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that he called the lump on the pedestal?” The soldier tried to duplicate the word without success. “Anyway, why don’t you and your son-in-law step out of the temple. It’s getting so you can’t see your hand in front of your face in here.”
    We followed the soldiers onto the porch and descended the steps. The soothsayer stood outside the gate, where there were now five horses tied to the pylons.
    “So, Gordianus of Rome, what’s your business in being here?” asked the soldier.
    “My immediate business is to find a way out of this valley.”
    He laughed. “Easy enough. Marcus and I will escort you out. In fact, we’ll escort you all the way to my commander’s tent. You being on a first-name basis with ‘Gaius Julius,’ maybe you’ll feel more comfortable explaining yourself to an officer.” He looked at me sidelong. “Whoever you are, I don’t mind saying I’m glad you turned up today. It’s slow out here, so far away from the action. You two are the first visitors we’ve had to the temple. Are you sure you’re not looters? Or spies? Only joking!”
    We readied our horses. The soldiers did likewise. The soothsayer conferred with them for a moment. The soldier called to us over his shoulder. “Rabidus says he wants to ride alongside us for a while. You don’t mind, do you?”
    I watched the cowled figure mount his swayback nag and shrugged.
    The soldiers led the way to a narrow cleft in the stone wall. The opening was impossible to see unless viewed straight on. I doubted that Davus and I would ever have found it by ourselves, even in broad daylight. A rocky path led between sheer limestone walls so close I could have touched both sides with outstretched arms. The passage was deep in shadow, almost as dim as the interior of the temple. My horse began to jerk in protest at being ridden over rough, unfamiliar ground in near darkness. At last a vertical slash of pale light appeared ahead of us. The path descended, dropping like a staircase.
    We emerged from the fissure as abruptly as we had entered it. Behind us rose a sheer cliff of limestone. Before us was a dense forest, brooding and dark.
    “How can we ride through that wilderness at night?” I asked Davus in a hushed voice. “These woods must go on for miles!”
    A voice startled me. It was the soothsayer. I had thought he was ahead with the soldiers, but suddenly he was alongside me. “Nothing in this place is what it appears to be,” he whispered hoarsely. “Nothing!”
    Before I could answer, the soldiers doubled back, edging out the soothsayer and hemming Davus and me in on either side like sheep to be herded. Did they really think we might try to escape into that deep, dark wood?
    But the forest was not as vast as it appeared to be. We rode through the enveloping gloom for only a moment, then suddenly emerged into a vast clearing. The last glow of twilight illuminated a landscape of endless tree stumps. The forest had been razed.
    The soldier saw my confusion and laughed. “Caesar’s doing!” he said. “When the Massilians refused to open their gates to him, he took one look at those thick city walls and decided an attack by sea might be advisable. Only problem: no ships! So Caesar decided to build a navy overnight. But to build ships you need big trees—cypresses, ash trees, oaks. Not many such trees in this rocky land; that’s why the Massilians declared this forest sacred and never touched it, not for all the hundreds of years they’ve been here. Gods lived in this wood, so theysaid, gods who’d been here since long before the Massilians came, gods so old and hidden in the gloom that even the Gauls had no names for them. The place was rank and wild, powdery beneath your feet from so much rotted heartwood over the years, with cobwebs the size of houses up in the branches. The Massilians built altars, sacrificed sheep and goats to the unknown gods of the forest. They never touched the trees for fear of some horrible, divine