She read my mind, or more likely my sick face.

"Don't worry, Falco, I'll bury you properly!"

XXIX.

I thought I was back at the mines.

No. Another world. I had left the mines, though they will never quite leave me.

I was lying on a high, hard bed in a small square room at a legionary hospital. Unhurried footsteps sometimes paced the long corridor round the courtyard at the back of their administration block. I recognized the evil reek of antiseptic turpentine. I felt the reassuring pressure of neat, firm bandaging. I was warm. I was clean. I was resting in tranquillity in a quiet, caring place.

Yet I was terrified.

What had woken me was a trumpet on the ramparts, sounding the night watch. A fort, I could cope with a fort. I heard the spiteful squawk of sea gulls. Must be Glevum. Glevum stood on the Estuary. She had done it then. For hours now I had been asleep in the Second Augusta's big new headquarters base. The Second. I belonged to them; I was home.

I wanted to cry.

"Thinks he's back on army service," said the dryly amused voice of the procurator Flavius.

I never saw him. I was a felled log surging through warm barley soup, though my legs and arms could hardly thrash against the bumbling grains; they had filled me with poppy juice to kill the pain.

"Marcus, rest now, I've had your report from Vitalis; I've been able to act on it already. Well done!"

Gaius, my friend; my friend, who sent me there...

I struggled abruptly; someone else gripped my arm. "Hush! It's over; you're quite safe."

Helena, his niece, my enemy. My enemy, who came and fetched me back...

"Lie still, Falco; don't make such a fuss..."

The dependable vindictiveness of Helena's voice swung with me through delirium. To a freed slave, tyranny can be oddly comforting.

XXX.

Awake again.

Their opium had ebbed away. When I moved pain shot back. A red tunic, brooched on one shoulder with the medical snake and staff, loomed over me, then sheered off again when I stared him in the eye. I recognized the complete absence of bedside manner: must be the chief orderly. Pupils stretched their necks behind him like awestruck ducklings jostling their mother duck.

Tell me the truth, Hippocrates!" I jested. They never tell you the truth.

He tickled me up and down my ribs like a moneychanger on an abacus. I yelped, though not because his hands were cold.

"Still in discomfort that will last several months. He can expect a great deal of pain. No real problems if he avoids getting pneumonia..." He sounded disappointed at the thought that I might. "Emaciated specimen; he's vulnerable to gangrene in this leg." My heart sank. "Best amputate, whilst he has some strength." I glared at him with a heartbreak that brightened him up. "We can give him something!" he consoled his listeners. Did you know, the main part of a surgeon's training is how to ignore the screams?

"Why not wait and see what develops!" I managed to croak.

"Your young woman asked me that' Now he sounded quite respectful; probably impressed to discover someone even more bad mannered than him.

"She's not mine! Don't insult me," I growled viciously, letting myself get annoyed over the girl as a way of fighting off what he had said. But it had to be faced. "Do what you have to then take the leg!"

I went back to sleep.

He woke me up again.

"Flavius Hilaris wants to interview you urgently. Is that all right?"

"You're the doctor."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Leave me alone."

I went back to sleep again.

They never leave you alone.

"Marcus Flavius Hilaris. He wanted me to tell him again everything about the mine that I had already passed on through Rufrius Vitalis. He was too polite to say he was taking formal evidence now in case I died under surgery but I understood.

I told him all I knew. Anything to make him go away.

As far as the plot went, Gaius told me that Triferus the contractor was refusing to talk. It was deep winter now, snow in the hills. No chance of trailing the waggons that turned south no waggons moving, probably for many weeks. Gaius would lock Triferus in a cell and abandon him; try again when I could help. I would be carried to the Sacred Springs to convalesce if I lived.

He sat for a long time at my bedside, grasping my wrist; he seemed upset. He said he had told Rome they should pay me double rates, I smiled. After thirty years of service he should have known better than to try. I remembered thinking a long time ago, it could be him! I smiled again.

I drifted back to sleep.

The surgeon was called Simplex. When they introduce themselves by name, you know the intended treatment is at best a drastic gamble and at worst very painful indeed.

Simplex had spent fourteen years in the army. He could calm a sixteen-year-old soldier with an arrow shot into his head. He could seal blisters, dose dysentery, bathe eyes, even deliver babies from the wives the legionaries were not supposed to have. He was bored with all that. I was his favourite patient now. Among his set of spatulas, scalpels, probes, shears, and forceps, he owned a shiny great mallet big enough to bash in fencing stakes. Its use in surgery was for amputations, driving home his chisel through soldiers' joints. He had the chisel and the saw too: a complete tool bag all laid out on a table by my bed.

