Walking side by side, carrying their bows and arrows and their other meagre possessions, they headed inland. They would rest for the night, before finding someone that could direct them to Mykenai.

They were lucky. There was a tavern right by the port, and it was full of life. A man stumbled past them as they came up the path that led to the front door, doubled over and was violently sick. Elissa held out the lip of her pack for Ruffler, who, used to it by now, jumped in.

The door of the tavern was ajar. Delicious wafts of roasting meats drifted to their nostrils. Inside was a lot of bustle and noise, the scraping of chairs and banging of tables. Silvius gently pushed the door fully open, and they entered as inconspicuously as they could, heads down, keeping to the wall.

There were about a dozen men inside, some sitting around low tables, others crouched on the floor playing dice. All were dark-haired and with the bronzed, toughened skin of sailors, and all had large wooden beakers to hand. A Molossian hound pricked up its ears and gazed right at them, but evidently lost interest, placing its massive head on its paws once more.

The friends slid round the edges of the room to where a thickset man was sweeping the floor. He barely glanced up at them, showing only an uninterested frown and some thick black eyebrows, until Silvius, gathering his courage, said, ‘Be well!’

The tavern keeper put his broom up and gazed at them with hard eyes. ‘Be glad,’ he answered, using the Achaean greeting that Elissa had heard sometimes at the port in Italia. His voice, however, did not suggest welcome.

‘A bed for the night?’ asked Silvius, haltingly.

‘From Italia, are you?’ said the man.

Silvius nodded. ‘We’ve come to visit our cousins.’ The tavern keeper stood watching them for a long time, during which Elissa prayed to the gods that Ruffler wouldn’t give himself away.

‘Our uncle’s a handsome man, like you!’ smiled Elissa.

The tavern keeper grunted. He smelled powerfully of rank sweat and ale. Then he turned and walked to a door. When they didn’t follow him, he sighed, and said theatrically, ‘A room. You can have it. Two bronze coins, on the nose now.’

They sent each other relieved smiles, Elissa slipping the money into the palm of her hand, and scuttled after him. He showed them down a dark, mud-floored corridor, into a small, stuffy room with a straw pallet on the floor, and then stood too long at the door.

Elissa gave him the bronze coins, which he pocketed without looking at them.

‘Well,’ she said, when he’d gone, ‘I don’t fancy asking anyone in there about the best way to Mykenai at the moment. Let’s wait till morning.’

Silvius glared at her. ‘We could be on our way by now.’