“My men don’t.” I didn’t allow it, and Trajan discouraged it too. “I want a province capable of paying decent taxes at the end of all this,” was the way he put it when he told his legates to keep their soldiers under control.

“I got a letter from Uncle Simon today,” Mirah was saying, drawing a circle on my bare chest with her finger. “He got his grant of land in Judaea—he says he’s moving his family there by the end of the year.”

“Bad time for it,” I said. There had been a Jewish revolt in Cyrene, or maybe it was Cyrenaica. Trajan had dispatched my old commander Quietus and his cavalry back to Mesopotamia to keep order there, before the revolt spread.

“Judaea outlasts everything.” Her head twisted on my shoulder as she looked at me through the dark. “Maybe we should settle there.”

“What?” I laughed.

“You’re not a common soldier anymore, tied to the Tenth. Centurions are always being transferred between legions. Maybe when your term as First Spear is done, and the invasion is over”—I could almost hear her little nose wrinkling—“you could angle for a posting in Judaea. Settle among our own people.”

“My people are in Britannia,” I pointed out. “About as far from Judaea as it’s possible to get.”

“Judaea is the real home of every Jew.” Firmly. “Us too. I’d like the girls to see it. It’s all very well to haul them around in reed baskets behind an army when they’re babies, but they should grow up somewhere proper and settled.”

“Later.” I closed my eyes, yawning. “When we finish with Parthia. I go back to Ctesiphon tomorrow…”

Did I really want to finish with Parthia, though? Did my Emperor? I remember something Trajan said to me one fine summer evening on the deck of a boat, shortly after the capture of Ctesiphon. I’d made a report to him on the rumored Jewish unrest in Cyprus, standing in my armor before his desk. It was supposed to be a simple pleasure cruise down the Tigris, a few days of sunlit leisure for the man who had conquered three new provinces, but Trajan was already bored with leisure. He’d dragged his desk out onto the deck and sat surrounded by scrolls and jotting notes on a slate. “We’ll need to raise the ferry charges across the Tigris for camels and horses,” he said absently when I paused. “Do you have a report from Quietus about the Jews in Cyprus?”

“Rumors of a revolt, Caesar. Roman citizens murdered, the usual whispers.”

“What whispers?”

“That the Jews eat their victims, make belts out of their guts, and tan their skins to wear for cloaks.”

“What do you make of it?” Trajan squinted at a slate, then held it up closer. “Gods’ bones, my eyes are going—”