Free Master and God by Lindsey Davis

and trampling on the public’s toes.
    ‘Done?’ Gaius Vinius took a snap decision: ‘Not enough, I’m afraid. I pulled a priest out of a burning temple; maybe a watching god was grateful. Otherwise, all I can offer is that I won the civic crown.’
    The Guard snapped to attention. ‘That we like!’
    Vinius tapped his face to illustrate his tale. Being ugly would help. Most of these big brutes were seamed with old wounds like crumpled laundry.
    With genuine modesty, he never normally discussed it. People knew; he just left it at that. He would rather have kept his full eyesight and not had a cheekful of scars that got cut open again every time a barber shaved him. But if there was one moment in his life when he needed to assert the honour he had won, this was it. The civic crown was a wreath of oak leaves, awarded for saving the life of a comrade in great danger. It was awarded very rarely indeed.
    Vinius explained how he had been in the Twentieth legion in Britain, a province which he was careful not to criticise in case his interrogator had served there in some fondly remembered youth; the Praetorian was not old enough to have jollied around the south beating up hill forts under the young Vespasian, but he could well have fought Queen Boudicca under Nero. Vinius had been in Britain later, when Julius Agricola was governor, pressing into new territory to the west and north. Annoyed by Roman expansion, a tribe called the Ordovices had ambushed parties of troops. On arrival in his province, where he had served before, Agricola wasted no time on familiarisation but launched a surprise attack to write the Ordovices out of history.
    ‘He did it too – annihilation. They won’t resist us again: they won’t be there. When the missiles started coming, I shoved a tribune out of the way. It was how I lost the eye. I failed to jump fast enough. I took the spear in the face.’
    ‘Bit of luck, for you?’ suggested the Guard. That was how these Praetorian idiots saw it. Even getting yourself half killed was clever, so long as you emerged with a bauble to show off on your tombstone when the time came. Some of the bastards had a torque, bracelets and nine breastplate disks. They went on parade so highly decorated they glistened with gold like girls.
    ‘You just do what you have to,’ murmured Vinius.
    ‘Now you’re talking our language.’
    That was it, then. He just had to bluff, like his father boozing among old comrades at some grisly cohort dinner. They were turning him into his father, however hard he fought against it.
    Vinius and his father had in fact enjoyed a fair relationship. This was mainly because young Gaius was too peaceful to start confrontations. His father and two half-brothers had conditioned him to do what they said. For instance, they had all told him to go into the army, which fortunately he had not minded. As far as they knew – so far – he never minded anything. He grew up letting them push him around, which in some odd way made him feel comfortable. He was saving rebellion for when something really mattered. With his father dead at fifty-two, whatever he was waiting to kick against would never happen.
    His father had been a solid, steady, military man. In Rome he had run his vigiles cohort with the right mix of rigidity, contempt for bureaucracy and loathing for the public; he terrorised petty criminals, slammed major gangsters, and out-schemed fraudsters of all kinds, while his firefighting successes were legendary. He kept the Aventine Hill, a lawless district full of poets and freed slaves, running as smoothly as anybody could.
    Flouting the rules, as was traditional in all branches of the military, he had married and produced two sons, Marcus Vinius Felix and Marcus Vinius Fortunatus. Their mother died when they were in their teens. The father coped for a time, then brought in a young woman to help with the house and his unruly lads. After a flurry of initial suspicion, all three came to