So, my dear gentlemen, we were left that Marfisa and Rolandus had been trapped in Dragontina's garden: one under the effect of a mysterious filter and the other of a different potion that mutated him into a small lion. Meanwhile, Medulfa, misinterpreting Madalgarius’ words, is heading for the mysterious and ancient Egypt. A land she knew well, having spent her childhood there, and whose legends had led her to believe that it was the catizi community of Alexandria that Madalgarius wanted to consult. 

Medulfa had intended to keep her identity a secret during the journey across the Mediterranean, but alas, some frequent visitor to the Flavian amphitheatre recognized her as one of the gladiators who fought there. 

With her golden eyes and long red braids, she was indeed all too recognizable, and in part her ego prevented her from keeping silent for long. On the slow nights under the Pleiades, which are so dear to sailors and anyone who, lost at sea, seeks help from the constellations, Medulfa enjoyed wearing her she-wolf-like armour to entertain passengers, especially wealthy ones. After all, once you are famous, it’s more easy to travel comfortably. Just find an admirer of your, and you will sail in the most comfortable accommodations and eat cuts of meat reserved for knights and senators. 

When they recognized her face, they always asked questions. They asked her if it was true that she fought Marfisa for a man, at which Medulfa laughed. How to contradict her? After all, she had left the same day. Too quickly for any passenger to have had a chance to confirm the rumours about that night. 

More evasive she was when asked where she was going. Since she too didn't know where she really was going and couldn't be honest, she just told them she wanted to see again Alexandria of Egypt, the city of her youth. 

More relaxed she was at the question they asked her in that evening, before seeing in the distance the lighthouse of Alexandria: why was she called the she-wolf of Rome? 

If you were to ask a resident of Rome, especially her admirers who followed all her fights in the arena, you would get as many as three different answers. 

The first, it seems obvious to me, Medulfa's armour is fashioned in the shape of a wolf, and since there were not many female gladiators in Rome, it is quite clear to whom one is referring when speaking of the she-wolf. 

The second is related to the extraordinary strength that Medulfa possesses. Although among gladiatrixes she does not have the greatest string of victories in the arena (that belongs to Marfisa), indeed hers is rather mediocre, she is a woman who lingers in the mind. I need not explain to you why male gladiators wear weights when facing a female gladiator. No one likes to see an unbalanced confrontation, but even without this compensation Medulfa was well able to hold her own against her male colleagues, except of course those of more massive size. And don't think she used tricks such as dexterity or expertise, because she would knock them to the ground with blows or shoulders. 

So it was that, I don't know who, I don't know how, the rumour began to circulate that she was some kind of little Mars. A woman worthy of the attentions of this god, as Rea Silvia, who had been more than a millennium earlier the mother of Romulus and Remus: the founders of Rome. Founders who abandoned as babies, had been suckled by a she-wolf. A woman worthy both of a god's attention and of nursing those who gave rise to an empire that still rules much of the known world. 

The origin of the third reason for her nickname is actually more prosaic. It is said that since she was not very wealthy due to her many defeats in the arena, but being very popular, there were quite a few willing to pay to lie in bed with her; a proposition that Medulfa was happy to accept in order to fill her ever-empty purse. 

There was also a forth theory, clearly not true. It came from one of the Egyptian sailors. He ask if she was a member of the Lupercani of Egypt. Now my dear readers, I assume most of you is not Egyptian, so let me explain why this sailor was so eager to ask this question. 

You see, the Lupercani of Egypt are different of those of Italy, Britannia and the Danube. I can really tell you how this cult began in a Egypt, and even today many in Egypt consider it foreign in nature. Popular among the catizi, it as an aura of reverence and fear because it is said this cult is tied to the famous Queen of Cats and Werewolf.  

Now, Medulfa wasn’t tied to this group, but under all that attention her ego began to mount. I am not saying she said she was part of this cult so feared in Egypt but... how should I put it, she did not even deny it. She simply began to vaunt her immense knowledge, much of which must have seemed ancient and arcane to those present, as they hung from her lips with every single word. 

She began to talk about the plants and animals she had studied in her youth, carefully choosing the most exotic and interesting ones, up to talking about the strange chimeras whose bones can still be seen preserved in the museum of Alexandria. She talked about the blasphemous beings investigated in Aristotle's Historia animalium and in Theophrastus' Historia plantarum, who questioned how many limbs a creature should have; as well as the problems exposed by Plutarch's Quaestiones naturales which brought to their knees anyone who claimed to have definitive knowledge of the universe. 

She knew that many of these strange creatures, that some people exhibited in their collections, were nothing more than the product of good charlatans, and in respect of the knowledge that she had collected in years of studies, she was honest: what was true or false beyond reasonable doubt, she was ready to say. What unclear or doubtful she was ready to admit it.  

