Sleeps With Angels

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Rowland hated driving on the motorway, so we made our way out of London on various A-roads that left us at the mercy of roadworks, traffic jams, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and idiots on mopeds and scooters. By the time we were on the A303 it was almost lunchtime, the very tenuous sense of humour with which I had left home had entirely evaporated, and a colossal wall of what appeared to be almost pure black had begun to rise out of the Western horizon.

“Weather looks bad,” Rowland said.

“Mm,” I said.

“I hope they’ve got the site properly secured,” he said.

“Mm,” I said.

“People just don’t realise how much damage rain can do to a newly-exposed floor,” he went on, shaking his head. “These things were laid down when acid rain was just some awful possibility.”

“Mm,” I said.

He looked at me. “Do you have a hangover?”

“No.”

“You sound as though you have a hangover.”

“Do I?”

“You’re very taciturn.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “You always get very taciturn when you have a hangover.” He looked back out of the windscreen at the great bank of black cloud we were driving toward. “You always did. I could always tell how much you’d had to drink the night before by how much you said in tutorials.”

“Could you?”

“Oh yes.” He nodded to himself. “Some of your other tutors used to comment on it. ‘Jim was very laconic today,’ they’d say, and I’d know you’d been out on the piss the night before.”

I glanced over at him. “That is so much bullshit.”

Rowland shook his head. “Of course, they meant it as a compliment. You were quite highly thought-of among the staff for your laconic sense of humour.”

“It didn’t make them give me better grades.”

He snorted. “Of course not. I knew you weren’t being laconic. You were just hungover.”

I reached into the little well under the radio, took out a packet of cigarettes, removed one, and lit it one-handed. Even after all this time, it was still a surprisingly difficult operation while trying to keep my eyes on the road.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I don’t mind you smoking — how you choose to die is up to you — but you could easily lose control of the car while you’re lighting your cigarette.”

“Oh, shut up, Rowland,” I said.

It was tempting to compare Rowland to a force of nature, but that wasn’t a very good comparison. Most forces of nature these days arrive with some kind of warning, but Rowland always arrived out of a clear blue sky, wanting you to track down some source in the British Library or copy-edit the manuscript of some paper or take photographs of one of the milecastles on Hadrian’s Wall or get samples of Roman concrete from a godforsaken bit of masonry on the Welsh Marches. Didn’t matter how inconvenient it was for you. Rowland wanted it, and it had to be done.

There was no way to predict Rowland, no handy early warning. He’d just be there on your doorstep, usually leaning casually on the doorbell at some ungodly hour of the morning, wanting.

I’d begun to pay more attention to the literature than I ever had when I was at university — not to keep up to speed with the subject, but to try and detect Rowland’s enthusiasms, give myself a little lead-time on that early-morning doorbell. It never worked. You couldn’t guess what would attract his attention. The bell would ring, there would be a phone call or an email or — very rarely, when he didn’t think there was much urgency — a letter. Do this, do that, I need this, I need that.

There was just no way to say no. Rowland used neurolinguistic programming or something; he could talk anyone into doing anything. He had, of course, never learned how to drive. Why bother? He had an endless supply of former students who had fallen under his spell and were just waiting for him to turn up, “Oh, hello, Jim, I have to go out to the West Country today and I know you’re not busy right now…” Rowland wasn’t a force of nature; he was a curse, and sometimes I thought he was my own personal curse.

We ran into the rain somewhere around Andover. One moment we were driving towards that great wall of cloud, the next the view out of the windscreen was like looking into a stormy aquarium. The line of traffic slowed to a crawl, apart from one arsehole in a Jeep Grand Cherokee who decided he needed to overtake everyone else and whose rear lights rapidly vanished into the rainy dusk ahead of us.

“I imagine we’ll be seeing him again,” Rowland said smugly. “Probably in the back of a hearse.” Like almost every non-driver I had ever encountered, Rowland was a terrible passenger.

“Fuck this thing in particular,” I muttered, and a couple of minutes later when a sign that said ‘Services’ loomed up out of the watery half-dark, I pulled off the road.

I blamed the internet. In days gone by, Rowland would have had to subscribe to dozens of journals and newsletters, and the theories and rumours and suppositions would have come to him in an orderly progression hindered only by the Royal Mail. These days, wild stuff came to him direct down his broadband connection. All he had to do was type a couple of words into Google and the world flooded into his cramped and musty little flat behind Holborn. He spent hours and hours, usually long after midnight, sifting through it all, saving some stuff onto memory sticks he got cheap from a former student who worked at PC World, printing other stuff out and filing it in great stacks of A4, keeping some things on his hard drive so he could drag it into Word and cut and paste until it took on a pleasing configuration. Then he’d jam half a ream of paper into his ageing Hewlett-Packard printer and out would come this… stuff…

“What is this?”

