“Then where is the seventh? What are they busy doing while we stand here watching the rest? Send the scouts wide. I want them found before we move on.”

Labienus gave the order and the fastest of their cavalry horses galloped out in all directions.

“Have we been seen?” Pompey asked.

In answer, Labienus pointed to where a distant horseman was trotting along the rocky tree line that bordered the plain. As the two men watched, the man raised a flag and signaled to Julius’s forces.

“I don’t like it,” Pompey said. “Those woods could hide anything. Yet it looks so much like a trap, I wonder if that is the conclusion he wants us to draw.”

“You have men to spare, sir. With your permission, I will send a single legion out to test them—perhaps the cohorts with General Brutus, sir.”

“No. Too few would not spring the trap, if it is one. He would let them close and then destroy them. We would lose men for nothing. I am reluctant to send more until I am better informed. Tell the men to stand down until the scouts return. Get a hot meal inside them and tell them to be ready for anything.”

The wind was increasing in force as the day waned. Dyrrhachium was a long way behind them and Pompey knew his men were tired. Perhaps it was better to set up hostile camps for the night and move on at dawn. He suspected Labienus was not impressed by his caution, but Pompey could still remember Julius gathering the old Primigenia legion around him and making them the core of his famous Tenth. Even those who hated Caesar admitted his ability to seize success against the odds. His skill could be read in the reports, and Pompey knew Julius was one of those rare ones who kept a sense of a battle even as it raged around him. Gaul had not fallen on its own, nor the shores of Britain. His men gave him their first loyalty, above the Senate and Rome. When he asked them to die, they went because he was the one asking. Perhaps because of that faith, they had become used to victory. Labienus had never even met the man, and Pompey was determined not to be another name on the list of those Julius had broken. His stomach twisted with a pang and he shifted uncomfortably in the saddle.

“Sir! They are moving east!” one of the scouts called out, just as Pompey became aware of it himself. Ten heartbeats after the enemy legions began to shift, the distant whisper of their horns reached them, almost lost on the wind.

“Your opinion, General?” Pompey murmured.

“They could be trying to draw us in,” Labienus said doubtfully.

“That is my feeling,” Pompey replied. “Have the scouts keep the widest chains back to us as we move around it. I want them in sight of each other at all times.”