He stretched, then turned and lay on his back. His shoulders and hips ached from the hard compacted sand. Last night he had scooped out hollows for each, but it was no substitute for a mattress or a soft bed. The serpents had been on his mind – he had a particular loathing of snakes – and he had placed his bedroll well up the beach from the fire. Now, lying there, gradually surfacing from slumber, fragments of dreams slipped from his grasp like smoke.

In Hades, Odysseus had reached to embrace his father. The insubstantial shade of the old man had slid through his arms. Valens knew that he had dreamt of his parents, but the memory moved tantalisingly and irrecoverably out of reach.

He threw off his blanket and sat up. One at a time he turned his boots upside down, and beat them on the ground to dislodge any scorpions that might have crept in for shelter during the night. His boots on, he clambered stiffly to his feet.

Walking a little away from the camp, he fumbled with his trousers, then relieved himself. Idly he directed the stream of urine into a hole under a bush. Then he remembered the snakes, and pissed elsewhere.

Walking back, he retrieved his sword belt and buckled it tight. Everyone except Clemens, with whom he had shared the watch, was already up, and the endlessly repeated routine of the morning was under way.

‘Where is the boy?’ Valens asked.

‘Gone,’ Iudex said.

‘Gone?’

‘He left before first light.’

Valens felt a rising dread hollowing out his stomach and chest. ‘Have you harmed him, without my orders?’

Aulus stopped grooming his horse. ‘Far from it.’ There was a sardonic smile on his ugly, drooping old face. ‘We had a talk to him, while you were asleep, and we gave him one of the spare horses.’

‘What is going on?’ Valens had thought that the journey had made things better between him and the men. But this ignoring of his authority was as bad as ever.

‘Of course we would have killed him,’ Iudex said. ‘In our line of work a certain heartlessness is often necessary. You have not been with us long enough yet to become acclimatised to the required brutality. But in this case it was the wrong option.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘We advised him to leave before you woke.’ The cherubic features of Iudex, so oddly set in his huge bald head, beamed amiably. ‘You are a man of great cruelty. We told him that you intended to do away with him in the morning, and throw his body in the sea for the fishes. After that he needed no further persuasion to return.’

‘But I had no such intention!’

‘Otherwise he would not have gone back,’ Iudex said.