‘Go! Go and earn your freedom!’

For a moment longer the prisoners hesitated, until a shaggy-haired giant who had hefted the ram’s heavy nose with straining muscles bellowed his defiance and loped forward into the fort, triggering a collective howl of anger and a sudden mad charge from the men behind him. As the last of the barbarians vanished through the gateway, Julius flashed his sword down.

‘Advance!’

The four centuries trotted quickly towards the smashed gate’s opening, flinching involuntarily as the bolt throwers on the hill behind them spat their heavy missiles over their heads in a salvo of shrieking iron. As Marcus rounded the gateway and stepped over the fallen gates’ shattered timbers a falling man rebounded from the palisade in front of him and hit the ground with a wet crunch of shattered bones, a bolt buried deeply in his chest. He stepped forward and hacked reflexively at the dying man’s head to make sure of the kill, then stared up and down the curved face of the inner wall. There seemed to be no other target for his sudden urgent need to take his blade to another enemy, only the half-naked barbarian prisoners milling about between the walls to either side of them and a few scattered corpses of the bolt throwers’ earlier targets. He started as a scream sounded from the rampart to his rear, suddenly feeling horridly vulnerable to whatever was happening above and behind him. Instinctively raising his shield as he spun to face the outer wall, he felt a clanging thud as a spear intended for his back found only the iron boss in the shield’s centre. The spearman howled his frustration at the miss, then staggered forward off the wall and turned a neat half-somersault to the ground with an arrow buried in his neck, the price of standing to make the throw.