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interrupted her morning walks with her baby through Rome to visit the butcher’s.
    Ulpius was blind to mockery and his parents’ increasing confusion because he was deeply in love with his own hair and Sulpicia’s mirror. He knew he could never hope to afford such a mirror, but he had to have it. That was why, one morning when Sulpicia had come to the shop alone, he found himself standing over her with the mirror in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Sulpicia was lying on the floor, blood jetting from her neck, staring at him with increasingly glassy eyes.
    He’d fled to Ostia, then to sea.
    At sea long spells of boredom had been broken by terrifying, exciting and shameful adventures. His self-obsession and growing penchant for brutality suited marine life. Soon he’d risen from junior deckhand to junior pirate. He did well. He killed a lot of people. Butchery skills, he discovered, lent themselves well to knowing how to finish a knife fight. A shipwreck on Britain’s south-west Dumnonian coast had put paid to piracy for a while, and Ulpius, via a host of ugly events that he’d pushed to the recesses of his memory (the men who’d rescued him, half-drowned, from the beach had pretended that they didn’t know he was a man, which wasn’t a great start), had ended up where he was now. Still with gorgeous, heavily styled but manly hair, he was stuck on the Hades-blighted isle of Britain, earning a performance-related wage as a land pirate in a small band of bandits run by a man called Landun Ogilvie, who went by the name of Ogre.
    Ulpius suspected that he’d been recruited to bring some beauty to the gang since Ogre had a large nose, no hair and no ears. He’d lost them in a torturing incident that he didn’t like to talk about. He could still hear through the puckered clumps of gristle that he had instead of ears, but he didn’t like talking about them either. Very few who mentioned waggishly that his ears looked like cats’ bumholes got away with their lives.
    Ogre was not just the most uncannily perceptive gang leader; he was also the cruellest man Ulpius had ever met, which was saying something. The depravity visited on the gang’s victims kept Ulpius very happy. Until his new obsession arrived. An obsession to rival or even supplant the mirror. This was Spring. A girl called Spring was ruining his life.
    Spring was the newest member of Ogre’s gang. They’d found her working in a drinking house and Ogre had taken a liking to her, Pluto knew why. They needed a replacement for Farrell, who, to everyone’s surprise, particularly Farrell’s, had been killed by a bear earlier that year.
    Ulpius knew that all women were trouble and Spring was no exception, even though she couldn’t yet be ten years old. She’d seemed fine to begin with, a quiet girl who sat on her own and was small, flexible and useful for burglary. But slowly, somehow, Spring had done something despicable and unforgivable that nobody else had ever done. She had made Ulpius feel embarrassed about his hair.
    She had a way of looking at him when he was combing it.
    Yesterday he’d asked her straight out, “Are you trying to mock me?”
    “No,” she’d replied. “Why would I mock your hair?”
    It was an hour later, running the exchange back in his memory, that he realised what she’d done there. He decided to kill her at the next possible opportunity.
    Sitting on the hill, drinking cider, watching the massacre below and looking forward to the next day’s battlefield looting, Ulpius silently practised tomorrow’s potentially tricky conversation. “That’s right, Ogre. Bugger was still alive! He stuck a knife in her when she tried to take if off him. A terrible shame. Such a sweet child, cruelly taken.”

Chapter 4
    D ug fled.
    He’d had a go at rallying them, shouting that they couldn’t lose if they just held the badger-fucking line! He’d grabbed a spear off a passing man and tried to push to the front. He’d thought,