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Diana, he had mastered the basic idea that letters could represent sounds and collections of letters could represent words, but his hold on the alphabet was tenuous. As I explained how letters could be shuffled arbitrarily about, then unshuffled, his face registered mounting bewilderment.
    "But I thought the whole point of letters was that they didn't change, that they always stood for the same thing."
    "Yes. Well ..." I tried to think of a metaphor. "Imagine the letters all taking on disguises. Take your name: The D might masquerade as an M, the A as a T, and so on, and altogether you'd have five letters that didn't look like any sort of word at all. But figure a way to see through those disguises, and you can unmask the whole word." I smiled, thinking this was rather clever, but the look on Davus's face was now of confusion verging on panic.
    "If only Meto were here," I muttered. The younger of my two adopted sons had turned out to have a genius for letters. His natural gifts had served him well in Caesar's ranks. He had become the general's literary adjutant. To hear Meto tell it, he had done much of the actual writing of Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars, which everyone in Rome had been reading for the last year. No one was more brilliant than Meto at cracking codes, anagrams, and ciphers.
    But Meto was not in Rome— not yet, anyway, though expectations of Caesar's imminent arrival continued to mount day by day, causing jubilation in some quarters, terror in others.
    "There are rules about solving ciphers," I muttered aloud, trying to remember the simple tricks that Meto had taught me. " 'A cipher is simply a puzzle, solving a puzzle is merely a game, and—"
    " 'And all games have rules, which any fool can follow.' "
    I looked up and saw my daughter standing in the doorway.
    "Diana! I told you to stay in the front of the house. What if little Aulus—"
    "Mother is watching him. She'll keep him out of the garden. You know how superstitious she is about dead bodies." Diana clicked her tongue. "That poor fellow looks awful!"
    "I wanted to spare you the sight."
    "Papa, I've seen dead bodies before."
    "But not ..."
    "Not strangled like that, no. Though I have seen a garrote before. It looks a lot like the one used to murder Titus Trebonius a few years ago, the fellow you proved was strangled by his wife. You kept the garrote as a souvenir, remember? Mother threatened to use it on Davus if he ever displeased me."
    "She was joking, I think. Such weapons are as common as daggers these days," I said.
    "Davus, are you doing a good job of helping Papa?" Diana moved to her husband's side and laid a slender arm over his brawny shoulders, then touched her lips to his forehead. Davus grinned. A strand of Diana's long black hair fell across his face, tickling his nose.
    I cleared my throat. "The problem appears to be a cipher. Davus and I have practically solved it already. Run along, Diana, back to your mother."
    "Isis and Osiris, Papa! How can you possibly read such fine writing?" She squinted at the parchment.
    "Contrary to prevailing opinion in this household, I am neither deaf nor blind," I said. "And it is unseemly for girls to speak impiously in front of their fathers, even if the deities invoked are Egyptian." A passion for all things Egyptian was Diana's latest rage. She called it a homage to her mother's origins. I called it an affectation.
    "I'm not a girl, Papa. I'm twenty years old, married, and a mother."
    "Yes, I know." I looked sidelong at Davus, who was completely absorbed in blowing wisps of his wife's shimmering black hair away from his nose.
    "If solving a cipher is the problem, Papa, then let me help you. Davus can go stand watch in the garden, to make sure no one else comes over the rooftop."
    Davus brightened at this suggestion. I nodded. He strode off at once. "You, too, Diana," I said. "Off with you!" Instead, she took Davus's place in the chair across from me. I sighed.
    "It needs to be done quickly," I