“Gordianus—you saved my life!”

Vindovix had roused himself enough to sit upright on the sunbeam. For a long moment he looked utterly stunned, then he flashed a lascivious grin. “Gordianus, what a man you are! For this, you deserve a reward—the kind of reward only a true man, a man with a moustache, can give you.”

He staggered to his feet and took a few steps toward me, leering at me with half-shut eyes.

“But Vindovix,” I said, still gasping for breath, “you no longer have your moustache.”

“What?” Perplexed, he reached up to touch his clean-shaven upper lip. Then his eyes rolled up, his knees gave way, and Vindovix the Gaul fell flat on his face.

*   *   *

That night I met with Posidonius in his library. Antipater and Cleobulus were there, as was Vindovix, who sat in a corner, still a bit befuddled by wine and nursing the cuts on his brow and the swollen lip he had suffered when he fell.

I explained what had happened, relying partly on reason and partly on conjecture.

“Gatamandix hated the idea that a Gaul had posed for the Colossus even more than Cleobulus did. According to the story, the ancestor of Vindovix had been a slave—and if a Gallic slave had been used by a Rhodian sculptor to create a monument to a Greek god, that was not a cause for pride, but for shame. To Gatamandix, then, what was the Colossus but a monument to the failure of the Gauls to conquer Greece, and a bitter reminder that a man of the Segurovi had been enslaved by the Greeks? No doubt he had long been irked by the family of Vindovix and their fantastic story, stubbornly repeated down the generations. It was Vindovix who really wanted to come to Rhodes, not Gatamandix. But if Vindovix returned home, not only having seen the Colossus with his own eyes but bearing some proof that his ancestor was the model, there would never be an end to the story. Gatamandix—as Druid, judge, and executioner—decided to take action. That was the real reason he accompanied you back to Rhodes—not to explore the world of the Greeks, but to thwart Vindovix’s quest to prove the historical reality of his family’s legend. Toward that end, he first destroyed the evidence of the plaster statue; to do that, he didn’t hesitate to murder Zenas and throw his body overboard. Then he set out to eliminate Vindovix, getting him too drunk to resist and preparing to murder him as a ritual sacrifice. Only he, Gatamandix, would return to the Segurovi, with a story that would refute and forever put an end to the tale of a Gallic slave who posed for the Colossus of Rhodes.”

Posidonius shook his head. “The tale as you reconstruct it makes perfect sense, Gordianus. How could I have been so blind to Gatamandix’s treachery? I was ready to accuse Cleobulus!”

“Of course, we still don’t know the truth of the question that set off this sequence of events,” said Antipater. “Was Vindovix’s ancestor the model for the Colossus, or not?”

“You forget that I saw the statue before it was defaced,” said Vindovix. “I have no doubt whatsoever. Vindovix, my great-great-great…” He lost track, blinked a few times, and went on. “He was the model for Chares.”

“I also saw the statue, and I have no doubt either,” said Cleobulus. “It looked nothing like you, Vindovix. You merely saw what you wanted to see.”

“But surely Gatamandix also thought it looked like Vindovix, or else he would never have gone to such lengths to destroy it,” observed Antipater.

“That bit of logic counts for something,” said Posidonius. “But the truth remains elusive. We have only legend, hearsay, and subjective observation to guide us. In this instance, empirical reasoning yields no definitive conclusion. Alas!”

*   *   *

It took Vindovix only a day to recover from his hangover, but I developed a fever from the wound I received from the Druid’s knife and was sick for days. With care from my host and Antipater, the fever passed, and I gradually recuperated.

Several days later, during a break in the stormy weather, I sat in the garden. Posidonius and Antipater were nearby, discussing a philosophical question. The slight warmth of the wintry sunshine felt good on my face.

Vindovix strolled across the garden. If anything, the lingering scars from his fall added character to his rugged features. He had begun to grow his moustache, but it would take a long time to regain its former glory.

He tugged at the silky hair above his lip, gave me a long, languid look, then walked on.

“Poor Vindovix,” said Antipater, “betrayed by a man he trusted. He must be lonely now, the only Gaul on an island of Greeks. I do believe he’s rather smitten with you, Gordianus.”

“He’s certainly persistent,” I said.

Posidonius raised an eyebrow. “And winter has only just begun. You’ll have to give in to his advances sooner or later.”

“What makes you think I haven’t done so already?”

Antipater blinked. “Have you?”

I smiled and shrugged, feeling quite sophisticated and at home among these worldly Greeks.

VII

STYX AND STONES

(The Walls and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon)

“In Babylon, we shall see not one, but two of the great Wonders of the World,” said Antipater. “Or at least, we shall see what remains of them.”

We had spent the night at a dusty little inn beside the Euphrates River. Antipater had been quiet and grumpy from the moment he got out of bed that morning—travel is hard on old men—but as we drew closer to Babylon, traveling south on the ancient road that ran alongside the river, his spirits rose and little by little he became more animated.

The innkeeper had told us that the ancient city was not more than a few hours distant, even accounting for the slow progress of the asses we were riding, and all morning a smudge that suggested a city had loomed ahead of us on the low horizon, very gradually growing more pronounced. The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and for miles around is absolutely flat, without even low hills to break the view. On such a vast, featureless plain, you might think that you could see forever, but the ripples of heat that rose from the earth distorted the view, so that objects near and far took on an uncertain, even uncanny appearance. A distant tower turned out to be a palm tree. A pile of strangely motionless—dead?—bodies suddenly resolved into a heap of gravel, apparently put there by whoever maintained the road.

For over an hour I tried to make sense of a party approaching us on the road. The shimmering heat waves by turns appeared to magnify the group, then make them grow smaller, then disappear altogether, then reappear. At first I thought it was a company of armed men, for I thought I saw sunlight glinting on their weapons. Then I decided I was seeing nothing more than a single man on horseback, perhaps wearing a helmet or some other piece of armor that reflected a bluish gleam. Then the person, or persons, or whatever it was that approached us, vanished in the blink of an eye, and I felt a shiver, wondering if we were about to encounter a company of phantoms.

At last we met our fellow travelers on the road. The party turned out to consist of several armed guards and two small carts pulled by asses and piled high with stacks of bricks, but not bricks of any sort I had seen before. These were large and variously shaped, most about a foot square, and covered on the outward-facing sides with a dazzling glaze, some yellow, some blue, some mixed. They were not newly made—uneven edges and bits of adhering mortar indicated they had been chiseled free from some existing structure—but except for a bit of dust, the colored glazes glimmered with a jewel-like brightness.

Antipater grew very excited. “Can it be?” he muttered. “Bricks from the fabled walls of Babylon!”

The old poet awkwardly dismounted and shuffled toward the nearest cart, where he reached out to touch one of the bricks, running his fingertips over the shimmering blue glaze.