I nodded. My horse seemed glad to be away from narrow, rocky places. He had no trouble picking his way between tree stumps. "But if this wood was sacred… I thought you said Caesar was making a point of respecting the Massilians' holy places."

The soldier snorted. "When it suits him!"

"He has no fear of sacrilege?"

"Was it sacrilege to cut down an old forest full of spiders and mulch? I wouldn't know. Maybe the soothsayer can tell us. What do you say, Rabidus?"

The soothsayer was keeping to himself, riding a little ways off. He turned his hooded head toward the soldier and spoke in a hoarse, strained voice. "I know why the Roman has come here."

"What?" The soldier was taken aback, but recovered with a grin. "Well, tell me then! You'll save us the trouble of torturing him to find out. Only joking! Go on, soothsayer, speak up."

"He's come to look for his son."

The strange voice emerging from the faceless hood chilled my blood. Wings fluttered in my chest. Involuntarily, I whispered the name of my son: "Meto!"

The soothsayer reined his horse and turned about. "Tell the Roman to go home. He has no business here. There's nothing he can do to help his son." He rode off at a slow pace in the direction from which we had come, back toward the last redoubt of the forest.

The soldier grimaced and shivered like a dog shaking off water. "There's a weird one. Not sad to see the back of him!" Davus tugged at my sleeve. "Father-in-law, the fellow really is a soothsayer! How else could he have known-"

I hissed at Davus to silence him: For a mad moment I considered turning back to pursue the hooded figure, to see what else he could tell me. But I knew that the soldiers, for all their joking, would never have allowed it. For the moment, we were their prisoners.

We ascended a small hill. At the summit the soldier halted and pointed straight ahead at a distant hilltop ablaze with campfires. "You see that? There's Caesar's camp. And beyond that lies Massilia, with her back against the sea. She'll open her gates to us, sooner or later. Because Caesar says so!"