‘Very pretty,’ one of the veterans said. ‘Like a salmon.’

Minura was beside him, helping him up as he panted. Her face was pitying, and then Bran appeared, still excited.

‘It’s burning!’ he shouted, ‘it’s burning!’ The wood inside must have been dry or the shape of the tower acted like a chimney because the fire was shooting upwards and black smoke rising high. Dacians were trying to beat at the flames with cloaks, but it was too late. Some ran across the bridge towards the wall, and the veterans stood up to meet them, striking at their legs. They fell and the ten men behind had nowhere to go because the tower itself was an inferno. Some burned and some jumped and the rest came forward only to be killed. The ropes burned through and the veterans managed to lever the edge of the bridge off the parapet with their swords until it flapped down against the front of the blazing tower.

The attack was not over, and many more men died before the Dacians gave in. They had plenty of ladders and a great deal of courage, and time and again men fought their way onto the parapet. Ferox led charge after charge to clear them off, and took a blow to the side that did not pierce his mail, but made a great bruise. Bran and Minura were always with him, and they worked as a pair, moving like dancers, each covering the other, dodging and cutting. The boy lost his helmet, took little cuts to arms and legs, but kept going until he was covered in the blood of the men he killed. The woman was untouched, and more than once she parried a blow that would have cut him down.

There was a moment when Ferox thought that the fort had fallen, and then his wife appeared at the head of her Brigantes, surging up the bank behind the rampart and killing all the Dacians who had broken through. He had not seen her fight for a long while and had forgotten her deadly grace, so that he marvelled even as he feared for her. Yet though tall and strong warriors fell on either side of her – several dying willingly as they used their bodies to protect her – she passed through unscathed, although her shield was left as little more than fragments by the end of the day.

The Dacians gave in just when he thought that the Romans could take no more, but the cost was dreadful. Sabinus was beheaded by a falx, Dionysius, returned to duty with a bandage over his ruined eye, lost his right leg and bled to death before he could be helped. Ephippus had his head torn off by a thrashing cable when the monâkon suddenly ripped itself apart as they were preparing to lob another stone into the mass of attacking warriors. Ferox did not know whether the repairs to the old machine had simply proved too weak or whether someone had tampered with it.