Chapter Twenty-Five

‘Someone bloody well told them!’ Macro snapped. ‘I mean, it’s not the kind of trap you set up on the off chance. And if it’s him, I’ll have his balls for breakfast.’ He jabbed his finger at Prasutagus, who was sitting on a fallen tree, chewing a strip of dried beef.

Macro glared at Boudica. ‘Tell him.’

She raised her eyes in weary frustration. ‘Tell him yourself. You really want a fight? With him?’

‘Fight?’ Prasutagus stopped chewing and his right hand casually slipped down to his sword belt. ‘You fight me, Roman?’

‘You’re beginning to get your tiny little mind round the world’s greatest language, aren’t you, sunshine?’

Prasutagus shrugged. ‘You want fight?’

Macro thought about it for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘It can wait.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Cato. ‘Prasutagus is in as much danger as the rest of us. If anyone told the Durotriges that we were coming, it has to be someone else. That farmer, for instance. Vellocatus.’

‘It’s possible,’ admitted Macro. ‘He was a shifty looking sod. So what now? The enemy knows what we’re up to. They’ll be on their guard everywhere we go. Numbskull here won’t be able to go anywhere near any of the locals to pick up news of the general’s family. I’d say that we’ve almost no chance of finding them now. Mounting a rescue is out of the question.’

Cato had to agree. The rational side of his mind knew they should abandon the mission and return to the Second Legion. Cato was confident that Vespasian possessed enough intelligence to see that they had done all they could before turning back. It would be foolhardy to continue while the Durotriges were hunting for them. As things stood, it would be dangerous enough trying to make it back into friendly territory. But as the thought of danger sidled into his consciousness, Cato could not help thinking of the vastly greater danger the general’s family was in. Cursed with a vivid imagination, he could picture Plautius’s wife and children living in daily terror at the prospect of being tied up inside one of those giant wicker effigies the Druids liked to construct. There they would be burned alive, and the mental image of their screaming faces struck Cato with such sharpness that he flinched. The general’s son, whom he had never met, assumed the features of the blond child he had seen in the well…