The boy nodded as Caroline finished her story. He turned and spoke to the old man who nodded as well. The pair had a lengthy exchange in which the boy did much of the talking in a language Caroline could not identify. After this the pair rose to their feet.
“He is Roman as well? He does not speak Latin,” the boy said and nodded toward Dwayne.
“He’s a Gaul. A barbarian who purchased citizenship,” Caroline said with mock scorn. Something like that wouldn’t be possible for a few more centuries. She was counting on the boy not knowing that.
The boy nodded sagely.
“What of us? What will you tell Ahinadab? Will you tell him we were only on this island due to misfortune?” Caroline said as the boy helped the old man up the planks to the deck above.
“We will tell him you are not spies. He will spare you.”
“Spare us?”
“He will probably sell you as slaves when we next reach port.” The boy shrugged and picked up the oil lamp and empty basket.
“Tell me your name,” Caroline said.
“Praxus,” the boy said as he took the light from them. “Praxus of Samos.”
35
Another Time in Rome
In another place on another day, Andrea Spara was deep in the stacks of Vatican Apostolic Library doing the thing he did each day—reading.
He was a common fixture in the stacks of the esteemed collection, ever since being freed by an endowment from a dead-end associate professorship at Sapienza Università di Roma. It was over ten years ago that a benefactor had granted him his lifelong dream of reading and studying ancient Latin texts in their original manuscript form. His every financial need was covered, and he had an excellent apartment in Piazza Barberini that he only visited to bathe and sleep. His every waking hour, aside from a hurried breakfast of rolls and coffee and a simple meat or fish dinner, was spent in the confines of university libraries in Rome and Naples or here in the cloistered confines of the Vatican’s treasure trove of ancient books.
His only duty to his benefactor was to report any new discovery or unusual finding in whatever manuscripts he read. That was an odd request in, itself. Andrea was fascinated by the language and the nuance and seeing the words of the ancients in their own hand. But he knew, by their very nature, that there could never be anything new found there. Hundreds, thousands of scholars had read and examined these words since they were first recorded and re-recorded by scribes from all over the ancient and medieval world. Papers and theses and libraries of books had been written examining even the most trivial literary works of the Romans and Greeks of the classical era. What would he find that they could not? Still, it made no sense to question a gift from the gods, especially a gift that allowed Andrea to live within these walls and drink in the wealth of knowledge they contained without the distasteful burden of making a living.
Most visitors to the library were only allowed access to the manuscripts via scanned images viewed on a computer monitor. But Andrea, thanks to the influence of his patron, was granted permission to read the actual words on the medium upon which they were written by the hand of the author. He was allowed access to the climate-controlled rooms in the library’s cellar, and whatever scroll or book he requested would be brought to him—except those contained in the Secret Archives, of course. But those were religious texts and held no interest for him in any case.
Today he sat in a comfortable chair of rich leather at a broad table in a glass-walled booth. He laid out a rolled sheet of vellum that almost covered the entire flat surface. Andrea was assisted in this by an elderly Barnabite bishop he had come to know well over the years of his daily, excepting Sundays, visits to the library. They laid the vellum flat and weighted the corners with fist-sized bags of sand. The vellum was still supple despite its age, thanks to the restoration and preservation talents of generations of priests and monks who worked to ensure that these fragile treasures remained intact until the day of the Rapture.
The bishop left him to his work, and Andrea took to examining the document written in Latin by a lively hand that was a joy to read. It was the Codex Profectus Praxus, an abridged work written by a Greek slave over two thousand years before and, most unusually, translated into Latin by the original author. It was a tale of the journeys in the Aegean Sea made special by being the first written reference in western literature of Halley’s Comet. But there was even more of interest in this personal memoir of a slave who served as an assistant to an oracle aboard a Phoenician pirate ship in the days when Carthage ruled the inland sea.
It was filled with details that others would find tedious, but which Andrea found fascinating. Chief among these was experiencing the resonance that came from reading and touching, albeit through acid-free cotton gloves, a document written in the hand of the author.
That it survived to this day was a miracle. The original Profectus was thought to have been lost in the fire that leveled the library at Alexandria. It was always a thrill to read the words as scribed on the actual document. Andrea could feel a contact with the humble slave and nimble wordsmith across the gulf of time that separated them.
He came to the passages about the bireme on which Praxus served coming to a hidden harbor for the crew to take on
