The younger officer looked surprised. ‘Are you sure, sir? I fear it will damage the men’s morale. It’s at a low ebb as it is.’

‘I know the mood of my men well enough, thank you,’ the legate snapped. At once he relented. The tribune had only recently arrived from Rome, all gleaming armour and keen to put into practice the military wisdom he had learned at second and third hand. Quintatus recalled that he had been no different when he had joined his first legion. He cleared his throat and forced himself to speak in a calm tone.

‘Let the men see the bodies.’ Many of the soldiers had only just joined the Fourteenth, replacements who had arrived on the first ships to sail from Gaul after the winter storms had passed. ‘I want them to understand what their fate will be if they ever allow themselves to be defeated by the enemy.’

The tribune hesitated a moment before he nodded. ‘As you command.’

Quintatus gently spurred his horse into a walk and continued towards the heart of the fort. Destruction and death sprawled out on either side of the broad, muddy track that cut through the ruins, intersected by a second way that crossed at a right angle. He came across the shreds of what had been the command tent of the cohort. There was another heap of bodies next to it and the legate felt a cold shiver trace its way down his spine as he recognised the face of Salvius, the senior centurion of one of the cohorts. The grey-haired veteran lay on his back staring sightlessly into the overcast, his jaw hanging slack and exposing his uneven yellowed teeth. He had been a fine officer, Quintatus reflected. Tough, efficient and courageous, and highly decorated, Salvius had no doubt maintained the highest standards of the centurionate to the very end. There were several wounds to his chest and stomach and the legate felt confident that there would be none on his back if his body was turned over. Perhaps they had left him his head as a mark of respect, the legate mused.

That still left the tribune Marcellus, the commander of the construction party. Quintatus raised himself up on the saddle horns, slipped his leg over the back of his mount and dropped to the ground with a loud squelch. He approached the corpses and searched for any sign of the young aristocrat whose first independent command had proved to be his last. There was no point in looking amongst the headless corpses and the legate avoided them as he searched. He could not find Marcellus, even after turning some of the bodies lying on their front. Two of the dead had been badly cut about the face, mangled flesh, shattered bone and flaps of scalp making immediate identification impossible. Finding Marcellus would have to wait.

Then the legate froze, struck by a sudden realisation. He straightened up and swept his gaze around the remains of the camp, roughly estimating the number of bodies that lay scattered in the mud. There was no sign of any fallen enemy. But there wouldn’t be. The natives always took their dead away to be buried secretly, where the Romans would not find them and so know how many casualties they had suffered.