The bandit holding Silvius looked at his leader in confusion. Silvius took advantage of his momentary lapse in attention and slipped from his grasp, jumping to the casket and landing on it, covering it with his body. He felt relief, as if he had slaked his thirst after a long journey.

‘Just kill him!’ shouted the leader.

‘I wouldn’t do that.’ The stoniness in the traveller’s voice was stronger.

The bandit sneered. ‘You going to stop me?’

‘Oh, not me. I wouldn’t do that. No.’ The traveller put his staff down, carefully, and reached into the bag around his neck. ‘She will.’

He pulled something out of it. It was a woman’s severed head, stuck in a terrifying grimace, with a rim of dead snakes, lolling and drooping. A bandage was covering the eyes.

The traveller pointed the head at the bandit leader.

‘You foolish boy.’ He smirked, showing broken yellow teeth. But the traveller whipped the bandage off, and the smirk rapidly became a circle of pain and terror. What was happening? Silvius scrambled to where Elissa was standing.

‘What is that?’

‘I don’t know …’

The leader looked down aghast. He tried to run, but his feet had become blocks of stone. He began to scream, far more terribly than he had done before, as if a whole slaughterhouse of pigs were being killed at once.

‘Could it be the Gorgon’s head?’ Silvius whispered. They should flee now. But if they did, he might turn it on them.

The transformation did not last long, and when the bandit’s whole body had become a rock, the traveller carefully bandaged up the severed head’s eyes, and placed it back into his sack.

The other bandits had already fled. Silvius, on edge, backed away, beckoning to Elissa.

‘Don’t fear me,’ said the stranger. ‘I would not harm those who don’t deserve it.’ He tied the ends of the rope around the sack in a tight knot, and then placed it back around his neck. ‘It is the head of the Last Gorgon. I won it. She was locked into her own gaze, and I tore the shield from her grasp.’

Silvius trod warily to pick up their belongings from where they had been dropped. Elissa paused by the stone man, a look of compassion etched into her face.

The traveller watched them, not smiling, and studiedly picked up his staff and his baggage once more.

They faced each other in a triangle, the sun not quite at the midpoint of the sky, the strong breeze rushing through their hair, the stone that had only moments before been a person right next to them. He had helped them, this long-haired Achaean. It was Silvius’s duty to acknowledge that.

‘I give you thanks, stranger,’ said Silvius. ‘I am Silvius, son of Aeneas.’

‘And I am Elissa, daughter of Anna Perenna,’ Elissa spoke in an undertone.