‘The next gate…’

He turned to Dubnus, pointing urgently past the seething mob of barbarians on the other side of their shield wall.

‘The second gate’s open! Give me ten men, quickly!’

He sheathed his spatha and tossed the shield aside, climbing nimbly up the rough wooden ladder that led on to the wall’s wooden fighting platform with a sudden burst of energy born of his realisation that the way to the heart of the fort had been left open behind the mass of warriors throwing themselves on to the Tungrians’ shields. Climbing on to the narrow platform, he looked out for a moment across the ridge, back to the legion cohorts waiting in the afternoon’s sunshine, their standards gleaming prettily in the sunlight. He waved down at the Syrian archers with the agreed crossed-fists gesture to indicate that the wall was taken, the signal to stop shooting at anything that moved along the wall’s length. The archers’ centurion waved back, barking to his men to stand down, and another man joined Marcus on the rampart, his face dimly remembered from his time commanding the 9th Century earlier that summer. Their eyes met, and as Marcus raised a hand to beckon him on down the wall in his wake a hot spray of the soldier’s blood stung his eyes. A heavy bolt had opened his throat with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, the man’s blood fountaining across Marcus’s mail armour as the soldier toppled choking back into space and fell on to the men fighting below them. Another bolt slammed into the timber an inch below the top of the wall, directly in line with Marcus’s stomach, and the third screamed past his head with a hand-span to spare and no more, burying itself in the rough timber of the second palisade. Another man climbed on to the wall, and Marcus recognised Scarface, a 9th Century soldier with little respect for the cohort’s officers.