The legate was sure that they would do a fine job of training Verica’s men. Yet he longed to have them back with the Second Legion. When the two officers had fully recovered from their injuries, and the supply lines were safe, he would send for them straight away. A legion was only ever as good as the centurions who led it into battle. Vespasian wanted the Second to be good - to be a crack unit - and that meant making the most of men of Macro and Cato’s calibre.

A trickle of sweat traced its way down his side under his linen tunic.

‘Shit, it’s hot!’ he muttered.

One of the staff tribunes raised his head and looked towards the legate, but Vespasian dismissed him with a wave of a hand, as if swatting some annoying fly or gnat. ‘It’s nothing . . . Might have a swim later.’

Both men gazed longingly across the slope of the hill towards the river, a quarter of a mile away. The white forms of naked men lay stretched out on the grassy banks, while others waded and swam in the glistening water. Here and there the surface of the river burst into glittering spray where the more exuberant men were indulging in horseplay.

‘I’d kill for a swim, sir,’ the tribune said quietly as he wiped the sweat from his brow on the back of one hand.

‘Some of them already have. Let them have their fun. But there’s work to be done.’ Vespasian nodded up at the remains of the hillfort. ‘Keep ‘em at it. I want nothing left by nightfall. Nothing that can be easily fortified.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Even though it was late afternoon, the sun was blazing down on the legionaries toiling on the hill. The few native buildings that had escaped the incendiary bolts of the Second Legion’s artillery battery had been set alight. Now the centurions were organising teams of men to tear up the palisade and hurl the timber down into the defence ditch. Soon the hillfort would be no more than a few black smouldering wooden frames and rings of ruined earthworks scarring the natural landscape. And after that, merely a fading memory in the minds of the legionaries who had destroyed the settlement and those natives who had ever passed this way.