“Beg pardon?”

“This.” Rowland was pointing at his plate, on which rested a fried plaice fillet in breadcrumbs, about two dozen shoestring fries, a wilted scrap of lettuce, half a tomato with its cut surface carved into uneven serrations, a small forest of mustard cress, and thumbnail-sized splots of tomato ketchup and tartare sauce.

“It’s fish and chips, Rowland,” I said.

He looked down at his meal. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” I said. I pointed. “Look. Fish there, and chips there.”

He poked the fried plaice with his fork. “That’s not funny.”

“No, it isn’t. But it’s fish and chips.”

“And all this…?” Indicating the lettuce and stuff.

“Garnish. It’s garnish.” I saw the look on his face and put down my knife and fork. “Look, you didn’t pay for it, so I think it’s pretty fucking rude to complain about it, actually.”

Rowland sat back on the slippery plastic-upholstered banquette and lowered his chin. “I didn’t want to stop anyway,” he muttered into his chest like a sulky six-year-old.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake…” I rubbed my face and sat back and looked around the restaurant. The A-roads of Britain do not, as a rule, have the same dining facilities as the motorways. Travel on a motorway, and every half an hour or so there will be a service station where you can buy petrol and a weird and eclectic selection of newspapers, books, magazines, CDs, audio cassettes, soft toys, sweets, soft drinks, bunches of flowers and packets of crisps. These service stations will always have a restaurant. Back when I left school and spent a year, before going to university, working as a chef in a service station kitchen, they would have their own restaurants, with their own food. These days, they’ve mostly surrendered to the chains, and if you want something to eat you have a choice, depending on where you stop, of burgers or fried chicken or some obscure brand of pie.

On an A-road, on the other hand, the stops come at irregular intervals, if at all. There is usually petrol, but not often newspapers and magazines. And the restaurants are another thing altogether.

The one we had stopped at seemed to have been overlooked by the march of Civilisation, like the home of some undiscovered South American tribe. The orange carpet had the texture of a saucepan-scourer, the walls were panelled with vanishingly-thin strips of wood veneer, and the furniture looked like a 1970s low-budget film-maker’s idea of the seating on a passenger space vehicle. The food had been abused so much that it was barely food any longer, more an outdated ideal of food from the days when British situation comedies had found Afro-Caribbean accents amusing.

I was actually appalled that I had stopped here, but I needed large amounts of caffeine and sugar and I needed to be off the road while the storm was going on, two things this restaurant actually did very well. Rowland, on the other hand, had decided that he wanted lunch too. And then he had discovered that he had left home without his wallet.

I said, “I needed a break, Rowland.”

He didn’t bother to raise his head, but he did shrug.

“You can’t just turn up on someone’s doorstep at nine o’clock in the morning without any warning and expect them to be all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and waiting to drive you to the West Country,” I said.

Rowland looked at me from under his great badgery eyebrows. “You were lucky to get a degree at all, you know,” he said in a low voice.

“Oh, Rowland,” I groaned.

“The Faculty thought — quite accurately, I might add — that your coursework was of poor quality,” he went on, and as if gaining strength from his words he managed to spear a fry and pop it into his mouth. “I, of course, thought differently.” He chewed the fry and swallowed.

“Rowland,” I said. “Not now.”

“I went into Cunningham’s office and stood up for you, Jim,” he told me, and he magically managed to lift his head and sit up. “I told him I thought you had some worth.”

I drank some coffee.

By now his anger had enabled him to cut a small portion off his fried plaice. He swiped it through the ketchup and the tartare sauce. “I forced Cunningham to see that you had some promise.” He actually twinkled at me as he ate the piece of fish. “I got you that degree, Jim.”

I drank more coffee.

“And what did you do with that degree, Jim? Hm?” I watched his fork range around the oval platter his meal rested on, picking up fish, fries, a bit of lettuce, some cress. He put them all in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “What exactly did you do with that degree I put my career on the line for? Hm?”

“You didn’t put your career on the line for me, you mad old tosser,” I said. It was such a ludicrous concept that I almost laughed out loud. “You never put anybody else before yourself in your life.”

By now, he was industriously clearing his platter. “Whatever else you’ve managed to piss away up a wall in the meantime, I got you that degree,” he told me with enormous confidence. “You owe me, Jim.”

“I don’t owe you anything at all,” I said, but we both knew I was lying. He really had gone to Cunningham and argued in my favour. Of course, he’d done it knowing that he was storing up favours for the future. But he’d still done it.

“All I want you to do is drive me somewhere,” he said. “How hard can that be?”

I looked out of the windows. “I think the rain’s easing off,” I said.

