"You must live," said Phryne gently.
"Why?"
"For—well—" She stood beside him, and somehow he came to think of a certain brook, sun-speckled under airy beeches, long ago in Cimberland. "Well, for what help you can give your wife," she finished, looking straight before her, across the Samnian darkness.
"Which is none," he groaned.
Suddenly it burst within him. As if the sun had taken him full in the eyes, he gasped and cried low, "But I can!"
"What?" Fear shadowed the face that swung to him. "How?"
"Hear me, Phryne," he whispered, rapidly, shaking with the knowledge of it. "I will go hence. I know the road to Rome, I walked it the other way last year. I can find his house there, and steal Hwicca away, and—O Bull whose horns are the moon, why did you not make it clear to me before?"
"You cannot!" A muted shriek. "You do not know the land, the city ... every man who sees you will know your height and hair and—What use will it be, to die on a cross or thrown to wild beasts?"
"Why, if my ghost has any strength at all, it may try again somehow," he said. "Or if not—well, I tried once. I gave Hwicca a man for a husband to the very end." He lifted his hands to the eastern light, and in Cimberland's tongue he called upon the day and the dark, the wind and sea and all the Powers of earth to witness his promise.
Phryne flung herself to her knees. "Eodan, Eodan, you are a little child among wolves! You know not what you say!"