Free The Sacrifice Stone by Elizabeth Harris

suggested I should consider any other career.
    I went into the Sixth, or Legio VI Victrix, to give the official title. It had been my father’s legion, but don’t go thinking that made life easy for me. Quite the opposite: the son of a senior centurion who turns up as a raw recruit in his father’s old legion has to go through a special sort of hell. Even now, aspects of what I experienced still make me wince. Suffice to say that I endured, and probably emerged the stronger. As they say, what doesn’t break me makes me.
    Legionary recruits sign on for twenty-five years, which I can tell you is an eternity when you’re eighteen. To take our minds off the awful thought of the years stretching ahead, they kept us in a permanent state of exhaustion throughout our basic training. Four months of route marches, running and cross-country exercises with a sixty-pound pack on your back certainly makes you realize how unfit you are. And when they’d finished yelling at us to hurry up, we were letting the others down by being such sluggards, they started on weapons drill and taught us the hand-to-hand fighting that remains the legions’ most effective tactic. They yelled at us over that, too. And they taught us to swim. And how to march six abreast without anyone getting out of step. For the first few weeks with the unit, I can’t even remember crawling into my bed at night.
    The Sixth was based in Britannia, in a fort to the north of that legendary land at a place called Eboracum. Not that I spent much time there — during my advanced training I’d learned camp construction, and I was sent up to work on renovating Hadrian’s Wall.
    Have you ever been to Britannia? The south is quite pleasant — you get some sunshine, although nothing to compare with the Mediterranean — but the north is different. It rains. Sometimes it rains hard, great chill drops that sweep along on the wind and find every niche in your garments. And sometimes it’s a soft rain, more like a fine mist, so gentle that at first you hardly notice it. Then, three hours later, you wonder why your cloak feels so heavy and you realize it’s totally sodden with water. Mind you, a session in the bathhouse is all the more welcome when you’re soaked to the skin, cold and thoroughly miserable — the British may mock us for turning our forts into little Romes, as they say, but we make sure we don’t miss all our home comforts when we’re far away.
    By the time I was up on the wall, any sense that we were pushing the frontiers of the Empire back into wild, unknown territory had all but gone. With one exception — and what an exception it was — my years up there were spent on the reconstruction work going on in the fort at Coriosopitum, which lies a few miles south of the wall. When Hadrian’s great project first got under way, they’d moved the army up from the old forts such as Coriosopitum into new accommodation right on the wall — you can see the sense of that — but later, when they got going on the Antonine Wall, suddenly Coriosopitum was right on the great route north, so we had to restore it. Believe me, sometimes it didn’t feel so much like restoring it as starting all over again.
    My father had been on the wall before me. It was his last posting; he and the Sixth went fresh to Britannia with the Emperor himself, and didn’t my old father love to remind you. When I was little I’d badger him for tales of fighting, of days on the march and nights under the stars, but he’d just go on and on about how wonderful Hadrian had been, how he’d had this wide imaginative plan and brought it off, how nothing daunted him, how he’d improvise and surmount every crisis, etc., etc. Then he’d get going on the personal gossip — gods, he was worse than my mother and her friends when they got their heads together and started running down the neighbours. Father would repeat the old tales about Hadrian’s love for his Greek boy Antinous, and the tears