I remember watching the legion’s eagle, mesmerized, as it flashed in a shaft of sunlight. It rode proudly on a tall pole, carried by the aquilifer who marched along just as proudly in a lion-skin cloak. The eagle looked so regal and defiant, carried over the fields of alien grain, that I threw back my head and gave a shout of joy, and my centurion, the bastard, caned me across the shoulders with his staff as he rode past.

I remember my contubernium. Philip’s brown fingers endlessly rolling his dice, Boil carving a bracelet out of silky beech wood for his Dacian girl and then hurling it sullenly into a river when she left him, Simon trying to figure out which way was Jerusalem. My brothers. Not one of them alive now but me.

I remember Titus, who shouldn’t have been part of our contubernium because he was an overeducated sprat whose only ambition was to get home from this campaign and never go near a legion again. But he was one of us anyway, somehow, coming every few nights to our campfire after his duties to the legate were done, folding his long limbs inside his immaculate linens, telling wry stories of the other officers, telling the same stories over and over about Trajan because we couldn’t get enough of them. I remember the face he made the first time he tasted posca, the sour soldiers’ wine we got in rations. “What is this?”

“Posca,” I grinned. “Made from the finest vinegar in the Empire. It doubles excellently for cleaning wounds. Drink up!”

“Pour it in your helmet first,” Simon advised, “and soak your feet in it. Nothing better after a long march. A good foot bath in posca will peel off all the dead blistery stuff between your toes.”

“Surely you don’t drink it after that?” Titus said, horrified.

“You can strain it first if you’re fussy,” Boil allowed, and we all fell over howling as Titus poured his cup out into the earth.