Pulto hadn’t complained—he’d been a soldier for twenty-five years and the batman of Corylus’s father, Publius Cispius, for the last eighteen of them. On the other hand, the young master hadn’t specified footgear. Pulto had chosen to wear hobnailed army boots with the toga. Corylus grinned as they turned from the Argiletum Boulevard onto the street where the town house of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa, Varus’s father, stood. Pulto clashed along beside him, muttering curses. Hobnails were dangerous footwear on the streets of Carce. The stone pavers had been worn smooth as glass and were slimy besides: the last rain had been almost a month past, so more recent garbage hadn’t been swept into the central gutters and thence to the river. Corylus wasn’t an army officer yet, but he’d learned a few things growing up on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, where his father had been first centurion of the Alaudae Legion and then tribune in command of the Third Batavian Cavalry. Sometimes letting your subordinates do just what they pleased was the most effective punishment you could visit on them.
