Claudius Super did not look convinced. Crispinus said nothing and just watched. As the son of a senator, and someone who would within a few years be enrolled in the Senate, he was a far more important man than anyone here and could speak or be silent as he wished. Ferox had the sense that he was watching and thinking. At the moment the centurion was too busy to worry, and too tired to work out where he had encountered the man’s father, for it seemed an unlikely claim for the young man to have invented. Claudius Super was right about one thing – the alarm had been late, and men had died because of that. Women might have died too, or been raped and carried off. The fear about what had so nearly happened gnawed at him.

Ferox blamed himself for not listening to Vindex sooner, but even after that something was wrong. He had sent Victor to the tower, knowing him to be reliable and well mounted. The man should have reached the watchtower and the beacon been lit a good half-hour before the signal had gone up. Something was very wrong – yet another thing to add to the others that he did not understand.

‘Fire and sword!’ Claudius Super shouted the words angrily when someone told him about the castrated cavalryman. ‘That’s all these animals understand and it’s all we should ever give them!’

Ferox let him rant, for he was busy searching for arrows and had only managed to find one, hidden in the grass and broken off six inches from the head. He felt the tip. It was not iron, or even bronze, but bone of some sort, narrow and carefully sharpened. The archers must have picked up the missiles they had used, even the damaged ones, and taken them away to repair. A legionary, seeing him looking, produced a second stump.

‘Thank you.’ This one was iron, similar in shape, so that all the power was behind the narrow pointed head. Ferox had never seen ones like this, and remembered the great force behind them as they had gone past or struck the carriage.

One turma from Coria had already gone north after the raiders. Cerialis decided to take thirty of his men to join the chase, while Crispinus and the rest escorted his wife back to Vindolanda. The prefect took Claudius Super with him, ‘to make use of his experience’, and Ferox doubted that it was concern for their fatigue that prevented either of them from asking or ordering Vindex to go as well. Well, let them chase. He doubted that they would catch anyone and was more concerned to ride to the watchtower and find out what why it had taken them so long to fire the beacon.