“Wolves!” Julius bellowed, judging the time for silence was over. The excitement swept him as he and his men ran through the camp, killing anyone who stumbled out of their tents. He had told his men to kill two each of the enemy and then fight their way out, but three had fallen to his own blade and he was barely at the end of the first rush. He could feel the panic of Mithridates’ men. Their officers were slow to respond to the attack, and without orders, a hundred individuals tried to take the battle to the shadowed attackers, dying in scores on veteran blades. Julius’s cry was echoed by Gaditicus’s cohort, hundreds of voices adding to the confusion and fear of the enemy. Cabera fired his remaining arrows into dark tents, and Julius cut a naked man down as he tried to bring his sword to bear. It was chaos and in the confusion Julius almost missed the moment he’d sworn he would not ignore.

It came after many minutes, when horns sounded and the running Greeks began to gather in their units. In the tents the Roman forces had missed, the enemy had armed themselves and now began to fight back, orders in Greek heard over the hack and thump of blows.

Julius spun round to take off a man’s hand at the wrist as he leapt at him. Every cut with the heavy blade caused awful damage, but his next blow was blocked neatly and he found two men against him and more running in from all sides. They had recovered and it was time to retreat before his Wolves were cut to pieces.

“Disengage!” he bellowed, even as he swung low with the gladius, cutting deeply into an ankle of the closest man to him. The second sprawled over the body as he rushed in, and Julius stepped clear, turning in the space and suddenly sprinting away, his sandals skidding in the bloody dust. His men came with him on the instant, turning and running as soon as they could get free of the press.

Outside the torches of the camp, the night was a black hiding place. As Julius called the disengage, all the sentry torches had been extinguished and the Romans scattered invisibly, disappearing rapidly from the edge of the camp, leaving wreckage and bodies behind them.

The Greek units halted at the edge of the camp lights, unwilling to run into a darkness that seemed to contain thousands of the enemy—a foe they had been told was more than a week of marching away in a different direction. Confused orders were shouted back and forth as they hesitated and the Wolves ran clear.

*                                                      *                                                      *