This honesty had the opposite effect on his listeners than one might think. She knew few strange and arcane creatures, but the fact that she could distinguish the false from the real, and was honest what she could confirm, made her seem like a true repository of some secret ancient knowledge. 

It didn't take long for people to forget that Medulfa never claimed to be part of the Lupercani of Alexandria (or any other city). People kept demanding that she share her arcane knowledge. 

So it was that in the grip of a bacchant's frenzy, she began to tell random curiosities that she had accumulated in innumerable books. She spoke of how the cult of Lupercus had spread up the Danube and the Rhine to the British Isles, following the legions, and merging with the cults of Mithras, Sabazius and Dolichenus brought from the east.  

It was almost that someone mistook her for an ancient priestess of these cults, still alive after centuries of eternal youth. Even I didn't know about some of the things she said and had to research them among the heavy volumes kept in the Ulpia Library in Rome. 

Medulfa's eyes shone with joy. She was no longer the amazon who fought in the arena to delight the eyes of the spectators, nor the amazon submissive to bed for little money. She was the intellectual that everyone consulted. Years of study now repaid her with the admiration of the people and now she wanted more. 

In all that Dionysian frenzy, she began to recall still more arcane subjects into her mind, captivating the souls of her listeners. In the light of the braziers, strange shadows began to form on her peach skin and the long shape of a ravenous wolf formed behind Medulfa. To the rhythm of the braziers’ flames, a long and dark shadow danced frantically, like the priests of the ancient college of the Salii. 

She spoke of the expedition of Lucius Cornelius Balbus, who in 733 AUC departed from Sabratha, near Leptis Magna, and led an army of ten thousand men across the hot and suffocating Libyan desert, until he reached the Niger River, passing near the Thala mountains, where he saw Thalarion: the city of high grey walls, the City of a Thousand Wonders, the city whose armies were unstoppable thanks to their magic, but which nevertheless came to its macabre end. Finding confirmed by Valerius Festus when 823 retraced his same path. 

She then spoke of Suetonius Paulinus' expedition of 794 along the Atlantic coast and how he had arrived at the ruins of Atlantis, but what he had found there, he would not say. 

She then went on to tell of the expeditions of Septimius Flaccus and Julius Maternus, occurred between 829 and 841, to the land of Agisymba, where rhinos and elephants live, and where they were able to see the ruins of the cities of Ib and the doomed Sarnath. 

Finally she spoke of Nero's explorations in search of the sources of the Nile, which prepared for the conquest of the kingdom of Meroe and which opened a new route toward the Indian Ocean, bypassing the dangers of piracy in the Red Sea while encouraging future Roman commerce toward India and Azania. Expeditions that however failed to find the pool of Yoth-shesh whose divining powers were used, well before the rise of the pharaohs of Egypt. 

Everyone admired her in front of so much culture. For the first time in her life Medulfa felt rewarded for the long years she had spent over books.  

It was in that moment of ecstasy that one of the passengers asked her a question about the strange hybrid creatures with which she had begun the talk. He asked her if any of the explorers she had mentioned had ever found satyrs and if these creatures were really half-man and half-goat as the artists represented them. 

Sincerely, Medulfa did not know how to answer. So far as she knew, very few had seen these beings and they were said to inhabit the Hercynia Forest about which, indeed, she knew little or nothing; but in the bacchic delirium in which she found herself, a ‘I don't know’ was not an answer Medulfa could conceive. 

However, her professional ethics prevented her from lying, so she turned the question around so that an undeniable millennial wisdom still shone through from her answer. 

"Of course not..." replied Medulfa, "...if they had hooves instead of feet, as the statues show us, they would not be able to keep their balance. Their feet must have a different shape: cat feet would be better." 

Mind you, Medulfa did not say that satyrs had half-cat rather than half-goat bodies, nor did she say that with certainty they existed. It was a pure biological observation that allowed her to be truthful, hiding her ignorance. A pure guess, but for listeners mostly from Egypt, where cats held millennia of respect, having satyrs resemble their Egyptian goddess Bast more than the Greek god Pan must have made them feel full of pride, and made them see Medulfa as a priestess who had come to correct an ancient mistake. 

You can imagine the smile with which she threw herself into bed that night, and the good humour with which woke up the next morning. She enjoyed being greeted as she stepped off the ship, just as she appreciated the constant offers to help carry her luggage, even if she ended up doing it all herself. 

Disappointment, however, had to come when she arrived at the library in Alexandria and discovered that no one had seen anyone with the name or appearance of Madalgarius, or who had made requests for tomes concerning golden apples or fey artefacts related to nymphs and satyrs. 

