Under Honorius’s pressure, the Scythian eventually agreed to come to Rome. Papak came along too, as a more or less necessary interpreter — and, to Athalaric’s further dismay, so did two of the porters they had used in the desert.

Athalaric confronted Papak during the sea crossing back to Italy. “You are milking the old man’s purse. I know your kind, Persian.”

Papak was unperturbed. “But we are alike. I take his money, you empty his mind. What’s the difference? The young have always fed off the wealth of the old, one way or another. Isn’t it so?”

“I have pledged that I will bring him home safely. And that I will do, regardless of your ambitions.”

Papak laughed smoothly. “I mean Honorius no harm.” He indicated the impassive Scythian. “I have given him what he wants, haven’t I?” But the Scythian’s demeanor, as he coldly watched this exchange, made it clear to Athalaric that he was not to be regarded as anybody’s property, however temporarily.

Still, even Athalaric’s curiosity was pricked when this desert-dwelling nomad was brought to the greatest city in the world.

On the outskirts of Rome, they spent a night in a villa rented by Honorius.

Set on a slight rise on the edge of the city proper, this was a typical imperial-period home, its design drawn from Greek and Etruscan influences. The house was built on a series of bedrooms grouped around three sides of an open atrium. At the back were a dining room, offices, and utility rooms. Two street-facing rooms had been given over to shops. Honorius told him this had not been uncommon in the days of the empire; he reminded Athalaric of the shop his own family had once run.

But, like the city it overlooked, the villa had seen better days. The little shops were boarded up. The impluvium, the pool at the center of the atrium, had been crudely dug out, apparently to get at the lead piping that had once collected rainwater.

Honorius shrugged at this decay. “The place lost a lot of its value when the sackings came — too hard to defend, you see, so far out of the city. That is how I was able to rent it so cheaply.”

That night, amid this battered grandeur, they ate a meal together. Even the mosaic on the floor of the dining room was badly damaged; it appeared that thieves had taken any pieces that showed traces of gold leaf.

The food itself was a signature of the great pan-Eurasian mixing that had followed the expansion of the farming communities. The staples were wheat and rice from the original Anatolian agricultural package, but supplemented by quince originally from the Caucasus, millet from Central Asia, cucumber, sesame, and citrus fruit from India, and apricots and peaches from China. This transcontinental diet was an everyday miracle, unremarked on by those who ate it.

The next day they took the Scythian into the old city itself.

They walked to the Palatine, the Capitol, the Forum. The Scythian gazed around him with his horizon-sharp eyes, assessing, somehow measuring. He wore his desert garb of black clothing with scarlet wrap around his head; it must have been uncomfortable in Rome’s humid air, but he showed no signs of discomfort.

Athalaric murmured to Papak, “He doesn’t seem very impressed.”

Now the Scythian snapped out something in his terse, ancient language, and Papak translated automatically. “He says he understands now why the Romans had to take slaves and gold and food from his land.”

Honorius seemed obscurely pleased. “A savage he may be, but he is no fool — and he is not intimidated, not even by mighty Rome. Good for him.”

Away from the monumental areas, central Rome was a clotted network of streets and alleys, narrow and gloomy, the product of more than a thousand years’ uncontrolled building. Many of the residences here were five or six stories tall. Raised by unscrupulous landlords determined to get as much income as possible out of every scrap of precious land, they towered unsteadily. Walking through sewage-littered, unpaved streets, with buildings crowded so closely they almost touched above their heads, it seemed to Athalaric that he was passing through an immense network of sewers, like one of the famous cloacae that ran beneath Rome to the Tiber.

The crowds in the streets wore masks over their mouths and noses, gauze soaked in oil or spices. There had been a recent outbreak of smallpox. Disease was a constant threat: People still talked of the mighty Plague of Antoninus of three centuries earlier. In the millennia since the death of Juna, medical advances had barely slowed the march of the mighty diseases. Immense trade routes had united the populations of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia into a single vast resource pool for microbes, and the increased crowding of people into cities with little or no sanitation had exacerbated the problem. Throughout Rome’s imperial period it had been necessary to encourage a constant immigration of healthy peasants into the cities to replace those who died, and in fact urban populations would not become self-sustaining until the twentieth century.

This swarming place was a pathological outcome of the farming revolution, a place where people were crowded like ants, not primates.

It was almost a relief when they reached an area that had been burned out during one of the barbarian sackings. Though the destruction was decades past, this scorched, shattered area had never been rebuilt. But at least here among the rubble Athalaric could see the sky, unimpeded by filth-strewn balconies.

Honorius said to the Persian, “Ask him what he thinks now.”

The Scythian turned and surveyed the rows of heaped-up residential buildings. He murmured, and Papak translated. “How strange that you people choose to live in cliffs, like gulls.” Athalaric had heard the contempt in the Scythian’s voice.

When they returned to their villa Athalaric found that the purse he carried around his waist had been neatly slit open and emptied. He was angry, with himself as much as the thief — how was he supposed to be looking after Honorius if he couldn’t even watch over his own purse? — but he knew he should be grateful that the invisible bandit had not slit open his belly in the process and robbed him of his life as well.

The next day Honorius said he would take the party out into the country, to what he called the Museum of Augustus. So they piled into carts and went clattering over metaled but overgrown roads, out through the farms that crowded around the city.

They came to what must once have been an exclusive, expensive small town. An adobe wall contained a handful of villas and a cluster of meaner dwellings that had housed slaves. The place was obviously abandoned. The outer wall had been broken down, the buildings burned out and looted.

Honorius, with a scrawled map in his hand, led them into the complex, muttering, turning the map this way and that.

A thick layer of vegetation had broken through the mosaics and floor tiles, and ivy clung to fire-cracked walls. There must have been agony here, Athalaric thought, when the strength of the thousand-year empire had failed at last and its protection was lost. But the presence of the new vegetation in the midst of decay was oddly reassuring. It was even comforting to imagine that after another few centuries, as the green returned, nothing would be left of this place but a few hummocks in the ground, and oddly shaped stones that might break an unwary farmer’s plow.

Honorius brought them to a small building at the center of the complex. It might once have been a temple, but it was as burned out and ruined as the rest. The porters had to haul aside a tangle of vines and ivy. Honorius rummaged over the ground. At last, with a cry of triumph, he retrieved a bone, a great scapula the size of a dinner plate. “I knew it! The barbarians took the petty gold, the shiny silver, but they knew nothing of the true treasures here.”