Chapter Six
A Day at the Races
As the reader might well imagine from the preceding passages, my first summer at Bernesium was not altogether unpleasant. I spent many a leisurely day whiling away my hours there while enjoying the many delights of the house of Gratius. My official duties were hardly burdensome, although we were being increasingly called upon to provide additional patrols, to escort the passing caravans of slavers. It seems that a particularly nasty little war had erupted with the pesky Scythians, closing the normal trade routes so that the slavers were forced to divert their caravans through the mountains and past Bernesium. As a result, slave caravans began arriving in town, sometimes as many as two or three a week. The slavers would set up camp on a grassy plain just on
