As we left the Circus I heard in the crowd near us, along with fierce denunciations of the Crimsons and Golds, execrated by all the commonality as merely rich men's companies, the most enthusiastic laudations of Palus and expressions of hopes that the Blues, Greens, Reds or Whites, according to the preference of the speaker, might yet win him over and benefit by his prowess.

Colgius, although the Reds had won but five races, was in a high good humor and insisted on the whole party coming in to a family dinner. The three wives occupied the middle sofa, while Agathemer and I had the upper all to ourselves. The fare was abundant and good, with plenty of the cheaper relishes to begin with; roast sucking-pig, cold sliced roast pork, baked ham, and veal stew for the principal dishes, with cabbage, beans and lentils; the wine was passable, and there was plenty of olives, figs, apples, honey and quince marmalade.

The women talked among themselves and the men, with us putting in a word now and then, of Palus. They argued a long time as to just what he did in the fourteenth race and how he had saved himself at the critical moment. As to his victory in the last race, all three of them were loud in their praises. Colgius said:

"Nothing like that has ever happened before. The chariot which Palus drove had the shortest axle I ever saw or anybody else. No other chariot but that could have passed between the two wrecked chariots; any other would have crashed its two wheels against the wrecked chariot-bodies and would have smashed to bits. His chariot was so narrow that its wheels passed between the two chariot-bodies, clear.

"Even so any other chariot would have stopped dead when its wheels hit the axles of the stalled chariots, for it was plain that his wheels interlocked with the wheels of the stalled chariots and hit the axles. But his chariot had the longest spokes ever seen in Rome, or, I believe, anywhere else, and so had the tallest wheels ever seen and had its axle higher above the sand than any other chariot; so its wheels engaged the stalled axles well below their hub-level and so the team pulled them right over the axles and on."

"Yes," said Uttius, "but that never would have happened but for Palus' instantaneous grasp of the situation and lightning decision. Any other charioteer would have reined in or tried to swing round to the right; he lashed his team and guided them so perfectly that, with not a hand's- breadth to spare anywhere, the two wheels passed precisely where there was the only chance of their passing, and he guided his horses so perfectly that the yoke-mates shot between the stalled wheels without jostling them or each other. No man has ever displayed such skill as Palus."

"Nor had such luck," Ramnius cut in. "No man could have guided the yoke- mates as he did and, at the same time, exerted any influence whatever on the trace-mates. They showed their breed. Each saw the stalled wheel in front of him, neither tried to dodge. Each went straight at that wheel, reared at it, and leapt it clean. As they leapt they were not helping to pull the chariot, the yoke-mates pulled it over the stalled axles. But the momentary check as the chariot hit the axles and leapt up gave the leaping trace-mates just the instant of time they needed to find their feet and regain their stride. The whole thing was a miracle; of training, of skill and of luck."

"But don't forget," said Colgius, "that the skill and judgment Palus displayed counted for more than the breed of his team and his luck. Do not forget the perfect form he showed: not an awkward pose, not a sign of effort, not a hint of anxiety; self-possession, courage, self-confidence all through and the most perfect grace of movement, ease, and suggestion of reserve strength. He is a prodigy."

After Agathemer and I were alone in the dark on our cots we whispered to each other a long time.

"Do you really believe," I said, "that Commodus is so insane about horse- racing as to be willing to put Furfur on his throne in his robes so that he can degrade himself under the name of Palus?"

"I do," said Agathemer. "No other conjecture fits what we saw. The man on the throne was certainly the image of Commodus, but had not his elegance of port and grace of movement. Palus has all the inimitable gracefulness which Commodus displayed when driving teams in the Palace Stadium."

"He is incredibly stupid in undervaluing and failing to prize his privileges as Emperor," I said, "and amazingly reckless in allowing anyone else to occupy his throne, wearing his robes."

"He is yet more reckless to race as he does," Agathemer commented, "and I should not be astonished if we have seen his last public appearance as a charioteer."

"Why?" I queried startled.

"Because," said Agathemer, "he must be incredibly stupid not to perceive, now, what opportunities the Circus offers for getting rid of an Emperor posing as a charioteer.

