“I am now officially old, if my firstborn has given me grandchildren,” my mother announced with a smile. She was really only fifty or so, and barely looked it: a tall woman with threads of silver through dark hair, and in her red linen gown and tooled sandals she had the same serene elegance I remembered from the days she’d worn silks and pearls. She had worn silks and pearls, my mother, and yet she’d ended up here in this cozy villa on a hilltop in Britannia. Never mind how; I’ll tell that story another time.

The conversation had changed to Aramaic again, and Antinous was chiming in now, warming cups of wine for Mirah and my mother so they wouldn’t have to get up. “I see you’ve raised this boy well, Mirah.” My mother approved as Antinous served her. “Even though you’re clearly far too young to have borne him! Tell me . . . ”

“Our women want to chatter,” my father announced. “Let them.”

We went wandering, my father and I. Past the garden and up the slope, to another wooded hill thick with flowers. “Apple trees,” he said, ducking under a branch. “Blooming very late this year—we had a long winter. The fruit isn’t much, not this far north, but I still walk here every morning with the dogs.”

“When did you finally lose that old three-legged bitch of yours?”

“God love her, she lasted a long time. These are all her descendants. Grandpups, I suppose.” Three dogs frisked at his heels: two curly-haired, one sleek and black. “Maybe your boy would like a puppy? We’ve got a new litter.”

“He’d love that. He’s always collecting animals. Mirah keeps telling him she’s not keeping a menagerie, but it doesn’t stop him.”

We walked in silence a little ways, trading glances now and then, and we both grinned when we noticed I was walking just like him: hands clasped behind me at the small of my back. He was as gnarled as a badger now, my father, his shoulders bent but still burly. He’d never been sure of his age, but he had to be sixty at least, and unlike my mother, he looked older than his years. Well, he’d lived hard. The last few decades might have been easy, but the ones before hadn’t been. The ones in Rome, full of arena fights and blood, chains and whips and sand.

I showed him my campaign tokens; told a few stories of my campaigns in Dacia and Parthia. He told me of my younger brother and my three sisters; all grown now, living with families of their own in Vindolanda. “Your brother’s a stonemason. Never wanted the sword, not the way you did.” Another flick of a grin. “They none of them gave me trouble the way you did.”

“I turned out all right, didn’t I?”