It was an act that should have been witnessed by either his friends or a magistrate, but since he had held the office of consul he had decided to dispense with anything public for the very good reason that he was not sure he wanted this manumission to be generally known. Lucius was uncomfortable, certainly more so than his now ex-slave. Ragas had always carried himself in the manner to which he had been born, a war leader among his own tribe, which had rendered a troubled edge to their relationship from the day he had been accepted as a gift from Aulus Cornelius. Not one to suffer insolence, Lucius had made the man’s life a misery, seeking to rupture a spirit determined to challenge all notions of servitude. It had taken months and he could not claim to have broken him, but he had got Ragas to acknowledge who gave orders and who obeyed, in the process forming, for him, a strange admiration. Lucius did not like Ragas one little bit, but he saw qualities in him; some traits that he had himself, others more physical that he lacked but wished he possessed.

They shared a steely determination, a refusal to buckle under adversity. Where the slave had been physically hard, Lucius possessed a will of iron that could not be deflected from any objective, once set, a trait which had earned him his nickname, Nerva. Beyond those first confrontations, the master had found that his body slave had a brain as well. He learnt Latin with ease, both the written and spoken word, and possessed a devious mind, but it was the attraction of his wife Ameliana for this Dacian which had brought the greatest service of all. The couple had endured near-twenty childless years, not unusual in a Roman family, but galling to a man as proud as Lucius. Adoption was the commonplace solution for a patrician family, yet he was unwilling to take that step, not wishing to open himself up to the gossip of the mob or see ribald drawings on his own villa walls regarding his potency in the bedchamber.