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So the Vedians inferred that the Satronians, instead of taking their direct road to the Salarian Highway, would expect an ambush along it and would try to sneak through Vediamnum. Therefore they were in ambush at Vediamnum. Similarly and for similar reasons the Satronians were in ambush below their road entrance, calculating that the Vedians would pass that way.
With one accord, without any conference or the exchange of a word, our party made haste to escape from Vediamnum before our assailants rallied for a second onset. No horse or mule was hamstrung or lamed, no man had been knocked senseless.
"He had enough sense to tell us the name of the village," Tanno retorted, "and I had to acknowledge to Dromanus he was right, and so we turned round. When we were hardly more than out of sight of Vediamnum we met another party, a respectable-looking man, much like a farm bailiff, on horseback, and two slaves afoot. I had not seen them before, and they, apparently, had not previously seen us.
He was convinced that I had assaulted his men by prearrangement with the Vedians, after a mock fight with them at Vediamnum. I saw I was accomplishing nothing and endeavored to escape after a formal farewell. Satronius roared after me: "You left three corpses on the roadway below my villa. I'll not forget them nor will any man of my name.
This time we had an infinitesimally longer warning, as the bushes to right and left of the road were further apart than had been the houses lining the streets of Vediamnum; also we reacted more quickly to the yells, having heard the like such a short time before. The fight was fully joined all along the line and was raging with no advantage for either side, when I missed a parry and knew no more.
By the road, just before the first house, watching five goats, was a boy, a boy with a crooked twitching face. "'The village idiot, I put in. 'They can never let him out of sight and he is always beside the road. "He was not too big an idiot to tell us it was Vediamnum." "He was enough of an idiot," I said, "to forget you, and your question the next minute. The boy is almost a beast."
If we went this way we should have to wait for him. If we go the other we shall most likely meet him at the fork of the road." We turned to our right towards Villa Vedia and Vediamnum. About half way to the entrance to Villa Vedia, at the top of the hill between the two bridges, the rain for a brief interval fairly cascaded from the sky.
Commodus made a point of having Martius specially presented to him because he had heard that he had been, with you and Tanno, one of the foremost fighters in your affrays in Vediamnum and near Villa Satronia. At his private audience he congratulated and bepraised Martius and acclaimed his prowess.
It was, it certainly was, the very same man I had seen in the very same guise on the road below Villa Andivia as Tanno and I passed by on our way to our fatal brawl at Vediamnum; the very man who had peered in at me and Capito during his fatal conference with me in Nemestronia's water-garden, the man whom Tanno had asserted that he knew for an Imperial spy.
When I told of the cloaked and hatted horseman by the roadside in the rain, the day of the brawl in Vediamnum and the affray near Villa Satronia, he cut in with: "That was my brother, Marcus. He was detailed to report on your local feud. Whether he knew of you before that, whether his queer spite against you originated then or earlier, I don't know.
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