"A stupider man than Commodus can possibly be should be able to comprehend that there must have been a very carefully planned plot in the Blue Company, a plot which must have cost a mountain of gold to carry so far towards success, a plot which never would have been laid for a mere jockey, however much his rivalry threatened the Company's winnings and prestige. Only a coterie of very wealthy men could have devised and pushed it. It cost money to induce charioteers to come so close to almost certain death in order to compass the destruction of another charioteer. It cost money to sacrifice a company's teams in that fashion. Such a plot was never laid to get rid of Palus the jockey; it was aimed at ridding the nobility of an Emperor they fear and hate, however popular he may be with the commonality.

"I miss my guess if there is not a violent upheaval in the Blue Company, and if there is not an investigation scrutinizing the behavior and loyalty of every man affiliated with them, from their board of managers down to the stall-cleaners. I prophesy that the informers, spies and secret- service men will have fat pickings off the Blues for many a day to come. I'll bet the guilty men are putting their affairs in order now and hunting safe hiding-places. Commodus may be insane about horse-racing and fool enough to put a dummy Emperor in his place, so he can be free to enjoy jockeying, but he is no fool when it comes to attempts at assassination. He'll run down the guilty or exterminate them among a shoal of innocents."

I agreed.

But I added:

"What is the world coming to when the Prince of the Republic prizes his privileges so little that he neglects state business for horse-jockeying, when he is so crazy over charioteering that he lets another man wear his robes and occupy his throne? It is a mad world."

Next morning we were early on Orontides' ship and once more Agathemer charmed a crew with his flageolet.

At Ostia Orontides found he must lay over for some valuable packages consigned to a jeweler at Antioch for the conveyance of which he was highly paid. He suggested that, as the day was hot for so late in the year, we go ashore and see the sights which, indeed, we found well worth seeing, for Ostia has some buildings outmatching anything to be found outside of Rome. We took his hint, but he warned us:

"I have some sailors I don't trust. Don't leave anything aboard. Take your wallets with you."

We passed a pleasant, idle day, lunching and taking our siesta at an inn outside the Rome Gate. We had planned to dine at an inn near the harbor- front, on the west side of the town, not far from the Sea Gate: there we had barely sat down and begun tasting the relishes, when in came Clitellus and Summanus. They seemed surprised and pleased to recognize us, greeted us as if we had been old friends and close intimates, appeared to assume that we were as glad to see them as they were to see us, and, as a matter of course, joined us at dinner, telling the waiter-boy to bring them whatever we had ordered, only doubling the quantity of every order.

They talked of the races we had seen, of Palus, of his driving; of the smash-ups, of Posilla, of Colgius and of everything and anything. They announced that they would accompany us to our ship and see us safe aboard. Both Agathemer and I more than suspected that they had associates in waiting to follow them and, at a signal, fall on us and seize us. I felt all that and Agathemer whispered to me a word or two in Greek which advised me of his suspicions.

We prolonged our meal all we could, but there was no shaking them off. Agathemer ordered more wine, Falernian, and had it mixed with only one measure of water. Watching his opportunity he threw at me, in a whisper, two Greek words which advised me, since they were the first in a well- known quotation from Menander, that our only hope was to drink our tormentors dead drunk.

It turned out to be a question whether we would drink them drunk or they us. Certainly they showed no hesitation about pouring down the wine as fast as it was mixed and served, nor did either of them appear to notice that we drank less than they; they seemed able to hold any amount and stay sober and keep on drinking. As dusk deepened and the waiter-boys lit the inn lamps, I found myself perilously near sliding off my chair to the floor and very doubtful whether, if I did, I should be able to get up again or to resist my tendency to go to sleep then and there.

I was, in fact, just about to give up any attempt to resist my impulse to collapse when Summanus collapsed, slid to the floor, rolled over, spread out and snored.

Clitellus thickly objurgated his comrade and all weak-heads, worthless fellows who could not drink a few goblets without getting drunk. To prove his vast superiority and his prowess, he poured more wine down his throat, spilling some down into his tunic.

Agathemer winked at me and fingered the strap of his wallet. I groped for mine and fumbled at it.

