Vindex brought a sack and he dropped the head into it and tied it up.

‘We had better move,’ Ferox said. ‘That is, with your permission, my lord.’

‘Of course, centurion.’

They mounted, Vindex taking the reins of the three spare horses.

Crispinus turned in the saddle, looking at the tree and the bodies of the Romans surrounding the priest. ‘I am just glad that it is all over at last.’

Ferox thought about the sacrifice of a triple death, of the power that brought to the great druid who had hallowed this offering to the gods. If the Stallion was beaten and dead, the druid Acco was still at large, stronger than ever, and there was an ambitious and clever king in the north, and more traitors in the army, at least one who was senior and had given Flaccus his orders. Trajan was not yet secure, and from all Ferox heard showed no sign of leaving the frontier armies and heading to Rome.

‘Over, my lord? It’s only beginning.’

We hope you enjoyed this book.

Adrian Goldsworthy’s next book is coming in winter 2017

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HISTORICAL NOTE

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present [?]. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him [?] their greetings. [2nd hand] I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. [Back, 1st hand] To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa.

Vindolanda Tablets II. 291.

This text excavated at the fort of Vindolanda was the spark that first inspired this story. It was written around the turn of the first to second centuries AD, and the second hand in the text was surely that of Claudia Severa herself, adding a personal touch to the invitation. This makes it the first surviving piece of writing by a woman in the history of Britain. The original text, written in ink on a thin wooden writing tablet, can be seen today in the British Museum.

We will talk more about Vindolanda and the texts discovered there in a moment, but it was this glimpse of something as routine as a birthday party in a frontier zone on the edge of the Roman Empire that made me want to create a story around it and bring that time and place to life. Vindolanda is a novel, and much of the story is invented because we know very little about what was really happening in northern Britain at this time. However, given that I have spent my adult life studying the Roman world and the Roman army in particular, I have done my best to place the story in as accurate a setting as possible.