He was the best, his father said, absolutely the best.  And a good First Centurion was worth a cohort of men.    Vectis was packing his leather travel bags in the second story room at his father’s villa when Julian flung open the door.  He stepped in, pressed his back against the wall, and closed his eyes. In their years of marriage, she bore no children for the Empire, and it was the great disappointment of her husband’s life.  He never knew, but each day she drank the juice of the silphium plant to ward off pregnancy.  Her worst mistake, she judged, was her decision to stop sending letters to her brothers.  Imagine what the Roman overseers would think, her husband had said, if they discovered that a wife of a liaison official had relatives among the warlike Only4Gamers.