• • •

"I suppose you're quite pleased with yourself," I said to Tiro. Along with Fortex, we were making our second circuit of the camp on horseback. Tiro was all eyes and ears, taking in every detail.

As we had left Caesar's tent, one of his aides handed me a copper disk stamped with an image of Venus. The man told me I could show it as a passport to anyone who questioned us. The disk signified that I was a guest of the imperator himself, allowed to come and go and move freely about the camp, as long as I stayed out of the way. The disk was even good for obtaining rations at the mess tent.

Had it been up to me, we would have spent no more time in the camp than it took to leave it. I was eager to get into Brundisium. Once Pompey began his nautical retreat and the siege commenced, everything would be in chaos. Any hope of finding Davus could slip away in an instant. I wanted to know Tiro's plan. But Tiro insisted on taking full advantage of Caesar's hospitality first. "You traveled on Pompey's passport," he said with a smile. "Now I shall travel a bit on Caesar's."

"Tiro, we must get inside the walls, quickly."

"Indulge me, Gordianus. Today is Liberalia, you know!"

"I should like to indulge you by sitting you down on one of those giant phalli the priests of Dionysus carry."

Fortex yelped at the idea. Tiro hooted. He was in high spirits, almost giddy. Why not? He had carried off his charade with spectacular success. He had slipped through Antony's hands unscathed, slipped in and out of Caesar's tent undetected, and had even garnered valuable information from the lips of the imperator himself. Now he was skimming a last bit of intelligence, observing the numbers and dispositions of Caesar's troops and siege machines.

After some morning cloudiness, the sky had cleared. An offshore wind was rising. It was a perfect day for sailing. At any moment Pompey might begin his retreat. The transport ships might be loading at that very moment. "What will be the use of all this information you're gathering, Tiro, if we wait too long to get into Brundisium? Pompey may leave without you- or he may become trapped, for lack of what you might have told him."

"You're right, Gordianus, we must be getting on. But first, something to quiet the rumbling in my belly. Who knows what sort of rations Pompey's troops have been reduced to inside the city? I suggest we eat at Caesar's expense, and slip into Brundisium with full stomachs."

"Where's the mess tent, then?" I grumbled.

"Three up and two over." Tiro had memorized the layout of the camp.

We were given steaming millet porridge sweetened with a dollop of honey. I even found a few raisins in my portion. Fortex grumbled at the lack of any meat.

"Meto tells me that a soldier fights best with grain in his belly," I said. "Too much beef bloats a man, makes him sluggish, turns his bowels to mud. Once, in Gaul, Caesar's troops ran out of grain. For days on end they had nothing to eat but cattle requisitioned from the natives. They hated it, to the point of becoming mutinous. They demanded their porridge!"

"Your son must be a remarkable person," said Tiro.

"Why do you say that?"

"Meto was born a slave, wasn't he?"

"So were you, Tiro."

"Yes, but I was educated and groomed to be Cicero's companion from early on. I had the life of a scribe. There's room for a slave to prove himself in that kind of position, to show off his natural talents and rise in the world. But Meto was born a slave to Marcus Crassus, wasn't he? A bad man to have for a master. Crassus may have been the richest man in the world, but he never knew the true value of anything."

I nodded. "Meto wasn't even in Crassus's household, properly speaking. He was an errand boy in one of Crassus's villas on the coast, in Baiae. That's where I first met him, during the slave revolt of Spartacus. There had been a murder, presumably by some runaway slaves. Crassus intended to kill every slave in the household in retribution, including Meto. Imagine, slaughtering an innocent child in the arena!"

"Roman justice is sometimes hard," agreed Tiro.

"Crassus wasn't entirely pleased with the way things turned out. When it was all over, he sent Meto off to an estate in Sicily. Do you know what Meto was doing, when I finally tracked him down? He was a scarecrow. It was terrible for him. Endless days in the hot sun, the buzz of insects in the grain, the hungry crows always coming back, the foreman beating him if any of the crop was eaten. He had nightmares about it for years afterward. Perhaps he still does."

"I should think by now he's seen enough horrors as a soldier to drive out that nightmare and replace it with others," observed Tiro. "What made him want to become a soldier?"

"Catilina." I saw Tiro wrinkle his nose at the mention of the radical insurgent who had been Cicero's enemy. "When he was sixteen, he fell in love with Catilina, or the idea of Catilina, and ran off to fight for him. I was there, too, at the battle of Pistoria, when Catilina's dreams ended. Meto and I survived, by the favor of the gods. That taste of battle was more than enough to satisfy any curiosity I ever had about warfare and slaughter, but Meto wanted more. He needed another leader to follow, more battles to fight. It has something to do with being born a slave, I think. I freed him. I made him my son, and never treated him as anything less than my own flesh and blood. But he never quite felt a sense of birthright, a sureness of belonging. The night before his toga day, when he was sixteen…"

I caught myself. Why I was speaking so candidly? The mood of an army camp on the brink of battle has a way of loosening a man's tongue. "On the eve of his toga day, Meto had the nightmare- the scarecrow nightmare. I told him that was all in the past. He knew that, but he didn't feel it. Becoming my son, becoming a citizen- it all felt unreal to him. In his heart, he was still a frightened, helpless slaveboy. It wasn't until he went off to Gaul and found favor with Caesar that he seemed finally to put his beginnings behind him. He found the place where he belonged, and the leader he was looking for. And yet, now-" I stopped myself from going further. "I don't pretend to understand him, Tiro, not completely. But I am his father, as surely as if he came from my seed."

"You love him very much," said Tiro quietly.

"More than anything else. Too much, perhaps."

XIX

"I'm not a swimmer," I said.

After eating, we had returned to the lookout post on the hill north of the city. Tiro, Fortex, and I sat on horseback, surveying the view. It was much as I had seen it the day before, except that the harbor was now crowded with moored transport ships, and the harbor entrance had been pinched a bit tighter, thanks to new rafts hastily added to the end of each breakwater. Tiro had said he wanted a final look at the lay of the land and the disposition of Caesar's forces, but I was beginning to suspect that he had no idea of what to do next and was searching for a way to get inside the city walls.

Lacking the wings of Daedalus, this could be done in only two ways: by land or by water. Entry by land would require getting past the front line of Caesar's heavily manned trenches, traversing the no man's land before the city wall, and then penetrating or scaling the wall itself. We could hardly do any of this in secret. Long before we crossed the front line, the attackers would order us to stop or be killed as defectors. Even if we crossed the no man's land alive, the defenders might fire upon us long before we could explain ourselves, and they could hardly be expected to open the gates or let down ladders even if they wanted to help us.

That left the possibility of approaching Brundisium by water. The city wall that fronted the harbor was shorter and less heavily guarded than the landward wall, but scarcely less formidable to three men without wings. Outside this wall, a narrow road ran along the waterfront and gave access to the port situated at the tip of the peninsula, but the entire length of this road had been covered with a veritable thicket of spikes and caltrops to make passage impossible and discourage even small boats from landing. There was only one point of possible ingress: the port itself, where gates in the walls opened onto a wide boardwalk and several large quays projected into the water. The gates to the port were open and there seemed to be a great deal of activity on the quays, but as yet there was no sign that the ships moored there were being readied for departure.