She was not deterred and tried the nearby Museum. There, once again, waiting for her was disappointment, for of the presence of Madalgarius there was not even the suspicion. Nor there was any trace of anything that seemed related to what she sought. 

A poetic cryptoporticus led her to a square teeming with chariots and carriages; while the nearby theatre of Dionysus swallowed tides of spectators, none of whom resembled her Madalgarius. 

Of course, going from square to square in search of a specific person was not a good idea, but that was all she could do for the moment. Medulfa convinced herself that she had arrived early, that she had beaten him to the punch, and that on some ship at sea Madalgarius was catching up with her, while Marfisa was drowning somewhere at sea stricken by divine retribution. 

She stopped at the Royal Guesthouses, joined by a carriage that sped along wide, well-constructed streets. The Royal Guesthouses was an expensive hotel, which had once been part of the royal palaces of the Ptolemies, but was now a city-run hotel for important public guests and anyone who could afford to parlay a room. 

She paid the carriage driver to take her luggage to the hotel and make her look as wealthy as anyone who could afford a personal servant. Then disbursed eight nummi resisting the temptation to count the coins left in her purse. Eight silver-plated copper coins left her hand, a good four days' wages for many, but when Madalgarius would arrive in town, the Royal Guesthouses were the most likely place he would seek lodging, at least based on the social status she had imagined Madalgarius to be a part of. In any case she was both a physician and a popular gladiator in Rome, on papers she should have had money. Nevertheless, once she locked herself in her room, she immediately set about counting the coins she had left.  

"What am I doing?" said Medulfa as she watched her meagre life savings grow thinner and thinner before her eyes, "Oh, Venus! Venus! You whom everyone calls the friendly goddess! Little do you care about the consequences of your deeds. Curse the one who said that money does not bring happiness, for I do not know how much longer I can continue with this madness." 

She tipped forward and with her elbows on the table continued to look at the piles of coins. 

"Hold on my little ones, hold on!” said Medulfa,” I know I promised you that together we would realize our dream, but this is just a little delay." 

She put the money back into her purse and pondered what to do. She contemplated being nice and having some wealthy hotel guest host her for the night, but what would Madalgarius think seeing her in the arms of another man? No, no. Madalgarius did not know about her reputation and should never have known, or else her chance of not being alone would have been lost forever. 

She shook her head and decided to immerse herself in the delightful atmosphere of the city of the pharaohs; in its typically Greek grid of rational streets and in its Roman glory: the age of the Ptolemies seemed to come alive as well as that of the great scientists in the Museum. 

Guided by her youthful memories, she headed south, past the gardens and pavilions that decorated the city, in search of the tomb of Alexander III of Macedon, Alexander the Conqueror of Persia, Alexander the Great. 

She soon found herself in the hands of a clamorous guide who, despite later developments, was surely a master of her craft. Only later did she realize that she should have requested a licensed guide from the hotel, but being originary of the city she forgot the caution necessary in an unfamiliar place. 

This woman, or rather this catiza, vaunted to descent both from the catizus who from the deep south had settled in the swamps of the Nile delta at the time of the first pharaohs, and from the catizus who had followed Alexander the Great, but in the end there was hardly a catizus native of Alexandria who could not vaunt such a thing. 

She called herself "Spinalba," although Medulfa could not say whether this was a translation of a Greek, Coptic, or Nubian name or just a nickname. 

She seemed to have a lot of influence over others of her species. She seemed to know the quattuorviri at the head of the vicus pygmeus, where the majority of the catizi lives. She also claimed to work at the Museum which, in addition to making her more trustworthy in Medulfa's eyes, provided her with the extraordinary opportunity of being able to consult her about the golden apples of Madalgarius or give her access to reserved texts. 

Spinalba herself seemed to have no problem answering questions on such arcane matters. Her very appearance exuded confidence, with her snow-white gown, white hair, and light grey eyes, accompanied by a young brown skin. 

In height she did not exceeded ninety centimetres, and even an ordinary woman could have grabbed her by the collar and lifted her with one arm. Image Medulfa. 

Spinalba led her through marvels that Medulfa had never thought existed in her childhood city. Alexandria itself was a fairytale book and a dream: labyrinths of narrow alleys that smelled of aromatic secrets; ornate balconies which almost meet above the cobbled streets; eddies of oriental traffic with strange cries, rattling whips, rattling carts, rattling money and rattling donkeys. 

Kaleidoscopes of polychrome dresses, veils and turbans; water carriers and dancers, dogs and cats, soothsayers and barbers; and above all the lament of the beggars crouched in the niches and the resounding song of the temples that are delicately silhouetted against a sky of a blue deep and immutable over the centuries. 

In the grip of an empathy also due to experience, she threw some coins to the poor beggars, coins that shone like gold in their eyes. 

