All around him were the sounds of building work. He wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, but found himself in front of the blacksmith’s. The door was ajar, and he stood watching intently from the threshold.

Even though it was day, inside it was dark. Light came from the forge, and from torches on the walls. The blacksmith was making a sword. His boy was at the bellows, pumping the flames white hot. Blaeso was a thin man, with cropped black hair, bristles showing on his pointed chin; and when he grasped the molten bronze in its container with his tongs, his strong arm muscles showed. Blaeso hissed approvingly through his teeth.

It was hot inside the smithy, and Silvius, though half outside, still had to wipe the sweat off his brow. The movement caused the blacksmith to look up.

‘You again?’ he said, not unkindly, pouring the molten bronze into its stone mould. ‘You’d better get off home. Aeneas will be wanting you, surely?’

‘I just wanted to see my sword being made,’ said Silvius. The cuts on his back still burned. ‘I will need it in Achaea.’ He said it with a note of importance, hoping the blacksmith would pick up on it. But Blaeso simply continued his work.

‘You’ll see it when it’s ready,’ the blacksmith grinned. ‘Now, off.’ He made a shooing gesture with his big, blackened hands, and Silvius shuffled back into the street.

He spent the rest of the morning just wandering about the streets, knowing that he wasn’t meant to, that he should be engaged in something useful. And people did give him curious glances as he went by. But somehow he felt that he was allowed these few moments of peace. He would know what was required of him soon enough.

As the sun began to slide down from its zenith, Silvius returned home and into the cool first courtyard with its fig trees and their juicy fruits. The centaur was standing solemnly by himself in its shade, the Arrowhead in its casket around his neck on the golden chain.

Silvius thought, with a shudder, of the strange, dark coils of Python he’d seen when he’d touched it. The huge form of the beast, seeming to take up the space of an entire plain, almost as high as a mountain, with eyes red and pitiless. And the voice that insinuated its way into his mind.

He didn’t want to experience that again. The light of Apollo had come as a relief, like rain after a drought. He longed for more.

Aeneas was there already. Iulus, conspicuously, was not, but one of his companions, a dark-eyed, slim young man, watched silently. Elissa was in the far corner, playing dice with Brutus. She brightened when Silvius entered, and hurried towards him.

‘I saw the centaur eating this morning – he swallowed down two whole sacks of oats!’