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protection. Claudius opened one of the tall doors. They slipped inside the temple and closed the door behind them.
    The air smelled of incense. A giant statue of Apollo dominated the sanctuary, lit by flickering lamps mounted on the walls. On this stormy night, it seemed to Lucius that the place had an eerie magic. The air itself carried a charge of excitement. Gazing up at the god, Lucius felt hackles rise on the back of his neck. With an uncanny certainty he knew that something very important was going to happen that night.
    He looked behind him. Claudius was sitting on a marble bench against one wall, already nodding, his jaw hanging open and a bit of drool suspended from his lower lip. Truly, anyone who saw him at that moment would have assumed he was an idiot. Poor Claudius!
    The uncanny sensation subsided. Lucius sat beside Claudius, listening to him softly snore, and waited for the raging storm to subside.
    When the massive door began to swing inward, he gave a start. Had he been dozing, and for how long? A man entered the temple, dressed in the tunic of an imperial servant and carrying a torch.
    “Claudius? Are you here, Claudius?”
    Claudius woke. He clutched Lucius’s arm and wiped a bit of drool from his chin. “What? Who’s there?”
    “Euphranor.” It was one of the emperor’s most trusted freedmen. His hair was black but his beard was almost entirely white. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” He approached and handed Claudius a wax tablet of the sort that could be written on, rubbed flat, and written over.
    By the light of the torch Claudius peered at the tablet. In a crabbed, elderly hand was written the quaint phrase “Come, quick as asparagus,” with the word
asparagus
marked through and the word
lightning
scrawled above.
    “A message written in Great-Uncle’s own hand!” declared Claudius, obviously surprised. “The man has an army of scribes to take his dictation at any moment of the day or night. Why in his own hand? What can he want so urgently? And why ‘quick as
lightning’
?”
    Lucius suddenly felt out of place. “I suppose I should go home now—”
    “While the storm still rages? No, no! You’ll come with me.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Great-Uncle didn’t say for you
not
to come. Follow me, cousin—quick as asparagus! Euphranor, lead the way.”
    Pelted by rain, they followed Euphranor back to the house, past the dining rooms and the garden, where rain descended in a torrent, and then through a series of doors and a maze of hallways. At last they came to a narrow doorway that opened onto a flight of stairs leading down.
    “I’ll stay here,” said Euphranor. “You’ll find him at the bottom of the steps.”
    Claudius descended the long, steep, winding flight of stairs with Lucius following. At last they arrived in a lamp-lit, subterranean room. Lucius saw at once that the ceiling and the walls were decorated with mosaics; the thousands of tiny tiles glinted and shimmered. Among the dazzling images he recognized King Romulus with his long beard and iron crown. Another image could only be the infant twins, Romulus and his brother Remus, adrift on the Tiber in a basket. Another image showed Romulus being carried up to the heavens on a ray of light sent by Jupiter. There were many more images, all illustrating stories from the life of the Founder.
    “What is
he
doing here?”
    Lucius turned to see Augustus, standing closer than Lucius had ever seen the man before. What terrible teeth the emperor had, all yellow and decayed, and how short he was, wearing slippers instead of the thick-soled shoes that usually made him taller. Lucius told himself he should be at least a little awed, but the presence of the emperor was underwhelming. In his younger days, the fair-haired Octavius was said to have been the best-looking boy in Roma, so pretty that his uncle Julius Caesar took himfor a lover (so went the whispered rumor), and in later days, the boy Octavius who became the man