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stony backs. But never let them grow fond of you or you will never get rid of them…
That had been his father’s advice. And Demetrius has memorized those words of travertine.
    The caravan reached Pompeii in June. The boy was put to work with the other slaves in a quarry. He had to learn fast but he never got into trouble. Apart from his stubbornness: the vow of silence continued. But along the road something had changed in the Briton’s mind. Latin, the cursed language of the murderous invaders, no longer sounded foreign. With the constant hum of it in the boy’s ears it had planted its eggs, like some damned insect, tenacious and fertile.
    The Briton had started to notice it by chance when he turned his head to listen in on an exchange of dirty jokes between two
vigiles
patrolling the quarry. “And so I say to her: ‘Seventy
assarii
to hoist your skirt, my dear? For that amount Oreste would repaint my whole house! Either we make a deal on thirty or you’ll have to get hold of a brush and a bucket of paint…’ ”
    The boy had burst out laughing like a fool, waking up a couple of his companions who had then given him a piece of their mind in no uncertain terms.
    Another time, he was standing in line waiting for his rations—hand resting on the hard, dusty bar where the food was doled out—when a tall, well-built Numidian pushed in front of him murmuring: “Get out of my way, you shitty, mangy dog!”
    Thus it was that the son of Ordovician blood had broken the brute’s nose with a head butt, convincing him to reconsider his manners. But he had not done it instinctively: for the first time, he had calculated his attack, channeling his anger from the affront into his muscles, his veins, his knuckles and the tendons in his neck, building up to the brutal lunge that had put the gorilla back in his place.
    Even if the thought of it made him sick to his stomach, Latin had become his new language. There was nothing he could do about it. And that was how, one intuition after another, his silence slowly crumbled.
    Behind bars, solitude is a boulder. In the end its weight begins to crush you, day after day. Your bones break apart and hope falters, especially when the obsession with keeping it alive has flickered out.
    One afternoon when the sun was low in the sky, hotter than usual, the boy decided that the moment had arrived to come back to the world. It was with difficulty that he addressed his companion. It was the same African whose nose he had taken the trouble to break no more than a couple of months earlier. In all honesty it was not very original. He simply asked: “How are you today?”
    The man opened his eyes wide—far too white for that face, as black as night. He thought the boy was making fun of him, but remembered all too well how deftly he had been beaten, so he did no more than scratch his head and stare at the boy in puzzlement.
    So the boy cleared his throat and launched into a grammatically perfect series of words, all impeccably pronounced.
    â€œExcuse me, I do not speak very well. I asked you: How are you? But I meant: How are you today, you shitty, mangy dog?”
    The Numidian stared at him for a very long time, unsure as to whether he was on the verge of yet another fight or simply facing somebody who had completely lost his mind. Then, when the boy flashed him an ear-to-ear smile and hugged him tight, starting to chuckle like a possessed haruspex, the African relaxed, returned the hug and knew he had found a friend. A pretty strange friend, but a friend nonetheless, by the balls of Hercules!
    It was certainly no small thing, beneath the sun in that open-air prison.
    When they parted company, the African looked the boy straight in the eyes.
    â€œI am Massinissa. I bear the name of a great king of the past…”
    Now it was the boy’s turn to scratch his head and stare at his friend in embarrassment. There could hardly be a less