THE TINKLE-TONKLE of retreating goatbells must have woken me.
It was a wonderful morning. We both slept late, even on the bare ground. Well, we had had a hundred-mile ride, a long night of heavy festivities with a wealthy hunting party, great excitement here in secret, and too much to drink again. Besides, with the prospect of an enormous income, all the troubles of our lives were solved.
Perhaps we should have eaten some of our hard rations last night, while we sat up dreaming of the palatial villas we would own one day, our fleets of ships, the glittering jewels with which we would adorn our adoring womenfolk, and the huge inheritances we could leave to our expensively educated children (so long as they groveled enough as we declined into our well-kept old age)…
My head ached as if I had a troop of dancing elephants restyling my haircut. Justinus looked gray. Once I had glimpsed the glaring sunlight as it bounced off the rocks, I preferred to keep horizontal, with my eyes closed. He was the poor devil who sat up and looked around.
He let out a tortured groan. Then he yelled. After that he must have jumped up and thrown back his head, as he howled at the top of his voice.
I too was sitting up by then. Part of me already knew what must have happened, because Camillus Justinus was a senator's son so he had been brought up to be nobly undemonstrative. Even if a vintner's cart drove over his toe, Justinus was supposed to ignore his bones cracking but to wear his toga in neat folds like his ancestors, then to speak nicely as he requested the driver to please move along. Yelling at the sky like that could only mean disaster.
It was quite simple. As the star-filled desert night faded to dawn, while we two still dozed like oblivious logs, a group of nomads must have wandered past. They had taken one of our horses (either despising mine, or else leaving us the means to escape alive out of quaint old desert courtesy), and they had stolen all our money. They had robbed us of our flagon, though like us they rejected the biscuit.
Then their flocks of half-starved sheep or goats had devoured the surrounding vegetation. Taking offense at our silphium, before they meandered off on their age-old journey to nowhere, the nomads had yanked out any remaining shreds of our plant.
Our chance of a fortune had gone. There was almost nothing left.
While we stared in dismay, one lone brown goat skipped down from a rock and chewed up the last sunbaked threads of root.