The site was littered with broken, charred beams, cracked roofing tiles, pools of black water, and heaps of smoldering ashes. Usually, in the ruins of a great house, one sees remnants of furnishings and decorations-metal lamp stands and marble statues will survive a fire-but in these ruins there were no such artifacts to be seen; before it went up in flames, the scapegoat's house had been picked clean by looters. Instead, poking up from the general debris were remnants of some of the looters themselves. Scattered amid the ruins were poles driven into the mud, and mounted on the sharpened, bloodstained poles were severed heads. I heard Davus murmur quietly and saw that he was moving his lips, counting.

"Eighteen," he whispered. There were as many woman as men among them; some looked hardly older than children.

The looters must have been beheaded on the spot, for at our feet were great pools of blood. Where it lay thin on the paving stones, the blood had dried to purple, almost black. Where it lay thickest, it appeared still moist and dark red. Elsewhere it had mingled with pools of sooty water, staining them deep crimson. Eighteen bodies contain a veritable lake of blood.

I turned my face away. I was ready to return to the house of Apollonides.

Suddenly, there was a sound like a thundercrack, followed by a loud rumbling noise. The earth shook. People in the street stopped in their tracks and fell silent.

The noise was not thunder; the sky above was blue and cloudless.

"Earthquake?" whispered Davus.

I shook my head. I turned to look in the direction of the city's main gate and pointed to a great white plume that rose into the air, billowing and growing higher as we watched.

"Smoke? From a fire?" said Davus.

"Not smoke. Dust. A great cloud of dust. From the rubble."

"Rubble? What's happened?"

"Let's go and see," I said; but with a thrill of intuition that made my heart pound in my chest, I knew exactly what had occurred.

XX

"Apollonides thought he was being so clever to dig that inner moat and fill it with water. He anticipated that Trebonius would attempt to tunnel beneath the section of wall nearest the city gate, and the moat was his solution. It worked, as you and I know all too well. When the sappers broke through, the tunnel was flooded and the men sent to take the gate were horribly drowned."

Davus and I had found a spot a little away from the crowd of spectators who thronged the main market square of Massilia. We were only a few steps from the very spot where we had pulled ourselves out of the water, where I had been abused by the old man Calamitos, and where Hieronymus had come to our rescue. That all seemed very long ago.

The day had begun to wane. The sun was lowering in the cloudless sky, casting long shadows.

Some of the spectators wailed and tore their hair. Some hung their heads and wept. Some stood in stony silence. Some simply stared at this latest, most terrible catastrophe to overtake their city, their eyes wide and their jaws open in disbelief.

A cordon of soldiers kept the crowd away from the frantically working engineers. A path was kept clear for the troops of archers and the teams of laborers who kept arriving from all parts of the city. By the hundreds they converged at this spot. The laborers were dispatched to take orders from the engineers. The archers were sent to the nearest bastion towers, where they scurried up the stairwells to take up posts at the already crowded battlements.

Nothing remained of the moat but a great morass of mud and muck, in which the engineers and their workers stamped about, shouting orders and forming lines to pass broken timbers and bits of rubble toward the gaping breach in the wall.

The breach was narrowest at the top, widest at the bottom. Where the battlement platform had fallen in, a man with long legs might, with luck, be able to jump across. Immediately below that point, the breach widened dramatically and continued to widen until it reached the base of the wall. The pile of debris formed by the collapsing blocks of limestone was considerable, but much too small to contain all the stones that had fallen.

One did not have to be Vitruvius to see what had happened. Over time, the flooded tunnel beneath the wall had created a sinkhole. In a single moment, the sinkhole had given way and had swallowed up the foundation, causing a considerable section of the wall above to collapse. The gaping sinkhole had swallowed much of the resulting debris, so that only a pile of rubble, hardly taller than a man, remained to be seen.

A breach-any breach, no matter how small-in the walls of a city under siege is a disaster. Once a breach is made, it can always be widened. When it becomes wide enough, it can no longer be defended. If the besieger's forces are numerous enough-and those of Trebonius seemed to me more than sufficient-a besieged city with a breached wall must ultimately capitulate.

The great irony was that this breach had not been caused by the besiegers. Trebonius had dug the tunnel, to be sure, but the tunnel itself was much too small to undermine the wall; nor was that its purpose. It was Apollonides who had caused the wall to collapse by flooding the tunnel beneath the foundation. Even so, if after the flooding he had drained the moat and filled the mouth of the tunnel with debris, the sinkhole might have been prevented. But Apollonides had left the moat in place, and in fact had refilled it day by day as the water level continually dropped. He and his engineers had created the sinkhole themselves, and the collapsed foundation was the result.

Apollonides's response was to fill in as much of the breach as he could, as quickly as possible. While the engineers and their workers gathered the scattered debris, archers on the wall stood ready to protect them should Trebonius mount an assault. So far, no assault had materialized, possibly because Apollonides had flown a white flag from the battlements above the breach, a signal that he was willing to parley.

Davus tugged at my elbow and pointed. Two figures had emerged from the mass of soldiers gathered around the breach and were walking toward us. It was the First Timouchos himself with his son-in-law following behind. Both were in full battle armor. Both were covered with mud from the waist down, and from the waist up with white, chalky dust. Apollonides apparently wished to view the breach from a greater distance and walked all the way to the cordon of soldiers, only a few feet away from us, before he stopped and turned back to have a look. Zeno followed after him, badgering him.

"We'll never be able to fill the gap sufficiently," Zeno said, "not with material strong enough to keep out a battering ram. It can't be done. If Trebonius mounts a full-scale assault-"

"He won't!" snapped Apollonides. "Not as long as we fly the white flag. He's held back so far."

"Why should he hurry? He can mount his assault tomorrow or the next day. That breach isn't going away."

"It's a breach, yes, but only a narrow one; narrow enough to be… defensible." Apollonides spoke through gritted teeth and kept his eyes on the activity by the wall, refusing to look at Zeno. "Even if Trebonius lined up his entire army to rush the breach, he'd never push enough men through to take the gate. Our archers would pick them off one by one until Roman corpses filled the gap. Any of them who did get through the breach and over the hurdle of debris would be trapped in that lake of mud, like flies in honey, made into even easier targets for our archers."

"And if the breach becomes wider?"

"It won't!"

"Why not? Some of those overhanging blocks on either side look ready to fall at any moment."

"The engineers will shore up the damage. They know what they're doing."