Marcus could walk, of course—what honor lay in honesty with a traitor? He kept easily to the villa's shadows. The landscape beyond the windows displayed a town sprawled in every direction. Perhaps without his armor he could melt into the crowd and disappear on his way back to the coast. He was nearly out the front door when it swung open and a number of finely-dressed men and women startled at the sight of him. He reached for a nonexistent sword.

"General Trogia," they said smiling, bowing, and opening a path.

He straightened, hoping he masked his confusion as he strolled them and outside with no resistance.

The courtyard was layered with colorful gardens boasting hundreds of specimens of countless varieties of flowers. Every twist was filled with either caretakers or men and women dressed in their grandest finery including togas, Marcus saw right away. Several togas were trimmed in the broad gold border so popular among senators—a style born after the Icelandia expedition disappeared.

Numerous eyes turned cheerful and curious and—it seemed, though Marcus could scarcely believe it—awestruck on sight of him. Several garden guests bowed. One old man, erect as a soldier, put his fist to his heart.

The guards at the front gate did likewise. They wore the chain mail so prevalent among the Northmen, but their plumed helmets marked them unmistakably as Roman soldiers.

The town was planted at the villa's feet. From the narrow stone- paved via prima the boulevard overflowed with timber and stone shops, smells of fish and bread and horses and the wet forest, vendors shouting in Latin and occasionally Greek, overhanging awnings and wheeled carts, pipes carrying water from a makeshift aqueduct attached to the far end of the town, glittering oil lamps that didn't sputter . . . even that same slow pumping noise from Quintillius' villa.

People stepped aside for him, bowing, smiling, or staring with eyes wide and mouths hanging. Northmen moved about freely— Marcus continually reminded himself he was unarmed—and they glared or grinned at him, but otherwise left him alone. Here and there were also copper-skinned Skraelings slightly dressed in deerskin.

Very well, Marcus abruptly decided to test his freedom of movement. If they seem so willing to defer to me, perhaps they will also answer my questions.

Many did—to an extent. The town's name was Concordia and it spread loosely over one hundred acres. Suburbs radiated out in all directions, plus numerous home- and farmsteads all the way to the mountains some two-hundred miles west—though Marcus hardly credited reports of loners so distant. The burned site on the coast was the original Castra Concordia, though inquiries about its fate met with extremely polite refusals.

Gaius Julius Quintillius was indeed Emperor, though in recent years had begged off most of his powers to the Senate. So this place not only had its own emperor, but another Senate as well!

A bookseller's shop spilled over into most of an intersection. Like the other shops Marcus visited, there was a draft inside even though the muggy summer was windless, and he heard the odd pumping noise within.

Herodotus was a prominent volume alongside other classic historians: Thucydides, Polybius, Ammianus, Procopius, Turturis Columbus. There were also healthy shelves of science boasting multiple copies of Archimedes, Euclid and others he knew only by reputation, little interested in science beyond siege engineering. He pulled down a copy of Archimedes' The Sand Reckoner and flipped open a random page.

The handwriting was extraordinary. Absolutely perfect. Every letter was the flawless mirror image of its twins. Marcus had read much if not widely and caught himself awestruck at the precision.

Marcus opened the book to the shopkeeper in genuine admiration. "I must know, what scribe did this book? It's magnificent!"

"That would be Athenodorus, corner of Baker Street and Via Patomac," the bookseller pointed. His accent was Tuscan Latin. "Best printer in town."

"Printer—?" Then something snared Marcus' attention: the man's collar had a certain twisting flair of the same variety so much the rage in Rome these past two years.

Ambrosian spies in the Empire, Marcus realized. The new fashions, how Quintillius knew about my dreadful sieges . . . And how they knew I was coming.

"General Trogia?"

A woman's voice—a Skraeling, Marcus realized when he saw her copper skin, long straight black hair, and supple deerskin dress that stretched to her knees like a Scandian tunic. Shells and brightly-colored beads hung from her neck. She stood in a dark corner of the shop as if wanting only him to see her. She told him in Latin, "I wish you to see something."

He stepped toward her curiously, wondering how she knew him. But every step dropped away a little more of the strange sluggish exhaustion permeating him. By her side he was filled with so much energy he thought it would blast him apart.

"I am Three Rivers of the Tatanka Lakota, and I have walked for six years to find you," she said. "Walk with me."

He followed her out the rear gate, past drained marshes being farmed and rivers fished jointly by Romans and Skraelings, to a hillside where the trees dropped away into a windswept open field and blue mountains appeared in the distance.

"What do you see?" she asked him.

"Mountains," he said simply. And you he wanted to add, feeling lightheaded. "But those . . . I was told the mountains were two hundred miles away."

"The Apalachee. The Romans call them the Caerulean Mountains. My home lies beyond them. Can you see the plains beyond?"

Of course he saw nothing—how could he? But from her the question seemed reasonable, and tinged with grief.

"No . . . no, I can't see the plains."

She closed her eyes and her chin dropped. "I can't either. As I knew I would not." Her eyes opened and she faced him squarely, boring through his soul. "Then that is the way it must be."

Marcus tried shaking a haze out of his mind. You've drugged me, he concluded. Why else would I see what isn't real?

Three Rivers answered as if he'd spoken aloud. "There are some who do not realize they are tired until they stop to rest. Your exhaustion comes from spending years walking on too many wrong paths. This is why you see what is not real. The mountains are real—so many other things you have seen before coming here are not. Terra Ambrosia is a place of rest, to stop and see what path you will take next."

"General Trogia?"

A harsher voice. A centurion with twelve soldiers waiting behind him. Marcus was back in the bookshop, Three Rivers vanished. He thought to bolt, but where? He needed to learn the terrain if he hoped to escape, and defenses should he ever return—

He calmly set down the perfect copy of Archimedes. "I am General Trogia. What would you have of me?"

"I carry a message from the Emperor Gaius Quintillius."

Curious—didn't they designate Quintillius as Caesar here?

The centurion continued, "The emperor has charged me to inform the general that there will be a dinner of state at the nineteenth hour in the imperial villa, and he formally requests your presence."

"As the Emperor's honored guest?" Marcus sneered. He was being manipulated, he knew, as he had been since the Northmen first captured him. Very well. If they had eyes in Rome, then he would be Rome's eyes in Ambrosia.

"Tell Quintillius that I will attend," Marcus said down his nose.

The centurion saluted fist to heart, then he and his men pivoted in unison and continued marching down the street.