As Gisco never failed to remind them, the men of this unit were the dregs of the conscripts and levies the suffetes, the executive officers of the city, had raised to swell out the Carthaginian army, as rumours swirled of the advance of the Hatti horde by land and sea. Even Suniatus was a poor soldier for all his bullying: strong, fearless, but evidently too stupid to obey the simplest order. But the men around Nelo seemed keen enough as they charged – keen to get among the killing at last, especially if it could be against an opponent already beaten and demoralised, and keener, perhaps, to get their hands on some booty.

Already they closed on the Libyans.

The Carthaginians descended with a roar. Sergeant Gisco himself went in with sword swinging, cutting down rebels like a sickle in a field of wheat. Suniatus threw himself on the back of a fleeing Libyan, forcing the man to the ground and stabbing him brutally in the side of the face with his sword, over and over as the man writhed and blood spilled. Nelo had got used to the noise of battle, or so he thought, but he had always been out of it before, held back from the fray. Now he was in the midst of it, and the noise of men screaming in anger or pain all around him was astonishing. It was like an abattoir.

Suddenly there was a hiss, a blur, and something shot past his ear. A javelin!

Shocked, heart hammering, he turned to see an enemy warrior, wounded, blood streaming from his leg, but with a round wooden shield in one arm, sword in wooden scabbard. He wore a crude leather tunic as a herdsman might wear, but he had no protection at all for his bare arms or legs or face, and if he’d ever had a helmet it was long lost. He hardly looked like a soldier at all. But he had some kind of loop of leather around his fingers, which he was fitting into a notch on another javelin. He was fumbling, pale from loss of blood.

Gisco knocked the man’s javelin aside, and he stumbled back onto one knee.

‘He could have killed you!’ the sergeant screamed in Nelo’s ear. ‘That javelin missed your stupid melon of a head by a thumb’s width. If not, you’d be lying in the dirt already, Northlander. Dead! Everything that you are, have ever been, or ever might have been, spilled out into the Dark Earth for all eternity, for that’s where bad soldiers end up, believe you me, never mind what the Jesus botherers will tell you. All because of him! That man in the dirt, who never saw you before today! And now he’s trying again. Are you going to stand there and let him? Are you, aurochs? Are you?’

It was Gisco’s screaming that drove him forward as much as the shock.