The whole century stood attention around Julius’s grave and one by one poured wine from their skins into the earth. Good men. They might not like me, but they liked my reputation, they liked bragging up their latest feats to the other soldiers, and they boasted there wasn’t a century in the whole Tenth who could do what we did. Whether they were lumped turtle formation in one vast shielded square or whipping through a phalanx of Mesopotamian soldiers in forty separate screaming pairs, there didn’t seem to be a fight my men could lose that year. They were the tip of the spear; they were hardness; they were death. Mesopotamia fell. I jumped up another rank.

Now, now, now.

We wintered in Antioch again at the end of that year. “Thank God,” Mirah said, having somehow managed to find us a tiny room of our own on the ground floor of a tall tenement building in the western quarter of the city. “Not that I don’t like a little adventure, and it is lovely seeing all this beautiful countryside before you and your locust band of soldiers move through and destroy it, but I’ll be happy to give birth to this baby in a bed and not a wagon.”

“You’re bigger this time around, aren’t you? Well, not you,” I said hastily as my wife’s eyes shot daggers. “You’re slim as ever—look at those ankles! Just the baby, I mean. It’s bigger.” Mirah had quickened again when Dinah turned a year old, but I didn’t mind. Our daughter wasn’t much trouble: a placid baby who slept soundly at night and was even now cooing to herself and crawling around the hard-packed dirt floor with a crude little wooden horse Antinous had carved for her. At least I thought it was a horse. I’d been teaching him how to handle a knife and he might know how to stab someone with it, but he couldn’t whittle worth a damn. He sat frowning in the corner now, hacking bits of wood off a crude block. “What’s that going to be?” I asked him, sinking down on the edge of the bed. I’d spent so many months in bedrolls on hard ground, a mattress felt too soft for sleeping.

“Don’t know.” He turned the block over, optimistic. “I could make blocks, for the new baby?”

“You’re a gem, Antinous.” Mirah massaged the bulk under her apron. “Ooof, he’s kicking like a mule.”

“Sounds like it hurts.” I winced.

“Not a bit; it’s thrilling. Just means the baby will be big and strong.” She patted her stomach again, proudly. “Hannibal might be a good name for this one.”

“I thought I’d name him after Trajan,” I suggested. “Or one of his names, anyway. Marcus Ulpius Trajan—”