“You haven’t gotten slow with age,” I told my father. “But you still can’t garden worth a tribune’s arse.”

He dropped his dagger and I dropped Mirah’s hand. We’d neither of us ever admit it, my father and I, but when we came together in a thunderclap of an embrace, we were both crying.

* * *

It was downright frightening they way my mother and Mirah took to each other. It didn’t start quite smoothly—Mirah was unaccustomedly shy meeting my mother’s dark eyes (anyone who knew my mother’s history would be), and there was a certain awkwardness when Mirah introduced the children. My mother took one look at Antinous and smiled warmly. “How did a lummox like Vix ever sire such a handsome son?”

Mirah looked just a little stiff at that. She stood between Dinah and Chaya, one arm about each, and I could see her arms tighten protectively. Our girls were pretty things, dark-haired and pink-cheeked and dimpled, but it was Antinous everyone noticed first: his carved Bithynian face that broke into such a radiant grin, his lean-muscled height, his curling hair the color of dark honey . . . And Mirah gave a little sigh, month after month, when she saw the evidence that her own belly hadn’t decided yet to produce a boy just as beautiful.

I’d told her it didn’t matter; I wasn’t one of those arses who divorced their wives if they couldn’t pump out heirs. But Mirah wanted to give me a son of my own blood, and she prayed daily to her God asking Him to put a miracle in her belly. I was starting to think it might take a miracle—she’d conceived our two girls easily, one after the other, but Chaya’s birth had come very hard indeed, and my wife hadn’t quickened since.

My mother must have seen the little flicker of disappointment on Mirah’s face, because she turned with all her quiet warmth to the girls and clasped them against her. They were shy with strangers, but she addressed them in fluid Aramaic, and Mirah smiled and in the same language offered the traditional greeting of a daughter to a mother-in-law. My mother had a low, melodious voice that could charm shy children and savage emperors in any language, and soon my daughters forgot their fear and my wife her diffidence, and all four of them were chattering away.

“More than thirty years with your mother,” my father mused. “And I still don’t speak a word of that odd tongue of hers.”

“I’m not so quick at it myself,” I admitted, and we traded quick grins and looked immediately away because we were damned if we were going to cry again.

“Vix!” Mirah exclaimed, switching out of Aramaic. “No wonder our girls both turned out dark. They look like their grandmother!”