Clitellus, with a hiccough, slid to the floor beside Summanus.

I was for trying to rise.

"Let us be sure," said Agathemer in Greek, "perhaps they are pretending to be drunk, just to catch us."

But, after a brief contemplation of the precious pair, we concluded that no acting could be as perfect as this reality. They were drunk at last and safely asleep.

Agathemer paid the whole amount, for all four of us, adjured the waiter- boy to be good to Clitellus and Summanus, gave him an extra coin, and signalled me to rise. I lurched to my feet, swaying, almost as drunk as our victims and beholding Agathemer swaying before me, not only because of my blurred eyesight, but also because of his unsteadiness on his feet.

We almost fell, but not quite. Somehow we staggered to the door, where, once outside, the cool night air made us feel almost sobered, though still too nearly drunk to be sure of our location or direction.

More by luck than anything else we took the right turn and found the harbor front before the night was entirely black. In the half gloom we tried to find the pier from which we had come that morning. As we explored we heard a cheerful hail.

"Is that you, Orontides?"

Agathemer called.

"Aye, Aye!" came back the cheery answer. "Come aboard!"

And we were met and assisted up the gang-plank and down over the bulwarks.

"I was afraid you boys were lost," the shipmaster said, "and I am to sail at dawn, after all; everything is aboard. I'm glad to see you. You've dined pretty liberally. Come over here and get to sleep."

And he led us to where we found something soft to sleep on.

I was asleep almost as soon as I lay down.

I awoke with a terrific headache and an annoying buzzing in my ears, awoke only partially, not knowing where I was or why and without any distinct recollections of recent events. My first sensation was discomfort, not only from the pain of my headache, but also from the heat of the sunrays beating on me, and that despite the fact that I could feel a strong cool breeze ruffling my hair and beard.

I sat up and looked about me. Agathemer was snoring. The sun was not low; in fact, at that time of the year, it was near its highest. I had slept till noon!

Then, all of a sudden I realized that the ship was wholly strange to me and that it was headed not southeast, but northwest. That realization shocked me broad awake. At the same instant I saw the shipmaster approaching. He was not Orontides, nor was he at all like him. He had small feet, was knock-kneed, tall, lean, had a hatchet-face and red hair.

"Awake at last!" he commented. "You lads must have dined gloriously last night. You don't look half yourselves, yet."

He stared at me, and at Agathemer, who had waked, into much the same sort of daze in which I had been at first.

"Neptune's trident!" the shipmaster exclaimed. "You two aren't the two lads I was to convoy! Who are you and how did you get here?"

"We were hunting for our ship after dark," Agathemer said, "and somebody hailed us. We asked whether it was Orontides and the answer that came back was: 'Aye, Aye!' We were pretty thoroughly drunk and were glad to be helped aboard and shown our beds. That's all I know."

"Kingdom of Pluto!" the shipmaster cried, "my name's Gerontides, not Orontides. I heard your question, but you were so drunk I never knew the difference: probably I shouldn't have known the difference if you had been sober. I was on the lookout for two lads much like you two who had part paid me to carry them to Genoa. They'll be in a fix."

"'Bout ship," said Agathemer, "and put back to Ostia. You can't be far on your way yet. We'll pay you what you ask to set us ashore at Ostia."

"I wouldn't 'bout ship," said Gerontides, "for twenty gold pieces."

"We'll pay you thirty," said Agathemer.

"Don't bid any higher, son," Gerontides laughed. "If you were made of gold, to Genoa you go. I've a bigger stake in a quick landing at Genoa than any sum you could name would overbalance. Best be content!"

And content we had to be, no arguments, no entreaties, nothing would move him.

"I'll be fair with you," he said. "The lads I took you for had paid me all I had asked them except one gold piece each on landing at Genoa. That's all you'll have to pay me."

