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hills on your fool's errand?'
    'And if we had been here? What difference could we have made?'
    Attilius descended a couple of the steps, the back of his hand pressed to his nose. The light was fading. Out of sight, beyond the pillars, he could hear the aqueduct disgorging into the reservoir, but with nothing like its normal percussive force. It was as he had suspected at the fishery: the pressure was dropping, fast.
    He called up to the Greek slave, Polites, who was waiting at the top of the steps, that he wanted a few things fetched – a torch, a plan of the aqueduct's main line and one of the stoppered bottles from the storeroom, which they used for taking water samples. Polites trotted off obediently and Attilius peered into the gloom, glad that the overseer could not see his expression, for a man was his face; the face the man.
    'How long have you worked on the Augusta, Corax?'
    'Twenty years.'
    'Anything like this ever happened before?'
    'Never. You've brought us all bad luck.'
    Keeping one hand on the wall, Attilius made his way cautiously down the remaining steps to the reservoir's edge. The splash of water falling from the mouth of the Augusta, together with the smell and the melancholy light of the day's last hour, made him feel as if he were descending into hell. There was even a rowing boat moored at his feet: a suitable ferry to carry him across the Styx.
    He tried to make a joke of it, to disguise the panic that was fastening hold of him. 'You can be my Charon,' he said to Corax, 'but I don't have a coin to pay you.'
    'Well, then – you are doomed to wander in hell for ever.'
    That was funny. Attilius tapped his fist against his chest, his habit when thinking, then shouted back up towards the yard, 'Polites! Get a move on!'
    'Coming, aquarius!'
    The slim outline of the slave appeared in the doorway, holding a taper and a torch. He ran down and handed them to Attilius, who touched the glowing tip to the mass of tow and pitch. It ignited with a wumph and a gust of oily heat. Their shadows danced on the concrete walls.
    Attilius stepped carefully into the boat, holding the torch aloft, then turned to collect the rolled-up plans and the glass bottle. The boat was light and shallow-bottomed, used for maintenance work in the reservoir, and when Corax climbed aboard it dipped low in the water.
    I must fight my panic, thought Attilius. I must be the master.
    'If this had happened when Exomnius was here, what would he have done?'
    'I don't know. But I tell you one thing. He knew this water better than any man alive. He would have seen this coming.'
    'Perhaps he did, and that was why he ran away.'
    'Exomnius was no coward. He didn't run anywhere.'
    'Then where is he, Corax?'
    'I've told you, pretty boy, a hundred times: I don't know.'
    The overseer leaned across, untied the rope from its mooring ring and pushed them away from the steps, then turned to sit facing Attilius and took up the oars. His face in the torchlight was swarthy, guileful, older than his forty years. He had a wife and a brood of children crammed into an apartment across the street from the reservoir. Attilius wondered why Corax hated him so much. Was it simply that he had coveted the post of aquarius for himself and resented the arrival of a younger man from Rome? Or was there something more?
    He told Corax to row them towards the centre of the Piscina and when they reached it he handed him the torch, uncorked the bottle and rolled up the sleeves of his tunic. How often had he seen his father do this, in the subterranean reservoir of the Claudia and the Anio Novus on the Esquiline Hill? The old man had shown him how each of the matrices had its own flavour, as distinct from another as different vintages of wine. The Aqua Marcia was the sweetest-tasting, drawn from the three clear springs of the River Anio; the Aqua Alsietina the foulest, a gritty lakewater, fit only for irrigating gardens; the Aqua Julia, soft and tepid; and so on. A good aquarius, his