“Let’s see if they taught you anything about grappling.” I lunged and took my wife around the waist. She shrieked and pummeled at my shoulders, and Antinous came in on her side and started in on my ribs with his little fists. “Two against one?” I yelped. “No fair!”

Mirah giggled as I dropped her. “All right, all right, enough rough-housing. Go wash up, both of you, you’re all over dust!”

“Better listen to her,” I told Antinous, man to man.

“Women,” he agreed sagely, and dashed for the water basin.

Scrubbed and clean, I took my place at the small table with Antinous on my other side as Mirah covered her head and began the first of the Shabbat prayers. The candles cast friendly yellow circles of light over the table, softening the rough wattle of the wall behind, giving a soft brilliance to Mirah’s eyes as she intoned the old, old words. I was learning to follow the Hebrew now, and so was Antinous. A Briton, a Greek, and a Jew, all saying Shabbat prayers around the table… I forked slabs of roast lamb onto the various plates when prayers were done, and Mirah ate heartily. No patrician nibbling for her. From time to time I saw her touch her rounding belly, saw her look at a gobbling Antinous and imagine how our boy would look at seven years old. I hooked my arm over the back of my chair and sipped at my mug of beer, looking around and liking what I saw. My table. My food. My wife. A boy who had somehow become my son. All in my home, earned by my sword.

I liked that.

Though even through that busy peaceful winter, I still heard the thrum in my blood: now, now, now.

We marched on Armenia in the spring, and then we took it. We took it? Trajan took it. Mountainous country, the peaks steeper and stonier than the ones I’d seen in Dacia, falling to flat green lowlands. No tangy pines like I remembered around Old Sarm; just rushing rivers and narrow mountain passes hedged by rocky cliffs. Trajan swept through those passes with eighty thousand men, and at Elegeia I watched him hold court as one Armenian prince after another came to bend the knee and offer him fealty. One of the princes handed his diadem over with one of those complacent smirks you just itch to slap off with an open palm, fully expecting Trajan to put the crown back on his head with a nice little speech, but Trajan didn’t. He kicked the prince out, and I heard him protesting all the way down the hall outside, wanting to know what he’d done wrong. I could have told him: Trajan hated smirkers. He tossed the diadem to a steward and told him to melt it down for the jewels.