Nero stood in the doorway for a moment. The mess hall was half full — candidates from other cohorts, a few off-duty guards, the low hum of the midday hour settling into the stone. The porridge had been replaced by something darker and hotter that smelled of turnip and salt, which was an improvement by most available measures.
He went in, found a seat at the end of one of the long tables, and ate, and thought about the eastern edge of Golgotha and about records made incomplete by difficult circumstances and about the distance between what institutions said about themselves and what they were, which was not always a dishonest distance but was always, in the end, a self-serving one.
