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woman, who had her hands pressed to her face and was crying, her head bowed. “Who is this?”
    “She’s his mother.”
    The men were quiet now.
    “Do you see?” Corelia reached out and touched his arm. “Come,” she said quietly. “Please.”
    “Does your father know where you are?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t interfere,” said Corax. “That’s my advice.”
    And wise advice, thought Attilius, for if a man were to take a hand every time he heard of a slave being cruelly treated, he would have no time to eat or sleep. A seawater pool full of dead mullet? That was nothing to do with him. He looked at Corelia. But then again, if the poor wretch was actually asking for him . . .
    Omens, portents, auspices.
    Vapor that jerked like a fishing line. Springs that ran backward into the earth. An aquarius who vanished into the hot air. On the pastured lower slopes of Mount Vesuvius , shepherds had reported seeing giants. In Herculaneum , according to the men, a woman had given birth to a baby with fins instead of feet. And now an entire pool of red mullet had died in Misenum, in the space of a single afternoon, of no apparent cause.
    A man must make such sense of it as he could.
    He scratched his ear. “How far away is this villa?”
    “Please. A few hundred paces. No distance at all.” She tugged at his arm, and he allowed himself to be pulled along. She was not an easy woman to resist, this Corelia Ampliata. Perhaps he ought at least to walk her back to her family? It was hardly safe for a woman of her age and class to be out in the streets of a naval town. He shouted over his shoulder to Corax to follow, but Corax shrugged—“Don’t interfere!” he repeated—and then Attilius, almost before he realized what was happening, was out of the gate and into the street, and the others were lost from sight.
     
    It was that time of day, an hour or so before dusk, when the people of the Mediterranean begin emerging from their houses. Not that the town had lost much of its heat. The stones were like bricks from a kiln. Old women sat on stools beside their porches, fanning themselves, while the men stood at the bars, drinking and talking. Thickly bearded Bessians and Dalmatians, Egyptians with gold rings in their ears, redheaded Germans, olive-skinned Greeks and Cilicians, great muscled Nubians as black as charcoal and with eyes bloodshot by wine—men from every country of the empire, all of them desperate enough, or ambitious enough, or stupid enough, to be willing to trade twenty-five years of their lives at the oars in return for Roman citizenship. From somewhere down in the town, near the harbor front, came the piping notes of a water organ.
    Corelia was mounting the steps quickly, her skirts gathered up in either hand, her slippers soft and soundless on the stone, the slave woman running on ahead. Attilius loped behind them. “ ‘A few hundred paces,’ ” he muttered to himself, “ ‘no distance at all’—yes, but every foot of the way uphill!” His tunic was glued to his back by his sweat.
    They came at last to level ground and before them was a long high wall, dun-colored, with an arched gate set into it, surmounted by two wrought-iron dolphins leaping to exchange a kiss. The women hurried through the unguarded entrance, and Attilius, after a glance around, followed—plunging at once from noisy, dusty reality into a silent world of blue that knocked away his breath. Turquoise, lapis lazuli, indigo, sapphire—every jeweled blue that Mother Nature had ever bestowed—rose in layers before him, from crystal shallows, to deep water, to sharp horizon, to sky. The villa itself sprawled below on a series of terraces, its back to the hillside, its face to the bay, built solely for this sublime panorama. Moored to a jetty was a twenty-oared luxury cruiser, painted crimson and gold, with a carpeted deck to match.
    He had little time to register much else, apart from this engulfing blueness, before they were off again,