Free The Sacrifice Stone by Elizabeth Harris Page A

would appear in his own eyes when he recalled the Emperor’s vast grief when the youth drowned in the river Nilus. Some grief it was, too; only an emperor has the wherewithal to build a city in memory of his beloved, and that’s what Hadrian did. There would be no point in trying to distract Father at this stage in his monologue: I’d resign myself and listen patiently while he described how the poor old Emperor’s life degenerated into illness and various unspecified diseases, and he’d drag up the soldiers’ speculation that Hadrian had grown his beard not to cover his scars but to conceal the ravages of sickness that were eating into his face.
    So there I was twenty-three years later on the wall my father had helped to build — well, I don’t suppose he ever got his hands dirty, being rather too senior for that by then — and, instead of being able to draw on stirring tales of Father’s exploits, I’d stand up there in that dramatic landscape and picture a grieving old man scratching at his beard. Such is life — I suppose it was quite funny, really.
    My father ended his military career up on the wall, I began mine. A man is, I suppose, most susceptible to impressions in his late teens and early twenties, which is perhaps why the things that happened to me there remain so vivid in my mind. I don’t know, though — they’d surely have been indelible whenever they happened. I learned to stand up for myself, to labour all day without complaint, to do my appointed tasks with such thoroughness that I could take a real pride in them. And all of this in a countryside so different from any I’d known before, one so wild, so desolately beautiful that, once I’d stopped moaning about the rain and the cold, I grew to love it as much as the small sun-bathed fields and vineyards of childhood.
    I made my first true friends, and I met my first love. I was initiated into a new religion — Mithras the Unconquered was universally beloved throughout the army, and, once he had accepted my allegiance, I began to see why. I made my one bitter enemy — the only one I know about, anyway — and understood what it is to be hated and cursed. Or I thought I did: as it turned out, I hadn’t experienced the half of it. Then.
    But enough of that. I was speaking of my friends and my first love, and in fact the one led to the other — in the greater freedom earned by advancing in my career, I started going out with my friends to the small settlement that had grown up around the fort, and we would spend our nights of leave in the ways you’d expect of soldiers far from home and starved of female company. Yes, of course I visited the whores — most of us did. If you were lucky, you could get a girl who made you laugh as well as satisfying your lust. If you were really lucky, you’d get one who fleetingly made you think she was enjoying it as much as you were.
    But I didn’t meet Carmandua in a brothel; I’m quite sure her father and her brothers would have cut her throat if they’d even found her lurking in the street outside. Not that she ever would, she had better things to do with her time, as she used to say. I met her when I was in my mid twenties, when promotion had shot me up to the dizzy heights of a senior post on the commander’s staff and I no longer went out carousing on my rare leaves. She came from an important local family, and every last one of them let me know from the start that I was barely good enough for her. Gods, they were a touchy lot, those Brigantes, we needed all the diplomatic skills drilled into us to cope with them.
    Roman legionaries weren’t allowed to marry until discharge, but since that was still thirteen years off when Carmandua decided she wanted to be a bride, we went through the form of ceremony used by her own people. I found that I was just as firmly married as if the Emperor Antoninus Pius himself had ordained it.
    It was a year or so after we were married that I had my trouble. Perhaps