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those who were unfit or witless or too old. In the first few towns he was able to pick and choose, but as the recruitment tour wore on he found that other officers had been before him and had already taken the best men. Even so, by the time he returned to the cohort, he had enough men to bring it up to full strength, and sufficient time to train them before any campaign could begin.
    Macro spent the long winter months drilling the new recruits while Cato put the rest of the men through gruelling route marches and weapons practice. As the Second Illyrian trained, a steady stream of other units arrived at Antioch and joined the growing camp outside the fortress of the Tenth Legion. With them came throngs of camp-followers and the avenues and markets of Antioch resounded with the cries of street vendors. Every inn was filled with soldiers and queues of men waited outside the brightly painted brothels which reeked of cheap incense and sweat.
    As the sun set over the city, Cato’s gaze took all this in without any sense of judgement. Although he was barely in his twenties he had already served four and half years in the army and had grown used to the ways of soldiers and the effect they had on the towns they passed through. Despite an unpromising start Cato had turned out to be a good soldier, as even he was prepared to admit. Quick wits and courage had played their part in transforming him from a pampered product of the imperial household into a commander of men. Luck had played its part too. He had been fortunate to find himself appointed to Macro’s century when he had joined the Second Legion, he reflected. If Centurion Macro had not recognised some potential in the thin, nervous-looking recruit from Rome, and taken him under his wing, then Cato had little doubt that he would not have survived for long on the German frontier, and the campaign that followed in Britain. Since then the two of them had left the Second Legion and had served briefly in the navy before being sent east to join Macro’s present command. In the coming campaign they would be fighting as part of an army again and Cato felt some small relief that the burdens of independent command would be lifted from their shoulders: relief tempered by instinctive concerns about the realities of entering a new campaign.
    Far better soldiers than Cato had been struck down by an arrow, slingshot or sword thrust they had not seen coming. So far he had been spared, and he hoped that his good luck would continue if there was a war against Parthia. He had fought the Parthians briefly the year before and well knew their accuracy with a bow, and the speed with which they could mount a sudden attack and then melt away before the Romans could respond. It was a style of fighting that would sorely test the men of the legions, let alone those of the Second Illyrian cohort.
    Or perhaps that was not fair, Cato reflected.The men of his cohort actually had a better chance against the Parthians than the legionaries. They wore lighter armour and a quarter of them were mounted, so that the Parthians would have to be far more wary in attacking the cohort than in any assault they mounted on the slow-marching heavy infantry of the legions. Cassius Longinus would have to proceed cautiously against the Parthians if he were to avoid the fate of Marcus Crassus and his six legions nearly a hundred years earlier. Crassus had blundered into the desert and after several days of harassing attacks under the pitiless glare of the sun his army had been cut to pieces, along with its general.
    As the sun finally sank below the horizon there was a distant blare of bucinas from the army camp announcing the first watch of the night. Macro stirred and eased himself away from the rough plaster of the wall.
    ‘Better get back to the camp. I’m taking the new boys out into the desert tomorrow. Their first time. It’ll be interesting to see how they cope.’
    ‘Best to go easy on them,’ Cato suggested. ‘We