‘Nice throw, Marcus, that’s worth a few cups of wine once we get to Arab Town. You didn’t even hit the bone…’

The younger man scowled, stretching out his arm and spreading the fingers wide before bunching them into a fist and looking down at his knuckles, crisscrossed with scar tissue from his long years of tuition at the hands of his father’s bodyguards.

‘I must be losing my touch, Julius. I was aiming for the middle of his back.’

His brother officer laughed mirthlessly.

‘And nevertheless, tragic though it is that you missed your mark by a foot with a spear slung on the run between trees, here we have that rarest of commodities…’ He extended an arm to gesture to the tribesman, still writhing with the pain of his wound. ‘… a live barbarian captive. A bit soiled, I’ll give you that, but in no real danger of dying any time soon and ripe for a few questions, I’d say.’ He reached out and rapped on the spear’s wooden shaft, then took a hold of it and twisted it sharply, rotating the wooden shaft inside the man’s wound. The tribesman screamed again, louder than before, his eyes bulging with the effort wrung from his pain-racked body. The centurion smiled down at him. ‘I thought that might hurt. Anything you feel like telling us?’ The barbarian snarled back at him, spitting defiantly at his armoured chest. Julius smiled back even more broadly, looking down at the spittle dribbling down the shining metal rings. ‘Oh, good, a challenge…’

Hearing a voice behind him he stood up, turning away from the fallen tribesman. Rufius had crossed the gap between the road and the forest’s edge, and now stood staring into the shadows cast by the trees. He had picked up a fallen arrow and was examining the barbed head closely, talking in conversational tones to his comrades.

‘One of ours, I’d say. That puts paid to the story that they were all burned when we put the Noisy Valley stores to the torch. Just a shoot-and-run, do you think, or were they hoping to lure us into some nasty little ambush? That was the way in my day.’