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lions today, ravaged their way through the Roman trade ships and barges, drinking the wine they found to their taste and tipping the rest into the river. Debris of all kinds floated downstream towards the sea.
    The depot itself had been torched as soon as the honoured dead were removed along with anything of use or value. Now, the smouldering timbers were falling in on themselves, throwing up ash from the charred pile beneath.
    Rome had been extinguished, here.
    In the cold, glistening moonlight, a hand twitched.
    Among the ordered lines of the honoured Carnute dead, a cold, grey arm, covered in the mire of the battle, moved, found purchase and pushed. A body slowly rose to a seated position, the head looking this way and that, checking for movement. No one nearby. The place was… well, as quiet as a grave.
    Bennacos clutched the wound at his side. It had bled profusely, but was little more really than a flesh wound. The real pain he’d suffered had been landing on the compacted earth floor after the dramatic and convincing fall. It had been the hardest, tensest thing he had done in his life to lie still, temper his breathing as shallow and slow as possible and appear utterly limp and lifeless as two Carnutes had carried him out of the building alongside the other victims of the Roman war machine.
    The wound had stopped bleeding and clotted.
    Staggering painfully to his feet and rubbing his other arm - the one that had been dislocated and possibly fractured during the fall - he scrambled away from the enemy dead and towards the pit where he’d seen the Romans thrown.
    It was not hard to find the body of Cita, chubbier than the rest and turned out so well, even in bloody death. It struck him as comforting that his former commander seemed to have a smile on his face in the grave more genuine than any he’d ever seen while the man lived.
    Pausing only momentarily to check that a coin was in place beneath the tongue, he quickly screwed the officer’s signet ring, bearing the ‘Castor and Pollux’ seal of his family, from his finger and tucked it away into his own pouch as evidence of his identity.
    With a last, lingering look at his commander, Bennacos of the Boii - loyal oath-man of Caesar and only survivor of the massacre at Cenabum - trotted off into the night, heading for Boii lands and the path to the legions.
     

Bovillae: The fallen eagle
     

     
    Titus Annius Milo twitched open the curtain on his coach, peering out at the Latin countryside, partially obscured by the endless mausolea and columbaria that lined the Via Appia even this far out - more than ten miles south of Rome. In the mid-Ianuarius weather, the fields lay fallow and untended and a light morning frost had coated the world’s surfaces with a fine white fur, though the cold, bright sun had burned most of it away throughout the morning and early afternoon, leaving only the patches the sun had failed to reach.
    ‘This is utterly ridiculous. We will miss Canuleia’s gathering, and most of the important personages of the city will be there, Titus. You will miss a chance to build your status, I will miss a chance to talk fashion and the theatre with the ladies, and for what? For a cold, uncomfortable carriage ride into the backside of the country.’
    Milo sighed and cast his wife a sympathetic smile. ‘Dear Cornelia, we are political animals all, even you. You know as well as I that the weather and social engagements cannot stand in the way of the running of the Republic.’
    ‘Pompey runs the republic, Titus, not you - at least not until you are consul.’
    The sound of Milo’s teeth grinding was almost audible over the rattling of the carriage. ‘No one man runs the Republic, whatever Pompey or Caesar would wish - not even the consuls.’
    ‘Caesar is a low-born clot in virtual exile in the north. Everyone knows now that Pompey runs Rome. The senate might as well hand him a crown and be done with it.’
    Letting the curtain fall back into place,