‘Best keep you fuckin’ head down, Centurion, or those legion tosspots’ll put a dart clean through it.’

Marcus nodded, ducking below the rampart and beckoning the other man on.

‘Follow me!’

He scuttled off down the line of the rampart bent almost double, slipping and almost falling on a patch of still-wet blood, and looked back to make sure that the men who had climbed up after him were following. Thirty paces around the outer palisade’s curve from the point he had climbed up he dropped from the platform’s eight-foot elevation to land beside the massively muscled prisoner, drawing both swords as the man spoke in rough Latin, his voice a bass rumble.

‘Gate open. We close, they trap.’

Marcus nodded, beckoning his men to jump down.

‘What’s your name?’

The Briton spoke without taking his eyes from the open gate.

‘Lugos.’

‘Come with me, Lugos. I may need someone that speaks the language, and you’ll be safer with us than staying here. If this works you’ll be a free man by the end of this fight.’

The big barbarian nodded curtly, and Marcus led his small party along the curve of the inner palisade to the gate, still open despite the obvious risk to the fort’s security. Marcus peeped round its timber frame, seeing a cluster of a dozen warriors standing next to the much smaller opening in the fort’s third and last wall. He pulled his head back, speaking quickly to his men.

‘There’s only one more gate. It’s still open, and they’ve only left a few men to guard it. We’ve already captured this one, and if we can stop them closing that one we’ve got the fort at our mercy. Are you with me?’

The three 9th Century men who had followed him nodded readily, Scarface glaring round at his comrades in a way they knew only too well, while the three others, from other centuries and therefore less used to his way of doing things, stared back with a mixture of uncertainty and apprehension. It would have to do. The barbarian had acquired a spear from somewhere, and stared down at him without any visible expression.