Honorius leaned forward. “So in the east we now know that there once lived a race of men of human form but of small brain. Animal men.” His voice was trembling. “And what if I were to tell you that in the furthest west, at the edge of the world, there was once another race of pre-men — men with bodies like bears and brows like centurions’ helmets?”

Athalaric was stunned; Honorius had told him nothing of this.

The Scythian began to talk. His smooth vowels and subdued consonants sounded like a song, barely perturbed by Papak’s clumsy translations, a song from the desert that soared up into the humid Italian night.

“He says there were once many kinds of people. They are all gone now, these people, but in the deserts and the mountains they linger on in stories and songs. We have forgotten, he says. Once the world was full of different men, different animals. We have forgotten.”

“Yes!” Honorius cried, and he suddenly stood up, flushed. “Yes, yes! We have forgotten almost everything, save only distorted traces preserved in myth. It is a tragedy, an agony of loneliness. Why, you and I, sir Scythian, have almost forgotten how to talk to each other. And yet you understand, as I do, that we float, like sailors on a raft, over a great sea of undiscovered time. Come with me — I must show you the bones I have found — oh, come with me!”

Athalaric and Honorius came from Burdigala, a city of the thirty-year-old Gothic kingdom that now spanned much of what had once been the Roman provinces of Gaul and Spain. To get home, they were forced to travel back through the patchwork of territories which had emerged as Roman dominion had broken down across western Europe.

The relationship between Rome and the clamoring German tribes of the north had long been problematic, as the Germans pressed down hard on the old empire’s long, vulnerable northern border. For centuries some Germans had been used as mercenaries by the empire, and at last whole tribes had been allowed to settle inside the empire on the understanding that they fought as allies against common enemies beyond the border. So the empire had become a kind of shell, inhabited and controlled not by Romans but by the more vigorous Germans, Goths, and Vandals.

As the pressure on the border increased — an indirect result of the mighty expansion of the Huns out of Asia — the last elements of Roman control had melted away. The governors and their staff had disappeared, and the last Roman soldiers left clinging to their posts, ill-paid, badly equipped, and demoralized, had failed to prevent the breakdown of order.

Thus the western empire had fallen, almost unremarked. New nations emerged amid the political rubble, and slaves became kings.

And so, from the kingdom of Odoacer, covering Italy and the remnants of the old provinces of Raetia and Noricum to the north, Athalaric and Honorius passed through the kingdom of the Burgundians, which spanned much of the hinterland of the Rhone to the east of Gaul, and the kingdom of the Soissons in northern France, before returning at last to their western Gothic kingdom.

Athalaric had feared his jaunt into the failing heart of the old empire might leave him overwhelmed by the inferiority of his people’s meager achievements. But when he at last got home he found the opposite seemed to be true. After the crumbling grandeur of Rome, Burdigala indeed seemed small, provincial, primitive, even ugly. But Burdigala was expanding. Large new developments were visible all around its harbor area, and the harbor itself was crowded with ships.

Rome was magnificent, but it was dead. This was the future — his future, his to make.

Athalaric’s uncle Theodoric was a remote cousin of Euric, the Goth king of Gaul and Spain. Theodoric, who nursed long-term ambitions for his family, had set up a kind of satellite court in an old, expansive Roman villa outside Burdigala. When he heard about the exotic visitors brought back by Honorius and Athalaric, he insisted they stay in his villa, and he immediately began to plan a series of social occasions to show off the visitors, as well as the accomplishments and travels of his nephew.

At these occasions, Theodoric was to entertain members of the new Goth nobility — and also Roman aristocrats.

If political control had been lost, the culture of the thousand-year-old empire persisted. The new German rulers showed themselves willing to learn from the Romans. The Goth king Euric had had the laws of his kingdom drawn up by Roman jurists and issued in Latin; it was this body of law which Athalaric had been assigned to Honorius to study. And meanwhile the old landed aristocracy of the empire continued to live alongside the newcomers. Many of them, with centuries of acquisition behind them, remained rich and powerful even now.

Even after visiting Rome itself, Athalaric found it ironic to see these toga-clad scions of ancient families, many of them still holding imperial titles, among leather-clad barbarian nobles, gliding effortlessly through rooms whose genteel frescoes and mosaics were now overlaid with the cruder imagery of a warrior people, horseback warriors with their helmets, shields, and lances. It could be argued — Honorius did argue — that with their systematic greed, practiced over centuries, these exquisite creatures had destroyed the very empire that created them. But for these aristocrats, the replacement of the vast imperial superstructure with the new patchwork of Gothic and Burgundian chiefs had made no significant difference in their own gilded lives.

In fact, for some of them, it seemed that the collapse of the empire had actually opened up business opportunities.

As a trophy guest the Scythian proved less than satisfactory for Theodoric. The man from the desert seemed revolted by the elaborate atrium, gardens, and rooms of the villa. He preferred to spend his time in the room Theodoric had granted him. But he ignored the bed and the rest of the furniture in the room, spread the rolled blanket he carried on the floor, and set up a kind of tent of sheets. It was as if he had brought the desert to Gaul.

If the Scythian was a social disappointment, Papak was a success, as Athalaric had sourly expected. Bringing a whiff of the exotic, the Persian moved smoothly among Theodoric’s guests, barbarian and citizen alike. He flirted outrageously with the women, and captivated the men with his tales of the peculiar dangers of the east. Everyone was charmed.

One of Papak’s most popular innovations was chess. This was a game, he said, recently invented to amuse the court of Persia. Nobody in Gaul had heard of it, and Papak had one of Theodoric’s craftsman carve a board and pieces for him. The game was played on a six-by-six grid of squares, over which pieces shaped like horses or warriors moved and battled. The rules were simple, but the strategy was deceptively deep. The Goths — who still prided themselves on their warrior credentials, even though many of them had not been near a horse in twenty years — relished the sublimated combat of the new game. Their first tournaments were fast and bloody affairs. But under Papak’s tactful tutelage, the better players soon grasped the game’s subtleties, and the matches became drawn out and interesting.

As for Honorius himself, he was irritated that the parlor games of a Persian were so much more compelling than his tales of old bones. But then, Athalaric thought with exasperated fondness, the old man never had been much of a one for social niceties, and still less for the intricacies of court life. Honorius insisted on sticking to his usual games of backgammon, played with his cronies from the old landed aristocracy — “the game of Plato,” as he called it.

After a few days of the stay, Theodoric called his nephew into a private room.