I didn’t have to wait long. “Hell’s gates,” I sputtered, fighting off a bear hug. “What happened to you, Simon?” I cast an eye over my former brother-in-arms, the first man to leave my old contubernium in retirement. Simon had grown a full curly beard, his hair was halfway to gray and covered with a cap, and he wore a tasseled cloak in the eastern fashion instead of the breastplate that had so long been a second skin on him. “Where’s the man who taught me to spar with my right hand?”

“Gone forever, and good riddance to him.” Simon dragged me out of the entry hall and into the house. I had a pleasant impression of a sunny open-roofed atrium, no different from any other Roman house, with orange trees in small tubs and broad carved doors leading to other airy rooms. People instantly began flooding through those doors, staring at me curiously.

“Didn’t think I’d see you so soon.” Simon thumped me on the shoulder, still grinning. “You must have just arrived!”

“Boil and Julius and Philip would eat me alive if I let another night pass without checking in on you.” I cast a glance around the growing crowd of people, seeing variations of Simon’s bearded face and dark eyes. “This is all your family?”

“Every one! This is my niece Mirah, that’s her brother Benjamin—” A pretty freckled girl came forward with a little black-haired boy, who Simon promptly tossed in the air. He patted the freckled girl’s cheek, saying something in Hebrew, and then switched back to Latin. “And my brother Isaac, his wife Hadassah, my cousins—” More names, more welcoming faces and words of greeting. I felt oddly wistful as I nodded to one friendly face after another. I wondered what my own sisters looked like: the one I’d seen only as a baby and the other one I’d never seen at all. I wondered if my father’s hair had gone entirely gray yet, or if my brother had grown up looking like me. I sent letters out to my family whenever there was a messenger going to Britannia, and even more rarely I got a crumpled letter back in my mother’s oddly elegant writing: Last I’d heard, life was still serene on their mountaintop, my father busy torturing his garden and teaching my brother how to spar, my sisters lengthening into coltish half-grown girls. Who knew when I’d see any of them again? There was more than a decade left on my term of service. By then, my mother might not be alive to welcome me home with kisses.