Half an hour must have passed before the advance scouts of the enemy column appeared half a mile from the ford. In all that time Bedriacus had kept absolutely still. Only his eyes moved, restlessly scanning the landscape, and Cato began to have more confidence in the hunter. Cato felt the faintest touch of a hand on his arm and looked round at Bedriacus. He nodded gently towards the track and Cato’s eyes searched for a moment before they fixed on the distant figures. Two men on horseback, side by side, slowly approached round the curve of the hill. They came on cautiously enough, glancing around them as they approached the ford.

‘Bedriacus . . .’ Cato said softly.

‘Sa?’

Cato pointed to the scouts and drew his finger across his throat, and then indicated the track just down from the crest. Bedriacus smiled his gap-toothed smile and nodded, shuffling away from Cato and easing his way behind a large tuft of spiky grass right at the edge of the track. Then he lay perfectly still again.

Peering carefully through the grass, Cato watched the scouts walk their horses up to the far side of the ford, no more than a hundred paces away. They stopped and exchanged some words, gesturing back in the direction of the main force of the Durotrigans. Then, both men slid from the backs of their mounts and led them into the pebble-bottomed shallows of the river. While the horses lowered their muzzles into the lazily sparkling current, one of the scouts waded a few steps downstream, untied his waist cords and unleashed a long golden arc of piss with a grunt of satisfaction that carried up the slope to Cato. When he had finished, the man just stood staring down-river for a moment and then hitched up his breeches and retied the waist cord. Making his way back to the riverbank, he sat beside his companion and gazed across the ford. Cato forced himself to keep still. With the sun low in the sky behind the scouts the crest of the hillock would be well lit, making any sudden movement easily detectable. But, as time crawled by, the scouts gave no sign that they were at all suspicious.