Part One CORPSES, LIVING AND DEAD

Part Two THE JAWS OF HADES

Part Three DEATH IN A CUP

Part Four FUNERAL GAMES

The BAYS of NAPLES

At the Time of the Spartacan Slave Revolt, 72 B.C.

Part One

Corpses, Living and Dead

For all his fine qualities – his honesty and devotion, his cleverness, his uncanny agility – Eco was not well suited for answering the door. Eco was mute.

But he was not and has never been deaf. He has, in fact, the sharpest ears of anyone I've ever known. He is also a light sleeper, a habit held over from the wretched, watchful days of his childhood, before his mother abandoned him and I took him in from the street and finally adopted him. Not surprisingly, it was Eco who heard the knock at the door in the second hour after nightfall, when everyone in the household had gone to bed. It was Eco who greeted my nocturnal visitor, but was unable to send him away, short of shooing at him the way a farmer shoos an errant goose from his doorway.

Therefore, what else could Eco have done? He might have roused Belbo, my strong-armer. Hulking and reeking of garlic and stupidly rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Belbo might have intimidated my visitor, but I doubt that he could have got rid of him; the stranger was persistent and twice as clever as Belbo is strong. So Eco did what he had to do; he made a sign for my visitor to wait in the doorway and came rapping gendy at my door. Rapping having failed to rouse me – generous helpings of Bethesda's fish and barley soup washed down with white wine had sent me fast asleep – Eco gingerly opened the door, tiptoed into the room, and shook my shoulder.

Beside me Bethesda stirred and sighed. A mass of black hair had somehow setded across my face and neck. The shifting strands tickled my nose and lips. The odour of her perfumed henna sent a quiver of erotic tingling below my waist. I reached for her, making my lips into a kiss, running my hands over her body. How was it possible, I wondered, that she could reach all the way over and around me to tug at my shoulder from behind?