It was hailing as they crossed, the sluggish waters pocked with splashes. Ferox felt his face stinging from the blows. The people in the houses on the south bank were nervous, reluctant to talk, and they discovered the cause an hour later. At first they saw only the outline of the great yew tree, standing alone on the low ridge above the track leading south. When they got closer they saw the overturned cart, blackened and smouldering, the remains of a fire under the boughs of the tree and the two bodies hanging down from the branches. One of the men wore a Roman tunic, the dull white wool slashed and stained dark with blood from where they had sliced at him with knives as he slowly choked to death from the noose around his neck.

The other corpse was naked, and hung upside down, the rope around his ankles, his head downwards so that it was held just above the fire lit under the tree. He would not have been in the flames but kept in their heat, and Ferox imagined the men who had done this sitting and listening to his screams.

‘I hope the poor fellow was dead when they did that to him,’ Crispinus said, staring in horror at the corpse, the head burst open and its scorched contents in the fire.

Ferox did not bother to answer so foolish a question but jumped down to look at the ground properly.

‘If he was dead they wouldn’t have bothered,’ Vindex replied when the centurion said nothing.

‘It’s the Treviran,’ Ferox said at last, recognising the dead man’s hands. ‘The one we met at Trimontium.’ There was little left to recognise of the man’s face.

Crispinus glanced at him, obviously wondering how he could tell, but deciding not to ask.

There were three more corpses in the grass, all badly cut about, which meant that whoever did this had kept slashing long after they were dead. Apart from the burned cart there were marks from a dozen mules, which the attackers had taken with them.

‘Whatever they were carrying, the Stallion’s men have it now,’ Ferox said. ‘Come on, we’d better get them down and buried.’ He called to Masclus and his men to help.

‘Won’t do them much good now,’ Crispinus said, unable to tear his eyes away from the dead men, ‘and it will take a lot of time. Why bother?’ Then something occurred to him. ‘How do you know it was the priest’s men?’

‘Who else? They were killed because they were Roman and whoever killed them had a lot of hate. They wanted their goods – whether it was food or weapons it was something of value. And it’s a yew tree. That would have appealed to them.’

‘Weapons?’