“Legio XVII Inquieta”

One of the students had unearthed the top edge of the artifact, and Annike crossed herself three times in relief that it was Hannes. Some of this summer’s crop of undergrads were stupid enough to grab the exposed corner and pull, hoping to yank the whole thing out and doing untold damage instead. A few were ambitious enough that they would have tried to unearth it on their own, and none of them were skilled enough archaeologists to do it right. But Hannes was smart enough to call Annike over to take a look when it became clear he’d found something important.

One of the reasons I try to make sure I feed my brain a steady diet of random nonfiction is because you never know when something will cause a story to fall out.

In this case, I was reading Rose Mary Sheldon’s Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, But Verify, and specifically its chapter on the Clades Variana. I wrote a short story that very night, not even letting myself be stopped by the realization, two-thirds of the way through, that I’d missed a crucial detail that negated my whole premise (in revisions I was able to work around that). The result is, among other things, a love letter to my own past as a Latin nerd and an archaeologist.

It appeared in issue #129 of On Spec Magazine in September 2024!