The tall man struggled violently and then went limp and heavy so that Ferox almost fell over with the corpse as it slumped down. He lowered the body to the ground and crouched beside it. No one was moving nearby or seemed to have noticed what he had done. In the valley there was a confused whirl of fighting around the picket and more of the torch-carrying warriors streaming past at the entrance to the camp. Some of them dropped, hit by javelins he could not see in the darkness. The rest kept going, swinging to the right to go through the gate. More of them fell to missiles, and the score or so of survivors met a line of waiting soldiers, shields raised. Blades glinted in the light of the last few torches.

Ferox could see no sign of other attackers, and there was nothing he could do to help. This looked like a diversion, something to distract the men on the far ramparts before a heavier wave of warriors swarmed out of the night to overwhelm them. Yet there was no sign of anyone approaching from another direction, and what he had heard the dead man and the other warriors say suggested that this was it, and the warriors were being sacrificed in a doomed attack whose only purpose was to kill as many enemies as possible. He looked down at the body and even in this light saw a chest covered in tattoos like ivy on an old stone wall. He pulled back the headdress and there was the mark of the horse. Pressing hard at the torc he prised it open and lifted the man’s head so that he could take it off.

Below him in the valley the fight was dying as swiftly as the attackers. A few of the dropped torches smouldered on the ground, but the only one flung across the rampart had failed to set fire to anything for there was not much in the camp to burn, given that the tents had not been set up. The fallen torches gave a little light to see the heap of naked corpses piled in the entrance. There was still a fierce struggle around the picket, a cluster of Romans standing back to back.