Aquila Terentius left the mountain town of Beneventum the morning after he killed the four Greeks, descending from the high hills of central Italy to the coastal plain and a proper Roman road, which would take him north.

Forced by poverty to walk and hunt his food, he had much time to consider the recent events in his life. The experience of Sicily: arriving as a boy, leaving as a man; his own participation in the recent slave revolt: the dilemma of a Roman fighting against his own kind; the way his old friend and mentor had been sacrificed by the men upon whom he had taken his bloody revenge the previous night. They had betrayed the revolt they led and abandoned their slave army to Roman revenge, the beaten slaves — men, women and children — being herded and returned to the backbreaking work on the farms whence they had come. It was hard to see them as they had so recently been, a powerful army large enough to make Rome shiver.

The quartet of traitorous Greeks, once slaves themselves, had been relaxed in their luxurious hilltop villa, feeling secure under the protection of local guards, with slaves of their own now to fetch and carry. The long ladder he had fashioned to get in and out of the villa had been broken up, the bark strips used to bind the crosspieces to the long central staff had become kindling, the wooden slats he had fashioned from tree branches, firewood to keep him warm for the remainder of the night. No one had seen him enter or leave, and he had killed three of the turncoats quickly and in total silence — the leader first, his tongue cut out, because that had been his weapon of choice to both inspire and then betray. Two of the others had been nonentities, lapdog pets of their chief, but the fourth, called Pentheus, had merited special treatment.

He had been present at the death of Gadoric, the Celtic warrior Aquila had seen as a surrogate father, who died as he would have wished, charging his Roman enemies in a fight he could not win — a way to paradise for one of his religion.