I couldn’t even remember now why I had applied for the course, apart from it being relatively easy to get on to and promising a certain amount of work in the open air. And, at the beginning, I had been absolutely illuminated with enthusiasm. I had, in fact, been enthusiastic about it for a little over two thirds of my time at university. Then I simply realised that I had never been cut out to be an archaeologist. I had a moment of epiphany at the bottom of a trench just outside Cirencester when I stood up, looked at the trowel I was holding, and thought, hang on, what on Earth is this all about? And right there and then I lost the faith, and I never got it back.

Certainly, there were little moments later, on rainy digs in fields from Wiltshire to Northumbria, when my trowel turned up a piece of pottery thrown just a hundred years or so after the birth of Christ. and I remembered that I had once seen the point of it all, and I did sort of do enough to finish the course and kind of get a degree. But mostly it was just unrewarding backbreaking toil, and anything of interest I found was subsumed uncited into papers published by my tutors — usually Rowland, who loved fieldwork. I was a nobody, a little ant scraping away at the soil. And that was how I was going to stay.

I did, however, have some small talent for writing, and in my final year at university, having finally realised that I had wasted the previous two years, I began to make approaches to various national newspapers, and was finally offered a post as a journalist at the London office of a regional newspaper publisher. When I graduated, I fled to Fleet Street. At much the same time that every other newspaper was quitting the Street for offices in Docklands or Kensington.

I managed to last twenty years on Fleet Street, something which still astounded me when I considered how much of my time had been spent writing stories about self-help gurus, fading soap stars and little boys whose kittens had somehow managed to secrete themselves in tumble driers. Then one day I lost the faith again. Something snapped and I freelanced a couple of thousand words to a listings magazine about an up-and-coming author’s new novel. The novel went on to the Booker shortlist, though it didn’t win, and I was invited onto a couple of television arts programmes to talk about it, and that led to various irregular gigs writing pieces for magazines and newspapers and occasional appearances on arts shows. Engorged with my new-found status as a prophet of the zeitgeist, which was really annoying my employers, I tendered my resignation and officially went freelance.

At which point, of course, all my commissions dried up. Prophets have a short shelf-life. I wrote stuff, and no one wanted it. I was reduced to doing lifestyle pieces for the Observer and the Times. After a while even that stopped and I wound up doing speculative stuff for the Evening Standard’s Friday magazine.

Rowland knew all this, of course; he kept a careful watch on his graduates, ranking them according to how bright they were and how handy they were likely to be in an emergency. Some of the more forward-thinking of his former students had attempted to eliminate themselves from the equation by moving to Canada, Australia and the United States, but I had wound up not only living in London but with increasing amounts of free time on my hands, which was why he had been on my doorstep this morning, “I mean, it’s not as if you have anything better to do today, is it, Jim..?”

About half an hour west of Stonehenge, we encountered some complicated business involving junctions and roundabouts and traffic lights which Rowland navigated me through by saying, “Left,” “Right” and “Straight on” at the relevant points. He wasn’t consulting a road map at the time, which might have been faintly scary, but if he was the world’s worst passenger Rowland was at least a navigator next to none. The rain eased up, the clouds parted, and Rowland kept us on the road. None of this was particularly surprising. He knew where he wanted to go, and nothing was going to get in his way.

When I first met Rowland he had been in his late forties, a short, stocky man with stumpy legs, long fair hair and dirt under his fingernails. He’d walked into the lecture room at the university, looked at the pile of books on the table before him, and then out and up at us, sitting there with our pens poised waiting to write down everything he said.

What he said was, “Put your bloody pens down and listen for a minute.”

We put our pens down. Well, some of us did. I noticed some people making surreptitious notes, as if they thought he was trying to trick us.

He went on, “At some point in the next three years, you’re going to be holding in your hands something that was made a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years after the birth of Christ. Some of you will find the remains of someone who died hundreds of years before Christ was born. These were real people. As real as you or me. What they were not is just like us. They didn’t think like us, and over the next three years I hope you’re going to learn why.”

The main thesis of Rowland’s life was that historians down the ages had made a single glaring mistake: they had assumed that the people they had written about were just like them, only without modern conveniences. It was a bigotry which had been reinforced by countless movies about the Romans and the Egyptians; modern screenwriters had written scripts about gladiators or slaves or whatever, and the roles they had written had been acted by modern actors for modern audiences. The characters all had modern motivations, they spoke recognisably modern English, and everyone who watched those films could identify with them.