They drugged me, but not enough. Flavius Hilaris wished me luck, then slipped out of the room. I don't blame him. If I hadn't been strapped down to the bed with four six-foot set faced cavalrymen grappling my shoulders and feet, I would have shot straight out after him myself.

Through the drugs I saw Simplex approach. I had changed my mind. Now I knew him for a knife-happy maniac. I tried to speak; no sound emerged. I tried to shout.

Someone else cried out: a woman's voice.

"Stop it at once!" Helena Justina. I had no idea when she came in. I had not realized she was there. "There's no gangrene!" stormed the senator's daughter. She seemed to lose her temper wherever she was. "I would expect an army surgeon to know gangrene has its own distinctive smell. Didius Falco's feet may be cheesy, but they're not that bad!" Wonderful woman; an informer in trouble could always count on her. "He has chilblains. In Britain that's nothing to wonder at all he needs for those is a hot turnip mash! Pull his leg as straight as you can, then leave him alone; the poor man has suffered enough!"

I passed out with relief.

They tried twice to pull my leg straight. The first time I ground the pad of cloth between my teeth in shocked silence while hot tears raced down either side of my neck. The second time I was expecting it; the second time I screamed.

Someone sobbed.

I gurgled, but before I suffocated, a hand presumably attached to one of the heavy-squad holding me down removed the pad from my mouth. I was drenched in perspiration. Someone took the trouble to wipe my face.

At the same time a shaft of piquant perfume pierced my senses, marvelous as that Regal Balsam concocted for the kings of Parthia from the essences of twenty-five individual fine oils. (I had never been there, but any spare-time poet knows about the long-haired rulers of Parthia; they are always good for enlivening a limp ode.) It was not Regal Balsam, but still a wonderful smell. I remember thinking cheerfully, some of these fifteen-stone horse guards are not all that they appear...

XXXI.

At Aquae Sulis I spent five weeks under the care of the procurator's personal physician. Hot springs gushed out of the rock at a shrine where puzzled Celts still came to dedicate coinage to Sul, gazing tolerantly at the brisk new plaque which announced that Roman Minerva was assuming management. There was that furtive atmosphere of commerce disguised as religion which always hangs around shrines. Rome had replaced some basic native equipment with a proper lead-lined reservoir, yet I could not believe that anything could ever be made of this place. Oh there were plans, but there are always plans. We sat in the reservoir, which was full of sand thrown up by the spring, drank flat, tepid water laden with foul-tasting minerals" and watched red-nosed building surveyors clambering about the cliffs, trying to convince themselves there was scope for a vibrant leisure spa.

We played a lot of draughts. I hate draughts. I loathe draughts played against an Egyptian physician who always wins. However, there was not much else to do in a spa that was still on the drawing board, in Britain, at the end of a snowy March. I might have chased after women, but I had given women up. In my present state, even if I caught one it would be hard work doing anything a woman would appreciate.

The hot springs helped, but while I lay in them I stared into space with a dark look. The bones might heal, but never my slave's soul. The procurator's physician said drinking the water had given him piles. I answered I was sorry to hear that, but he may have noticed that I sounded insincere.

Sometimes I brooded about Sosia; it did nothing to help.

Back to Glevum. Hilaris and I tackled Triferus together. Action did me good, and we made a strong team. Gaius sat on his official chair of office, a folding do with yellowed ivory legs that he told me was ruin for the back. I roamed about in a menacing way.

Triferus was a loud British wide boy all twisty elect rum neck lets and narrow, pointed shoes. He wore the toga such middlemen had been encouraged to adopt, but the soldiers who dragged him in peeled that off him at a nod from us. We parked him on a stool so if he turned his head in either direction he was eyeball to muscled thigh with chain-mailed auxiliaries two morose Spanish horsemen, who ignored his shifty jokes. (Only their officers spoke Latin; we had chosen the guards for that reason.) Apart from the torques beneath that puffy British face, he could have been any barrow boy in any city in the world. He used the forenames Tiberius Claudius possibly a freed slave named for the old Emperor, but more likely some minor tribal dignitary, honoured as an ally at some past date. I doubted he could produce a diploma to support his citizenship.

"We know how you operate: just cough up the names!" I barked at him.

"All right, Falco," murmured Gaius, like a senior man being hopelessly overruled from Rome. This is Britain, we do things differently here. Triferus, whether I can help is up to you. This man is an Imperial agent"

Triferus tried bluff. "Weights and measures? Safety regulations? What's your problem, officer?" He had a high voice with an irritating nasal lilt. He belonged to the Coritani, a self-sufficient tribe on the midland plain.

I tested the point of a dagger between my thumbs. I glanced at Gaius; he nodded.

