“Don’t ask,” I snickered as Boil scowled. He was the youngest of us at seventeen, a fair-haired Gaul as big as a stone outhouse, and when he’d first joined our contubernium he’d had a boil on his arse the size of an apple. In the legions you’ll be dead before you ever get rid of a nickname like that.

My redhead was scowling at me. “So that’s why you stay with that Greek girl. For the food?”

“Now, don’t be cross with me—”

“You can find another bed warmer, Vercingetorix,” she sniffed, and slid off my lap. “I think I’ll find myself a gentleman for a change.” She grabbed Titus’s hand and hauled him up from his chair. “Want to see if I’m red-haired all over, Tribune?”

“I wouldn’t dream of doubting a lady’s word,” he said politely. But she was already hauling him away.

“Didn’t have to poach mine, did you?” I called after him, but he just gave me a rueful look as the redhead yanked him upstairs.

“Serves you right,” Simon told me. Simon was senior man in my contubernium, a dark burly man of forty years or so, close to the end of his stint with the legion. He’d been the one to welcome me to the Tenth, when I first shipped north out of my training camp to Germania.

“Vercingetorix.” He’d looked me up and down in my creaky new armor and clean sandals. “From Gaul?”

“Britannia.”

He grunted and waved a hand at the lowest cot in the contubernium. “The recruits keep getting younger,” he muttered in Hebrew.

“And the veterans keep getting older,” I said back in the same language, and his heavy brows shot up.

“A Jew as well as a Briton?”

“No.” I lapsed out of Hebrew, which was rusty for me. “My mother was, that’s all.”

“Then you’re a Jew,” Simon said firmly.

“How’s that?”

“You’re a Jew if your mother is a Jew. That’s our law.”

“Why the mother?” I wondered. “Why not the father?”

“Because too many soldiers like us have marched through Judaea to make anyone too certain of their fathers,” Simon had grimaced. A good man to have on your shield arm.

Titus came down from my redhead’s room a few minutes later, looking mussed. “Done already?” I jeered. “Quick work. Admit it, she was your first!”

“No, I just thought I’d come tell you to go home without me,” he explained. “She’s giving me a whole night free.”

“I never get a night free,” Boil complained. “What’s your secret?”

“I said she had wine-dark lips. It’s from the Odyssey, sort of.”

“Poetry,” Philip mused. “Never tried that before. Have you got any more quotes handy?”