Gold... it was gold that had led Medulfa to become a disciple of Aesculapius. The gold that is found in gestures that help people and the gold that is found in the purses that buy food and blankets. Gold accompanied by golden gestures, that so much good can do. Medulfa shook her head and went back to enjoying the city. 

The covered and quieter markets were certainly no less attractive. Spices, perfumes, incense, beads, carpets, silks and brass... everything led Medulfa to travel in nostalgia. 

There was one smell in particular that caught her attention. It was an aroma little known even to the locale. In fact it was mainly consumed by outsiders, but Medulfa would have recognised it among a thousand. 

It was the seed of a plant that grew in the African highlands between the kingdoms of Axume and Sabe. City dwellers used it to season their food, but shepherds mixed it with fat to make bars to chew when they had to stay woke at night. 

These bars were very useful to Medulfa during her long nights of study, and she could not resist the temptation to buy a good supply of these seeds. 

Medulfa left the market with a smile on her face and plenty of coffee beans. 

The agora, or assembly square, also served as a marketplace where merchants kept stalls or shops to sell their wares. This was surrounded on four sides by a continuous colonnaded courtyard. Here the young ladies waited for the afternoon to avoid the crowds. 

They visited the near Tychaion of Alexandria, named for the city goddess Fortune: it was a circular temple with exedras with statues of Fortune and Victory. Both two goddess Medulfa needed at her side. 

In the end Spinalba led her to the Arsinoe’s fountain house: it was a semicircular structure of marble, with an Ionic entablature and a base of red granite. It had running water and was decorated with white marble statues of Arsinoe and nymphs. 

They stayed there to refresh themselves and started to talk. Medulfa wanted to talk about the golden apples or anything related to them, while Spinalba wanted to elaborate on the strange places Medulfa had described before arriving in the harbour and the chimeric creatures she had described. 

Medulfa didn't wonder how Spinalba had known about what had happened on the ship, or perhaps it would be better to say that she didn't care, but be sincere... you wouldn't have cared either. 

She spoke good naturedly, above all behind a good Egyptian beer that she had not tasted in a long time at the coolness of Arsinoe's fountain. 

Spinalba turned her head westward, and Medulfa followed her gaze until she saw a stone building towering above the others. 

Over the city, not far from the Museum and its library that housed the latest discoveries in every science, towered the great tower of Paneum: an artificial mound of the shape of a fir-cone, resembling a pile of rock. On the top of it there was an ascent by a spiral path, decorated with cypress trees. From the summit may be seen the whole city lying all around and beneath it and it contained a shrine of Pan, protector of travellers. 

The red sun lowered, bringing the relentless cold of Egyptian twilight, but painting the Paneum with elegant shadows, long and thin. It seemed to stand poised on the edge of the world like the ancient Palatine hill beneath which lay the Lupercal cave: a cave already ancient when Rome was nothing more than a mound of wood and mud huts. 

It was a beautiful landscape under which to discuss deep and arcane mysteries, so much so that Medulfa almost did not notice either the pangs of hunger, that naturally came with evening, or the coming of night.  

It was precisely with the arrival of the stars that Spinalba suggested that she visit the gardens of the courthouse, in which the very Paneum was located, promising her that, from the top of it, she would show her constellations known to few. 

The moon shone among the stars, and there was almost no need for the streetlights that accompanied the tree-lined avenues. But she soon had to reconsider when she reached the Paneum, where there were no streetlights or artificial lights. Darkness dominated, and the further she advanced, the more the feeling of being watched increased. 

For a moment her head was traversed by the rumours that had been swirling for centuries about the species of catizi: about the unnatural powers accumulated over the centuries by the union of Egyptian wisdom and Greek rationality. 

She remembered the stories about the fey Queen of Cats and Werewolves who in Lycopolis was said to have harboured the catizi fleeing after the destruction of the library in Alexandria and who had helped rebuild it. 

She heard a rustling in the shrubs, but continued walking alongside Spinalba until she reached the top of the man-made hill, where the temple of Pan stood. Before her loomed the city as only the night could frame it in all its beauty.   

It was then that she heard the rustling again and noticed that Spinalba was no longer with her. In the shadows she saw wolves with black snouts and white manes, scampering across the pavement. And they were advancing, and advancing, while a dark cloud covered the moon and the high stars.  

As if moved by instinct Medulfa searched for her own club that laid far away in her hotel room. Still she put herself in a defensive position and stepped back toward the parapet.   

A glance, a moment in which her thoughts were turned elsewhere, and turning her head behind her she saw a swarm of dark wolves that, like small shadows, climbed up the Paneum slope and surrounded her as the cloudy sky grew darker and darker. The moon disappeared, and with it all light. The city disappeared, the Paneum with its cypresses disappeared, and in the blackness of the night the wolves disappeared. There was only darkness.