Nias wiped his nose and shook out his aching fingers.

Gripping a stylus for too long always made the make.

His years of service in the legions as a centurion had taught him that officers like him

spent far more time with a

stylus in their hands than a sword. Leading a manniple of 120 men, though usually fewer as disease

and injury took their toll, involved a great deal of scratching on a wax tablet. Supplies had to be

requisition, disciplinary measures reported to superiors, campsites measured and surveyed, and plunder accounted for.

That last task, counting plunder, was what currently occupied Nias and produced the ache in his fingers.

The teenaged military tribune overseeing the collection and processing had assigned Nias'

mannacle just to guard the prisoners, but then the lad had snuck off with one of the slave

girls and hadn't been seen since. Taking a slave while her home city smoldered around her

seemed to touch cruel to Nias, but that was war. That left Nias to do the counting. One column

on the wax tablet for men, one for women, and one for children, with each individual getting

a stroke of the stylist to represent them.

His nose was still running.

Smoke rose from the embers of Carthage around him, and that always irritated him.

So far, Nias had counted six men, 20 women, and a dozen children.

In his 24 years in the legions, those numbers seemed typical to Nias.

The men usually died fighting or were killed in the orgy of violence that accompanied the sack of a city.

If the siege was long, as it had been at Carthage, the children usually died.

The women survived more often, though whether that was better than death, he couldn't really say.

Many had opened their veins or thrown themselves into the flames as Carthage burned.

...