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command.
    ‘Go now, and prove yourselves first with this one assignment. And then, next spring, we will march against the traitors.’

C HAPTER S IX
    Rome, 1 August AD 69
Geminus
    DISMISSED, I HAD no further duties until I took command of the watch at dusk.
    Outside, the rain had eased; we were greeted by grey skies, but the gods were no longer weeping. My fellow Guards surged in a pack towards the barracks on the Field of Mars at the back of the Quirinal hill. All the chatter was of Vespasian’s eight legions and where and how they might be beaten, which was pointless, because we all knew that even if they’d set off on the first day of July with their oaths to Vespasian still hot in their throats, it would take them half a year to reach Rome and they’d get here in the middle of winter when nobody fights.
    I didn’t want to hear a hundred men explaining the unlikely detail of how they’d smash the enemy lines single-handed, so I drew back from the rest to take short cuts that turned out to be long cuts, but meant that I was alone and nobody wasasking questions, and I was free to learn my way around Rome again.
    I grew up here. Rome was my birthplace and my home, but I joined the legions when I was nineteen and that was twelve years ago and I’d only been back once, just before the fire, and that disaster had changed everything.
    We lost four out of fourteen districts and Nero’s building programme afterwards was as radical as any we’d seen. He set statues where once were eighteen-storey slums, and slums where once were temples, so that there were areas of the city that felt completely alien to me as I walked through them. Only the seven hills were unchanged; their outline was – is – moulded on my soul.
    That day, with the lead lottery done, I came down the Capitol and made my way through the forum. From there, I turned left up the Quirinal, at least notionally heading in the direction of the Guards’ barracks.
    This hill is not like the Palatine, home to senators and equestrians and merchants who have too much gold and need to show it off. The Quirinal is a thrifty place that offers residence to impecunious senators, bad gamblers, and the recently arrived who have not yet carved a place for themselves elsewhere.
    I like it there; I always have. Free of my colleagues and their inane battle fantasies, I walked faster up the hill.
    The Quirinal is like the rest of Rome in that money and status buys you height. As the hill rose, shabby shop fronts gave way to marginally more prosperous dwellings. Villas lined the road, and tucked away to one side halfway up were three parallel streets of small, neat houses funded by the imperial coffers for the widows of fallen generals, and then beyond them the bachelor homes of impecunious but worthy men who had lost their wives: in Rome, few things are left to chance and this proximity was no accident.
    I came toa forked junction and took the left-hand path, which led to one of the widows’ streets.
    Here were flowers outside the doors, and the doors themselves had legion shapes carved on them: a Capricorn, a Taurus, a Thunderbolt. The women did not grieve openly for their lost menfolk, but the signs were there if you knew what to look for.
    I had gone barely ten paces when I heard light footsteps behind me. Six months on campaign and you don’t take these things lightly. I snapped round, blade sighing free.
    ‘Juvens?’
    Marcus Decius Juvens was standing just out of striking distance, a half-smile on his face, his head cocked to one side. He was a good man. I let drop my hand. ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘I saw you go off on your own and wondered why.’
    ‘Why d’you think? Did you hear the Runt saying how he’d disembowel Vespasian and all his armies at a single stroke? Or Arminios swearing on his Germanic gods to stand at the gates of Rome and slaughter anyone who tried to come through after the ides of September? Pointless bloody nonsense.’
    ‘But harmless