Nothing would budge him from his resolution. Agathemer in despair drowned his misery in flageolet playing. It seemed to comfort him and certainly comforted me. The crew were delighted. After a voyage as easy and pleasant as our cruise with Maganno, we landed on the eighth day before the Ides of September, at Genoa, paid our two gold pieces and set about getting out of that city as quickly as might be. We avoided, of course, the posting- station where we had changed horses while in couriers' trappings. But there was a posting-station at each gate of Genoa and we, having talked over all possibilities in the intervals of flageolet playing, were for Dertona. We had little trouble in buying a used travelling-carriage. Horses we did not have to wait long for, as hiring teams were luckily plentiful that day and Imperial agents scarce. Off we set for Milan.

We were in haste but there was no hurrying postillions on those mountain roads. We nooned at some nameless change-house and were glad to make the thirty-six miles to Libarium by dusk. The next day was consumed in covering the thirty-five miles to Dertona. From there on we travelled, in general down hill, and so quicker, but not much quicker, so that a third day entire was needed for making the fifty-one miles to Placentia.

Placentia, a second time, was unlucky for us. It might have been worse, for we did not again encounter Gratillus, or anyone else who might have recognized me. But I made a fool of myself. I am not going to tell what happened; Agathemer never reproached me for my folly, not even in our bitterest misery; but I reproached myself daily for nearly three years; I am still ashamed of myself and I do not want to set down my idiotic behavior.

Let it suffice, that, through no fault of Agathemer's, but wholly through my fault, we were suspected, interrogated, arrested, stripped, our brand- marks and scourge-scars observed and ourselves haled before a magistrate. To him Agathemer told the same tale he had told to Tarrutenus Spinellus. It might have served had we been dealing with a man of like temper, for travellers from Aneona for Aquileia regularly passed through Placentia turning there from northwest along the road from Aneona to northeast along the road to Aquileia.

But Stabilius Norbanus was a very different kind of man.

"Your story may be true," he said, "but it impresses me as an ingenious lie. If I believed it I'd not send men like you, with their records written in welts on their backs, with any convoy, no matter how strict, on the long journey to Aquileia, on which you'd have countless opportunities of escape. I do not believe your tale. Yet I'll pay this much attention to it: I'll write to Vedius Aquileiensis and ask him if he owned two slaves answering your descriptions and lost them through unexplained disappearance or known crimping by Dalmatian pirates at about the time you indicate.

"Meantime I'll commit you to an ergastulum [Footnote: See Note H.] where you'll be herded with your kind, all safely chained, so that no escape is possible, and all doing some good to the state by some sort of productive labor. A winter at the flour-mills will do you two good."

Our winter at the mills may have benefited us, but it was certainly, with its successor at similar mills, one of the two most wretched winters of my life. And Agathemer, I think, suffered every bit as acutely as I. We were not chained, except for a few days and about twice as many more nights; as soon as the manager of the ergastulum felt that he knew us he let us go unchained like the rest of his charges.

This was because of the structure of the ergastulum. It was located in the cellars of one of the six or more granaries of Placentia, which has, near each city gate, an extensive public store-house. The granary under which we were immured was that near the Cremona gate. Above ground it was a series of rectangles about courtyards each just big enough to accommodate four carts, all unloading or loading at once. It was everywhere of four stories of bin-rooms, all built of coarse hard-faced rubble concrete. The cellars were very extensive, and not all on one level, being cunningly planned to be everywhere about the same depth underground. Where their floor-levels altered the two were joined by short flights of three, four or five stone steps, under a vaulted doorway, in the thick partition walls.

Each cellar-floor was about four yards below the ground level so that a tall man, standing on a tall man's shoulders, could barely reach with his outstretched fingers the tip of the sill of one of the low windows. These windows, each about a yard high and two yards broad, were heavily barred with gratings of round iron bars as thick as a man's wrist, set too close together for a boy's head to pass between them, and each two bars hot- welded at each intersection, so that each grating was practically one piece of wrought iron, made before the granary was built and with the ends of each bar set deep in the flinty old rubble concrete. The inmates need not be chained, as no escape was possible through the windows, though raw night air, rain, snow at times and the icy winter blasts came in on us through them.

