“If it were that easy to cut off their water, we’d have done it already.” Hadrian began shaking his head before Titus was even finished. “It won’t work.”

“It will work,” Titus found himself venturing to his own surprise. “We know they don’t have a water supply up there, not one that will supply the whole city. They rely on those pipes.”

“Boy’s right,” one of the engineers grunted. “This place your legionary found, Tribune—he’s sure he’s seen where the pipes feed out? It’s not on our maps.”

“You see?” Hadrian dismissed. “If they were accessible, we would have known.”

“Not necessarily; the spot’s hidden. They took good care to keep it off our maps.” Titus edged forward, pointing to the maps. “Here, let me show you…”

More muttering, more arguments and speculation and pessimistic grumbles, but the Emperor’s optimism had already risen to fill the tent. He was making plans now, striding up and down in his battered armor, arguing with his officers, and Titus was content to drift back to the back of the throng. Unnoticed, just as he liked it.

Perhaps not quite unnoticed.

“You should have come to me with your notion, Tribune.” Hadrian’s voice sounded at Titus’s shoulder, and it was distinctly cool.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Titus said. “I thought—I thought I might just get shot down, so why bother making you look a fool.”

“But instead you look very clever. Doubtless what you wanted.”

“No, sir… I don’t want much of anything. Just to get along in this world.”

Hadrian cast him a disbelieving glance and moved off. “Caesar, perhaps I can draw your attention here on the map—my tribune and I had discussed the idea before, analyzing the weakness—”

No one ever believes me when I say I don’t want much from the world, Titus thought. Hadrian, who wanted to rise to consul or even beyond… the Emperor, who wanted to conquer the whole world… Vix, who wanted his own army to help do it… Sabina, who wouldn’t be content until she’d crossed every sea and horizon the earth had to offer. So many movers and shakers, Titus thought, and in the middle of all those grand ambitions, me. With no ambitions at all.

Except maybe to acquire a nickname someday besides “the fellow who quotes.”

“Tribune,” Trajan said at last, tugging on his gauntlets, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, to be sure. Any epigrams for the occasion?”

“‘My tongue is palsied,’” Titus found himself quoting. “‘Subtly hid fire creeps me through from limb to limb.’ Catullus said it about a woman, Caesar, but that’s how nervous I was trying to approach this tent.”

Trajan laughed, giving Titus’s shoulder a thump of Imperial approval that buckled his knees, and his retinue were quick to laugh with him—though Hadrian gave only a token shadow of a smile.

VIX