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The wine tasted good as it passed the old soldier's lips and slid down into his gullet.

He only drank good wine these days, pressed from his own grapes.

No longer did he have to drink the sour old horse urine he had so often been forced to consume during the long years of campaigning under old King Philip, his son Alexander, and their many

successors.

From his sun-kissed vantage point overlooking the Mediterranean,

a house on a hill, a short distance outside the city of Ephesus,

those days seemed very far away.

Forty years.

That was how long he had hefted a pike in the service of his kings,

marching everywhere from the Danube to the Oxus to the Nile, and now he was done. At first the transition had been difficult. He had walked

across half of Asia to reach Ephesus, carrying a fortune in gold and silver, and had to defend his

winnings with his sword on more than one occasion. But his money was good here. The house,

olive groves, small vineyard, and fields had cost him only a little, the slaves to work them a bit more.

Here, he was just another old soldier, one of many spending the pay they had accumulated in the

service of the Argeids and their heirs. But waking up in the same place every day with no horns blaring

or office or shouting, on a comfortable bed instead of rocky ground, took some getting used to.

The dreams still came to him at night, awful dreams full of the screams of burning villagers

and the stink of a fresh battlefield piled with the dead and dying. He didn't regret those years, not when he was

awake, but at night he questioned every thrust of his pike and swing of his sword. There were

children running around the little estate now, his children, which was not something he had ever

...