'I said,' Caesar repeated, 'dismiss.'

n.o.body moved. They had all turned their heads to watch something directly behind Caesar's right shoulder.

'Hey,' Caesar protested, 'so what's so b.l.o.o.d.y interesting all of a sudden that -' He looked round too, and saw a large group of angry soldiers chasing two eccentrically dressed men through the camp. They were heading directly for the oak tree.

'Don't just stand there, you morons,' Caesar snapped. 'Grab hold of them and find out what -'

He got no further. The more brightly coloured of the two intruders had come dashing up, exhibiting a quite remarkable turn of speed, and collided with the military tribune t.i.tus Labienus, sending him reeling back. Labienus lost his footing on the damp gra.s.s, wobbled violently, and fell over. The intruder recovered his balance with an effort and was about to continue running when Caesar himself reached out a long thin arm and attached it to the intruder's ear.

'Ouch,' the intruder said. He froze.

'Now then,' Caesar said, 'just what the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing, barging in here when I'm having a -'

'Let go!'

The words came from the second intruder, who was standing about ten yards away from the tree, with a mob of soldiers gaining on him fast. The second intruder didn't seem to be paying any attention to them; he was pointing at Caesar with a small black metallic object in his hand.

'Let go!' he repeated.

'Hoy!' Caesar replied angrily. 'Who do you think you're talking to?'

The brightly dressed intruder squirmed in Caesar's grip. 'For crying out loud, Guy,' he yelled, 'put that confounded thing away! You know what happened the last -'

'If you don't let go,' said the other intruder, 'it'll be the worse for you.

Caesar gave him a blank stare; then threw back his head and burst out laughing, at the same time giving the ear in his grip a savage tweak. The second intruder swore, and then there was a loud crack, like a thunderclap. Caesar's hat jumped about a foot into the air, was caught by a gust of wind, and floated away towards the river.

'My hat!' Caesar shrieked, and clapped his hands to his bald head, too late to stop a great long lock of damp grey hair from slithering off his bald dome and flopping down over his ear. He directed a murderous look at the two intruders and set off in furious pursuit of his floating hat.

'Guy, you pillock,' Blondel panted, 'now look what you've done.'

They watched as Caesar, intent only on the recovery of his hat, dived into the waters of the river and started to swim. The current was almost too strong for him but he struck out vigorously, reached the other side and flung himself with a cry of exultant triumph on the hat, which had come to roost in the branches of a stunted thorn bush.

The army, meanwhile, was watching with fascinated attention. As soon as Caesar set foot on the far bank, a great whoop of joy rose from the ranks, as thirty thousand men shouted, all at once;

'The die is cast! Caesar has crossed the Rubicon! To Rome! Rome!'

Caesar looked up, the hat wedged once more over his slightly protruding ears. A look of supreme disgust crossed his face.

'Oh s.h.i.t,' he said.

The army had started to cross the river. Someone had hoisted up the sacred Eagle standards. They were singing the battle song of the Fifteenth Legion.

'I told you,' Blondel said. 'Didn't I tell you?'

They were alone now in the abandoned camp. On the other side of the river. Caesar was being carried on the shoulders of his bodyguard, on inexorably towards Rome and Empire.

'But I' thought that was what was supposed to happen,' Guy whimpered.

Blondel shook his head. 'In a sense, yes,' he replied. 'But ... oh, never mind. Let's get out of here and go and have a drink.'

Giovanni smiled.

'What I always say to people in your situation,' he said, 'people who've fallen off the edge of the world and are sailing aimlessly about, is that one of these days you're bound to find your way back again, and in the meantime, don't you think your money should be working for you as hard as it possibly can, so that when you do finally get out of here...'

The Genoese merchant gave him a blank, empty-eye-socket stare. Giovanni kept going. In his youth, when he was just another Florentine wide boy hawking scarlet hose and fragments of the True Cross door to door through Gascony, he'd come up against harder nuts than this.

'Think how long you've been down here,' he said. 'A hundred years? Two hundred? Would five hundred be nearer the mark, maybe?'

The Genoese made a little m.u.f.fled noise, somewhere between a moan and a shriek. Giovanni nodded.

'Okay,' he said, 'call it four hundred and fifty years, give or take fifty on either side. Now, a modest stake of say one thousand bezants, invested at twenty-five per cent compound interest, tax-free for four hundred and fifty years ...

The Genoese suddenly howled and tried to bite Giovanni in the neck. Being a man of action as well as a man of intellect, Giovanni sidestepped, picked up an oar and clubbed him savagely on the head. Being an insurance broker he mentioned to him the benefits of proper accident insurance and private health cover. Before he could get any forms out or unscrew the top of his fountain pen, however, the Genoese stopped twitching and lay still. Giovanni sighed; an opportunity lost, he couldn't help feeling.

'Is he ...?' Marco asked.

Giovanni nodded. 'Fool to himself,' he said. 'I suppose we could retrospectively insure his life for a couple of grand, but it hardly seems worth the bother. Come on, let's try over there.

They walked on over the insubstantial sea, keeping their spirits up by offering pa.s.sing ships the opportunity to take advantage of low-start endowment mortgages. After about an hour, they came to what looked remarkably like a bank.

'Don't look at it,' Giovanni said, 'it's probably just a mirage or something.'

Iachimo shook his head. 'Look,' he said, 'they're members of FIMBRA, it says so in the window. It must be a bank.'

'Iachimo...'

'But Giovanni,' Iachimo said, 'they aren't allowed to display the FIMBRA logo unless they're...'

Giovanni shrugged. If he was going to start hallucinating, a bank was a nice thing to hallucinate. Especially a bank which, in the circ.u.mstances, must count as definitively offsh.o.r.e.

'We might just wander in,' he said tentatively. 'Just on the off chance, you know...'

It was a very nice bank, and before he knew what he was doing Giovanni had filled his pockets with leaflets. Then he noticed something.

'Iachimo,' he said, 'Marco, there's n.o.body here.' Iachimo sniffed like a dog. 'You're right,' he said. 'Completely deserted. How can they be members of FIMBRA if there's n.o.body ...

Giovanni rang the bell; n.o.body came. Mind you, that didn't mean very much. Next he tried the door that led to the area behind the bullet-proof screen. It opened.

'Coming?' he asked.

Marco looked nervously at the security cameras. 'Do you think we should?' he said. 'I mean, we are in the Archives, and -'

'There's n.o.body here,' Giovanni replied. 'Come on.' They walked through. At once, all the computer screens, which had been blank, sprang into life. They started displaying stock market results from all over the Universe. There were one or two that Giovanni had never heard of before.

'Here, Iachimo,' he said, 'you know about these things. What's the ????????? 600 Share Index when it's at home?'