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military checkpoint manned by legionaries.
    Seeing his lavishly decorated equipment, the soldiers jumped to attention, saluting at the detachment commander’s barked order while Marcus climbed down from the horse’s saddle.
    ‘Tribune Sir! We will do what is ordered and at every command we will be ready!’
    Marcus looked round at the men of the detachment.
    ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I’m looking for the Third Legion’s officers. Do you know where I might find them?’
    The detachment’s chosen man, a heavily built man with the look of a pugilist, stepped forward and nodded vigorously.
    ‘Yes Tribune, I’ll have one of the men walk you up there.’
    ‘Up?’
    The big man smiled.
    ‘Nothing but the best for our young gentlemen, sir. They’ve rented a villa on the mountain slopes, high up, with a view for miles around.’
    The soldier gestured to one of his men.
    ‘You, take the officer here up to the Honeypot.’
    Marcus raised an eyebrow in question.
    ‘Honeypot?’
    The chosen man smiled knowingly.
    ‘You’ll see why we call it that soon enough sir. I presume you’ll be moving in with the other gentlemen?’
    Marcus held his gaze for a moment, reading the man’s barely hidden cynicism as to the legion officers’ professionalism, and by association his own.
    ‘Thank you, Chosen.’
    He turned away, leaving the soldiers staring after him, and followed his guide along the road’s path as it ran through a further belt of forest until it branched into three, one running straight on, a second climbing gently away to its left, and another taking the steepest path up into the foothills.
    ‘This way sir.’
    The soldier indicated the steepest of the three roads, and after a moment’s walk Marcus found his calves aching at the sudden and unaccustomed exercise after so long at sea. The soldier turned back, and, seeing the pained expression on the officer’s face, slowed his pace.
    ‘Keep walking,’ said Marcus. ‘I’m just unfit from too long on a ship coming here from Rome.’
    The road ran out of the forest and on up the slope into a wide open area in which a dozen or so palatial villas had been built on the hillside, high above the groves of bay laurels that had given the city’s richest and most decadent suburb its name.
    ‘Are these the largest houses in Daphne?’
    The soldier shook his head.
    ‘No sir. Some of the villas lower down the hill are bigger, but the young gentlemen say they like to be above the town, for the privacy.’
    Marcus nodded, turning to take in the view over the ranks of trees across the valley, the mountains five miles distant on the far side a misty grey in the afternoon’s haze. When they reached the house in question he dismissed the man to rejoin his fellows, striding through the open gate into a well-maintained garden clearly designed around several mature trees, which had been left in place when others around them had been felled to make way for the house’s construction. A lone red-haired figure in a sweat-soaked tunic was exercising with sword and shield in one corner, repetitively cutting and stabbing at a wooden post with a blunt practice weapon, stepping back into a defensive shield brace after every strike, before stamping forward to repeat the attack. As Marcus strolled towards him the man spotted him from the corner of his eye and nodded, but continued his exercise with undiminished vigour.
    ‘You’re opening your body up for too long when you lunge.’
    The labouring man, clearly no older than Marcus himself, shot him a sideways glance.
    ‘You speak from experience?’
    His voice was taut, that of a driven man, as he stabbed the sword at the post again. Marcus shrugged.
    ‘Enough not to have any strong desire to see any more. Britannia, mostly, plus enough experience in Germania and Dacia to make me appreciate the protection to be had from a well-made shield. You must be Varus?’
    The exercising man stopped in mid-thrust, slowly straightening out of the