Cato clambered up the steep turf slope to the roughly hewn wooden stakes of the palisade. On the far side, spread out across the ditch and the white landscape beyond, were the dark shapes of those who had managed to escape the slaughter of their comrades back in the settlement. A number of his men joined him, anxious to get after the enemy.

‘Hold still!’ Cato managed to cry out hoarsely, despite the pain in his throat. Some of the men continued forward, and Cato had to shout again, straining to make his order louder. ‘Hold!’

‘Sir!’ someone protested. ‘They’re getting away!’

‘I can bloody well see that for myself!’ Cato cursed angrily. ‘There’s nothing we can do. We’d never catch them now. Have to hope the cavalry scouts see ‘em.’

Discipline and good sense halted the men. Chests heaving from their exertions, and steamy breath whipping around their heads, they watched the enemy flee into the darkness. Cato was shaking, partly from the cold wind that blew even more keenly up on the ramparts, and partly from the release of nervous tension.

Had so little time passed since they had rushed the enemy in the centre of the settlement? Forcing himself to concentrate, he realised that the whole affair could only have lasted little more than quarter of an hour. No sounds of fighting carried on the wind, so the skirmish at the gate must be over as well. All finished with as quickly as that. He recalled the first ever battle he had fought in. A village in Germania, not so very different to this one. But that desperate fight had lasted an afternoon and through the night until the first rays of dawn. Short though this fight might have been, the same burning exultation at having survived fired his veins and made him feel somehow older and wiser.

His throat ached abominably, and it was an agony to swallow or move his head too far in any direction. That huge Durotrigan warrior had almost done for him.

When The Eagle Hunts

Chapter Thirteen

The faint pink glow in the sky cast a paler shade over the snow lying across the ruined settlement. As if the very earth itself had bled during the night, thought Cato as he rose stiffly from the corner of a wall where he had been resting under his army cloak. He had not slept. It had been too uncomfortable for that; his thin frame meant he felt the cold more keenly than the more muscled and hardened veterans of the legion, like Macro. As usual the centurion’s full-throated snore had filled the night, until awakened for his century’s turn on guard duty. Then, having woken the next officer on the rota, he had slipped instantly back into a deep sleep with a guttural rumbling that sounded like a distant earthquake.