‘We’ve been trusted to watch this side of the camp, to sound the warning if we hear as much as a badger stirring the leaves, and that’s what we’ll do, until the sun’s over the horizon and eyes are stronger than ears. If either of you don’t like that, you can fuck off back into the camp and discuss it with…’

He started at a sudden sound, thinking for a moment that someone was wielding an axe at the palisade a hundred paces to their rear before he realised that the younger of the two men facing him had been punched sideways to the ground with something protruding from his ear. The stink of blood was suddenly heavy in the air. The older warrior slumped away from the log a split second later with an agonised, bubbling grunt. His eyes rolled upwards as the arrow buried deep in his chest took his life. Their leader ripped the hunting horn from his belt, grabbing a deep breath and putting it to his lips, only to shudder with the bone-crunching impact of an arrow into his own ribs. The horn fell from his nerveless fingers to the fallen leaves with a soft thud, and he stared stupidly for a moment at the short length of its feathered wooden shaft jutting from his chest, feeling his blood spraying from the terrible wound chopped deep into his body by its iron-tipped head. His vision narrowing, he sank slowly to his knees, caught for a moment between life and death as a noiseless figure ghosted across the forest floor towards him.

Without any sound that the dying barbarian could make out, the shadowy figure was abruptly beside him, a tall, lean man dressed in a grey cloak and with a Roman gladius gleaming palely in his right hand, his face painted with stripes of dark mud beneath a cross-crested helmet to match the forest’s dappled moonlit floor. He grabbed at the tottering warrior’s hair to steady him and lifted his sword to strike, angling the blade for the killing thrust. He looked into the dying man’s eyes for a moment, then ran the gladius’s razor-sharp blade through the helpless tribesman’s throat and eased him down to lie glassy eyed in the leaves. Putting a hand inside the tunic beneath his mail armour, he touched a pendant hanging around his neck and muttered a quiet prayer.