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EPILOGUE

Late the next day, in the marching camp behind the battlefield—that was already a mass of corruption you could smell from here, five miles away, and the flocks of carrion birds were like drifting wisps of smoke overhead as they flocked toward it—Artorius spoke quietly to Sarukê.

“I’m glad Filipa has you,” he said. “She needs . . . a true comrade like you badly now.”

The Sarmatian nodded, smiling with fond pride.

“She brave, lord,” she said, and thought before she went on: “But . . . sweet. Tenderhearted. I go back to her now. See if I can get her eat some. Maybe drink a lot. Hold her.”

Tenderhearted? I wouldn’t have said so, not unusually . . . Well, not by our standards, but it’s all what you’re used to, he thought. There were more dead in that battle than the total population of some of the smaller state capitals like Juneau or Helena back . . . back in the twenty-first. Not back home, this is home now.

She strode away with the basket of rations on one arm, an amphora of wine sticking out of one corner and the edge of a round loaf opposite it.

Then his head came up. A courier with sweat-stained clothes, smelling strongly of horse, pushed up to the Praetorians standing in the gateway of the Imperial tent compound. He waved, and Artorius went over to him.

The Praetorians had been in the battle, too; some of the ones here had bandaged minor wounds to show it. There was deep respect in the looks they cast him, behind the stiff drilled discipline.

He took the message cylinder with a nod of thanks and the courier staggered, as if his strings had been cut. They had, the strings of willpower that had kept him focused until now. His horse was lathered and dull eyed too where it stood behind him.

“Serious news, Tribune,” the courier said.

The message he unrolled within was from Paula Atkins, and it was short and in English, hence absolutely secure:


Other bigwig arrived.


That was Imperator Caesar Lucius Aurelius Verus Augustus, the co-emperor, returned from finishing up his campaign against the Parthians.


He and many of entourage ill. Administering antivirals to himself, prognosis good. Others in quarantine. Definitely smallpox.


Then, less formally:

This is a fight I can really get behind, Prof. We’re ready and so are the calves with the shaved tummies. All and sundry being vaccinated.


“Good,” Artorius said grimly.

Smallpox they could do something about, and they’d been making preparations. If it had been measles . . . 

The courier looked at him, gaping.

“Good news indeed.”


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Framed