He thrust out his jaw to stop it from quivering. "I think… I may know who she was."

Hieronymus and Davus both stepped closer.

"I think… the girl who fell… was my daughter." I raised an eyebrow.

Arausio's voice was suddenly choked and bitter. "He led her on, you see. Right up until the moment he married that monster, he led Rindel to think he might choose her instead."

"Rindel?" I said.

"My daughter. That's her name. Was her name.",Who led her on?"

"Zeno! The son of a whore said he loved her. But like every other lying Greek, all he cared for in the end was bettering himself."

Zeno. Where had I heard the name recently? From Domitius, I recalled, when he told me the tale of Apollonides and his hideously deformed daughter, Cydimache. The young man who had recently married Cydimache was named Zeno.

"Do you mean the son-in-law of the First Timouchos?"

"That's the one. We weren't good enough for him. Never mind that I could buy and sell Zeno's father if I wanted. Never mind that Rindel was one of the most beautiful girls in Massilia. We're Gauls, you see, not Greeks; and no one in our family has ever been elected to the Timouchoi. In this town, that puts us just one step above the barbarians in the forest. Even so, Zeno could have married Rindel. Greeks and Gauls do marry. But Zeno was too good for that. Curse his ambition! He saw his chance to leap to the top, and he took it, over the head of my poor Rindel."

A part of me, frozen with grief for Meto, simply wanted the man to go away. But another part of me grudgingly stirred. I was curious. Looking at Arausio, his face now nakedly showing his misery, I felt a pang of sympathy as well. Were we not both fathers grieving for lost children? If I understood correctly, his daughter and my son had ended their lives within a few hundred feet of each other, beneath the same wall, claimed by a plunge into the same unforgiving sea.

"She was desperately in love with him," Arausio went on. "Why not? Zeno's handsome and charming. He dazzled her. The young can't see beneath the surface of things. When he told her he loved her in return, she thought that was the end of it. She'd found her bliss and nothing could spoil it. I can't say I wasn't pleased myself; he'd have made a good match. Then Zeno stopped calling on her. And the next thing we knew, he'd married Cydimache. It broke Rindel's heart. She wept and tore her hair. She shut herself away; wouldn't eat or talk to anyone, not even to her mother. Then she took to slipping out of the house, disappearing for hours at a time. I was furious, but it did no good. She said it helped her to take long walks alone. Imagine that, a young girl walking the streets in broad daylight by herself, unescorted! `People will think you've gone mad,' I told her. Perhaps she was going mad. I should have kept a closer eye on her, but with everything in such chaos,…" He shook his head.

"What makes you think it was Rindel we saw on the Sacrifice Rock?" I asked. "And how did you hear about it? How did you know that we saw it happen?"

"Massilia is a small town, Gordianus. Everyone's talking about it. 'The scapegoat has two Romans staying at his house, and you won't believe what the three of them saw-a man chased a woman up the Sacrifice Rock, and over she went. And one of these Romans is a character named Gordianus, called the Finder; investigates for people like Cicero and Pompey, digs up scandal and snoops under people's sheets.' "

That was not exactly how I would have described my livelihood, but I felt curiously flattered to discover that my name was sufficiently well-known to provide fodder for gossip in a city where I had never previously set foot. Of course, anything to do with the scapegoat would be of interest to the locals, and any death at the Sacrifice Rock would excite speculation.

"As for why I think it must have been Rindel… There was a catch in Arausio's voice. He cleared his throat and pressed on. "That morning she went missing again. Out for another of her long walks, I thought. But I had other things to worry about. That was the day the Romans brought up the battering-ram. For all we knew, the walls of the city might come down at any moment. As it turned out, the walls held; our soldiers even captured the battering-ram for a trophy. But Rindel… He cleared his throat. "Rindel never came home. Night fell, and the curfew, and still no sign of her. I was angry, then worried, then frantic. I sent slaves to search for her. One of them came back with the rumor about a girl who had been seen on the Sacrifice Rock pursued by a soldier-an officer in a blue cape." His eyes bored into mine. "Is it true? Is that what you saw?"

"The man wore a pale blue cape," I acknowledged. I remembered it fluttering in the wind.

"Zeno! It must have been him. I knew it! Rindel must have found him and confronted him. He'd led her on, betrayed her, broken her heart-married that monster instead. Who knows what Rindel said to him, or what he said to her? And it ended with him driving her up the rock, and then-"

"No one drove anyone," objected Hieronymus. "The woman we saw led, and the man chased after her. He was clearly trying to stop her. The tragedy is that he failed. The woman jumped."

"No, Arausio is right," insisted Davus. "The woman was trying to get away from the man. Then he caught up with her. He pushed her over."

Arausio looked at me. "What do you say, Gordianus?"

Both Hieronymus and Davus looked to me for vindication. I turned my gaze to the Sacrifice Rock. "I'm not sure. But both versions can't be true."

"It matters, don't you see?" Arausio leaned forward. "If Zeno pushed Rindel, then it was murder. The heartless beast!"

"If the woman was Rindel; if the man was Zeno."

"But it must have been them! Rindel never came home. She couldn't simply disappear, not in a city as small as Massilia, with every exit blocked. It was her on that rock. I know it was! And the man was Zeno, wearing his blue officer's cape; you saw that for yourself."

"And if it was your daughter and Zeno, and if the only witnesses to the event were the three of us on this terrace, then there are at least two different opinions of what may have occurred-and no way to reconcile them."

"But there is a way. There's someone who knows the truth," insisted Arausio. "Zeno!"

I nodded slowly. "Yes, if it was Zeno we saw in the blue cape, then he alone can tell you exactly what happened, and why."

"But he never will! He lied to my daughter about loving her. He'll lie about this as well."

"Unless he could be compelled to tell the truth."

"By whom? His father-in-law, the First Timouchos? Apollonides controls the city police and the courts. He'll stop at nothing to protect his son-in-law and avoid a scandal." Arausio lowered his eyes. "But there will be a scandal. Word is already out. Everyone knows there was a death at the Sacrifice Rock. No one knows yet who it was, but word will spread soon enough. `I heard it was the daughter of that Gaulish merchant Arausio,' they'll say. `Rindel was her name. She went crazy after Zeno spurned her. Her father should have seen it coming.' And I should have. I should have locked her in her room! How could she bring such shame on her family? Unless I can show that Zeno pushed her, everyone will assume that she killed herself. An illegal suicide, unsanctioned by the Timouchoi-an offense to the gods at the very moment they sit in judgment on the city, deciding whether Massilia lives or dies! How can I bear it? This will be the ruin of me!"

I felt a sudden chill toward the man. He had come to us grief-stricken at the disappearance of his daughter. Now he seemed more concerned about damage to his own reputation. But the scapegoat had a different reaction. Hieronymus knew what it meant to suffer the onus of public humiliation and ruin in Massilia, to be outcast for the sins of others. He looked at Arausio with tears in his eyes.