Wrong, said Rowland. We could no more identify with a Second Century Roman gladiator or a Bronze Age artisan than we could identify with a squid. Nobody would want to go and see a film that accurately depicted the way those people really saw the world, we just couldn’t get our heads around it. They were not like us, and we were not like them. It all had to do with evolution, with the way the brain learned to interact with its environment. The Bronze Age peoples were only a few generations away from the development of language itself, and they had not yet learned to identify with the ‘thought I,’ said Rowland. They hadn’t yet figured out that if you had an idea, it came from you. They simply assumed it was the word of God. Music was an aspect of divinity, a magical thing. The Celts believed, in the same way we believe that when we push a button on a pedestrian crossing the little red man will eventually turn green and let us cross the road, that gods lived in the rocks and the rivers and the streams. It was real, not even an article of faith. We couldn’t imagine how they saw their world of gods and goddesses. It was simply beyond us. They were not like us.

I was hooked. This wasn’t archaeology the way I had imagined it. Rowland wasn’t talking about digging up the artefacts and remains of people who had been just like us, apart from the obvious handicaps of not having electricity and computers and Woody Allen films. He was describing a discipline which ought, if it were done properly, to be about examining truly alien cultures and trying to understand them. I loved it. From then on, right up until that moment in the trench outside Cirencester, I was a wild-eyed acolyte. And Rowland, with his patient predator’s eye, marked me down as a useful future asset.

“Here. Take a left here. No, not here, past this junction. Here.”

I sighed and turned the wheel. The car bumped off the road and onto a narrow track between two fields. The track was muddy from the passage of many vehicles and the recent rain, and it was dotted with potholes full of water. I felt the car’s suspension bottom a couple of times, and thought I heard the exhaust scrape a groove in the ground.

We were just outside a village called Stafford Bishop, about ten miles east and north of Gloucester, not far from the part of the Cotswold Hills which had once been dubbed the ‘Haute Cotswolds’ because of its wealthy inhabitants. Where we were was not haute anything. It was a big muddy field surrounded by scrappy hedges and the occasional tree. The ruts in the track fought the steering wheel and it was hard to keep the car from bumping off into the field. Not that it mattered, particularly. It looked as if the farmer to whom the field belonged had been growing mainly weeds and grass. Maybe there was an EU weeds and grass subsidy you could claim.

Rowland was getting excited, leaning forward against his seatbelt and looking out through the windscreen. “He’s here,’’ he kept saying. “I can feel him. He’s here.”

At the end of the track was a little collection of caravans and mobile homes belonging to Bristol University and a couple of West Country archaeological groups. I parked us beside one of the caravans and we got out and stood beside the car. The air smelled wet and fresh and earthy. I lit a cigarette and rubbed my face and wondered how my life had managed to come so far off its tracks as to deliver me here today.

Half the field had been dug up. A little yellow excavator sat on its caterpillar tracks off to one side, next to a huge pile of earth. Beyond it was an enormous shallow pit, crisscrossed with duckboards and dotted with markers, in which dozens of people were moving slowly and with great purpose, scraping away at the dirt exposed by the bucket of the excavator. One of the figures in the excavation, noticing our arrival, had climbed out of the pit and was coming towards us. My heart began to sink all over again.

Lew King had been a year below me at the University, a rotund little Yorkshireman already starting to go bald. Where I had been galvanised by Rowland’s vision of alien cultures buried beneath our feet, Lew had bought into it entirely. He worshipped Rowland. He had picked up Rowland’s torch when Rowland retired five years ago, although in all the important respects Rowland had never retired at all.

“Professor Gibson,” Lew said as he approached us, hand outstretched. “Welcome. Such a great day.”

“Doctor King,” Rowland said solemnly, shaking his hand. He turned and indicated me. “You’ll remember Jim.”

Lew looked at me and I looked at Lew. No hearty handshakes for Lew and me. We regarded each other the way two attack dogs might regard each other. For a long time I had been Rowland’s spear-carrier, in spite of my disillusionment about the fieldwork. When I had betrayed the faith, Lew had picked up the spear, had become the New Improved Jim. I was conscious of looking at a faster, more streamlined version of myself, the tool which Rowland had shaped to use as the front end of his obsession, the person who actually dug things up. The digging life had slimmed Lew down; he was whiplash thin now, and his skin was tanned like old leather from his years spent out in the wind and the rain and the sun as Rowland’s avatar. His hair was gone completely, and he was wearing a huge pair of wire-framed John Lennon spectacles. His clothes were saturated with mud and dirt, and he was holding a filthy baseball cap in one hand.

“Lewis,” I said.

“James,” he said.

“Keeping busy?” he asked.

“Keeping busy,” I agreed. “How’s Fiona?”

“She’s fine. How’s Christina?”

“If it wasn’t for alimony, I wouldn’t know what to do with my time,” I said.

Lew blinked at me.

“My life’s a train-wreck,” I told him. “How’s yours?”

He blinked at me again. Lew, bless him, had always been an unsophisticated organism. Dig and record, that was all he did. The news of his marriage had come as something of a surprise. The news of his divorce had been something less than a surprise. Although possibly more of a surprise than my own divorce.

