I stopped and looked at the figures beneath my feet.
“Rowland,” I said, “they’re red.”
Rowland’s most recent obsession was with a discovery made by archaeologists in Indonesia, of small primate skeletons which possibly represented a parallel branch of evolution. The media had dubbed them ‘Hobbits,’ but Rowland’s mind had gone back to the homunculi Lucius claimed to have seen in Rome. Could some of them, he wondered, have been captured in Indonesia and been passed westward, from owner to owner, until they arrived on the Black Sea coast, where they had been swept up by the Empire and brought to Rome, only to die in the arena? There were, apparently, local stories of the little primates surviving into historical times. It wasn’t impossible that they might have wound up in Rome. Vanishingly unlikely, but not impossible, and Rowland’s mind was deliriously at home in that tiny area labelled not impossible. Theories came and went about the nature of Homo floresiensis. Rowland ignored them all, snuggled himself up to not impossible, and came up with his own narrative.
Lucius was Rowland’s greatest prize, and fitting the villa and the information it contained into what he already knew would complete his life’s work. But he thought that once, nearly two millennia ago, Lucius had spoken with a cousin of the human race, and he thought that Lucius, with his enormous ego, would record it somehow at his home. He thought that it would prove not only that H. floresiensis had survived into the Second Century, but that it was capable of language and sophisticated thought. One of them had been taught Latin. Lucius had spoken with it. And then it had died in the Colosseum.
But.
We had all been taking that word homunculi a little bit too seriously. I looked down at the figures in the tiles. These were not H. floresiensis, or at least not H. floresiensis as they had been depicted by the people who do artists’ impressions for newspapers and television news organisations. They did not look like little hairy apes walking upright. They did not, in fact, look much like primates at all.
There were five of them, standing in line abreast, and behind them was a section of wall that looked as though it could have been part of the Colosseum. If the figures of gladiators standing a little over to the right, menacing them with swords and nets and tridents, were any guide, none of the homunculi was more than five feet tall. They were all bright red, as if they had been tandooried, and they were all wearing bits and pieces of clothing, some of it Roman, most of it not. One was wearing boots; another was wearing big padded-looking gloves.
I knelt down on the floor at the feet of the figures. I heard Rowland step down onto the mosaic and start walking towards me, and a moment later I heard Lew do the same. Lew was recovering quickly. “Yes, perhaps it was remiss of me not to mention them,” he was saying. “But surely they’re representations of household gods? Figures from myth? Deities Setibogius may have felt protected him?”
I tried to imagine Lucius dragging Caecilius all the way from Rome to do this. I thought of him standing over Caecilius, dictating every bit of the design like a mugging victim working with a police artist. I thought of Caecilius shaking his head as he tried to get the faces right, wondering what the hell his employer had been drinking.
They all had flat faces. Their eyes were narrow and tilted, their mouths parted in lipless slashes that exposed rows of needle-like teeth. They had the huge, flat noses of leaf-nosed bats, and enormous ears. They had horns. Great backward-curving horns.
On Rowland’s orders, Lew cleared the site and sent everybody home for the day. The three of us covered the floor with plastic sheeting and went and sat around a table in one of the portakabins, where nobody said a word for quite a while.
Finally, Lew said, “I assumed —”
“Shut up, Lewis,” said Rowland. Lewis reddened and looked out through the window. It had started to rain again. Rowland looked at me.
I raised my hands. “I’m only the chauffeur,” I said.
Rowland glared at me.
I sighed. “Lucius said he met them. He said he talked to one of them. He wrote that letter to Marcus, what, ten, fifteen years before he had this place built? If he was lying, he kept it going for a hell of a long time.”
“Why would he lie about something like that? What would he have to gain?”
“I don’t know.” I spread my hands. “The Romans weren’t like us.”
Rowland glared at me again.
“But they don’t appear anywhere else in the literature,” Lew protested.
“I told you to shut up, Lewis,” Rowland said again without bothering to take his eyes off me.
“I bet they do, though,” I said. “I bet somewhere, in some document nobody’s found yet, maybe something that’s been sitting in a drawer since the Eighteenth Century, there’s another description of them. There were only five of them; it’s not like they were some army that the Empire defeated, something that got celebrated in song and poetry and sculpture.” I sat back and thought of the five creatures. Maybe there had been more of them; maybe some had died when a Roman patrol out on the far fringe of the Empire had come across them and overwhelmed them. Maybe some more had died on the journey back to the capital. It must have been a hell of a trip; one of them, at least, had had time to learn Latin. I am told they lived in a bronze house.
Rowland blinked at me, and I knew he had just had the same thought, and my heart sank.
“Call me when you get there,” Rowland told me.
“This isn’t fair, Rowland,” I said. “I have a life of my own.”
He smiled and watched the crowds circulate around us in Terminal Two at Heathrow. “Imagine the story you’ll be able to sell, Jim,” he said.
“It’s no good appealing to my venal side,” I said, but it was pointless. I looked over at Lew, who was sitting miserably a few feet away with our cabin baggage piled around him. Lew was being sent with me as punishment for not telling Rowland about the red figures immediately. He didn’t look like a man who was in on the ground floor of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in history. But then, I supposed, neither did I.
“What are you going to be doing while we’re poking around in the Danube delta?” I asked Rowland.
“You’re right about the literature,” he said. “There has to be some corroboration somewhere. It might be in a pile of documents nobody’s ever read. It might be in a private collection. Someone’s got to look for it.”
“And it’s not as though you’d ever have to leave your armchair to do it, right?” I said sourly.
“And it never occurred to you to wonder what happened to the homunculi after they had been killed in the arena,” he noted.
I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again.
“Somewhere in Rome,” Rowland said with a smug grin on his face, “there is a midden full of bones and little horned skulls. You mark my words.”
“Probably a hundred feet under an office building,” I said.
“Still there, all the same.” He looked at his watch. “I’m booked on the half past six flight to Rome. We’ll see.”