5 Task ForceThe Prefect’s room stank with incense, stale wine and sweat. It was very aristocratic sweat, of course, because his assembled Tribunes all came from Patrician families. But to Gemellus and Duatha, it was still sweat, the sort they knew when their leather-clad footmen marched in the sun or their horsemen rode for a stretch over rough country.
The Prefect was a man of sixty or more, lined and grey, worn thin and tender by ten years in an occupied country. His eyes were vacant and tired, his shoulders sagged, his waistline was too heavy to allow him to wear armour any longer, for the sheer discomfort of it all.
The Prefect sat at the white marble table which he had had transported specially from Italy when he first took up his command. Before him lay many scrolls and maps of the