Rowland was watching us the way an owner might watch two dangerous animals he had grown rather tired of. “Gentlemen,” he muttered. “Might we save this for another time, please?”

“If I’m lucky, there might not be another time,” I told him, but I backed off a fraction and Lew backed off a fraction and Rowland shook his head.

“Doctor King,” he said. “I understand you have something to show me.”

I watched Lew put me to the back of his mind. “It’s over here,” he told Rowland, gesturing across the field. “You were right all along, of course. It’s a marvellous thing.”

He led us out across the field towards the excavation, and as we walked I spotted people I knew working around the site, people who had been in my year at university, or a year above or below me. All of them Rowland’s former students. It was possible that the only two other organisations as adept at placing moles and sleepers in useful positions were the CIA and the East German foreign intelligence service. Rowland didn’t actually have to be physically present at a dig any more; wherever a spade went into the soil anywhere in Britain there would be someone who reported directly or indirectly back to him. I thought about that for a moment, while we walked beside Lew, and thought it was more than a little scary.

Lew had been rehearsing; you could see it in his body language. He walked us to the edge of the dig and he stopped, and he swept his arm across the thing that he and his team had uncovered, and he said, “Professor Gibson, may I present the home of Lucius Claudius Setibogius.”

We looked. “Oh, fucking hell,” I said.

Lucius was a Second Century spiv. Rowland said that we weren’t supposed to think of the people of antiquity in modern terms, but I’d found that I couldn’t think of Lucius in any other way. We had never managed to find out what he looked like, but I always imagined that he was like the Flash Harry character George Cole played in those old St Trinians movies. Pencil moustache, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, long overcoat with the collar turned up, trilby tilted down over his eyes, that strange stiff rapid walk, that was Lucius. If he was alive today he’d be making his living hawking dodgy postcards around the harbour in Naples, asking likely-looking tourists if they wanted to meet his sister.

He was actually a Romano-Brit, and a Roman citizen to boot. We never established how he managed to get his name, but I had my theories. In those days it was fairly common practice when a non-Roman was granted citizenship for him to pick a first name more or less at random, take as his middle name the name of the person to whom he owed his citizenship — often a local governor or a general — and keep his original native name as a surname. I thought Lucius got his citizenship, and his name, because he had done a favour for someone called Claudius. Lucius was good at favours. They had made him colossally wealthy.

They do say that you never forget your first love, and Lucius was Rowland’s. Rowland had first come across him when he was an undergraduate, going through some documents at the British Museum which nobody had looked at since they had been dug up in Rome in the late 1800s. Rowland, for all his faults, had an infallible eye. He spotted Lucius immediately, the way he’d spotted me, knowing that he’d struck gold. Lucius popped up periodically out of the documentation, doing deals, sending letters, being rude to contractors, refusing to pay bills to merchants because he claimed their goods were substandard. He’d lived in Rome for a while, and there was a letter from a fish merchant which mentioned that complete bastard Lucius Claudius Setibogius. Lucius had never conquered a country or won a famous legal case, but he was extraordinary. Lucius was nouveau-riche, he was fast-track, he was a man of the future. His descendants were probably still here, doing deals, fucking somebody over for a percentage, driving the latest model car, living in rancho-style homes in Chigwell with permatanned wives and daughters with belly-button jewellery and big hair.

All of which was deeply interesting to Rowland. But his attention really began to focus when archaeologists working at Vindolanda, one of the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, turned up a huge haul of letters. The letters were in the form of flat pieces of wood about the size of postcards, hinged together with leather thongs. A person would write on these, tie them up with the thongs, and send them off. And there was one signed Lucius Claudius Setibogius.

I could guess what effect this had on Rowland — mainly because I had seen an enormous blown-up photograph of the letter blu-tacked to his living room wall. All those years trying to follow Lucius through bits of documents and things other people had said about him, and here was Rowland finally looking at the man’s handwriting. It was, I thought, rather florid and childish handwriting, the kind of handwriting an eager country boy on the make might have.

Only fragments of the letter survived. We had the salutation at the beginning, to somebody called Marcus — presumably someone stationed at Vindolanda — and we had the signature. And in the middle, where the faint ink-scratched words hadn’t been rotted or faded away, we had a few sentences about a visit Lucius had made to the Colosseum.

You needed a bit of background for this part. The Colosseum was not all gladiators knocking seven shades of shit out of each other. The Romans loved pitting people against animals, staging hunts in the arena that must have been like bloodier versions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They brought megatons of animals to Rome from all over the Empire for this purpose. I forget how many animals were killed when the Colosseum was dedicated, but I once heard a figure that ran into the thousands. Lions, cheetahs, bears. If it had claws and teeth and an attitude, the Romans were happy.

