The Roman was coming closer. Brasus saw his men waiting, weapons in hand. One was an archer and as he watched the man reached into his bag for an arrow. If there was a fight, then Brasus would shout down to him to shoot the one left behind and stop him getting away.

Brasus knew the tower well, which made it a shame to see it abandoned and in disrepair. His father had held this place for the king for many years. He remembered parting with the old man and sensing how strongly he yearned to defend it against the invaders in the last war with Rome. For the first year he was frustrated, until in the second the Romans came and his father fought them and held them for seventeen days before they breached the wall. As his men died fighting, his father had taken his own life in devotion to the god. That too was a good death.

Fate and the will of Zalmoxis, those were the drivers of men’s lives, and the pure accepted this truth and embraced their destiny. Yet now he struggled. He had been chosen as Messenger and yet not chosen to go to the god. The other two men were brave warriors, but neither was pileatus, neither a noble or leader of a clan. As reward the king favoured him, even promising to give Brasus one of his daughters in marriage. Instead of passage to the Heavens, he would receive land and power and a royal bride. Accepting this as his just fate might have been easier if it had not seemed so convenient. A loyal nobleman was honoured and rewarded, his devotion to the king confirmed, and the only Roman of value was spared to serve Decebalus. Was that simply the will of the god? If so, then the Lord Zalmoxis was very obliging. The thought was disturbing, gnawing away at his old certainties like a worm burrowing into fruit, but would not go away. He had seen too much in battles and all the little fights of the last war to be certain about anything. So many of the pure failed to act as they should, while other lesser men outshone them like comets – and even Rome and its creatures sometimes showed true purity.

The rider was almost at the rubble piled outside the breach in the wall where the gate and its towers had once stood. He had a yellow crest on his bronze helmet and that was the mark of a junior officer. Still there was no sign of anyone else. If they were not alone, then these men were taking a great risk.

‘We are friends!’ The man shouted in Latin. He had a strong accent, which Brasus did not recognise, and then he switched to a dialect of the Keltoi, so perhaps he was from one of the tribes of Gaul. ‘Friends!’ he tried in guttural Greek. The man held his sword high and then dropped it into the snow. ‘Friends!’