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the years, I felt eyes on my back, yet still I kept my gaze straight ahead. But as we pulled alongside the galley, I could not resist a final glance over my shoulder. Quite tiny in the distance, I saw them all standing along the rail—not only the captain and all his sailors, but Rupa, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and the boys wearing only the loincloths they slept in, and Bethesda in her sleeping gown. At the sight of me looking back, she raised her hands and covered her face.
    Centurion Macro escorted me aboard. A crowd of officers had gathered at the prow of the galley, clustered around Pompey himself, to judge from the magnificent purple plume that bristled atop the helmet of the man at the middle of the group, who was hidden by the surrounding throng. I swallowed hard and braced myself to face Pompey, but the centurion gripped my elbow and steered me in the opposite direction, toward the cabin where I had been received the previous day. He rapped on the cabin door. Cornelia herself opened it.
    “Come inside, Finder,” she said, keeping her voice low. She closed the door behind me.
    The room was stuffy from the smoke of burning lamp oil. Against one wall, the coverlet on the bed that Pompey and his wife presumably shared was pulled down and rumpled on one side but untouched on the other.
    “You slept well last night?” I said.
    She raised an eyebrow. “Well enough, considering.”
    “But the Great One never went to bed at all.”
    She followed my gaze to the half-made bed. “My husband told me you’re good at noticing such details.”
    “A bad habit I can’t seem to break. I used to make my living by it. These days it only seems to get me into trouble.”
    “All virtues turn at last to vices, if one lives long enough. My husband is a prime example of that.”
    “Is he?”
    “When I first married him, he was no longer young, but he was nonetheless still brash, fearless, supremely confident that the gods were on his side. Those virtues had earned him a lifetime of victories, and his victories earned him the right to call himself Great and to demand that others address him thusly. But brashness can turn to arrogance, fearlessness to foolhardiness, and confidence can become that vice the Greeks call hubris—an overweening pride that tempts the gods to strike a man down.”
    “All this is by way of explaining what happened at Pharsalus, I presume?”
    She blanched, as Pompey had done the previous day when I said too much. “You’re quite capable of hubris yourself, Finder.”
    “Is it hubris to speak the truth to a fellow mortal? Pompey’s not a god. Neither are you. To stand up to either of you gives no insult to heaven.”
    She breathed in through dilated nostrils, fixing me with a catlike stare. At last she blinked and lowered her eyes. “Do you know what day this is?”
    “The date? Three days before the kalends of October, unless I’ve lost track.”
    “It’s my husband’s birthday—and the anniversary of his great triumphal parade in Rome thirteen years ago. He had destroyed the pirates who infested the seas; he had crushed Sertorius in Spain and the Marian rebels in Africa; he had subjugated King Mithridates and a host of lesser potentates in Asia. With all those victories behind him, he returned to Rome as Pompey the Great, invincible on land and sea. He rode through the city in a gem-encrusted chariot, followed by an entourage of Asian princes and princesses and a gigantic portrait of himself made entirely of pearls. Caesar was nothing in those days. Pompey had no rivals. He might have made himself king of Rome. He chose instead to respect the institutions of his ancestors. It was the greatest day of his life. We always celebrate with a special dinner on this date, to commemorate the anniversary of that triumph. Perhaps tonight, if all goes well . . .”
    She shook her head. “Somehow we strayed from your original observation, that my husband passed yet another night without sleep.