The Farthest Shield (Paperback)

The lost legion of Carrhae marched east into history. One man marched all the way to China.

Lucius Ateporix Vettius grows up near Mediolanum between his Roman father's gods and his Gaulish mother's, and belongs to neither. The only road to citizenship runs through the army. At seventeen he takes it, his name written onto the muster roll by a centurion willing to bend the rules for him.

In 53 BC Crassus leads seven legions into Parthia and loses them at Carrhae. Lucius survives and is marched east with the other prisoners to guard the far edge of the Parthian empire. He keeps his centurion's shield. Over the next forty years it goes with him across the Oxus, into the pay of the Xiongnu king Zhizhi, and through a siege by a Han army whose commander would rather question these strange soldiers who fight behind a wall of shields than kill them.

What is left of the cohort ends up on the Han frontier. There Lucius marries a magistrate's daughter, raises a son, keeps the names of the dead in a Latin chronicle, and hangs the old shield over the gate of the town they built. Rome never hears of any of it.

The novel takes up the Lost Legion hypothesis, first put forward by the sinologist Homer Dubs: that survivors of Carrhae founded the frontier county of Liqian, in western China.