Caius Cassius sat in his study with his elbows on the table, handling his dagger from time to time. But mainly he just thought and remembered: his life as it flowed past. After time and time again he was transfixed in the escape from Carrhae. The sheer terror he and the fivehundred horsemen he had led felt as they tried to get to the river, to the west. The cold desert night and the day filled with the suffocating desert air.

Then the picture of Publius Crassus. It would not go away. Publius Crassus who had promised his father to return when he had led the Gaulish cavalry on to a counterattack. The dust cloud in the horizon. The savages returning carrying the head on a pole around us. "The expression on old Crassus´ face - then I knew that he would not lead us out of there." They would all die in the desert, with the vultures. "No, no."

He had never liked Publius. Too rich, too brilliant. But he did his best at Carrhae, we knew that the charge... - there was no alternative. The men, peasents from the Italian countryside, one out of ten could read, forcibly drafted into the army of a state they hated. Now, I have to do my duty to Rome. I have to. Caesar will not go to Parthia, the King.

I will do my duty, I will.

The sun shone from the peristyle as Cassius handled his dagger, feeling its sharp edge until blood oozed from his thumb. He quickly dried the knife with a piece of papyrus and put it in its case which he tied to his arm. He walked out from the room standing in the warm sunshine the blood still coming waiting the slave to come to dress his master, the Praetor Peregrinus, for the Senate.

The lictors must already be waiting outside.