Her fine hair in a braid that was always coming undone. Her fingers ruthlessly rubbing and yanking and kneading my feet after a twenty-mile march until all my muscles were jelly. Her endlessly repeated “That’s interesting” when Philip showed her how to palm dice, when Simon taught her the Hebrew prayer for bread, when Boil demonstrated how to scrub rust off a breastplate. Her short nose at first getting brown under the sun, and then getting freckled. I don’t know if she bribed her maid and her guards or just swore them to secrecy, but she spent her days marching in the hot sun beside the wagon that was supposed to carry her in isolated comfort, and more than half her nights in my tent, where my friends didn’t even realize she was their legate’s wife. Once a week she put on silk and ate dinner with the Emperor, and she looked elegant enough to put on a temple plinth and sacrifice goats to—but the rest of the time in her wool dress and sturdy sandals she could have been any other muddy capable woman who followed her man to the legions. I’d heard stories of goddesses who walked the earth in disguise, and no one knew them for who they were either. Maybe my girl had a little goddess in her.

I remember laughing at her. At the face she made when she first tasted barley soup boiled over a cook-fire in a helmet; at the time she performed a flawless set of legion parade maneuvers around the empty tent wearing nothing but that same helmet and a very serious expression. I remember admiring her too—for the uncomplaining way she bound up her blistered feet until they toughened to the marching; for all the times she loaded up her luxurious wagon with camp followers and their children so they could cross a ford in safety instead of struggling against the currents; for the fight she picked with the Tenth’s senior medicus. The legion’s doctors didn’t like treating the legionary women or their children—“They aren’t supposed to be here anyway; we’re not wasting medical supplies on them!” Sabina reduced the senior medicus to a quivering heap and reported him to Hadrian for a flogging. After that, the legion women and their children got treated for fevers and broken bones just like the soldiers.

I remember making love to Sabina under the blankets of my bedroll in the darkness of the tent, trying to keep quiet, not always succeeding. Philip once threatened to throw a bucket of water over the pair of us so he could get some sleep. “Go fuck a horse,” Sabina advised him politely through the dark, and I laughed at that too, so hard I nearly died.