Valens knew how it started—innocently enough, a bright clear day with laughter. Then the ambush by pirates and watching eight of his men fall and the rest held captive. Then came the agony of watching the others perish—two, and finally the last six as Aquila laughed. In the next act, it switched to the arena and the men he had fought and killed. Sometimes he fought back and at others, he was rooted to the spot, defenceless, unable to fight. Always it ended with him fighting a faceless opponent and waking drenched in sweat, gasping for breath with violently trembling hands, his nostrils filled with the stench of blood and rotting flesh, his ears aching from the screams of the dying. All the more terrifying for the repetition.

'Valens, Valens, you're dreaming. Let go of me.'

Through the cries of the crowd and screams of the dying,

Valens heard Julia. His eyes snapped opened and his arm fell back on the bed.

He stared at the woman before him, feeling the sweat drip down his neck, but uncertain of the vision before him. His hand had encountered solid flesh but was it just another illusion? Here was a Julia unlike he had ever seen before except in his dreams, a Julia with her hair curling softly about her shoulders, and a dark wool blanket around her shoulders.

Was she real or was she some new twist on the nightmare?

Her subtle scent of lavender and roses enveloped him and he knew he was in the land of the living. He drank in her being as a man dying of thirst gulps in water. His body hardened as his eyes fastened on her breasts pushing gently underneath her gown with each breath she took. She shifted slightly and broke the spell.

'Julia, what are you doing here?' he said, annoyed at finding comfort in her presence, annoyed at his body's reaction to her. He pulled the soft wool blanket firmly around his midriff. 'You should be asleep in your own bed.'

'I heard you calling out,' Julia answered, rubbing her throat as she stood uncertainly by his bed.

Against the cream-coloured flesh of her neck, three broad red stripes stood out. He watched as they started to fade, horrified by what he might have done to her. 'You should have stayed away.'

'You called for help,' she whispered.

'It was a nightmare,' Valens explained and dragged his eyes from the hollow of her throat to the frieze of garden flowers on the wall behind her.

'I guessed as much.'

He glanced again at her throat where the red marks had disappeared. His stomach turned over and knew the words were inadequate.

'I thought you were someone else. It would have passed if you had not come. It always does.'

'You sounded terrified as you shouted out, begging for help.' Her fingers held the blanket tight about her shoulders. Her body was half-turned towards the door.

Valens froze. How much had he revealed? He examined her in the soft lamp light. She looked wary, ready to flee with sleep-laden eyes and reddened lips.

In his mind, he listed all the reasons to keep away from her. All the reasons that had seemed so important when he first thought of them. They seemed much less important here with Julia standing beside his bed.

'Your name? I called your name?' He closed his eyes and knew he had, remembered doing so. The nightmare had taken a new and frightening twist. Besides his men, he had to save Julia, to keep her from Aquilia's clutches. If he failed in his task, she would be lost for ever, dying like the rest.

'No, others.' Her voice was soft and hesitant. 'You called for a centurion to help you. Then you told your men to get away. Finally you pleaded for help from anyone. At that plea, I ran.'

She gave a slight laugh. Valens opened his eyes and stared directly into her face. A small crease of a frown showed between her eyebrows. His shoulders relaxed. She hadn't heard him call her name, but she had come anyway, only knowing he was in pain.

'I regret disturbing you.'

'You didn't disturb me.' In the soft lamplight, her cheek glowed pink. His gaze dropped to her mouth and his body hardened further, aching for her touch. 'I was awake.'

'I was in the army,' he said, anything to get the conversation away from her and his need for her. 'Years ago, before I became a gladiator.'

'As an auxiliary?' she asked in a puzzled tone. Her head tilted to one side and again Valens was reminded of his pet blackbird, ready to flee but curious.

He refused to lie to her. He would open the door to his memory the tiniest of cracks, and then shut it firmly. It could do no harm. 'As a legionary.'

