They settled back down on the soft bed of pine needles covering the forest floor. Cato pulled his cloak tightly around him and curled up, resting his head on an arm. Above him, in small gaps in the foliage, the stars twinkled through the swirling steam of his breath. Another time he would have wondered at the beauty of this sylvan setting, but tonight the stars looked as hard and cold as ice. Despite his weariness, Cato could not sleep. The memory of his enforced abandonment of Lady Pomponia and her terrified son played over and over in his mind, tormenting him with his powerlessness. When that image faded, it was replaced by the dreadful vision of Macro’s wound, and much as he might pray to the gods to spare Macro’s life, he had been in the army long enough to know that the wound was almost certainly fatal. It was a coldly clinical assessment, but in his heart Cato could not bring himself to believe that his centurion would die. Not Macro. Hadn’t he survived that final stand in the marshes by the River Tamesis the previous summer? If he could come back from that, then surely he could survive this wound. Nearby, in the darkness, Prasutagus stirred.

‘Cato.’

‘Yes?’

‘Tomorrow we kill Druids. Yes?’

‘No. Tomorrow we watch Druids. Now get some rest.’

‘Huh!’ Prasutagus grunted, and gradually slipped into the deep regular breathing of sleep.

Cato sighed. Macro was gone, and now he was saddled with this mad Celt. He couldn’t deny the man was good in a fight, but although he had the physique of an ox he had the brains of a mouse. Life, the optio decided, had a funny way of making an impossible situation effortlessly worse.

When The Eagle Hunts

Chapter Thirty