There was a battle late that year, a proper one outside Ctesiphon. The kind of battle I’d dreamed of when I was a boy, rank upon rank of soldiers lined up behind their shields, unbending, unbreaking, the wicked javelin points glistening in the sun. Trajan led us himself, and I saw his magnificent gray head from a distance and heard his Praetorians begging him to wear his helmet. I saw my men taut and eager and primed, and touched the amulet around my neck to mutter a quick prayer to the god of war, who in my mind’s eye still looked like my father. I muttered another prayer to Mirah’s god—the more divine protection before a fight, the better—and then I kicked off my horse and joined the line to fight on foot. I killed six or seven men that day, and those Parthians might part their hair with scented oils and paint kohl around their eyes, but they were savage fighters. I got pressed badly between three men who’d seen me shouting orders and figured that they would crumple my men by taking out their leader. Idiots, I thought irritably, my men would carry this fight straight on over my corpse. But the Parthians didn’t know that, and they pressed around me and I spitted one and thumped my shield boss into a second, but the third would have buried his curved sword in my neck if Philip on my right arm hadn’t whipped his javelin through the man’s throat. I saw the man look down at the bloody spearhead that had cored his Adam’s apple as he crumpled to the trampled ground, and I gave Philip one of those wordless panting battlefield nods that have more thanks in them than an hour of flowery speeches. He nodded back, and then he screamed because another curved Parthian sword had found the gap between his breastplate and backplate, and Philip was dead before the scream choked off in his throat. I screamed back, and everything slipped sideways at that point and later Boil had to tell me three times that the enemy fled—that we won. We won, or so I was told. My hands were gloved in blood up to the elbow after that battle, from hacking apart the Parthian who’d killed Philip, and that was when the men in the Tenth started calling me Vercingetorix the Red.

Another series of lightning-fast marches once the year turned—how many miles of the Empire had I marched? More night marches, more scrappy little fights in squelching marshlands or arid desert sands. Not nearly enough nights in Antioch with Mirah. I came home after a few months’ absence, and little Chaya had no idea who I was. She cried and hid her face in her mother’s neck at the sight of me in my tall helmet.

“She’ll get to know you again,” Mirah told me.