Lindsey Davis - Last Act In Palmyra

'Are there good pickings?' I prompted in a not very quiet mutter.

'Thanks, Falco! Yes, I think Syria still holds out a welcome for a reputable theatre group like ours. We still have a large repertoire which we have not properly explored – '

'Falco's ghost play!' suggested a satirist. I had not been aware that my idea for writing a play of my own was so widely known about.

'Jupiter forfend!' cried Chremes as raucous merriment erupted and I grinned gamely. My ghost play would be better than these bastards knew, but I was a professional writer now; I had learned to keep my smouldering genius quiet. 'So where shall we take ourselves? The choices are various.'

His options had turned into choices, but the dilemma remained.

'Do we want to complete the Decapolis towns? Or shall we travel north more quickly and tackle the sophisticated cities there? We won't want to go into the desert, but beyond Damascus there is a good route in a fairly civilised area, through Emesa, Epiphania, Beroia, and across to Antiochia. On the way we can certainly cover Damascus.'

'Any drawbacks?' I queried.

'Long distances, mainly.^'

'Longer than going to Canatha?' I pressed.

'Very much so. Canatha would mean a detour back through Bostra -'

'Though there would be a good road up to Damascus afterwards?' I had already been looking at itineraries myself. I never rely on anyone else to research a route.

'Er, yes.' Chremes was feeling hard-pressed, a position he hated. 'Do you particularly want us to go to Canatha, Falco?'

'Taking the company or not is up to you. Myself, I've no option. I'd be happy to stay with you as your playwright but I have my own business in the Decapolis, a commission I want to clear up – '

I was trying to give the impression my private search for Sophrona was taking precedence over finding the murderer. I wanted the villain to think I was losing interest. I hoped to make him relax.

'I dare say we can accommodate your wish to visit Canatha,' Chremes offered graciously. 'A city which is off the beaten track may be ripe for some of our high-class performances -'

'Oh, I reckon they are starved of culture!' I encouraged, not specifying whether I thought 'culture' would be a product handed out by us.

'We'll go where Falco says,' called one of the stagehands. 'He's our lucky talisman.' Some of the others gave me nods and winks that proclaimed in a far from subtle manner that they wanted to keep me close enough to protect them. Not that I had done much on their behalf so far.

'Show of hands then,' answered Chremes, as usual letting anybody other than himself decide. He loved the fine idea of democracy, like most men who couldn't organise an orgy with twenty bored gladiators in a women's bathhouse on a hot Tuesday night.

As the stagehands shuffled and glanced around them it seemed to me the killer must have detected the widespread conspiracy building up against him. But if he did, he uttered no protest. A further quick scan of our male suspects revealed nobody visibly cursing. No one seemed resentful that the chance to shed me, or to break up the troupe altogether, had just been deferred.

So to Canatha it was. The group would be staying together for two more Decapolis cities, Canatha, then Damascus. However, after Damascus – a major administrative centre, with plenty of other work on offer – group members might start drifting off.

Which meant that if I was to expose the killer, time was now running out.

The temperature was definitely bothering all of us now. Travel by day, previously inadvisable, had become quite impossible. Travel in the dark was twice as tiring since we had to go more slowly while drivers constantly peered at the road, needing to concentrate. Our animals were restless. Fear of ambush was increasing as we re-entered Nabataea and ahead of us lay expanses of desert where the nomads were by our standards lawless and their livelihood openly depended on a centuries-old tradition of robbing passers-by. Only the fact that we were obviously not a caravan of rich merchants gave us any protection; it seemed to suffice, but we could never be off guard.

All the time the heat grew daily. It was relentless and inescapable – until night fell abruptly, bringing fierce cold as the warmth lifted like a curtain under open skies. Then, lit by a few flares, we had to set off on the road again, on journeys that seemed far longer, more uncomfortable and more tiresome than they would have been in daylight.

The climate was draining and dehydrating. We saw little of the country, and met hardly anyone to talk to; Musa told us the local tribes all migrated towards the mountains in summer. At roadside stops, our people stood about stamping their feet to get the blood running, miserably taking refreshments and talking in hushed voices. Millions of stars watched us, probably all wondering just what we were doing there. Then, by day, we collapsed in our tents, through which the baking heat soon breathed with suffocating strength, killing the sleep we needed so desperately. So we tossed and turned, groaned and quarrelled with each other, threatening to turn around, head for the coast and go home.

On the road it was difficult for me to continue reinterviewing people. The conditions were so unpleasant everyone stuck with their own camels or waggons. The strongest and those with the best eyesight were always needed for driving. The quarrelsome were always bickering with their friends too angrily to listen to me. None of the women were interested in handing out personal favours, so none of them developed the kind of jealousies that normally bring them running to confide in a handy informer. None of the men wanted to stop threatening to divorce their wives long enough to answer rational questions, especially if they thought the questions might be about the generous Ione. Nobody wanted to share food or precious water, so hitching a lift on another waggon was discouraged. At stops on the road everyone was too busy feeding themselves and their animals or swatting flies.

I did manage one useful conversation, just as we were heading into Bostra. Philocrates lost the pin from one wheel of his waggon. Nothing was broken, luckily; it had just loosened and dropped out. Davos, in the cart behind, saw it happen and shouted a warning before the whole wheel fell off. Davos seemed to spend his life averting disasters. A cynic might have suspected it was some kind of bluff, but I was in no mood for that kind of subtlety.

Philocrates managed to halt his smart equipage gently. He made no attempt to ask for help; he must have known how unpopular this would be after all the times he had refused assistance to the rest of us. Without a word, he jumped down, inspected the problem, cursed, and started to unload the cart. -Nobody else was prepared to help him out, so I volunteered. The rest drew up on the road ahead, and waited while I helped with the repair.

Philocrates had a light, zippy two-wheeler – a real fast chaser's vehicle – with flashy spokes and metal felloes welded on to the rims. But whoever sold him this hot property had passed on a salvage job: one wheel did have a decent hub that was probably original, but the other had been cobbled together with a museum-piece arrangement of a linchpin on the axle.

'Somebody saw you coming!' I commented. He made no reply.

I had expected Philocrates to be useless, but it turned out he could be a pretty handy technician if his alternative was to be abandoned on a lonely road in Nabataea. He was small but muscular, and certainly well exercised. We had to unhitch his mule, which had sensed trouble, then we improvised blocks to support the weight of the cart. Philocrates had to use some of his valuable water supply to cool down the axle-bush. Normally I would have peed on it, but not with a jeering audience.