12 Quotes by M.C. Scott

Do you have still the dye with which to turn your tunic red?’‘The madder? Yes, I do.’‘Enough of it for a century?’‘Enough for the entire cohort, if you want it.’He twitched a smile then; I was coming to know it, and to revel in the sight of it. I was his then, part of the XIIth, and he knew it.‘Not the entire cohort yet, Demalion. The century will do. Henceforth we are the Bloody First. And I fancy we might have a mule’s tail on our standard. See to it on our return.

But, new soldier that I was, I understood at last what Cadus had been trying to tell me all along: that life and love and rank were not enough. To be whole in myself, I needed honour, and I had lost it, and could see no way to get it back.

Harder! Harder! Strike at it, for the gods’ sake! It’s a Parthian, not your grandmother! I swear if you don’t put some effort into— What?

We broke camp together and set off in our opposite directions: we of the XIIth and our allies marched east, towards the rising sun, combat and honour; the IVth went west, to the setting sun, to ignominy and a wealth of digging. We sang as we marched. They did not.

Demalion, we’re alive.’ Pantera’s voice was unusually clipped, as if his patience had finally run to an end. ‘If we were trying to get ourselves killed, we three would have managed it, I think. Two officers of the Fifth and a spy trained by Seneca could manage that much at least.

Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring aspriests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence.

To my shame, the name he gave was not one that conjured any feeling in me: not fear, nor revulsion, nor horror at a man who carried ill-luck with him wherever he went. On that bright summerday at the height of the world, I heard Aquila say ‘Lucius Caesennius Paetus’, and I shrugged and said, ‘He who was consul in Rome last year?

Tell me we’re not going to be stoking up the cook fires to build palisades through the night by their light.’ I stood, turning as I spoke.Gravely, he said, ‘You’re not going to be stoking the cook fires and building palisades through the night by their light.’Something was wrong with Lupus. He had never in his life made a joke, and his eyes were not laughing; quite the reverse.

A man who had the legions of the east marching at his back could be bred by a donkey on a mule and the senate would have no choice but to accept him.