In truth, I wasn’t Trajan’s pet because I was special, or because I was unusual, or even because he liked my looks. I just happened to be the type he liked to have around him: an energetic young soldier who wanted nothing more out of life than a fast hard march and a fast hard fight at the end of it. The Emperor had hundreds of favorites like me, scattered through the legions and the Praetorians and the Empire. Even now I can always spot a Trajan man—an alertness in the eyes, a spring in the step, even now that we’re all mostly old and gray. A little extra shine that came from having served such an emperor.

And now he’d given me a month’s leave.

I stood in the shadow of the gate as I left the palace grounds and took a moment to look out over the teeming city. Last night I’d been too tired from the road, too eager for a meal and a friend’s company to pay attention to my homecoming, and this morning my head had been pounding too hard to absorb the city’s sights, but now I paused to take a look around the raucous streets. The buildings crowded me in, crammed so close together and leaning over the street—strange, after so many years of Germania’s muddy tracks and tree-choked horizons. I was sweating freely under a brass coin of a sun, and that was strange too. Midsummer in Mog was wet.

I hadn’t exactly missed Rome during my ten years in Germania, but now I took a deep hungry whiff of city air. “Hello, you old bitch.” I smelled pitch and ale and spiced meat, unwashed bodies and perfume and life.

“What’s that smell?” said the courier.

“She does stink, doesn’t she?” I said, cheerful. “Nowhere like it. I love this city.”

“Too hot,” the courier complained, and soon tramped off to find himself an inn. “Coming?” he called over his shoulder.

“No, I’ve got a call to pay.”

An old freedwoman in a headscarf answered my knock at her door, looking me dubiously up and down. “Yes, sir?”

I doffed my helmet, introducing myself, and halfway through my explanation her walnut face split in a semitoothless smile. “Of course, of course!” Ushering me into a tiled entry hall. “He’s been expecting you, just wait here—”