The Plain of Capua has no public facilities. Still, no one was going to mind if a two-year-old in trouble watered their crops.
Petronius Longus waited with the ox cart while Tadia and I stumbled about the local scenery. We were in the most fertile region of Italy, whose thriving vineyards, neat market gardens and well-gnarled olive groves extend from the great Vulturnus River to the sweet Lactarii Mountains, where the flocks of sheep run to six hundred ewes at a time. We might as well have been in the deserts of Arabia Petrae. We had to look for a bush. Our immediate location offered only thin scrub. At two, Tadia was a woman of the world, which meant she refused to attempt a public performance so long as anyone within a five-mile radius might be buried in a foxhole watching her.
Finding Tadia's camouflage took us so far we could hardly see the road. It was rapturously peaceful. A cricket scraped at us from a sprig of flowering broom and there was a woozy scent of warm, bruised thyme underfoot. Birds were singing everywhere. I would have liked to dawdle and enjoy the countryside but Petronius held the rigid view that a family on a journey has to rush on.
Tadia and I gave her bush a thorough dousing, then emerged.
'Hmm! Tadia Longina, that's a pretty butterfly; let's wait here and watch him-' Tadia watched the butterfly, while I stared nervously towards the road.
I had glimpsed a dark, surly flurry. Men on horseback flooded round our companions like sparrows mobbing a crust. Then the slight figure of Arria Silvia stood up in the cart, apparently delivering Cato the Elder's speech to the senate on the need to destroy Carthage… The riders galloped off, somewhat hastily.
I seized Tadia, sprinted back to the road, recaptured a loose kitten, then vaulted up beside Petronius, who started the ox.
Silvia sat in pinched silence while I tried to betray no excitement as Petronius drove on. He was steering as he always did, except when he spotted a narrow bridge ahead or some squabble among his children was making him tense. He held the reins loosely in his left hand, leaning forwards on one knee, while his right arm lolled on his diaphragm. He looked as if he was nursing the first murmur of a heart attack, yet it was just how he relaxed.
'What was all that about?' I murmured discreetly.
'Oh…' He stretched his shoulders slowly before he spoke. 'Half a dozen foul-mouthed countrymen in armour-plated helmets looking for some idiot who had stamped on their toes. They pawed our kit and threatened us all until Silvia gave them a piece of her mind-' Sampling Arria Silvia's mind was as tricky as letting a midge fly up your nose. 'I pretended I was just a Roman tourist who had stopped beside the highroad for an argument with his wife-' I wondered what they were arguing about; knowing them, probably me. 'They rattled off towards Capua. The sour green cloak in charge said I was the wrong man anyway…'
'Who did they want then?' I meekly enquired.
'Some stupid bastard called Falco,' Petronius growled.