Lucius’s letter to his friend Marcus bemoaned his life now he was living in Britain again. He recalled his days in Rome, in particular an afternoon spent at the Colosseum watching gladiators fight animals. More specifically, some animals he called homunculi.

“They were very small,’’ he told Marcus, “but very quick and hard to kill.’’

Most commentators thought Lucius was referring to chimpanzees here. Most commentators dismissed as pure fantasy Lucius’s next comment, which translated as, “One had been taught to speak Latin, and I conversed with it. It told me its home was much warmer than Rome.’’

Rowland was not most commentators. He really did wonder about that line. Lucius was not given to flights of fancy. He was money-driven. He was the world’s most prosaic man. Rowland thought he really was remembering talking to a small creature, regarded by the Romans as an animal, which nonetheless was capable of speaking Latin. “I am told,” Lucius wrote, “that they lived in a bronze house.”

Rowland wondered. Lucius said the homunculi had been found in the great braided area of deltas and marshes where the Danube enters the Black Sea. Rowland put all his data about Lucius and the Colosseum and Roman ‘hunts’ and stories of mythical animals into his PC and he juggled them around and for years and years he wondered.

Archaeology never stands still. There’s always somebody digging something up somewhere. Fragments of letters, for instance, from an unidentified inhabitant of Lincoln to an unidentified inhabitant of Rome talking about money lent to Lucius Claudius Setibogius for a villa. A letter from one Caecilius, an apparently much sought-after mosaic artist, to his sister, bemoaning the fact that he had to travel all the way to Britain to work for someone called Luci Cl S (the rest of the name had faded away) and that his employer wanted to include much eye-witness detail in his work. Rowland looked at all this stuff, and he did wonder, oh yes he did.

And then, about six months ago, a farmer in the Cotswolds was given a metal detector for his birthday. He took it out into one of his fields, just to try it out, and it went berserk the moment he switched it on. He dug a hole in the field and came up with a dozen Roman coins, thirty assorted silver ornaments and a hundredweight of roof-tiles, and then he called the local archaeological society, who dug around a bit and called the nearest university, who dug around a bit and called Lew, who called Rowland. Who turned up on my doorstep.

And here we were, almost two thousand years after the death of Lucius Claudius Setibogius, standing in a muddy field in Gloucestershire, looking down from the edge of a huge hole at the mosaic floor of the largest Roman villa ever discovered in Britain.

Rowland’s first words were, I thought, marvellously restrained under the circumstances. He said, “Are you certain it’s him?”

“There’s no doubt,” Lew said smugly. “There are inscriptions praising him all over the site. His name’s everywhere.”

I couldn’t stop staring at the floor.

“You know,” Rowland said, looking around the site as if the idea had only just occurred to him, “do you think he might actually be buried around here somewhere?”

The floor was a wonder.

“There’s a cemetery just over there,” Lew said, pointing. “We’ve only just opened it up, but we’re turning up burials with extraordinary grave goods.”

I took a step forward.

“My god,” Rowland said quietly. Then he yelled, “What on Earth are you doing?”

I walked out across the floor, across the mosaic tiles in which Lucius had instructed Caecilius to record his life’s story. Caecilius was a genius; this was the best mosaic work I had ever seen. It must have cost Lucius a fortune to bring him out here from Rome. He had added representations of the gods and goddesses in various places, but really what I was standing on was a biography, a monument to the ego of one man. I walked with my head bent forward, looking at the pictures. Here was Lucius’s early life in what appeared to be a pretty standard British hovel circa the Second Century. Here he was driving a little herd of goats. Here he was selling the goats. Here he was buying some sheep. Here he was selling wool to somebody else…

I turned and looked at Rowland. “Caecilius was working from life,” I said. I pointed at the representations of Lucius beneath my feet. “This is what he looked like.”

Rowland had his mouth open ready to yell at me for walking on the floor. He closed his mouth with a little gulp and looked at all the figures.

I presumed that Caecilius was no fool; he’d idealised his patron, but even so Lucius looked disappointingly ordinary. He didn’t look like Flash Harry in a toga. He had a Roman haircut that had grown out a bit, and he had a mean little mouth and what looked like a bit of a beergut, but really he could have been anybody.

The winner always writes the history. Okay. So here was Lucius turning his little herd of sheep bit by bit into a mighty trading empire. He shook hands with clients. He didn’t cheat anyone or make shady deals. He married his wife, whose name we still didn’t know but Caecilius had given her a J-Lo arse and a penchant for playing stringed instruments. Later on there was a son, as cute as you could make a mosaic representation. I wandered back and forth across the floor, picking up details. Here he went to Rome. Here he visited the Colosseum. Here…

I stopped and looked at the figures beneath my feet.

“Rowland,” I said, “they’re red.”

