"I'll agree to come back here and stay here quietly," I said, "if you will let me go out first for a while with you or any man or men you choose. I want to go to the Temple of Mercury and I want you to give me back enough of my money to buy two white hens to offer to the god."
"You surprise me," he said. "I shouldn't have expected a man of your origin to pay particular attention to gaining the favor of Mercury. He is more in the line of men like me. I am first and always devoted to Mithras, of course. But Mercury comes high up on my list. I've a mind to take the risk, go with you and buy four hens, two for you and two for me."
Actually we went out together shortly after sunrise, down the Subura, through Nerva's Forum, and diagonally across the Forum itself. There I quaked, for fear of being recognized; and marvelled at the coolness of Maternus. He feasted his eyes and mind on the gorgeousness about us, but with such discretion that no one could have conjectured that he was a foreigner, viewing Rome for the first time.
On down the Vicus Tuscus we went into the meat market, where he bought four plump, young, white hens. As we started on with them, each of us carrying two, he asked his first question.
"What building is that?" nodding.
"The Temple of Hercules," I told him.
"I thought so," he said, "they always build his circular. We'll stop in there on our way back. I never miss a chance to ask his help."
Whereas, when I made my offering before my flight the previous year, the street had been deserted, since I passed along it within an hour after sunrise, now it was humming with unsavory life, the eating-stalls under the vaults crowded, throngs about the Babylonian and Egyptian seers who prophesied anyone's future for a copper, tawdry hussies leering before the doors of their dens, unsavory louts chatting with some of them, idlers everywhere. This festering cess-pool of humanity Maternus regarded with disdain and contempt manifest to me, but carefully concealed behind a bland expression.
When we came out of the Temple of Mercury, after making our offering,
Maternus whispered:
"Walk very much at ease and as if your mind were as much as possible at peace; two men opposite are watching us."