Cool marble colonnades surrounded squares containing temples or planted groves, their internal walls adorned with magnificent frescoes and their quiet cloisters filled with two centuries of booty from Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. First on the right was the Portico of Octavia, produced by Augustus in honor of his sister; within its Corinthian columns he had deposited half the workshop of the sculptors Pasiteles and Dionysius, plus some of the finest antiques a civilized collector ever managed to loot, including a Venus and a Cupid of Praxiteles. It contained temples to Jupiter and Juno, and schools. This Portico also boasted a superbly endowed public library.

The searcher rested, his feet upon crisply frosted grass, his face upturned to the open sky, creamy as papyrus with the faint threat of rain. He gazed absently at Lysippus' slender group of Alexander and his generals conferring before the Battle of Granicus. Then once again he left his slaves outside, some squatting on their haunches and others lounging out of the wind beside the mighty columns, staring at passers-by.

The reading room was huge: thousands of manuscript rolls set into the walls like doves in a columbarium, guarded by humorless busts of safely dead historians and poets. He noticed a roped-off area where a major reorganization was in hand. Caenis could well be involved with this; she was the sort of girl anybody would ask to help.

He invented an excuse to potter about, enlisting advice from the custodian of maps. "Granicus, sir? Is that somewhere near the Bosphorus? No, here we are—it's on the Sea of Marmora."

"Thanks. Stupid of me. Must have plodded through Alexander's campaigns often enough at school."

A familiar shape on a mapskin arrested him. Caenis had called the island a scrawny goose braised in a swordfish pot: "Somebody interested in Crete?"

"Just been returned, sir." The custodian looked sheepish. "We don't normally loan out the maps."