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usual and lacked the customary draughts, as if, a full year after its construction, someone had finally found and blocked all the gaps in the brickwork. The night-time lamps had burned out long since and the space was darkly empty. Valerius stood a while, feeling the stillness. Asleep, night was his enemy; awake, it became hisfriend. It had taken him a long time to acknowledge it, but recently he had begun to realize how much he enjoyed the anonymity of the dark.
    In a while, brushing his fingertips along the walls, he made his way to the outer door. The night was not like other nights. The crunch of his feet on the corridor’s gravel was muffled, folding in on itself and dying away too soon, and the air smelled clean and sharp so that, when he breathed in deeply, grains of ice formed in the hairs of his nose, and when he let the breath out it made white fog round his head.
    Because it was dark and he was concentrating on finding his way without stumbling and was not keeping his mind in check, a twenty-year-old memory rose from nowhere of a night just like this, with a three-quarter moon hanging low over winter oaks, of himself as a small child, wrapped safe in the folds of his mother’s winter cloak, standing at the borderlands between the wild wood and the horse paddocks, with exactly the same feel of ice crystals forming and melting in his nose. Walking the length of a barracks corridor, he heard his mother’s voice whisper in his ear, showing him the hare that lived on the moon’s surface and was the god’s messenger to her people. He’d screwed up his eyes, staring hard until he saw the outline of the beast sitting side-on to the world. When he found it, his mother’s hands enfolded his and raised them, explaining how to make the salute the dreamers made to the moon so that he would always be able to ask help of that god when he was in need. In the world of the legionary barracks, his arm rose to shoulder height before it hit the wall.
    It was an unforgivable lapse. Cursing aloud, Valerius spun backwards and jammed his shoulders hard against anupright oak beam. Urgently, pressing the back of his head on solid wood and his thumb on his brand, he called the images of Mithras that had been shown him over these last two months: the youth in cap and cape emerging fully formed from solid rock, the corn of his fertility, the serpent and the hound that drank on the bull’s spilled blood. In the stretches of time between heartbeats, Valerius built his god layer by layer in the air before him, manifesting by willpower alone the bull, most worthy of all opponents, to dance and struggle with its captor until the knife stabbed into its throat and a fountain of blood wept onto the earth.
    The images worked, as they always did, slowly and imperfectly. Sweating, Valerius spoke the prayers to Sol Invictus aloud in his mind until they overwhelmed everything else. The power of the god had kept his mother from his dreams since the branding and it banished her now from his waking inattention, destroying every memory, down to the soft husk of her voice in his ears.
    Her voice lasted longest and he had to chant openly not to let her words slide snake-like into his head and heart. He had once believed his mother dead, with his father and sister, and had sworn allegiance to Rome on the strength of it. Later, standing beside her newly slain body on the invasion battlefield, he had watched her soul cross to the otherworld and had tried to follow. His mother had forbidden it, cursing him with continued life. Before Mithras’ intervention, her ghost had returned to him nightly, standing in judgement of his deeds, taunting him with the many different pasts and futures that could have been his had he not chosen to fight for Rome: Valerius the dreamer, Valerius the warrior, Valerius, friend and lover of dreamers and warriors,nightwalker, hound-caller, hare-dreamer, hero of battles. Most often, she brought bright, vivid images of his sister,