“Or my older brother Paulinus; he had some stories from his tribune days. Like the time he got the maps mixed up and marched a whole cohort sixteen miles in the wrong direction…”

“I’m leaving now!”

“Cheer up.” Sabina stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “I’m sure it won’t be that bad.”

TITUS

It was.

“Any advice?” Titus asked his father.

His father stared back. Sympathetic, Titus thought. But unfortunately still just marble. A small hand-sized bust his grandfather had pressed into his pack the day he left to join the Tenth Fidelis. “To keep you on the right path, boy. You’ll do well as long as you remember your father and obey your legate.”

“Anything else?” Titus had asked hopefully.

“Try not to pick up the pox from any German whores.”

Titus rested his chin on his folded arms. Tribunes had their own quarters, as barren or as luxurious as their private allowances would supply, but he wouldn’t have minded sharing. At least it would have given him someone to talk to besides a bust. “‘Obey my legate,’” he told his father. “Not very useful advice. The legate doesn’t even know my name. I haven’t done a thing since I got here but watch clerks file records, and scrape the mud off my boots.”

The trouble, Titus decided, was that tribunes as a whole were utterly useless. The legionaries, now, those stamping swearing creatures with their swagger and their scars and their rough stubbled faces, they were frankly intimidating but undoubtedly useful. There didn’t seem to be anything they couldn’t do, from fighting endless drills to marching endless miles to building endless additions on their crude German fort. Then there were the bustling clerks and quartermasters who apparently found it no strain at all to maintain, in the middle of a dank German forest, a camp large enough to hold three legions at once—useful fellows, no doubt about that. And then there were the centurions, mostly ex-legionaries risen from the ranks, even tougher and more terrifying than the men they commanded, and the prefect of the camp, who was built like a mountain and seemed to know all five thousand or more men in the legion by name, and then there was the legate who did a great deal of frowning and stamping and ordering about. But the tribunes?

“We’re nothing,” he told his father. “A handful of layabouts who are here only because our families bought us our posts. So we’re second to the legate, but everyone hops over us down to the camp prefect and the centurions. What are we good for? Sitting around playing dice and talking about the rain and waiting till we can go home with a stint of service on our records so we can get elected quaestor.”