Twenty years apart. Same legion, same province. He served when the glorious Second Augusta were the crack troops in the British invasion force. Vespasian was his commander—that was how they met. I served in the Second at Isca, at the time when Paulinus the British governor decided to invade Mona—Druids’ Island—to clear out that rats’ nest of troublemakers once and for all. Paulinus left us at Isca, guarding his back, but was accompanied by our commandant among his advisory corps. We were stuck therefore with an incompetent Camp Prefect named Poenius Postumus, who called Queen Boudicca’s Revolt “just a local tiff.” When the governor’s frantic orders arrived informing this halfwit that the Iceni had swept a bloody swathe all through the south, instead of haring off to join the beleaguered field army, either from terror or further misjudgement Postumus refused to march out. I served in our legion when its glorious name stank.

“Not your fault!” remarked my new colleague gently, reading my mind.

I said nothing.

After the rebels were annihilated and the truth came out, our peabrained Camp Prefect fell on his sword. We made sure of that. But first he had forced us to abandon twenty thousand comrades in open country with no supplies and nowhere to retreat, facing two hundred thousand screaming Celts. Eighty thousand civilians had been massacred while we polished our studs in barracks. We might have lost all four British legions. We might have lost the governor. We might have lost the province.

If a Roman province had fallen, in a native rebellion, led by a mere woman, the whole Empire might have blown away. It could have been the end of Rome. That was the kind of “local tiff” the British rebellion was.

Afterwards we witnessed what the barbarians had done. We saw Camulodunum, where the huddled townsfolk had melted in each other’s arms during a four-day inferno at the Temple of Claudius. We choked in the black dust of Verulamium and Londinium. We cut down the crucified settlers at their lonely country villas; we flung earth on the burned skeletons of their strangled slaves. We stared in shock and horror at mutilated women hanging like crimson rags from the trees in the pagan groves. I was twenty years old.

That was why, when I could, I left the army. It took five years to arrange, but I had never had second thoughts. I worked for myself. Never again would I entrust myself to orders from a man of such criminal ineptitude. Never again would I be part of the establishment that foists such fools into positions of command.

Flavius Hilaris was still watching me in my reverie.