The Inquest by Stephen Dando-Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

implicitly were reason enough for Varro to handle his dealings with the man with judicious care.
    As for the others, the reputation for drunkenness that had preceded Diocles the physician had caused Varro to issue strict instructions that all members of his party were to refrain from excessive drinking during the mission and that Diocles in particular was not to touch a single drop of wine until they had returned to Antioch. Then there was young Venerius, the spoilt, arrogant and lazy thin-stripe tribune. Varro was expecting to have difficulties with him, sooner or later. The other military officers serving under Varro were unknown quantities but came with good reports. Pompeius the cavalry decurion, Crispus’s deputy and a man with a fearsome battle scar from right ear to empty eye socket, was an aggressive cavalryman of fifteen years’ service. The commander of the 4th Scythica Legion detachment, Centurion Titus Gallo, also appeared to Varro to be a valuable man. The fifty-two-year-old had thirty-two years’ legion service to his credit. Right now, the centurion was out ahead of the main column with Decurion Pompeius, Callidus, and the advance guard, setting in train procedures designed to become routine on the march over the coming weeks and months.
     
    Centurion Gallo urged his horse to the gallop. To his rear, the two cavalrymen riding with him, caught by surprise at first, did the same. The stone-paved military road, just fifteen feet across, and built by legion engineers with a slight central camber so that rainwater ran off into culverts at the roadsides, cleaved through the wheat fields to the south of Antioch without deviation. Nobody knows better than an engineer that the most direct route between two points is a straight line.
    The wiry, silver-haired Gallo wore the same red uniform and cloak as his legionaries, but his armor and equipment was richly decorated with gold and jet inlay. He also had the additional protection of metal greaves on his shins. His officer’s rank was confirmed by the fact that he wore his sword on the left and dagger on the right, the opposite configuration to that of the ordinary enlisted man.
    The centurion had parted company with the advance guard near the coast, at a courier station a six-hour march south-west of Antioch, and accompanied by the two cavalrymen he was heading back up the road to rejoin Questor Varro and the main column. Glancing over his shoulder, Gallo grinned to himself as he saw the two troopers struggling to keep up. Now, with travelers appearing on the road in the distance, the centurion eased back to the trot, allowing the Vettonians to catch him up.
    Titus Gallo was a man with a large chip on his brawny shoulder. After joining the 22nd Primigeneia Legion in his native Galatia as a twenty-year-old recruit, he’d risen to centurion of the fourth grade with the 12th Legion, stationed in Syria. A promising career had then met a brick wall under an incompetent general, Cesennius Petus, the same General Petus who was destined to return to the East to take up the governorship of Syria in the coming year. Petus had been recalled to Rome by Nero after his inept performance in Armenia, where he’d as good as surrendered to the Parthians, and many of his centurions had been dishonorably discharged or reduced in rank. Even though Titus Gallo felt that he had served well under a poor commander, he had been demoted four grades by General Corbulo, commander in chief in the East.
    Gallo’s chance to redeem himself, and his career, had eventually come when the Jewish Revolt blew up. The 12th Legion was included in the task force led south from Antioch by the then Governor of Syria, General Gaius Cestius Gallus, to put down the uprising. But after reaching Jerusalem, General Gallus had led his army on a bloody retreat all the way back to Caesarea, losing six thousand men along the way. Gallus had died shortly after, some said of shame.
    Titus Gallo had survived the Jewish