Similarly no escape was possible up the one entrance to the cellars, which was through an inner courtyard, from which led down a stone stair with four sets of heavy doors; one at the bottom, one at each end of a landing lighted by a heavily barred window, and one at the top. Between the inner and outer courtyard were two sets of heavier doors and two equally heavy were at the street entrance of the outer courtyard. On the stair-landing was the chained-up porter-accountant seated under the window on a backless stool by a small, heavy accountant's table on which stood a tall clepsydra by his big account-book. Checking the hours by the clepsydra, he entered the name of every human being passing, up or down that stair, even the name of the manager every time he came in or went out. By him always stood a wild Scythian, armed with a spear, girt with a sabre, and with a short bow and a quiver of short arrows hanging over his back. Similar Scythians guarded the doorways, a pair of them to each door. The slide by which the grain was lowered into the ergastulum, the other slide by which the flour, coarse siftings and bran were hauled up, were similarly guarded. Escape was made so difficult by these precautions that, while I was there, no one escaped out of the three hundred wretches confined in the ergastulum.

There we suffered sleepless nights in our hard bunks, under worn and tattered quilts, tormented by every sort of vermin. Swarming with vermin we toiled through the days, from the first hint of light to its last glimmer, shivering in our ragged tunics, our bare feet numb on the chilly pavements. We were cold, hungry, underfed on horribly revolting food, reviled, abused, beaten and always smarting from old welts or new weals of the whip-lashes.

It was all a nightmare: the toil, the lashings, if our monotonous walk around our mill, eight men to a mill, two to each bar, did not suit the notions of the room-overseer; the dampness, the cold, the vermin, the pain of our unhealed bruises, the scanty food and its disgusting uneatableness.

The food seemed the worst feature of our misery. So, in fact, it appears to have seemed to our despicable companions. Certainly, of the food they complained more than of the toil, the cold, the vermin, the malignity of the overseers or even of the barbarity of the Scythian guards. Anyhow their fury at the quality of their food brought to me and Agathemer an alleviation of our misery. For some hotheaded wretches, goaded beyond endurance, jerked the bars of their mill from their sockets and with them felled, beat to death and even brained the cook and his two assistants.

After their corpses had been removed, the floor swabbed up and the murderers turned over to the gloating Scythians to be done to death by impalement, Scythian fashion, with all the tortures Scythian ferocity could devise, the manager went from cellar to cellar, all through the ergastulum, enquiring if any prisoner could cook. No one volunteered, and, when he questioned more than a few, everyone denied any knowledge of cookery.

A second time he made the tour of his domain, promising any cook a warm tunic, a bunk with a thick mattress and two heavy quilts, all the food he could eat and two helpers; the helpers to have similar indulgences. On this second round, in our cellar, a Lydian, nearer to being fat than any prisoner in the ergastulum, admitted that he could make and bake bread, but vowed that he could not do anything else connected with cooking. Spurred on by his confession and tempted by the offers of better clothing and bedding and more food, also by the memories of Agathemer's cookery the winter before, I blurted out that Agathemer could not make bread, but could do everything else needed in cookery. Agathemer, after one reproachful glance at me, admitted that he was a cook of a sort, but declared that he was almost as bad a cook as the wretch just murdered. The overseer bade him go to the kitchen and told him he might select a helper; the baker would have been the other helper. As helper Agathemer, naturally, selected me.

After that we suffered less. The slaves acclaimed Agathemer's cooking; for, if their rations were still scanty by order of the watchful manager, at least their food was edible. Far from being ultimately killed, like our predecessors, and continually threatened and reviled, we were blessed by our fellow-slaves. We slept better, in spite of the vermin, on our grass- stuffed mattresses, under our foul quilts, we shivered less in our thicker tunics. We were not too tired to discuss, at times, the oddities of our vicissitudes, to congratulate each other on being, at least, alive, on my not being suspected of being what I actually was, and, above all, on the safety of our old, blackened, greasy, worthless-looking, amulet-bags, with their precious contents. To be reduced to carrying food to three hundred of the vilest rascals alive was a horrible fate for a man who had, two years before, been a wealthy nobleman, but it was far better than death as a suspected conspirator. And Agathemer was hopeful of our future, of survival, of escape, of comfort somewhere after he had sold another emerald, ruby, or opal. Nothing could, for any length of time, dim or cloud the light of Agathemer's buoyancy of disposition.