I had an impulse to bend down and kiss her, even in front of the stablemaster and his slaves; instead I turned my attention to Vespa, calming her early-morning friskiness, guiding her into the street and easing her into a gentle trot. Long ago I learned that whenever a master shows affection for a slave in public the gesture must go awry. No matter how sincere, the act becomes patronizing, embarrassing, a parody. Even so, a sudden fear gripped me, a premonition that I might regret forever having denied myself that parting kiss.
The fog was so thick I would have been lost had I not known the route by heart. The mist swirled around us, swallowing the clatter of Vespa's hooves and hiding us from the twice-million eyes of Rome. Around me the city seemed to stir, but that was an illusion; the city had never quite slept. All night long men and horses and wagons come and go in the deep-shadowed streets. I passed through the Fontinal Gate. I broke into a trot as I passed the voting stalls on the Field of Mars, taking the northward route of the great Flaminian Way.
Rome receded, invisible, behind me. The muted stench of the city was replaced by the smells of tilled earth and dew. Hidden by mist, the world seemed open and boundless, a place without walls or even men. Then the sun rose over the black and green fields, dispelling every vapour before it. By the time I reached the great northward curving arm of the Tiber, the sky was hard as crystal, utterly cloudless, and pregnant with heat.
Part Two
Portents
16
The rich on their way from city to villa and back again travel in retinues with gladiators and bodyguards. The wandering poor travel in bands. Actors go in troupes. Any farmer driving his sheep to market will surround himself with shepherds. But the man who travels alone — so runs that proverb as old as the Etruscans — has a fool for a companion.
Everywhere I have lived there is a belief among city folk that life in the countryside must be safer, quieter, less fraught with crime and menace. The Romans especially are blindly sentimental about country life, imbuing it with a tranquil, lofty character beyond the reach of crime or base passion. This fantasy is believed only by those who have never spent much time in the countryside, and especially by those who have never travelled for day after day across the roads that Rome has laid like spokes radiating through the world. Crime is everywhere, and nowhere is a man in more danger at any given- moment than when he is on the open road, especially if he travels alone.
If he must travel alone he should at least travel very fast, stopping for no one. The old woman who appears to lie hurt and abandoned beside the road may in fact be neither hurt nor abandoned nor even a woman, but a young bandit among a troupe of bandits, murderers, and kidnappers. A man can die on the open road or disappear forever. For the unwary a journey often miles may take an unexpected turn — that ends in a slave market a thousand miles from home. The traveller must be prepared to flee at a moment's
warning, to scream for help without embarrassment, and to kill if he must.
In spite of these thoughts, or perhaps because of them, I passed the long day without incident The distance I needed to cover required long, unbroken hours of hard riding. I steeled myself to it early on and fell into the rhythm of constant speed. Not a single rider overtook me during the day. I passed traveller after traveller as if they were tortoises beside the road.
The Flaminian Way travels north from Rome, crossing the Tiber twice as it passes through south-eastern Etruria. At length it reaches the river Nar, which runs into the Tiber from the east. The road crosses a bridge at the town of Narnia and enters southernmost Umbria. A few miles north of Narnia a minor road branches west, back towards the Tiber. It ascends a series of steep hills and then drops into a shallow valley of fertile vineyards and pastures. Here, nesded in a V of land between the Tiber and the Nar, lies the sleepy hill town of Ameria.
I had not travelled north of Rome in many years. When I had to leave the city, my business usually took me west to the seaport at Ostia or else south along the Appian Way through that region of lush villas and estates that ends at the resorts of Baiae and Pompeii, where the rich vent their boredom in manufacturing new scandals and plotting new crimes, and where the powerful had chosen sides in the civil wars. Occasionally I ventured east, into the rebellious territories that had vented their rage against Rome in the Social War. Southward and eastward I had seen first-hand the devastations often years of warfare — farms in ruin, roads and bridges destroyed, piles of corpses left uncovered and rotting until they turned to mountains of bones.
I had expected the same in the north, but here the land was largely untouched; here the people had exercised caution to the extent of cowardice, always hedging their bets, sniffing out the neutral path until the clear victor emerged and men rushing to his side. In the Social War they had declined to join the other client states in pressing Rome for their rights, waiting instead until Rome called on them for help and so securing those same rights without revolt. In the civil wars they had danced the dagger's edge between Marius and Sulla, between Sulla and Cinna until the dictator emerged triumphant, Sextus Roscius the elder had himself been a declared supporter of Sulla even before it became convenient.
Warfare had not spoiled the rolling pastures and dense woodlands that carpeted the southern reaches of Etruria and Umbria. Where in other regions one could sense in a thousand ways the disruptions brought by war and resettlement, here there was a feeling of timelessness, changelessness, almost of stagnation. People showed neither friendliness nor curiosity at a passing stranger; faces turned towards me from the fields, stared blankly, and turned back to their work with a disinterested scowl. The dry spring had so far yielded little colour to refresh the earth. Meagre trickles ran through stony creek beds; a fine dust covered and obscured everything. Heat lay heavy on the land, but there was something else that seemed to blanket the earth: a suffocating and dispiriting gloom beneath the blinding sunlight.
The monotony of the journey gave me time to think; the ever-changing countryside freed my mind from the cobwebs and cul-de-sacs of Rome. Yet the mystery of who had mounted the attack on my house defied solution. Once I began the investigation in earnest, I was open to danger from any quarter — the shopkeeper and his wife, the widow, the whore, any of them might have passed an alert to the enemy. But my visitors had come on the very morning after I first met with Cicero, even as I was on my way to the scene of the crime, before I had interviewed anyone. I counted the names of those who knew from the day before that I had been engaged in the case: Cicero himself, and Tiro; Caecilia Metella; Sextus Roscius; Rufus Messalla; Bethesda. Unless the plot against Sextus Roscius was more convoluted and madly illogical than I could imagine, none of these people had any reason for driving me from the case. There was always the possibility of an eavesdropping servant in either Cicero's or Caecilia's house, a spy passing information to the enemies of Sextus Roscius; but given the loyalty inspired by Cicero and the kind of punishments to be incurred under Caecilia, the likelihood seemed absurdly small. Yet someone had known of my involvement early enough to see that hired enforcers were on my doorstep the very next morning, someone willing to kill me if I refused to turn aside.