Demetra’s boy, growing up in this sinkhole looking like her? He’d be dancing for dirty old men and bleeding from the arse by the time he was ten years old. I remembered the bald man who had offered me oysters and then tried to bugger me; how he’d screamed when I broke his fingers and ran.

Demetra’s little boy looked up at me for the first time, tentatively.

He’s not yours, something in my head whispered. Not your blood, not your responsibility. My responsibility had died. I’d gotten away clean.

The boy pointed his chubby finger at the maned pelt over my head. “Yion!” he crowed. “Yion!”

“Oh, fuck,” I said, and grabbed him out of that dirty cow’s arms.

“Hey!” she squawked.

“Hands off,” I snarled. “He’s coming with me.”

“What, you’re going to raise him? You with the legion and all?”

No, I was not bloody well going to raise him. What did I know about raising children? I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I just wasn’t leaving him here. He was a very solid little weight in my arms, not crying at all.

“Yion,” he said, petting the tawny pelt over my head as I carried him out of that dingy greasy room.

“Yion,” I agreed, swinging him around so he could ride my back. He crowed with delight, clinging to the lion’s mane. “You aren’t much trouble, are you? I can pay some nice family to look after you. Drop in every few months to check in.”

“Yion,” he shouted happily.

“Oh, fuck,” I said again, and started up the street.

PART III

PARTHIA

CHAPTER 17

Summer A. D. 113

TITUS

“Ennia!” Titus looked around for his housekeeper. “Ennia, my graceful Terpsichorean nymph of the matchless gaze—”

“Never mind the pretty words, Dominus.” His skinny black-haired freedwoman crossed her arms over her breasts. “What do you need?”

“Dinner for six, as soon as you can see it ready. I will be in your debt forever.”

“Six?” Her gaze went from Titus to the armored figure with the dusty cloak and dustier russet hair, looming large and out of place in the narrow entry hall. The passage of three or four years had hardly changed Vix at all: a little browner, a little tougher, a little more weathered from the sun, but the same. “There’s more of him coming?” Ennia asked unenthusiastically.

“No, just him, but he eats enough for five.”

“Give me an hour.” She disappeared toward the little kitchen, yelling for the slaves.

Vix was gazing around the small atrium: blue-tiled, modestly vaulted, narrow enough to cross in a few strides. “Can’t a quaestor’s salary buy something bigger than this? I thought you had a family villa taking up half the Palatine Hill.”