‘Get back to Macro. Tell him to round up some men and kill the prisoners. Make sure the bodies are left with those we’ve just killed on the far side of the barricade. No sense in giving the enemy any greater cause for grievance. What are you waiting for? Go!’

Cato saluted and ran back towards his century. A wave of nausea swept up from the pit of his stomach as he passed the kneeling forms of the prisoners. He cursed himself for being a weak sentimental fool. Hadn’t these same men killed all their prisoners? And not just killed, but tortured, raped and mutilated them. The face of the flaxen-haired boy staring lifelessly from the bodies heaped in the well swam back before his eyes and bitter tears of confused rage and a sense of injustice welled up. Much as he had wished death on every member of the Durotrigan nation, now that it came to killing these prisoners, some strange reserve of morality made it seem wrong.

Macro, too, hesitated on hearing the order.

‘Kill the prisoners?’

‘Yes, sir. Right now.’

‘I see.’ Macro looked into the young optio’s shadowed expression and made a quick decision. ‘I’ll see to it then. You stay here. Keep the men formed up and ready, just in case that lot get it into their thick British heads to try it on again.’

Cato fixed his eyes on the churned-up snow stretching out ahead of the cohort. Even when pitiful cries and screams rose up from a short distance behind him, he refused to turn and acknowledge the sound.

‘Keep your eyes to the front!’ he shouted at the men closest to him, who had turned to seek out the source of the awful noise.

At length it died down and the last cries were drowned out by the sound of the fight from the rear of the formation. Cato waited for fresh orders, numb with the cold and exhaustion, his spirit weighed down by the bloody deed Centurion Hortensius had ordered done. No matter how hard he tried to justify the execution of the prisoners in terms of the cohort’s survival, or the well-deserved retribution for the massacre of the Atrebate inhabitants of Noviomagus, it felt wrong to kill their captives in cold blood.