A land in two colors: the flat sand of desert blushing into green beside the rivers; rocks and dunes turning to grassy pastures where goats grazed and nomad shepherds hastily collapsed their tents at the sight of the Roman eagles. A thousand tributaries threaded the land between the rivers, and our feet squelched from dawn to dusk as we crossed one ford after another. Trajan crossed every ford and bridge on foot beside us, bawling out bawdy marching songs, and I cuffed tears from my eyes to see him, so strong and sturdy at more than sixty years of age, making us younger men speed our steps, his iron-gray head bare under the sun. A good portion of the army was cuffing their eyes right along with me. There is no more sentimental creature in the world than the average Roman foot soldier.

We trapped Mesopotamia in a vast fork that year, Lusius Quietus moving east and the Emperor west. I was on permanent loan to Quietus now; he liked my fast-marching men who could be counted on to keep up with his cavalry and could buttress an attack with one hard smash of a charge or lie in wait in the thick of night to jump out of the dark with screams and steel. Hard fights and heady days—this war was wine, it was song, it was a woman but with none of the complications.

We lost Julius that summer in a night attack. I’d swept up a score of men to chase after what was left of a Mesopotamian cohort after we’d shattered their camp in the dead of night, and when I returned I found Julius lying on his back with a broken spear in his side and his eyes reflecting the moon. I wept, and Boil howled as he wrenched the spear from Julius’s side, and I held my optio as he beat his big fists against my shoulders in helpless rage. The two of us dug a grave for Julius with our own hands, ordering the other men back when they tried to help. We laid Julius in the fertile black earth on the bank of the Euphrates, and I buried him with two more campaign tokens that I stripped off my own breastplate in mark of the two enemies he’d taken down before the spear took his life. One of my best scouts was a stonemason’s son, and I had him carve a stone with Julius’s name. “Carve in that he was a descendant of the noble Julius Caesar.”

“Was he?” My scout looked skeptical.

“He was.”