"
"We'd be locked up as runaway slaves," I said, "advertised, sold to the
highest bidder if unclaimed and henceforth kept in slavery."
"I'm in slavery now," said Agathemer. "You, if kept in slavery, would at
least be alive and in no danger of being recognized."
"Let us go," said I.
We looked at each other and burst out laughing. We made a sufficiently
absurd spectacle, each stark naked, each holding a copper cylinder, as we
stood in that elegant and luxurious room. According to the fashion of the
time, which aped the ways of the young Emperor, we wore our hair
moderately long and as both had hair naturally curly, were perfectly in
style as to hair. Our beards, also, we wore clipped but not shaved, and
long enough to show a tendency to curl, as the Emperor wore his.
Our laugh over I gave a farewell glance about my little-used library. It
was then about the fifth hour. Agathemer gazing rather outside at the
landscape than inside at the room remained frozen stiff, staring northward
down the valley.
"We are barely in time," he said. "Mercury is with us and Fortune."
"Before I left Rome," I said, "I prayed to Fortune and sacrificed to
Mercury."
"Time well spent," he said. "Look there!"
Peering where he pointed I saw, where the road was first visible in the
distance, fully two miles away, a dozen or more horsemen, manifestly, even
at that distance, of military bearing: I caught, against the sunrays, a
gleam of crimson and a glint of gold; I conjectured a detail of Praetorian
Guards coming to arrest me or to put me out of the way.
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