All that was long ago. Ferox had been at this outpost for seven years and nothing bad had happened. Nothing much had happened at all. The Thracian did not know whether a weakness for drink was why the centurion had been sent here in the first place or whether the damp monotony since had turned him to it. Still, Ferox was a Briton and they were an odd lot, so perhaps he liked this hole and was just prone to melancholy. When he arrived, he had had someone paint a much bigger sign with the word SYRACVSE in tall elegant letters, and had had this nailed above the message left by II Adiutrix. No one even pretended to know why.

The light was growing, and it was nearly day, which meant that the Thracian’s four hours on guard would soon be over. Built for some fifty men and a dozen horses and mules, the outpost Syracuse now had less than half that number, and so Crescens had decided to inflict double watches on everyone since Ferox had shut himself away. The curator was parading his little power as garrison commander, picking on all those he did not like. Fortunately, that was just about everyone, so that the burden was shared. The man had barely served five years, but looked eager and could write in a clear hand, so would probably get promotion sooner or later, instead of this temporary post, which did not grant a man any permanent rank.

Stamping his feet to bring them back to life – and taking care to step over the soft plank – the Thracian went to the parapet on the outer side of the tower and looked out across the valley. The small village on the far side seemed quiet, although no doubt the women were stirring the hearth fires back into life. A few boys drove little clusters of cattle down to the stream.

‘Omnes ad stercus,’ the Thracian groaned, too tired for anger, but not for fear. ‘Boy,’ he hissed at the young sentry standing outside the little fort. The pair of them had shared this long watch, and as the senior man he had taken the ramparts and tower. The regulations for the army set down by the divine Augustus and repeated by every Caesar since then stated that a picket must always be maintained in the open outside each gate of a camp. Men on that duty were oath-bound to stand their ground even in the face of overwhelming odds, and were there to warn the garrison of danger. ‘What if the barbarians come?’ asked the new recruit in one of the army’s oldest jokes. ‘Just make plenty of noise while they’re killing you,’ was the centurion’s answer.