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predicted that he would soon go on a journey, and on that journey he would be in danger. The danger would not be from without, she had told him with quaking voice, it would be from within.
    Now Callidus laughed out loud as he heard Aquila’s words replaying in his mind, so loud that Paris the cook riding beside him looked around with a question on his face. Callidus was as superstitious as the next man, but he had never been convinced of Aquila’s so-called talent for divination. For Priscilla’s sake he pretended to be awed by the old woman, but her forecasts had never impressed him. And so it was with her latest predictions. Danger, on a journey? He was always going on one journey or another. And in his job when was he not in danger from within? On the strength of that sort of prognostication, Callidus told himself, he could go into business telling fortunes.
    As Callidus and the advance party rode on ahead, the expedition proper was led by anothertroop of ten Vettonian cavalrymen, advancing two-by-two at walking pace on neat Spanish ponies. Each man was equipped with a sheathed spatha , the long Roman cavalry sword, a round shield, a lance, and a quiver of small throwing spears. Behind the horsemen walked Questor Varro’s grim-faced, gray-headed lictor, Lucius Pedius. Wearing a loose white tunic, the former 10th Legion centurion was tanned and fit, with calves like steel and thighs like tree trunks after two decades of military service. A scar down the left side of his neck was a permanent souvenir of that service. The unarmed Pedius bore the questor’s full-size fasces , a bundle of rods surrounding an ax, all bound with red chord, symbol of a magistrate’s ultimate power to punish and to execute. Just two men in all of Syria, Varro and his superior Collega, were endowed with that power. It meant that the fasces was a symbol sufficient to send a shiver down the spine of many a traveler standing at the roadside to let the column pass.
    Pedius was not a happy man. For four years he had fought in General Vespasian’s battles in Galilee, had stormed Jericho, had slogged through the five-month siege of Jerusalem for Titus. Then, the previous December, he had retired at the end of his twenty-year enlistment, glad to leave behind the blood and death of legion life and start a new life with his savings and his retirement bonus. On his discharge he had quickly gone up to Antioch, where, permitted to marry now that he had left the army, he immediately wed Phoebe, a freedwoman and native of the Syrian capital whom he had met and fallen in love with seven years before while serving under General Corbulo. It was then that Questor Varro had offered him a one-year appointment as his lictor.
    The offer had been attractive at the time. A good deal of prestige attached to the post of lictor, and it was not overly demanding. Even the annual tax gathering trip around the province was nothing more than a sociable ramble, with the questor and his staff made the guests of the communities they visited. Pedius had not hesitated to accept the appointment. Little had he known at the time that the questor would within three months be setting off on a journey which would take Pedius back into territory that held many unpleasant memories for him. His new bride had not complained. Phoebe had assured Pedius that he would soon be back with her, and had sent him on his way that morning with a loving kiss and a long embrace. He might even be able to do some good on this mission, she had told him. But as far as Pedius was concerned, the sooner this expedition was over and he was back with his new wife, the happier he would be.
    Directly behind the lictor marched a bare-headed standard-bearer of the 4th Scythica Legion, proudly holding aloft his vexillum , a square cloth banner signifying a legion detachment. On the red cloth was painted the motif ‘COHVIII LEGIVSC’ denoting an element of the 8th Cohort of the 4th Scythica Legion, together with the