“Vix, no,” Boil protested when I slung the belt and insignia of an optio at him across the little folding table where I now handled my century’s papers. “Bugger you, I don’t want to be optio! Everyone hates those weedy toads. Why do you have to pick on me?”

“Because you’re too stupid to cheat me, too cheerful to hate me, and too big to be pushed around,” I said briskly. “Just what I need. And it’s ‘Centurion’ now, you clod-pole. Get out of here and start checking the men’s weapons. I want a full report by morning of what’s missing.”

“All the luck,” Boil muttered, his broad Gallic face red as his cloak, and tramped out. None of my contubernium was particularly happy about my promotion, not after I made sure they all ended up in my new century. But I didn’t care if they were happy. I’d dreamed for years of having my own command, and I knew just what kind of men I wanted. I begged, I borrowed, I traded, I bribed the other centurions to get the best men out of their centuries and into mine before we had to march. “I’ll give you a week’s pay if I can have that big African of yours—what’s his name?”

“Africanus, and I’m not giving him to you. He’s worth three legionaries all on his own in a fight!”

“Is he worth three weeks’ pay? Think about it.”

“Aren’t you the go-getter,” the other centurions said sourly. They didn’t like me—I’d been passed straight up to the first cohort, when they’d had to claw their way up. Hard men, career men, most of them ten and twenty years my senior. I was the most junior of the lot, and I got every unpleasant duty they could shove on me, but I didn’t care. From the moment the three cohorts of men from the Tenth Fidelis started the long march from Mog to join the growing band of legions in the east, I felt a joyous, insistent little pulse inside, as if every beat that pumped blood through my body was thumping to the rhythm of now, now, now.