Hooked around and saw a friendly-faced farmer on horseback. His copper-coloured hair and round face reminded me of my old friend Lucius Claudius, though Lucius would never have been seen in a tunic with so many patches. The man also had Lucius's red cheeks and nose and his unconcerned air, but these may have been attributable to the vanished contents of the deflated wineskin that hung from his shoulder. I hailed him and drew up alongside him.

'Citizen, what do you make of all this?' I said.

'Of what?’

"The crowd. The wagons alongside the road.'

He shrugged and burped. "They have to sleep somewhere. I went all the way back home to Veii myself, and now I'm back. There wasn't room for me and the rest of my family at my cousin's house in Rome. I could hardly camp by the road like these others, not by myself.'

‘I don't understand. People are leaving Rome and then coming back?'

He looked at me a bit suspiciously. 'What, you mean you're just now arriving? But you are a citizen.' He looked to the iron ring on my finger for confirmation.

'Does this have something to do with the consular election?'

'What, you don't know? You haven't heard?' He gave me that look of smug satisfaction that citizens who vote reserve for those who do not. "The election was cancelled!'

'Cancelled?'

He nodded gravely. 'By the mighty-mouthed Cicero himself. He got the Senate together and talked them into calling it off Filthy Optimates!'

'But why? What was the reason?'

"The reason, or more properly the pretext, was that Catilina is hatching some terrible plot to kill off the Senate, as if most of them didn't deserve to have their throats cut, and so it's not safe to hold an election. It all happened days ago — what, do you live in a cave? Messengers were sent out all over Italy telling people not to come to Rome, because the election was postponed. Well, a lot of people didn't believe it — thought it was just a trick to keep us away from the polls. Sounds just like the sort of thing the Optimates would pull, doesn't it? So we showed up anyway. Seeing such a crowd, the senators were ready to go ahead and hold the voting. But the day before, thunderbolts were seen on the horizon, out of a clear blue sky, and that night there was a small earthquake. The next morning the auspices were read and the augurs declared all the omens to be terrible. The voting stalls were all shut down. The election? Indefinitely postponed, they kept telling us. What in Hades does that mean? Then the rumours started flying thick and fast, saying the election will be in two days, or three, or ten. You see people leaving Rome and coming back and passing themselves going both ways. The last I heard is that the election will probably be the day after tomorrow.' 'What!'

'Yes, the same day as the election for praetors. That's why I'm heading back today. I figure that instead of two days from now, they'll try to have it tomorrow, you see, so they can fool me into showing up a day late! But I won't be fooled by those dirty Optimates. I’ll be at the Field of Mars outside the voting stalls bright and early tomorrow morning, ready to be counted with the rest of my tribe, and if need be, I'll be there again the next day and the next. For Catilina!' he abruptly shouted, raising his fist.

Around us, among the small circle who could hear the man's voice above the din, a number of fists went up in the air and I heard the name 'Catilina!' shouted again and again, until several voices took it up as a sort of chant.

The man smiled at the demonstration of support he had set oft) then turned back to me. 'Of course, not everybody can stay in Rome indefinitely,' he said, his smile fading. "That's why you see all these people going in the opposite direction. Common citizens have to get back to their farms, don't they? They have to worry about making a living and looking after their families. Not like Optimates, who can travel about at whim and never miss an election.' He looked me up and down suspiciously. 'I don't suppose you're one of the "Best People"?’

'I don't have to justify myself to you, citizen,' I snapped, and then realized I was not angry at the man, but at what he had told me. So it now appeared that the one thing I had most scrupulously avoided would take place, and I would be in Rome for the consular election! The gods were having a joke at my expense, I thought. No wonder we had suffered no mishaps on the journey — the gods insisted I get to Rome so that I could suffer through the election! I started to laugh. I stopped myself) then realized that it felt good to laugh, and so I let the laughter out. The stranger started to laugh, too, interrupted by a loud burp.

He raised his fist again. 'To Catilina!'

My laughter stopped. 'To the day when this madness is finally over,' I said under my breath.

'What's that?' the man said, leaning towards me. I merely shook my head, slowed my horse, and waved as he moved on ahead of me.

We made slow but steady progress into the city. Great clouds of smoke and dust rose from the Field of Mars, where thousands of voters from outside Rome had pitched their camps; on a normal day one would have seen chariot racers practising or soldiers staging mock battles. The Villa Publica, the open space where voters gathered, and the adjoining voting stalls, built like a maze of sheep runs, were closed off and empty. Traffic slowed again at the Flaminian Gate, but once through its portals we were at last within the old walls of the city, in Rome itself

The sun was lowering in the west, casting a red haze over the rooftops, but Rome was still very much awake, especially on the bustling Subura Way. The notorious street took us into the beating heart of the city, not to the place where its temples and palaces are proudly gathered, but into the district of butcher shops and brothels and gambling dens. The smells of the city assaulted my nostrils — horse dung and furnace smoke, raw fish and perfume, a whiff of urine from a public privy mingling with the aroma of freshly baked bread. In a single block I saw more faces than I had seen all year in the countryside. I saw bodies that were old, fat, young, supple, clothed in costly tunics and gowns, or in rags, or almost naked. Women leaned out of the upper-storey windows of cheap tenements and gossiped with one another across the street. little boys played trigon in an open square, standing in a triangle and tossing their leather ball back and forth. An Ethiop in a red gown, her skin the colour of lustrous ebony, gathered water at ' the public fountain.

The fountain caught my eye. It was the chief ornament of the neighbourhood it served, with a trough below for horses and a spout above for people. The spout was made of marble, carved in the likeness of a kneeling dryad pouring water from an urn. The fountain had been there since I was a boy. More times than I could possibly count I had put my lips below the spout to get a cool drink of water, had filled my wineskin from it, had watered my horses from the trough.

Nothing on earth could be more mundane, yet the fountain, and not just the fountain but everything around me, seemed at once familiar and strange. I had left Rome for good, I thought, and now I was back, and there was no denying that no matter how far afield I strayed or how long I stayed away, it would always be home.

I looked back at the cart. Diana was exhausted. She lay curled up against her mother, fast asleep despite the bumpy ride. Bethesda held one of her small hands and stroked her hair. She felt my gaze, looked up and smiled back at me. I knew in that moment that we shared the same sensation of homecoming, but she was less afraid to feel it, and less afraid to show it. The city was our city, no matter how much I might deny it or how deeply I might bury myself in the countryside. I breathed in deeply and smelled the Subura; I opened my eyes wide and tried to see everything before me at once. I turned and saw that Meto was looking at me oddly, the way I must so often look at him when I see him staring at the world around him in wide-eyed amazement. There is no place in the world like Rome.