One thing that puzzled him was why there had been so few attackers, given the force Maximus had seen. The Dacians must have had a pretty good idea of the size of his garrison, and known that the cavalry had ridden away, yet had attacked with barely double his strength. It made little sense for them to launch the attack on the west gate without anyone to exploit it. If they had had a couple of thousand, Ferox suspected that the fort would have fallen and he and all the rest of them would now be dead or captive. He had left the west gate too weakly defended, since it seemed least threatened, and the men he had sent there were not his best. By all accounts Bellicus had made a fool of himself and his men had hesitated for too long and then broken. There could not have been many more men attacking the gate and rampart than defending it, which meant the way that the Dacians had got in was even more remarkable. There was talk of a tall warrior with a great falx scything through men as if they were wheat as he charged along the wall. He did not seem to be among the dead.

Apart from the massacre at the hospital, the garrison had lost fourteen dead, and three or four more who would most likely soon join them, and thirty-nine wounded more or less seriously.

Sabinus had been pleased with the numbers. ‘We killed fifteen or more of theirs for every one of ours – more than four if you count our wounded as well, and most of them aren’t too bad.’

The centurion’s calculations were loose to say the least, and did not allow for the other damage. A small number of Dacians had brought torches and little barrels of pitch, and had set light to a granary and two more buildings before they were caught and killed. Ferox was thankful there had been so few of them and that they had not had enough fuel to get the blazes burning more quickly. As soon as the attack was repulsed and even before he was back on his feet, Dionysius had set men to fighting the fires. They saved half the granary and its contents, helped by the new way of storage Ephippus had suggested to them after the last fire. This meant that there were wide lanes left at regular intervals between the stores and a wall of mud bricks half way down the floor, broken only by a doorway. The other buildings, a barrack block and a storeroom, had been gutted, the latter taking the bulk of their straw for feed and bedding with it.

Yet everything could have been so much worse, and the fears that thought brought to his mind helped Ferox to drive himself and the men to work. The mist had cleared, which was a comfort and although they saw a few Dacians watching from a mile or so away on the far bank, none came any closer and that left the Romans to labour with only a small number of pickets to keep an eye on the enemy.