Macro slowly threaded his way back through his men to take up position in the front rank of his century. He stood beside Cato, grim-faced and silent. Cato glanced at his superior, a man he had come to know well over the last year and a half. He had quickly learned to respect Macro for his qualities as a soldier, and more importantly his integrity as a human being. While he would hesitate to call the centurion a friend to his face, a certain intimacy had grown between them. Not quite father and son, more that of a much older, worldly-wise brother and his younger sibling. Macro, he knew, regarded him with a degree of pride and smiled on his achievements.

For Cato’s part, Macro embodied all those qualities he aspired to. The centurion lived at ease with himself. He was a soldier through and through and had no other ambition in life. Not for him the tortuous self-analysis that Cato inflicted on himself. The intellectual pursuits he had been encouraged to indulge in when he was raised as a member of the imperial household were no preparation for life in the legions. No preparation at all. The lofty idealism Virgil lavished on his vision of Rome’s destiny to civilise the world had no relevance to the naked terror of this night’s fight, or the bloody horror of military necessity that had caused the prisoners to be killed.

‘It happens, lad,’ Macro muttered. ‘It happens. We do what we must if we are to win. We do what we must to see the light of the next day. But that doesn’t make it any easier.’

Cato stared at his centurion for a moment, before nodding bleakly.

‘Cohort!’ Hortensius bellowed from the rear of the formation. ‘Advance!’

The rearmost centuries had passed through the barricade and re-formed on the far side, all the while fighting off the increasingly desperate assault of the Durotriges’ heavy infantry. But once it was clear that the attempt to trap and destroy the cohort had failed, the fight went out of the Durotriges in that strange indefinable way that kindred sentiment spreads through a crowd. Warily, they disengaged from the Romans and simply stood in silence as the cohort tramped away from them. The defiant ranks of legionaries remained unbroken, and had left a trail of native bodies in their wake. But the night was far from over. Long hours remained before dawn stretched its first faint fingers over the horizon. Long enough to settle the score with the Romans.