‘Clear as day. They were Second Augusta – the Capricorns. Rode up as calm and casual as you like. Got down, returned the salutes as the lads were frantically trying to get dressed and put on a proper show. We weren’t due for inspection for another week – at least that’s what the detail we took over from had said. So they go in, and suddenly there’s screaming. One of our lads – Julianus his name was, a great snoring brute from Pannonia, but a good comrade – dashes out of the door and the officer himself hacks him down from behind. It all happened so quickly. There was nothing I could have done,’ Gannullius implored the centurion to believe him. ‘Nothing. If I’d come out I’d only have died with them, but to be honest I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. It didn’t seem real. They were our men – legionaries, it’s true, but soldiers just like us. I couldn’t understand. I still don’t understand.’ He stared at the fire for a long time, and Ferox waited.

‘It was all over so quickly. Then I heard them shouting out a count. Must have been of the men in the tower and they knew that they were one short, and one of them starts walking up past the beacon towards me. He couldn’t have seen me, but the bushes there were the obvious place to look. That’s if he was looking. Maybe he just wanted a quick slash. But anyway he comes up the slope and I’m about to stand up and draw my sword when the officer calls him back. “Yes, my lord tribune,” he says, and turns right around. They rode off soon afterwards, but not towards the road, which I thought was odd.

‘Now I know I shouldn’t have been away from the post. I’m guilty of that, I’ll admit. But they were my commilitones, my mates, and I wouldn’t have turned on them for the whole world. And I would never break my oath either.’

‘Then why did you vanish?’ Ferox asked.

‘I was scared. Scared they might come back and finish the job, scared that no one would believe me and that I’d be condemned before I could say a word. I ran, just ran, and kept on running. Hid in the farm for a week. My girl, she said that I should go to you, that you were a good man and fair, said you’d helped her Da when someone stole a couple of his pigs.’

Ferox nodded. He had a vague memory of the incident, but dealt with so many cases that most did not stick out in his memory.