Julius held his hand up and squinted at it, then the barred door, over and over until the headache began to throb in his left temple. He let his hand fall and closed his eyes to its wasted condition after a month on rations that kept them from death but did little more. What he wouldn’t give for a cold oyster to slip down his throat! He knew it was stupid to torture himself, but his mind produced bright visions of the shells, as real as if they hung before him and as sharp as his sight had been before the fight on Accipiter.

He remembered nothing of that day. As far as his memory told the tale, he had gone from healthy and strong to broken and in pain in a moment, and for the first few days of consciousness he had been filled with rage at what had been taken from him. He had been blind in his left eye for long enough to believe he would never see again, and never be able to use a sword with any degree of skill.

Suetonius had told him that one-eyed men couldn’t be good fighters, and he had already found he was missing things as he reached for them, his hand swiping the air as he failed to judge the distance properly. At least that had come back with his sight, though the shimmering outlines he could see with his left eye infuriated him, making him want to rub the eye clear. His hand rose to do just that again in habit, and he caught himself, knowing it would do no good.

The headache seemed to find another channel in his brain and worked its way into it until that spot throbbed in sympathy with the first. He hoped it would stay there and not go on. The thought of what had begun happening to him was a fear he had barely started to explore, but three times now the pain had swelled into flashing lights that consumed him and he had woken with his lips bitter from yellow bile, lying in his own filth, with Gaditicus holding him down grimly. In the first fit, he had bitten his tongue badly enough that his mouth filled with blood and choked him, but now they had a strip of grimy cloth torn from his tunic to shove between his teeth as he convulsed, blind.

All the red-eyed, stinking soldiers raised their heads at the tread of steps on the narrow rungs from the deck above. Anything unusual was seized upon to break the endless boredom, and even the two who were feverish tried to see, though one fell back, exhausted.

It was the captain, who seemed almost to glow with clean skin and health compared to the men of the Accipiter. He was tall enough to have to duck his head as he entered the cell, accompanied by another man, who carried a sword and a dagger ready to repel a sudden attack.