white Roman tunic with an eques’ purple stripes for a colorful Greek outfit of sheer linen. The better to blend in—you learn more. He had jumped at the chance to come to Bithynia on Pliny’s staff.
“Have you found what you wanted in the files?”
Pliny pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed, feeling the skin move on his skull—for an awful instant imagining the skull bare of flesh as it might look ten, fifteen years from now if he lasted that long, if he husbanded his strength. He drove the image from his mind. “Beyond belief, the mess he’s left us with! Six former governors of this province have been prosecuted and our friend Anicius is likely to be the seventh, for sheer incompetence, if nothing worse. Transcripts of trials, minutes of meetings with the local grandees—all missing. He’s taken them home with him or more likely burned them. And the people he’s left behind, this lot.” His glance took in the room. They come in late, they leave early, they give you sour looks when you speak to them. I’m putting you in charge of the secretariat. Whip them into shape.”
Suetonius winced. “Not really my—”
Pliny held up a finger. “What on earth is that racket?”
Through the open second-story window, carried on a soft September breeze, came a sudden shriek of flutes and a crash of cymbals. A parading army couldn’t have made more noise. Pliny and Suetonius looked out and, as they watched, a mob turned the corner, marching along the avenue below them, men and women together, dancing, leaping, shouting something—a word, a name? Pliny strained to make it out but in the general din it was impossible. But there was no doubting who the focus of this adulation was. On a litter that swayed above the heads of the crowd, rode a handsome man whose hair hung down his back in long curls. He stared straight ahead, looking neither left nor right, motionless as a statue while eager hands reached out to touch his long, white garment as he passed. In his right hand he held a glittering scimitar, but what held everyone’s eye was the giant python that draped itself around his chest and over his shoulder, its head swinging to and fro.
Pliny felt a stab of anxiety. Somewhere out there in this alien city was his wife.
***
“’Purnia, don’t let go of me!”
“Hold tight, Ione!”
Calpurnia, the taller and sturdier of the two women, gripped her maid’s hand as they struggled to keep their footing in this crowd of madmen that surged outside the temple of Asclepius and filled the whole marketplace alongside it. Elegant matrons pressed against greasy-aproned shopkeepers, beggars contested with merchants for a glimpse of the holy man who rode above them in his litter like a raft tossed upon a sea of eager faces and outstretched arms.
A sharp elbow hit Calpurnia in the side, knocking the breath out of her. Her knees buckled and she thought for an instant she would fall and be crushed under the stamping feet.
“Pancrates! The god returns!” The shout rose up from five hundred throats, mingling with the din of cymbals, flutes, and drums.
Calpurnia and Ione had spent the morning going round the shops and stalls and ateliers of the unfamiliar city, escorted by a retinue of slaves and local guides—all of them now lost somewhere in this seething confusion of color and noise. The palace in which she and Pliny and all their staff were housed had once belonged to the ancient kings of Bithynia. Mithridates the Great—a name that could still strike fear in Roman hearts even after a century and a half—had ruled his bloody empire from here; and so had Pompey the Great, who defeated him and made the kingdom a Roman province.
The palace, which sat on a high hill overlooking the harbor, was vast: more than a hundred rooms grouped around two great peristyle halls. Impressive in size but disappointing in detail. All the portable works of art, all the splendidly wrought furnishings had long since been looted, first by Mithridates and then by a succession of Roman governors, culminating with the wretched Anicius, who had filled a whole ship with whatever was still worth stealing. The mosaic floors were original and fine, but the statues that populated the courtyards were now mere copies of copies. The tapestries and draperies were shabby, the brass work tarnished, the frescoed walls black with soot, the rooms littered with trash, the smell of mildew heavy in