From noon onwards they saw more riders shadowing them. Ferox tried once again to meet them, but these proved even more skittish and rode away before he was close enough to call to them. They did not go far and kept watching. From the heights he looked down on the scouting force of a dozen troopers and about the same number of Brigantes. Vindex and his men took turns to go ahead and he could see some of them, lone warriors or pairs of them on the slopes of the valley for some way ahead. Back down the valley were the Batavian patrols. They were about a mile back, and he could see the main force as a dark patch on the green another half-mile beyond them. From up here, the column looked tiny. He stayed up on the crest for a while, keeping pace with them as they trotted along down in the valley. Half an hour later he saw another darker patch on a hillock ahead of where the ground rose to join another glen. It looked as if someone was waiting, but whether to fight or speak was hard to tell. The force was a good size, so it could be either.

Crispinus was still talking when he returned.

‘I had assumed you Britons would all be much alike,’ the tribune declared, ‘but in fact you vary a great deal, far more than the tribes of Gaul.’

‘You’ve studied a lot then,’ Vindex said sarcastically, as if the young aristocrat had just announced that rain comes from the skies.

Crispinus darted him an angry look and was ignored. He smiled. ‘I do remember my uncle telling me that the Silures were different from everyone, perhaps from every nation on earth.’

‘Oh well, everyone knows that,’ Vindex agreed. ‘Odd people. Funny customs. Don’t talk much. Don’t swear much either and you cannot say that is natural.’

‘Is it true?’ Crispinus asked. ‘Now that you mention it I have not heard you swear.’

‘Waste of good anger,’ Ferox said without looking at him. It was something his grandfather had often said. Do not waste rage. Nurture it, cherish it and use the strength it gives. Hot anger gets a man killed. Cold anger will put the other man in the earth.

‘Silures like killing.’ Vindex was enjoying stirring things up. ‘They like it more than food or drink – even women.’

Ferox said nothing. For the first time in years he wished he was back with his own people, men of sense who enjoyed silence for its own sake. He was tempted to say that his people most liked winning, but saw no point in the conversation. Things were as they were, and the tribune was marching into the lands of the Selgovae, not the Silures.