It seemed to me that was her problem. To say so achieved nothing, and I had no wish to criticize her father Decimus. No man can ever be entirely to blame for the women in his house. That was something I knew long before I possessed women in my own.

XXV

Flavius Hilaris made arrangements to have me taken west, which I thought decent of him until I grasped what his arrangements were. He sent me round by sea. He owned a town house in the middle of the south coast and an estate with a private summer villa even further west; for passing to and fro between his properties he had acquired a clinker-built Celtic ketch which he jovially called his yacht. This old and robust barnacled hulk was not exactly fit for dreaming in the August sun on Lake Volsinii. It probably seemed a good idea to him, but I made my own arrangements after that.

I was dropped off at Isca. Eighty Roman miles from the mines, but that was good: no point arriving straight off the procurator’s boat, virtually with a standard-bearer proclaiming “procurator’s spy.” I knew Isca. It’s my superstition that it helps to dive into a whirlpool from a rock where your feet feel at home.

There had been military regrouping since my time ten years before. Of the four original British legions, the Fourteenth Gemina were currently held in Europe pending Vespasian’s decision on their future: they had been active in the civil war—on the wrong side. The Ninth Hispana were in mid-transfer north to Eboracum, the Twentieth Valeria had plunged out towards the western mountains, while my old unit the Second Augusta advanced to Glevum, astride the upper reaches of the great Sabrina Estuary. Their present task was pegging down the dark Siluran tribesmen, preparing for the next push west as soon as they felt confident.

Isca without the Second was a ghost town to me. It seemed odd to see our fort again, but odder still to find all the gates open and the granaries stripped, with higgledy-piggledy workshops cluttering the crossroads, and a native magistrate lording over the commander’s house. Behind the fort, as I expected, once the lean-to cabins and shops thinned out there were the smallholdings of those veterans who retired while the Second was still there. Hard luck to take your land grant in order to live near your mates, then watch them march out to a new fort a hundred miles away. Still, intermarriage with the natives would be holding some of them. In this disgusting province, I ruled out any idea that they stayed because they liked the climate or the scenery.

I was relying on the veterans. Relying on the fact they would be here beside the Second’s fort—and the fact that the Second had gone. It seemed likely that if I came offering adventure now, I might find myself a crony with itchy feet.