Rowland’s most recent obsession was with a discovery made by archaeologists in Indonesia, of small primate skeletons which possibly represented a parallel branch of evolution. The media had dubbed them ‘Hobbits,’ but Rowland’s mind had gone back to the homunculi Lucius claimed to have seen in Rome. Could some of them, he wondered, have been captured in Indonesia and been passed westward, from owner to owner, until they arrived on the Black Sea coast, where they had been swept up by the Empire and brought to Rome, only to die in the arena? There were, apparently, local stories of the little primates surviving into historical times. It wasn’t impossible that they might have wound up in Rome. Vanishingly unlikely, but not impossible, and Rowland’s mind was deliriously at home in that tiny area labelled not impossible. Theories came and went about the nature of Homo floresiensis. Rowland ignored them all, snuggled himself up to not impossible, and came up with his own narrative.

Lucius was Rowland’s greatest prize, and fitting the villa and the information it contained into what he already knew would complete his life’s work. But he thought that once, nearly two millennia ago, Lucius had spoken with a cousin of the human race, and he thought that Lucius, with his enormous ego, would record it somehow at his home. He thought that it would prove not only that H. floresiensis had survived into the Second Century, but that it was capable of language and sophisticated thought. One of them had been taught Latin. Lucius had spoken with it. And then it had died in the Colosseum.

But.

We had all been taking that word homunculi a little bit too seriously. I looked down at the figures in the tiles. These were not H. floresiensis, or at least not H. floresiensis as they had been depicted by the people who do artists’ impressions for newspapers and television news organisations. They did not look like little hairy apes walking upright. They did not, in fact, look much like primates at all.

There were five of them, standing in line abreast, and behind them was a section of wall that looked as though it could have been part of the Colosseum. If the figures of gladiators standing a little over to the right, menacing them with swords and nets and tridents, were any guide, none of the homunculi was more than five feet tall. They were all bright red, as if they had been tandooried, and they were all wearing bits and pieces of clothing, some of it Roman, most of it not. One was wearing boots; another was wearing big padded-looking gloves.

I knelt down on the floor at the feet of the figures. I heard Rowland step down onto the mosaic and start walking towards me, and a moment later I heard Lew do the same. Lew was recovering quickly. “Yes, perhaps it was remiss of me not to mention them,” he was saying. “But surely they’re representations of household gods? Figures from myth? Deities Setibogius may have felt protected him?”

I tried to imagine Lucius dragging Caecilius all the way from Rome to do this. I thought of him standing over Caecilius, dictating every bit of the design like a mugging victim working with a police artist. I thought of Caecilius shaking his head as he tried to get the faces right, wondering what the hell his employer had been drinking.

They all had flat faces. Their eyes were narrow and tilted, their mouths parted in lipless slashes that exposed rows of needle-like teeth. They had the huge, flat noses of leaf-nosed bats, and enormous ears. They had horns. Great backward-curving horns.

On Rowland’s orders, Lew cleared the site and sent everybody home for the day. The three of us covered the floor with plastic sheeting and went and sat around a table in one of the portakabins, where nobody said a word for quite a while.

Finally, Lew said, “I assumed —”

“Shut up, Lewis,” said Rowland. Lewis reddened and looked out through the window. It had started to rain again. Rowland looked at me.

I raised my hands. “I’m only the chauffeur,” I said.

Rowland glared at me.

I sighed. “Lucius said he met them. He said he talked to one of them. He wrote that letter to Marcus, what, ten, fifteen years before he had this place built? If he was lying, he kept it going for a hell of a long time.”

“Why would he lie about something like that? What would he have to gain?”

“I don’t know.” I spread my hands. “The Romans weren’t like us.”

Rowland glared at me again.

“But they don’t appear anywhere else in the literature,” Lew protested.

“I told you to shut up, Lewis,” Rowland said again without bothering to take his eyes off me.

“I bet they do, though,” I said. “I bet somewhere, in some document nobody’s found yet, maybe something that’s been sitting in a drawer since the Eighteenth Century, there’s another description of them. There were only five of them; it’s not like they were some army that the Empire defeated, something that got celebrated in song and poetry and sculpture.” I sat back and thought of the five creatures. Maybe there had been more of them; maybe some had died when a Roman patrol out on the far fringe of the Empire had come across them and overwhelmed them. Maybe some more had died on the journey back to the capital. It must have been a hell of a trip; one of them, at least, had had time to learn Latin. I am told they lived in a bronze house.

Rowland blinked at me, and I knew he had just had the same thought, and my heart sank.

“Call me when you get there,” Rowland told me.

“This isn’t fair, Rowland,” I said. “I have a life of my own.”

He smiled and watched the crowds circulate around us in Terminal Two at Heathrow. “Imagine the story you’ll be able to sell, Jim,” he said.

