intricate designs. It was quite nice, but nothing spectacular. The lid to the pot was taped shut so securely that it took me nearly an hour to cut through all the tape. When I finally got the lid off I found an envelope inside the pot, with a special seal on it.

My twin brother and I had devised a unique code when we were children, so that when we left notes for each other and wanted to make sure no one else could read them, we taped them shut and wrote a particular series of two-digit numbers across the tape. There was always one of the numbers in the sequence that was not written on the tape, but was written on the front of the envelope in the lower left-hand corner – only the two digits were reversed from the normal sequence. Childish stuff, I admit, but back then, it worked for us.

I took the envelope out of the pot and went immediately to my computer desk to send Jake an e-mail and tell him that the brass pot had arrived undamaged, with its seal unbroken. There was a handwritten note inside from Jake that said:

“I had to write to you this way because they screen our e-mails and our letters home, and I didn’t want anyone to see this but you. I may be cracking up, but I don’t think so – however, some very strange things have been happening for the last week or so. Almost every night, I have some sort of dream about Roman Legions – marching soldiers, parading eagles, that sort of stuff. Nothing scary, just very weird. Then yesterday, we walked into an ambush – the unit was out of our Humvees, doing a house-to-house search in this one block of apartments, and it was a trap. We were under heavy fire, but I got the guys all out of there with only a few injuries – don’t panic, I wasn’t one of the injured. We took out 4-5 of their snipers, too. Bastards. After the firefight, I was standing by the door of the Humvee looking back at the street, and in the Humvee mirror I saw behind me – and I’m not lying, Bro, I saw this – a Roman Centurion standing in the middle of the street, brass plumed helmet, red cloak, short sword, sandals, straight out of Hollywood. He stood there for a minute, looking right at me and grinning, and saluted me with that “Heil Hitler” thing they did – and then he just vanished. Right into thin air. I thought about going to the base psychiatrist, but the fact is that since I’ve been having those dreams I feel more secure, not less so, more confident, more capable. Anyway, did you make it to Bath? Send me some pictures.”

I had not downloaded any of my pictures as yet (in eight weeks in England I had used up more than one memory chip), but I pulled out the chip that I had used for the trip to Bath and downloaded the contents. One of the pictures from there was of a gravestone on which the name “Lucius Quintullus” could just barely be discerned. The very last picture