desperate need of sleep. He hobbled past me and pulled up a chair for me to sit on.
'Tell me, neighbor, did you grow up in the countryside?' His voice cracked slightly, as if pleasant discourse was a strain to him.
'No, I was born in Rome.'
'Ah. I grew up near Arpinum, myself. I only mention it because I saw you staring at the leaves and the fire. I know how city folk dread fires and shun them except for heat and cooking. It's a country habit, burning leaves. Dangerous, but I'm careful. The smell of burning leaves reminds me of my boyhood. As does this garden.'
I looked up at the trees that loomed in stark silhouette against the cloudy sky. Among them were some cypresses and yews that still wore their shaggy gray-green coats, but most were bare. A weirdly twisted little tree, hardly more than a bush, stood in the corner, surrounded by a carpet of round yellow leaves. The old slave walked slowly toward the bush and began to rake its leaves in among the others.
'Have you lived in this house long?' I asked.
'For three years. I cashed in the farm Sulla gave me and bought this place. I retired before the fighting was finished. My leg was crippled. Another wound made my sword arm useless. My shoulder still hurts me now and again, especially at this time of year, when the weather turns cold. This is a bad time of year, all around.' He grimaced, whether at a phantom pain in his shoulder or at phantoms in the air I could not tell. 'When did you first see the lemures?' I asked. Since the man insisted on taking my time, there was no point in being subtle.
'Just after I moved into this house.'
'Perhaps the lemures were here before you arrived.'
'No,' he said gravely. 'They must have followed me here.' He limped toward the brazier, stooped stiffly, gathered up a handful of leaves and scattered them on the fire. 'Only a little at a time,' he said softly. 'Wouldn't want to be careless with a fire in the garden. Besides, it makes the pleasure last. A little today, a little more tomorrow. Burning leaves reminds me of boyhood.'
'How do you know they followed you? The lemures, I mean.'
'Because I recognize them.'
'Who were they?'
'I never knew their names.' He stared into the fire. 'But I remember the Etruscan's face when my sword cut open his entrails and he looked up at me, gasping and unbelieving. I remember the bloodshot eyes of the sentries we surprised one night outside Capua. They'd been drinking, the fools; when we stuck our swords into their bellies, I could smell the wine amid the stench that came pouring out. I remember the boy I killed in battle once-so young and tender my blade sliced clear through his neck. His head went flying off; one of my men caught it and cast it back at me, laughing. It landed at my feet. I swear, the boy's eyes were still open, and he knew what was happening to him…'
He stooped, groaning at the effort, and gathered another handful of leaves. 'The flames make all things pure again,' he whispered. 'The odor of burning leaves is the smell of innocence.'
He watched the fire for a long moment. 'They come at this time of year. The lemures, seeking revenge. They cannot harm my body; they had their chance to do that when they were living, and they only succeeded in maiming me. It was I who killed their bodies, I who triumphed. Now they seek to drive mad. They cast a spell on me. They cloud my mind and draw me into the pit. They shriek and dance about my head, they open their bellies over me and bury me in offal, they dismember themselves and drown me in a sea of blood and gore. Somehow I've always struggled free, but my will grows weaker every year. One day they'll draw me into the pit, and I'll never come out again.'
He covered his face. 'Go now. I'm ashamed that you should see me like this. When you see me again, it will more terrible than you can imagine. But you will come, when I send for you? You will come and see them for yourself? A man as clever as you might strike a bargain, even with the dead.'
He dropped his hands. I would hardly have recognized his face-his eyes were red, his cheeks gaunt, his lips trembling. 'Swear to me that you'll come, Finder. If only to bear witness to my destruction.'
'I won't make an oath-'
'Then promise me as a man, and leave the gods out of it. I beg you to come when I call.'
'I'll come.' I sighed, wondering if a promise to a madman was truly binding.
The old slave, clucking and shaking his head with worry, ushered me to the little door. 'I fear that your master is already mad,' I whispered. 'These lemures are from his own imagination.'
'Oh, no,' said the old slave. 'I have seen them, too.'
'You?'
'Yes, just as he describes.'
'And the other slaves?'
'We have all seen the lemures.'
I looked into the old slave's calm, unblinking eyes for a long moment. Then I stepped through the passage and he shut the door behind me.
'A veritable plague of lemures!' I said as I reclined upon my couch taking dinner that night. 'Rome is overrun by them!' Bethesda, who sensed the unease beneath my levity, tilted her head and arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. 'And that silly warning Lucius Claudius wrote in his note this morning! 'Do not bring the boy, the circumstances might frighten him.' Ha! What could be more appealing to a twelve-year-old boy than the chance to see a genuine lemur!' Eco chewed a mouthful of bread and watched me with round eyes, not sure whether I was joking or not.
'The whole affair seems quite absurd to me,' ventured Bethesda. She crossed her arms impatiently. As was her custom, she had already eaten in the kitchen, and merely watched while Eco and I feasted. 'As even the stupidest person in Egypt knows, the bodies of the dead cannot survive unless they have been carefully mummified according to ancient laws. How could the body of a dead man be wandering about Rome, frightening this Titus into jumping off a balcony? Especially a dead man who had his head cut off? It was a living fiend who pushed him off the balcony, that much is obvious. Ha! I'll wager it was the wife who did it!'
'Then what of the soldier's haunting? His slave swears that the whole household has seen the lemures. Not just one, but a whole swarm of them.'
'Fah! The slave lies to excuse his master's feeblemindedness. He is loyal, as a slave should be, but not necessarily honest.'
'Even so, I think I shall go if the soldier calls me, to judge with my own eyes. And the matter of the lemur on the Palatine Hill is worth pursuing, if only for the handsome fee that Cornelia promises.'
Bethesda shrugged. To change the subject, I turned to Eco. 'And speaking of outrageous fees, what did that thief of a tutor teach you today?'
Eco jumped from his couch and ran to fetch his stylus and wax tablet.
Bethesda uncrossed her arms. 'If you do continue with these matters,' she said, her voice now pitched to conceal her own unease, 'I think that your friend Lucius Claudius gives you good advice. There is no need to take Eco along with you. He's busy with his lessons and should stay at home. He's safe here, from evil men and evil spirits alike.'
I nodded, for I had been thinking the same thing myself.
The next morning I stepped quietly past the haunted soldier's house. He did not hear me and call out, though I knew he must be awake and in his garden; I smelled the tang of burning leaves on the air.
I had promised Lucius and Cornelia that I would come again to the house on the Palatine, but there was another call I wanted to make first.
A few questions in the right ears and a few coins in the right hands, were all it took to find the house of Furius's mother on the Caelian Hill, where his survivors had fled after he was proscribed, beheaded and dispossessed. The house was small and narrow, wedged in among other small, narrow houses that might have been standing for a hundred years; the street had somehow survived the fires and the constant rebuilding that continually change the face of the city, and seemed to take me into an older, simpler Rome, when rich and poor alike lived in modest private dwellings, before the powerful began to flaunt their wealth with great houses and the poor were pressed together into many-storied tenements.
A knock upon the door summoned a veritable giant, a hulking, thick-chested slave with squinting eyes and a
