, the opening skirmish, the first casualty?

His shrine was simple, as befitted a patrician with pretensions to the common touch. Atop a plain pedestal sat a ten-foot-tall marble stele carved with sheaves of wheat, a reminder of the grain dole that Clodius established. The sun cleared the hills. By the growing light I was able to see that the pedestal was littered all about with humble votive offerings- burnt tapers and plugs of incense, bouquets of sweet herbs and early spring flowers. But there was also a pile of something that looked and smelled like human excrement, and a graffito smeared in the same stuff on the base of the pedestal: Clodius fucked his sister.

Tiro wrinkled his nose. Fortex barked out a laugh. We rode on.

A little farther, on the opposite side of the road, we passed the Pompeius family plot. The tomb of Pompey's father was a gaudy, elaborate affair. All the gods of Olympus were crowded into the pediment, as if jealous of the honor, painted in lifelike colors and surrounded by a gilded border that glimmered red in the rays of the rising sun. The tomb looked recently painted and refurbished but lately neglected; weeds had grown about the base in the time since Pompey and his household had fled south. Otherwise, everything seemed perfect, until I noticed that heaps of horse dung, easy enough to collect on the road, had been deposited on the bronze roof. By midmorning of a sunny day, as this promised to be, travelers would smell the shrine to the elder Pompey long before they saw it.

Fortex snickered.

"Outrageous!" muttered Tiro. "When I was young, men fought for power just as viciously as they do today, but nobody would have dared to desecrate a tomb, not even as an act of war. What must the gods think? We deserve whatever misery they thrust upon us. Here, you! Climb up there and get rid of that stuff."