He smiled, touched her hair in passing, and looked down at the dog. “What do you say, old lady? Can you manage a short sprint after a stag?”

The dog uncurled with a happy pant and trotted after him as he ducked out. Sabina waved after them, then finished her mead and handed the cup to a page hovering outside the wagon. A beautiful page; dark-haired and long-limbed and well-muscled; an Antiochene youth of perhaps twenty. Hadrian had not taken as many slaves on this journey as dogs, but somehow all the slaves he’d brought were male and beautiful.

“Domina, will you be wanting to visit the other ladies while the wagons are halted?”

“Gods, no,” Sabina said, going back to her book. The long-dead legate Lucius Nystericus had abandoned his complaining about the natives and was now reminiscing about his days stationed in Greece.

Maybe we should go back to Athens soon. Hadrian would like that—he was already complaining about the air here in the north, so damp and heavy on the lungs. Very far from Greece’s violent white light and equally violent purple shades. But Sabina thought she might get to like the mists here, the deep stands of trees and the short days with their mole-dark shadows. Things to be learned here, and work to be done, she thought, and tossed aside the useless scroll with its prim views on native mead and native women. No matter what Lucius Nystericus says.

VIX

Moguntiacum was a different place with three and a half legions in it. Normally it was quiet enough—native women and children bustling through the markets in the daytime hours, taverns and brothels coming alive at night when the legionaries came off duty. Besides drinking and whoring there was a bridge over the Rhine, though what there was to do over the Rhine I didn’t know, and there was a shrine to some long-dead Roman prince that drew worshippers from all over Germania, and there was a playhouse that Demetra told me proudly was the largest north of the mountains. I told her I’d seen theatres three times as big in Rome, but she didn’t believe me. I’m not even sure she entirely believed in Rome. To Demetra, Rome was Elysium—it might exist somewhere, glittering and beautiful, but it had nothing to do with her.

Now, though, Mog wasn’t nearly so sleepy. It was full, crammed, bursting with soldiers. That bloody Dacian king was in full rebellion, and the Emperor had brought in more legions to deal with him properly.