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“Why not now?’ Horgias said. ‘We could go back in now and take it.’ ‘You can certainly try.’ Pantera rolled his tongue around his teeth and then said something in the native tongue that neither of us understood. When we made no response, he repeated it, more slowly, louder. We looked at each other, and at him. He smiled tightly. ‘I said, “You are Roman and we of Eleazir’s party take great pleasure in slaughtering your countrymen. We took five days to skin alive a man who tried to join you. Imagine what we can do now, when we have all winter.”’ ‘Very funny.’ I wasn’t smiling. Nor was Pantera. ‘If you want to go, I won’t stop you. But without fluency in both Aramaic and Hebrew, you will die.”

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Book:Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth
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“Seeking more information, I walked through the market listening to the gossip and discovered that our new general, the man sent to quell the unrest in the east, was the second son of a provincial tax collector whose only claims to recognition were that he had commanded some legions in Britain in the heady, early days of the invasion, that his brother had once stood for consul, and that he had been a governor in some African province, where the locals had thrown turnips at him. Despairing, I returned to the house, and that despair deepened later when Horgias came home with the news that our new paragon of martial virtue had until recently been hiding in Greece, in disgrace for having fallen asleep during one of Nero’s recitals in the theatre.”

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Book:Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth
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“It would have been easy to ask, then, ‘What of this Eagle?’, to have wheedled out of them all they knew: where it was kept, when and where paraded through the streets. I was halfway to asking when Pantera, swaying a little, trod on my foot and I bit the words back and glanced at Horgias, who had seen and gave the barest nod and continued to grin in the mindless manner of a man who only understands one word in every dozen that he hears. The Hebrews didn’t notice; they were too busy reminding each other of their victories, of the men killed, the stones dodged, the slingstones hurled.”

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Book:Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth
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“He bared thick teeth. ‘I am Zacchariah. My price will be right. You show me now?’ In that moment, ten generations of horse-traders counted for more than half a lifetime in the legions. I was my father made young again, itching to make a sale. Abandoning the Eagle – I was a horse-trader, what did I care for a gold bird on a stick, however venerated by the Hebrews? – I gathered Pantera and Horgias about me, and trekked back to the inn of the Cedar Tree. Along the way, we collected Zacchariah’s well-muscled younger relatives, three other, unrelated, horse merchants who gazed at him with undisguised venom, a woman who claimed she could more accurately assess the sex of the foal our pregnant mare carried, a bone-setter who set to arguing with Horgias but gave up when his poor Greek met Horgias’ worse Greek – and Nicodemus and his seven zealots who stood about as we conducted our business, obviously waiting for a chance to inflict violence upon us.”

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Book:Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth
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“Silvanus, the camp prefect, took a step forward. I heard his voice every morning after parade, but had never listened to the tones of it as I did now. He was not afraid, that much was clear; he was angry. "Pathetic. I should cashier you all now and destroy your Eagles." Silvanus spoke quietly; we had to strain to hear his voice. You could have heard the stars slide across the sky, we were so still and so silent. "If General Corbulo were here, he would destroy you. He dismissed half of the Fifth and the Tenth and sent them home. The rest are billeted in tents in the Armenian highlands with barley meal for fodder. He intends to make an army of them, to meet Vologases when he comes. I intend the same and therefore you will be treated the same as your betters in better legions. You will be proficient by the spring, or you will be dead." His gaze raked us, and we wondered which of us might die that night for the crime of being ineffectual. His voice rocked us. "To that end, you will spend the next three months in tents in the Mountains of the Hawk that lie between us and the sea. One hundred paces above the snow line, each century will determine an area suitable for three months’ stay and build its own base camp. You will alternate along the mountains’ length so that each century of the Fourth has a century of the Twelfth to either side, and vice versa. Each century will defend and maintain its own stocks against the men of the opposing legion; you are encouraged to avail yourselves of what you can. You may not remove stocks from camps belonging to other centuries of your own legion, and equally you may not aid in defending them against raiding parties from the opposing men. So that you may tell each other apart, the Twelfth legion will wear" – did I hear a note of distaste there? – "red cloth tied about their left arms at all times. The Fourth will wear blue. You will be provided with raw fleece with which to wrap your weapons that they might strike but not bite. A man who is careless enough to be captured by the other side will be flogged and returned to his unit. Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead and any man who wounds another will be staked out beyond the boundary of his camp for two days and nights; if he lives, he will be returned to his unit. Any man who dies of hunger, cold or fright, or who falls off the mountain, will be deemed to have died by his own hand. You have until the next watch to make ready. You are dismissed.”

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Book:Rome: The Eagle of the Twelfth
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