As a cool dusk settled over the land Cato found himself shivering. His head ached badly. He and the others had been forced to sit in the blazing sun all through the day and now the exposed parts of his skin felt tight and tingled painfully. Only as the day had ended had the sky become overcast and the air filled with a clammy closeness that threatened rain. Cato took this as a further sign that the gods had wholly abandoned him: tormented by the sun during the day and cold and wet by night.

One of the camp slaves had brought a few canteens of water up from the river and each man had been permitted a few mouthfuls to wet their dried throats. But there had been no food. When rations were in short supply condemned men were the first to go without. It made sense, Cato told himself. It was the logical thing to do.

About the only logical thing to be happening in the present circumstances. The fact that he had done nothing to merit tomorrow’s punishment was tormenting him more than any other thought. He had faced the enemy in battle, when a moment’s carelessness would have seen him dead. He had undertaken a perilous quest to find and snatch the general’s family from the heart of a druid stronghold. He had risked being burned alive to save Macro in that village in Germania nearly two years ago. Every one of those actions had been fraught with terrible risks, and he had entered into them knowing and accepting the danger. To have been killed at any of those times would have been a reasonable consequence of the dangers he had exposed himself to. That was the price paid by men of his profession.

But this? This cold-blooded execution designed to act as an example to the other legionaries? An example of what, precisely? An example of what happens to cowards. But he was no coward. To be sure he had been afraid more times than he would care to admit - terrified, even. That he had continued to fight on, despite such terror, was a kind of courage, he reflected earnestly. Courage, yes.

The fight at the crossing had been no exception. He had fought with the same will, driven by the same desire to be seen in the front rank, fighting alongside the rest of his men. No shirking behind the rear of the line, bellowing out weasel words of encouragement, and savage threats to those whose flinching cowardice was not protected by rank. To be singled out for execution, for a crime he had no part in, by something as blind and heedless of his virtues as a lottery, was the worst fate he could imagine.