He's not as brash and untutored as he used to be before he married my daughter, yet his style is still his own." He inserted two fingers into the cylinder and brought forth Pompey's scroll. "Ye Gods, it's long!" he exclaimed, then bent to pick up a tube of paper from the wooden floor. "No, there are two letters." He studied the outermost edges of both, grunted. "One written in Sextilis, one in September." Down went September on the table next to his curule chair, but he didn't unroll Sextilis and begin to read; instead he lifted his chin and looked blindly through the tent flap, wide apart to admit plenty of light. What am I doing here, contesting the possession of a few fields of wheat and some shaggy cattle with a blue-painted relic out of the verses of Homer? Who still rides into battle driven in a chariot with his mastiff dogs baying and his harper singing his praises? Well, I know that. Because my dignitas dictated it, because last year this benighted place and its benighted people thought that they had driven Gaius Julius Caesar from their shores forever. Thought that they had beaten Caesar. I came back for no other reason than to show them that no one beats Caesar. And once I have wrung a submission and a treaty out of Cassivellaunus, I will quit this benighted place never to return. But they will remember me. I've given Cassivellaunus's harper something new to carol. The coming of Rome, the vanishing of the chariots into the fabled Druidic west. Just as I will remain in Gaul of the Long-hairs until every man in it acknowledges me and Rome as his master. For I am Rome. And that is something my son-in-law, who is six years older than I, will never be. Guard your gates well, good Pompeius Magnus. You won't be the First Man in Rome for much longer. Caesar is coming.

He sat, spine absolutely straight, right foot forward and left foot rucked beneath the X of the curule chair, and opened Pompey the Great's letter marked Sextilis.