He heard her gasp and knew she understood the significance. No citizen would willingly take the gladiatorial oath to be burnt with fire, shackled with chains, whipped with rods and killed with steel. After the oath and burning of the tattoo, a man became an infamis, an outcast. Society turned its back on him. A gladiator could never enjoy the privileges of an ordinary citizen unless he won the wooden sword. And even then, the upper reaches of society would be closed to him. He could never be the best hope for his family's success for generations after that

'You were a citizen of Rome, a soldier, but now you are a slave. How could that happen?'

'It is a long and unedifying story about a young man who thought too highly of himself, and, like Icarus in the myth, flew too close to the sun.' Valens forced his lips to turn up into an ironic curve and lay back on his pillows. 'My main preoccupations were hunting, gambling and enjoying the company of loose women. The secondment to North Africa was a chance to break free from my father's lectures.'

'What did you do?' Julia took a step closer and her gown slipped off one shoulder to reveal the swell of her right breast. 'Why did you have to leave the army?

Valens's breath caught in his throat and he had a difficult time thinking of anything but the creamy expanse she had inadvertently exposed. His lips itched to taste the hollow between her breasts, to see if it did truly taste of summer as it had in his dream. With great effort, Valens tore his gaze from her bosom to look at the ceiling.

'My actions in North Africa led directly to the death of my men. Sixteen men, good and true, who expected more of me than I could give.'

'Please tell me, Valens. I would like to know more about you. How did you become a slave? Men have made mistakes in war before without being disgraced like that.'

He stared up, willing his breathing back to normal. The door in his memory he had kept closed for so long had been flung open.

He opted for a safe option, one that told the truth but not the whole truth. He could not bear to think of the look her eyes must surely give, if she realised the full height from which he had fallen and how he as much as anyone else had been his own master of his downfall.

If he had led his life differently, been more the son his father had desired, would his father have wanted him back?

The ransom Aquilia set was far from excessive. The question haunted him and made him more determined to succeed, to force people to acknowledge him as an honourable man. He wanted to return from the dead.

'When the pirates captured me in North Africa, my father refused to send the ransom. I suspect he thought I was dissolute enough to not waste any more money on me. Later I discovered he had adopted a man to take my place—someone more suited to his notions of propriety than I—almost before the ink on his response had dried. Someone less prone to fencing, gambling and gymnastics. The pirate was enraged and killed my men for sport. It tickled his sense of humour to sell me as a slave.'

Julia watched Valens's face twist as he said the words. His eyes bore a shadow of pain. She reached out and touched his hand, wishing she could say something that would take away that aching sorrow, and that she could gather him in her arms and hold him, much as a mother does with a young child. Her fingers longed to smooth the lock of black hair from his eyes.

She pressed her hands together, lacing the fingers and holding them back. She knew anything she said would sound trite.

Her blood became hot when she thought of what he must have suffered. To be disowned and without a family must be unimaginable torture. It was like taking away the centre of your being. Your family defined you and your status in society. To make matters worse, in losing his family, he also had lost his freedom, his citizenship and his identity. He had become a slave and had had to endure a kind of living death.

'I had no idea,' she said, pulling the blanket more firmly around her shoulders. 'How could a father behave like that towards what I think must have been his only son?'

He gave a bitter smile and a shutter came down over his eyes. The glimpse she had of his vulnerability was gone so quickly she wondered if she had mistaken it. His face with its clenched jaw was as remote as the statues that flanked Jupiter's temple on the Capitoline hill.

'It was over four years ago,' he said, 'and there was fault on both sides. I have forged a new life in the arena. There is a saying that you die when you take the gladiatorial oath and are reborn. If I had know then what I know now, I would have saved my men. We would never have been there in the first place.'

Julia heard the muffled sob hidden in the last words. She again longed to hold him, but feared his reactions. The last three and a half years with Lucius, when he had lashed out at her every time she sought to offer comfort, assaulted her memory. She contented herself with plucking at the folds of the blanket, pulling the folds tighter.