There's nothing you can tell me about the lead mines," I began. Triferus, I've been in there to explore the whole shambles for myself." His face shone with sweat; I had caught him off guard. "Your system stinks, from the shafts to the furnaces. Even the bakers in the village are using silver shavings for small change"

Trouble with the dockets is it?" he whined with an innocent wink. Treasury interference? Procedures to clear?"

I flung my nugget of silver onto a tripod table where it spun in front of Triferus on a level with his nose. I slammed my hand onto it. Even Gaius looked surprised.

Three weeks on the cupellation bellows and that was my haul! Make a dainty finger ring for some lucky skirt in Rome."

Triferus abruptly came the brave boy: "Shove it up your arse!"

I beamed at him pleasantly: "Oh I've done that!" Gaius blenched.

I strode up to Triferus, grabbing at one of his skinny torques so it pressed against his jugular just enough to make a dent.

"A smart slave can buy his passage to Gaul, if he survives your murderous foreman. Cornix diddles his tax-free bonus; the chain gangs have their sad little dodges; you organize a private racket of your own. How did these traitors from Rome lean on you threaten exposure unless you cut them in?"

"Look, you clerks have to face facts!" For one last desperate moment Triferus continued to pretend. "Mining is a special case. It's not like selling beer and oysters to the troops"

"Don't waste time on him, sir!" I snarled at the procurator. "Let me take him back to Rome. We have decent equipment there; he'll squeal. After that, the Vatican Circus lion-feed!" Releasing the torque as if the owner disgusted me too much to bother, I turned to Gaius with an irritable shout. "Ask him about the stamps! The ingots he steals himself are banged four times if they still contain silver that's one bar in four. The rest have been bled, but this enterprising bastard sells them as intact. How long before our political hopefuls spot his double-cross? I wouldn't like to wear the boots of a man who bribes the Praetorians with counterfeit dosh!"

Triferus, can't you see they know!" For the first time the financial procurator spoke in a voice stripped of all pretence. "British ingots have been found loose in Rome. Unless we arrest the plotters before they get to you, you can kiss goodbye to much more than your tender for the lead franchise in the Malvern Peaks. Vespasian's in for the duration, whatever you have been told. Save yourself, man, turn in whatever evidence you can to the state it's your only way to survive!"

Triferus took on a complexion like unpainted wall plaster.

He asked to speak to Gaius alone. He gave him two names.

Gaius wrote a letter to the Emperor, which I was to carry, though he refused to tell me what the two names were. I thought he was playing the pointless bureaucrat, though afterwards I understood why.

Gaius and I travelled coast wards to Durnovaria to his favourite villa, for me to ask his honourable niece Helena whether she was ready to travel home and if so, would she wish to be escorted through Europe by such as me. Gaius drove me down.

We tripped a hundred miles at a pace so sedate I longed to wrench the reins out of his hand.

I have to admit I hankered for Helena Justina's nippier driving style.

XXXII.

Gaius came with me to his villa because he wanted to prune his vines. They were miserable specimens. He had lived in Britain so long he had forgotten what a vine was really like.

The procurator's villa was a rich farm in a small river valley with views of low green hills. The soft climate seemed well suited to a man with a pain in his ribs. The house was full of books and toys. His wife and children had retreated to Londinium after the Saturnalian holiday, but I could imagine what life was like in summer when they were here. It was a house where I could have languished for a long time, the sort I wanted one day for myself.

Gaius amused himself pottering into Durnovaria to officiate as local magistrate. His objectionable niece was at the villa, but she kept to herself. Had I liked Helena Justina better I might have thought her shy; as I didn't, I called her unsociable instead. Since she had not returned to the comforts of Londinium with Aelia Camilla, she presumably intended going back to Rome now, but plans for her journey remained happily vague.

I was enjoying myself in this hospitable house. By day I read, wrote letters, or limped around the farm. The staff were friendly and being pampered felt quite acceptable. Every evening I talked cheerfully with my host. Even in Britain this was an ideal Roman life. I did not want to find the energy to leave.

One day, when it was raining too dismally for Gaius to drive off and impose fines on Celtic cattle thieves, he approached me. "Rufrius Vitalis asked me to have a word with you. I gather you had arranged to fix him up with a passage to Rome, acting as Helena's baggage master?"

"Let me guess he doesn't want to go?"

"Well, it's partly my fault," Gaius grinned. "I was impressed with him. I've offered him a contract in the lead mine, clearing up the procedural abuses as my official auditor."

"Good choice. He'll do well for you. Besides which," I chortled, "I reckon he and a certain dumpling called Truforna cannot bear to part!"

The procurator smiled in his prim way, avoiding details of other people's personal lives. Then he pointed out that if Vitalis was absenting himself, someone else would have to shepherd Helena...