As if in answer a sliver of burning orange light appeared over the top of the hill behind the fort and made him blink. Dawn was coming, and the Horseman was galloping through the heavens, his hound running alongside as they drove the stars from the sky and let the sun bring a fresh day to the world. A moment later he heard Crescens’ voice raised in anger, bawling at one of the slaves for no good reason.

‘That’s him, lord,’ the Thracian muttered. ‘Know you’re busy, but the bastard has it coming.’

The little garrison was stirring, apart from the centurion whose quarters were set up against the far wall. No one had seen the officer for three days – or heard him since the last burst of singing on the second morning. It happened every month or so, and by now the Thracian knew the pattern, and guessed that the centurion Flavius Ferox would be half sober by tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning.

Most of the time Ferox did not drink a lot by army standards, and did his job well. He was centurio regionarius, the centurion in charge of the region around here, tasked with keeping the peace and the rule of law, so that the army knew what was going on and the locals were content and willing to settle their disputes without lopping each other’s heads off. Ferox was a Briton, albeit from a tribe living far away in the south-west, and although men said that this was why the locals trusted him, the Thracian doubted that it was the main reason. The centurion was a hard man, grim-faced, but was known for keeping his word and never giving up. They told stories of how he had chased fugitives for weeks on end and over hundreds of miles and almost always got them. Once he went to the far north in the dead of winter and came back with a young warrior accused of raping and murdering the wife of a Roman trader – and then testified at the trial on behalf of the captive and proved that he was innocent and the Roman guilty. Not everyone thanked him for that, but the warrior’s relatives did, and word spread that the centurion prized the truth. It did not matter too much, for they never caught the husband, who had slipped away to Gaul, protected by influential friends.

The Thracian did not know whether any of this was true, for the army always had far more rumours than it had soldiers. Men also said that Ferox had once been a great hero and perhaps that was true, for the harness he occasionally wore over his mail was heavy with disc-shaped phalerae, torcs and other awards for valour. Others whispered that he was unlucky, and that disasters seemed to happen when he was around, with legions cut to pieces by the Dacians and Germans.