Lindsey Davis - Last Act In Palmyra

'All right, just tell me about Heliodorus.' My voice was rasping; I cleared my throat. 'I know he was obsessed with you.'

'Wrong.' She spoke very quietly. 'He was just obsessed with getting what he wanted.'

'Ah! Too pushy?'

'That's a man's way of putting it!' Now she sounded bitter, her voice rising.' "A bit too pushy" almost makes it sound as though it was my fault he went away disappointed.'

She was staring ahead, even though the road was easier to travel at this point. Away to our right a teenaged girl watched over a small flock of lean brown goats. In another direction vultures wheeled gracefully. We had started out early on purpose; now the heat was beginning to reflect off the stony track with dazzling force.

Byrria was not intending to help me. I pressed for more details: 'Heliodorus tried it on, and you rebuffed him?'

'Correct.'

'Then what?'

'What do you think?' Her voice remained dangerously level. 'He assumed that saying "No" meant "Yes, please -with force".'

'He raped you?'

She was a person who showed anger by very carefully keeping her temper. For a moment, while I reeled at this new angle, she also stayed silent. Then she attacked me contemptuously: 'I suppose you're going to tell me that there is always provocation, that women always want it, that rape never happens.'

'It happens.'

We were raging at one another. I suppose I knew why. Understanding it did not help.

'It happens,' I repeated. 'And I don't just mean men attacking women, be it strangers or acquaintances. I mean husbands misusing their wives. Fathers having "special secrets" with their children. Masters treating their slaves like so much bought meat. Guards torturing their prisoners. Soldiers bullying new recruits. High officials blackmailing – '

'Oh be quiet!' There was no mollifying her. Her green eyes flashed and she tossed her head so the ringlets danced, but there was nothing charming in the gesture. Undoubtedly enjoying the fact that she had misled me, she exclaimed, 'It did not happen to me, in fact. He had me on the ground, he had my wrists pinioned above my head and my skirts up, and the bruises he made forcing his knee between my thighs were still showing a month later, but somebody came looking for him and rescued me.'

'I'm glad.' I meant it, even though something in the way she had forced me to hear the details was subtly disturbing. 'Who was the useful friend?'

'Mind your own business.'

'Maybe it matters.' I wanted to force her to say it. Instinct told me I ought to identify her rescuer. She knew something I wanted to hear, and I could easily have become as much of a bully as Heliodorus.

'What matters to me,' Byrria flared angrily, 'is that I thought Heliodorus was going to rape me. Afterwards I was living with the knowledge that if he ever caught me on my own he was bound to try again – but all you need to know is that I never, ever went near him. I tried to know where he was always, because I made certain that I kept as far away from him as possible.'

'You can help me then,' I said, ignoring her hysterical edge. 'Did you know he was going up the mountain that last day at Petra? Did you see who went with him?'

'You mean, do I know who killed him?' The girl was effortlessly bright – and deliberately made me feel like an idiot. 'No. I just noticed the playwright was missing when the rest of us gathered at the theatre ready to leave.'

'All right.' Refusing to be put off, I tackled it another way. 'Who was there – and when did they arrive at the meeting point?'

'It won't help you,' Byrria assured me. 'When we noticed your girlfriend telling an official a body had been found, we had already missed Heliodorus and were complaining about him. Allowing time for you to have found the body and Helena to have come back down the hill – ' I hate witnesses who have done my thinking for me' – then he must have been dead before any of us gathered at the theatre. Actually I was one of the last to get there. I turned up at the same time as Tranio and Grumio, who were looking the worse for wear, as usual.'

'Why were you late?' I grinned cheekily, in the vain hope of reasserting myself. 'Saying a fond farewell to a manly paramour?'

Up ahead people were stopping so we could rest during the simmering heat of midday. Byrria reined in, then literally pushed me out of her cart.

I sauntered back to my own waggon.

'Falco!' Musa had his head-dress wrapped across his lower face in the Eastern manner; he looked lean, cool, and much wiser than I felt in my short Roman tunic, with my bare arms and legs burning and sweat rivuleting down my back beneath the hot cloth. Byrria must have worked her spell on him too; for once he seemed actively curious. 'Did you learn anything from the beautiful one?'

I burrowed in our lunch basket. 'Not much.'

'So how did you get on?' asked Helena innocently.

'The woman's incorrigible. I had to fend off her advances in case the donkey bolted.'

'That's the problem with being so witty and good-looking,' retorted Helena. Musa burst into a rare fit of giggling. Helena, having denounced me in her normal offhand manner, merely carried on with the more important work of cleaning dust from her right sandal.

Ignoring them both, I sat spitting out date stones like a man who had something extremely intriguing to think about.

Gerasa: otherwise known as 'Antioch on the Chrysorhoas'.

Antiochia itself had a reputation for soft living. My brother Festus, who could be relied on as a scandalmonger, had told me that as a legionary posting it was notorious for the routine debauchery of its happy garrison. Life there was continual festivity; the city resounded to minstrels playing harps and drums… I was hoping to visit Antiochia. But it lay a long way north, so for now I had to be content with its namesake. Chrysorhoan Antiochia had plenty to offer, though I personally was never offered much debauchery, with or without minstrels.

Gerasa had grown from a small walled town on a knoll into a larger suburban centre through which ran the River Chrysorhoas, the Golden River, a bit of a stream that, compared to the noble Tiber, could barely support three minnow-fishers and a few women slapping dirty shirts on stones. Pillaged by Jews in the Rebellion, and then plundered again by Romans because one of the main leaders of the Jewish Revolt was a Gerasene, the town had been fitted up recently with new city walls that sprouted a coronet of watchtowers Two of these defended the Watergate through which the Golden River rushed out via a sluice that directed its water under some pressure over a ten-foot waterfall. As we waited to enter the city we could see and hear the cascade to our right.

'This looks like a fine place for accidents!' I warned anyone who would listen. Only Musa took notice; he nodded, with his usual seriousness. He had the air of a fanatic who for the sake of Truth might volunteer to stand beside the sluice waiting for our murderer to tip him into the racing stream.

We were held up at the Southern Gate, waiting for customs clearance. Gerasa lay conveniently at the junction of two major trade routes. Its income from caravan tributes was such that twice it had smoothly survived being plundered. There must have been plenty of raiders to pillage, then afterwards, in the Pax Romana, there remained ample cash for restoration work. According to a site plan we later saw pegged up in the cleared area that was to become the main piazza, Gerasa was in the grip of a spectacular building programme that had started twenty years earlier and was projected to continue for several decades. Children were growing up here who had only ever seen a street that was half roped off by stonemasons. A bunch of shrines on the acropolis were being given cosmetic attention; waiting at the town gate we could hear hammers clanging frenziedly in the sanctuary of Zeus; suburban villas were being knocked out by smiling contractors like beans from a pod; and surveyors' poles impeded progress everywhere, marking out a new street grid and an ambitious elliptical forum.