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That night, after a generous meal and a long final talk with Chryseros, we set off to sneak our way into the Aemilian Estate and from there eastward. Before we set off Chryseros insisted on hanging round each of our necks, by the usual leathern thong, one of those tiny, flat leathern pouches, in which slaves were accustomed to wear protective amulets.
Neither Chryseros nor Agathemer had any doubt that a close watch was being quietly kept to make sure that I could not now return to Villa Andivia without being caught; nor yet leave it if I did return or had returned. As a result of his discussion with Agathemer they had agreed that we were to leave by night and on foot, as we had originally intended.
"As Agathemer and I were riding home and were passing his barn-yard gate, we heard yells for help. I dismounted and ran in. I found Chryseros rather at a disadvantage in handling a bull. I helped him get the beast into his pen. His gratitude seems exaggerated." "Not any more exaggerated than your modesty," spoke up Neponius Pomplio, who had hardly uttered a word since he arrived.
"Hedulio was walking toward him and the bull just stood and pawed and bellowed till Hedulio caught hold of the ring in his nose and led him off to his pen. "Chryseros, who had dodged through the little door into the barn and had slammed it after him, had peered out of it just before Hedulio reached the bull and had stood, mouth open, hands hanging, letting the door swing wide open.
And my thinking, multifold and effective as it was, was but as a chip on the surface of a freshet in a mountain gorge amid the torrent of emotions which inundated me. Since I had begun to mend as the result of the succour and medication of old Chryseros Philargyrus I had resolutely refrained from, thinking of Vedia.
Agathemer, I found, had told Chryseros that only he and Ofatulenus had seen me between my return and escape. Gratillus had especially questioned the wives of my eight tenants, and as Chryseros was a widower, his widowed daughter, who lived with him. Each of these he had summoned before him separately and had interrogated alone and at length. This was like Gratillus.
She was amazed at all of it; at our crawl through the drain, at the loyalty of old Chryseros, at my involvement with Maternus, at my encounter with Pescennius Niger, at my involvement with the mutineers; but most of all, at my having been present in the great circus, an eyewitness of the most spectacular day of racing Commodus ever exhibited under his transparent pseudonym of Palus and his last day of public jockeying; and, equally, at Agathemer's device by which we survived the massacre.
Although he had obeyed instantly when I ordered him to loose Agathemer, yet, perhaps from some vagary of my fever, I stared at Chryseros without any other feeling than that he had been for most of his life the tenant of our family enemy. As I looked at him I felt utterly lost, as if there was now no hope for me, as if Chryseros would certainly betray me to the authorities.
He let me eat my fill and drink all the milk I wanted. But he would not let me taste the wine of which Agathemer drank moderately. "If you feel sleepy," said Chryseros, "roll over, cover yourself and go to sleep; we can talk tomorrow." "I do not feel sleepy," I declared, "and I feel very much like asking questions."
Certainly both Chryseros and Agathemer appeared comical to me, even in my pain and misery and weakness and through the enveloping horror of my fever. Agathemer, his hair and beard a worse stubble than mine, was gasping and ruefully rubbing his throat, making a ridiculous figure in his brown tunic, patched with patches of red, yellow and blue, all sewed on with white thread.
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