“It’s no good appealing to my venal side,” I said, but it was pointless. I looked over at Lew, who was sitting miserably a few feet away with our cabin baggage piled around him. Lew was being sent with me as punishment for not telling Rowland about the red figures immediately. He didn’t look like a man who was in on the ground floor of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in history. But then, I supposed, neither did I.

“What are you going to be doing while we’re poking around in the Danube delta?” I asked Rowland.

“You’re right about the literature,” he said. “There has to be some corroboration somewhere. It might be in a pile of documents nobody’s ever read. It might be in a private collection. Someone’s got to look for it.”

“And it’s not as though you’d ever have to leave your armchair to do it, right?” I said sourly.

“And it never occurred to you to wonder what happened to the homunculi after they had been killed in the arena,” he noted.

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again.

“Somewhere in Rome,” Rowland said with a smug grin on his face, “there is a midden full of bones and little horned skulls. You mark my words.”

“Probably a hundred feet under an office building,” I said.

“Still there, all the same.” He looked at his watch. “I’m booked on the half past six flight to Rome. We’ll see.”

I checked my own watch. “We’d better go and check in.” I stood up and nudged Lew, and he half-heartedly began to gather our bags together. “You don’t think we’re being just a little bit too enthusiastic, do you?” I asked Rowland. “Lucius could have made it all up.”

Rowland shook his head. “He wasn’t the type. He couldn’t be bothered to be creative unless money or prestige were involved. What did he have to gain? Who was he going to impress with a story like that? He could show his guests the pictures on his floor. Who would care?”

“He wasn’t like us, Rowland,” I said, wanting to shake him. “We don’t know what he thought was important. Telling his friends that he’d met a bunch of aliens might have made him everybody’s favourite neighbour.”

Rowland sighed. We’d gone over and over this argument in the portakabin at Stafford Bishop, while the rain poured down and Lew sat sulkily in a corner. Lucius hadn’t known what the homunculi were, and he hadn’t cared, particularly. The little red men with the horns had been oddities, a good story to tell his mates, and once they were dead there hadn’t been any more of them and they’d just dropped straight out of history — unless Rowland was right and someone else had used them as their model for the classical image of the Devil. Maybe a skull had turned up in Rome decades later. A horned skull. That might have got people’s attention, particularly if the records of the homunculi had been lost. Somehow, over a series of increasingly fraught calls on my mobile — one of which had actually involved yelling — Rowland had managed to convince, cajole and variously blackmail a number of people into giving us quite a lot of money to fund our separate investigations. I didn’t want to know the details. I did know that a large sum of cash had suddenly appeared in my bank account, which was interesting.

“You really think Lucius sat in a holding cage in the Colosseum and had a conversation with the Devil?” I said. “And then the Devil and his friends went upstairs and were slaughtered for the entertainment of a few thousand Romans?”

“Is that any more outlandish than believing that they landed on the Black Sea coast in a bronze starship?”

“Oh, quite possibly,” I said.

“Not the Devil, Jim,” he reminded me. “Something which became the model for the representation of the Devil.” He shrugged. “Myself, I think they’ll still turn out to be a branch of Homo sapiens. A completely unknown branch of Homo sapiens. There’s a very strong chance that we’re about to make history.”

“I have a very strong urge to punch you,” I told him.

“And if you do turn out to be right, and there are starship remains in Romania, you and Lewis are going to be the most famous men on Earth.”

We looked at Lewis. Lewis, I felt, was not going to be very good company. “I still have a very strong urge to punch you.” I also had a very strong urge to punch Lewis.

Rowland glanced up the departure boards. “They’re calling my flight.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Have a nice time in Italy.”

He picked up his carry-on bag, which in typical Rowland fashion was almost the size of a normal person’s suitcase, but that didn’t matter because he’d be able to talk the cabin staff into letting him take it onto the plane.

“Stay in touch,” he told me as he started to walk towards his gate. “We have to coordinate things. If Romania turns out to be a dead end, you can join me in Rome.”

“All right,” I said. “Good luck.”

“You too,” he said.

I watched him walk away through the crowds of holidaymakers and business people in the terminal, a stout little pensioner moving with a great and terrible purpose, setting out to rewrite human history.

“And you never know,” he called over his shoulder. “It might really have been the Devil.”

v

Stories start with a lot of things — a word or a phrase or a line of dialogue or a place. This one started with the description of Rowland eating his fish and chips, I have no idea why. A lot of the time, the idea cooks for a while and doesn’t go anywhere, but this one had legs. Putting a story together, for me anyway, is just an exercise in answering questions. Jim and Rowland are in the restaurant for some reason. What is it? Jim’s driving Rowland somewhere. Why? Where? You answer questions like this, and other questions come up, and you answer them too, and at some point the story’s finished. I’m a ferociously idle writer; I find it very hard work, and this one was hard to get right. I’m still not sure I’ve managed it.