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that he was only capable of dry retching.
    John had a damp cloth and gently wiped Vitas’s face.
    It was an odd sensation for Vitas, to be cared for as if he were a child. More fragments of memory returned. Vitas had not been alone during the fever. He’d woken occasionally, dimly aware of that same damp cloth during the worst of it.
    “That was you,” Vitas said. He struggled again to his feet. “The blanket. Lifting me onto the deck. With me all through the fever.”
    John nodded.
    Vitas wanted to ask if John knew anything about the scroll, but caution tempered him. Perhaps what was inside the scroll was too valuable to let anyone know of it. Vitas, after all, had no reason to trust this Jew. The man was a stranger to him; all Vitas knew was that the Jew had defied Nero and had once been exiled for it.
    Vitas tried a step and nearly fell.
    John reached to steady him, but Vitas pushed away his hand. “Enough. I am well now.”
    The gray-haired man appeared to take no offense. “Of course.”
    Vitas moved a step past him. The search for the scroll could wait. First, he needed to find the captain.
    Vitas glanced around the deck. The ship was a corbita, a common merchant ship. Over a hundred feet long, if the ship was going to Alexandria, it would be carrying exports from Rome. In Alexandria, it would pick up grain for its return. But perhaps not for months. Too soon the winter winds would stop all travel back across the Mediterranean.
    Vitas could not wait months. He knew the commander of the legion stationed in Sicily. News of events in Rome would not have reached Sicily yet, and Vitas could plead his case to the commander. Sicily was far enough from Rome to be safe, yet close enough that he could return to Rome within days, not weeks or months.
    Vitas surveyed the crew, searching unsuccessfully for the captain. There were a dozen crew members in sight, engaged in the various activities necessary for sailing a ship this size. Vitas had spent months on similar ships, transporting his soldiers to Britannia and back to Italy, so the activities were familiar to him.
    There was the gubernator —the pilot—guiding the ship with the tiller bar that controlled the enormous steering bars on each quarter. A couple of crewmen were adjusting the lines of the huge square rig, the mainsail. Another couple worked the foresail. Several more were engaged in the tedious, unending task of bailing buckets of bilge water up from the hold. At the far end, the ship’s carpenter and two assistants moved two heavy beams of lumber. Beside the carpenter, on the floor of the deck, was a large triangular frame of wood, with tools scattered beside it. It looked as if the carpenter had set aside that task to move the beams.
    Vitas frowned.
    No passengers.
    Without fail, merchant ships carried passengers and their servants, men and women who would spend idle time in card games, dice, or commenting on the crew around them. A ship this size could be expected to have dozens of passengers.
    None.
    Vitas knew from experience that passengers would not be hidden below decks. The only quarters there belonged to the captain. They’d be on the deck, in or near tents that their servants pitched and maintained for them.
    No passengers.
    He frowned again, looking more closely at the carpenter and his assistants. It appeared to Vitas that they were lashing together the two beams, forming the shape of a cross.
    This was confirmed moments later when all three men strained to set the cross upright. They leaned it against the spar of the mainsail. All the rest of the crew stopped work. The exchanged glances among them were obvious.
    And chilling.

    “As a Jew, I’m sure you are aware of the Roman method of ruling the provinces,” Damian told his captive in the hillside olive grove.
    Damian sat on the edge of the lower half of the olive press, his feet dangling just above the ground. This half was a huge horizontal disk of stone, flat on the ground, like a wheel