Sergeants like Gisco applauded Fabius’ competence. The men grumbled at the extra work he created, and were annoyed when a change meant they suddenly found themselves downwind of the latrine trench rather than up. But then, Nelo was learning, soldiers always grumbled, if things stayed the same or if they changed, at the prospect of action or the lack of it. And the wise old heads predicted it could all change again when the suffetes or the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four decided that Fabius was nothing but an upstart Roman after all, and kicked him out in favour of some other strutting tin hat who would turn everything upside down once more.

For Nelo the best part of each day was the evening, when the soldiers gathered by their fires in the open air and prepared their bread for the evening. Following an ancient tradition Carthaginian armies on the march carried grain, not finished bread, and every unit had its own grinding stone. Fabius had insisted on the same discipline in camp, even though they were not far from the walls of the city itself. So you would grind out your barley by hand – and it was always barley these days, though this was looked down on by proper Carthaginians who preferred wheat – and you would knead up the meal in a scrap of leather with a little wine or oil if you had it, then flatten it into wafers. You roasted it quickly on the fire, and ate it quicker, for it was unleavened and would set hard as rock if you left it to cool. But the fresh, hot bread at the end of the day on an empty stomach, along with a little meat or cheese and wine if you were lucky, was always delicious, and the soldiers, gathered around their fires, kneading and roasting and eating their own bread, were at their most companionable. Even Suniatus tonight, who sported a ridiculous plumed helmet he had looted from the corpse of a Libyan officer, left Nelo alone for a while.

After the meal, as the dusk drew in, Nelo took himself off to a corner by the wall of a barracks house, dug his paper and crayons out from his satchel, and started to sketch. Soon the face of the Iberan he had killed took shape on the paper. The grimacing mouth, the eyes oddly defiant though he must have known death was near. Nelo had long ago given up his formal experiments, though when he drew larger scale scenes he still tried out his look-deep techniques. Now he just tried to capture the immediacy of the moment. The extraordinary experience of risking one’s life, and taking another man’s.

‘Nelo.’