was getting a little tired, and when I happened to look up after a particularly long period of unbroken concentration, I realized something had changed in the tavern.
“It was unaccountably quieter. In fact, it was almost empty. And across from me, barely illuminated by the sputtering light of my candle, there sat a tall fair-haired man with his back to the room who was watching me in silence. I was startled, not so much by the way he looked—though this was startling in itself—but by the realization that he had been there for some time, close to me, observing me, and I hadn’t noticed him.
“He was a giant of a Gaul as they all were, even taller than I was, and he had a long narrow face with an extremely strong jaw and hawklike nose, and eyes that gleamed beneath their bushy blond brows with a childlike intelligence. What I mean to say is he looked very very clever, but very young and innocent also. And he wasn’t young. The effect was perplexing.
“And it was made all the more so by the fact that his thick and coarse yellow hair wasn’t clipped short in the popular Roman style, but was streaming down to his shoulders. And instead of the usual tunic and cloak which you saw everywhere in those times, he wore the old belted leather jerkin that had been the barbarian dress before Caesar.
“Right out of the woods this character looked, with his gray eyes burning through me, and I was vaguely delighted with him. I wrote down hurriedly the details of his dress, confident he couldn’t read the Latin.
“But the stillness in which he sat unnerved me a little. His eyes were unnaturally wide, and his lips quivered slightly as if the mere sight of me excited him. His clean and delicate white hand, which casually rested on the table before him, seemed out of keeping with the rest of him.
“A quick glance about told me my slaves weren’t in the tavern. Well, they’re probably next door playing cards, I thought, or upstairs with a couple of women. They’ll stop in any minute.
“I forced a little smile at my strange and silent friend, and went back to writing. But directly he started talking.
“ ‘You are an educated man, aren’t you?’ he asked. He spoke the universal Latin of the Empire, but with a thick accent, pronouncing each word with a care that was almost musical.
“I told him, yes, I was fortunate enough to be educated, and I started to write again, thinking this would surely discourage him. After all, he was fine to look at, but I didn’t really want to talk to him.
“ ‘And you write both in Greek and in Latin, don’t you?’ he asked, glancing at the finished work that lay before me.
“I explained politely that the Greek I had written on the parchment was a quotation from another text. My text was in Latin. And again I started scribbling.
“ ‘But you are a Keltoi, are you not?’ he asked this time. It was the old Greek word for the Gauls.
“ ‘Not really, no. I am a Roman,’ I answered.
“ ‘You look like one of us, the Keltoi,’ he said. ‘You are tall like us, and you walk the way we do.’
“This was a strange statement. For hours I’d been sitting here, barely sipping my wine. I hadn’t walked anywhere. But I explained that my mother had been Keltic, but I hadn’t known her. My father was a Roman senator.
“ ‘And what is it you write in Greek and Latin?’ he asked. ‘What is it that arouses your passion?’
“I didn’t answer right away. He was beginning to intrigue me. But I knew enough at forty to realize that most people you meet in taverns sound interesting for the first few minutes and then begin to weary you beyond endurance.
“ ‘Your slaves say,’ he announced gravely, ‘that you are writing a great history.’
“ ‘Do they?’ I answered, a bit stiffly. ‘And where are my slaves, I wonder!’ Again I looked around. Nowhere in sight. Then I conceded to him that it was a history I was writing.
“ ‘And you have been to Egypt,’ he said. And his hand spread itself out flat on the table.
“I paused and took another good look at him. There was something otherworldly about him, the way that he sat, the way he used this one hand to gesture. It was the decorum primitive people often have that makes them seem repositors