‘Very well, gentlemen, let’s go and win ourselves a fort.’

He threw himself round the gate’s wooden frame and shouted a challenge at the warriors guarding the last gate, wanting them to see the small number of men charging along the wall at them with a single officer at their head. They dithered for a moment, caught between the need to deny the Romans the gate they were entrusted to guard and the opportunity to kill their enemy, and in that time his sprinting pace halved the distance between them. Glancing back, he saw that only the barbarian, his three former soldiers and one other man had joined him, but it was too late to do anything but face the enemy warriors, suddenly confident as they realised that they outnumbered their Roman attackers by two to one and came forward with their swords drawn.

Jinking to right and left, Marcus batted aside the leading warrior’s sword-thrust with the long blade of his spatha and hit the man hard with his right shoulder, punching him back into the men behind him and gaining a moment’s confusion in which his small group could gather their strength. Spinning away from the tangled knot of barbarians, he readied himself to take on another warrior, only to see Lugos leap at his intended victim with a blood-curdling howl, spitting him through the guts with a downward lunge of the spear he had found and leaving it buried deep in the man, taking the sword from his nerveless fingers. He raised the weapon over his head and hacked it down into another warrior’s unprotected head, his eyes bulging wide with the bloodlust. Marcus dragged his gaze from the spectacle in time to parry a sword-blow from his left with the gladius’ short blade, spinning to his right and chopping the spatha’s heavy blade through his attacker’s spine, severing the man’s head in a shower of gore. The headless corpse toppled stiffly backwards to the turf. The other Tungrian soldiers were in the fight now, crowding in behind Scarface’s lead, and the gate guards were abruptly on the defensive as they found their strength almost halved.