bureaucratic shorthand. And he could feel something else, something dark and bitter rising in his chest.
He’d given Rome everything. His youth, his health, his father’s legacy. He’d built an intelligence network from nothing, trained men who could move like ghosts through enemy territory, created a shield that had protected this frontier for years. And for what? To be dismissed by a patrician who’d probably never been north of the Wall in his life, who wore his armor like a costume and treated the frontier like a temporary posting on his way to better things.
“Is there anything else, Centurion?” Castor was already moving toward the door, the meeting clearly over in his mind.
Marcus looked down at his maps, at the careful notations marking Pictish war bands and Saxon fleets and Scotti raiders. He thought about the gold that King Nathalan was supposedly offering to anyone who could provide information about Roman defenses. He thought about Corinna, waiting for him in her villa near the frontier, and their son who would grow up with nothing unless Marcus found a way to secure their future.
He thought about loyalty, and what it was worth.
“No, sir,” Marcus said. “Nothing else.”
Castor paused at the door, and for a moment something almost like sympathy crossed his face. “Corvus, I know you take your duties seriously. That’s commendable. But don’t let the frontier make you paranoid. These barbarians aren’t the existential threat you seem to think they are. They’re a nuisance, nothing more.”
Then he was gone, his entourage trailing after him, leaving Marcus alone with his maps and his bitter thoughts.
The wind rattled the shutters. Outside, the Wall stretched away into the grey distance, that massive monument to Roman engineering and Roman power. Two hundred years it had stood. Two hundred years of keeping the barbarians at bay.
But walls, Marcus knew, were only as strong as the men who defended them.
He rolled up his maps slowly, methodically, the way his father had taught him. Everything in its place. Everything according to procedure. That was the Roman way.