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attacker shudder. Vespasian looked up. The man’s eyes were wide open with shock and his mouth had gone slack; a bloody javelin point poked from out of his right nostril.
    ‘What did I say about heroics, you stupid little shit?’
    Vespasian focused through the blood and made out Sabinus, on foot, holding a javelin in two hands, supporting the weight of the now limp runaway. Sabinus tossed the body contemptuously aside and held out his hand to help his brother up.
    ‘Well, now.’ He grinned maliciously. ‘Whatever good looks you may have thought you possessed have been ruined by that little escapade. Perhaps that’ll teach you to listen to your elders and betters in future.’
    ‘Did I kill the other one?’ Vespasian managed to ask through a mouthful of blood.
    ‘No, you killed his horse and then his horse killed him. Come on, there’s one left alive to nail up.’
    Vespasian held a strip of cloth, torn from the dead runaway’s tunic, over his bleeding nose as he walked back up the hill; it stank, but that helped him to remain conscious. His head pounded with pain nowthat the adrenalin had subsided. He breathed in laboured gasps and had to lean on Sabinus. Hieron followed behind with the horses.
    They reached the mules, which were calming down after their ordeal. Baseos and Ataphanes had rounded up those that had run off and had captured eight of the runaways’ horses. Pallo and Simeon were busy tying the animals together into a column. Only two had been killed; four others had flesh wounds that would heal with time.
    ‘Not a bad day’s work, eh boys? Two mules down, eight horses up, Father won’t have to take you to court for careless shooting,’ Sabinus chuckled at Baseos and Ataphanes.
    Baseos laughed. ‘We’d have had three horses more to take back if you stick throwers had bothered to aim at the riders and not their mounts.’
    Ataphanes clapped him on the back. ‘Well said, my squat little friend, the bow is a far more effective tool than the javelin, as my grandfather’s generation proved over seventy years ago at Carrhae.’
    Sabinus did not like to be reminded of Rome’s greatest defeat in the East, when Marcus Crassus and seven legions had been almost annihilated in a day under the continuous rain of Parthian arrows. Seven legions’ eagle standards had been lost on that day.
    ‘That’ll do, you lanky, hook-nosed horse-botherer; anyway you’re here now, having been captured by proper soldiers who stand and fight, not shoot and run away. What happened, ran out of arrows?’
    ‘I may be here but I’m free now, whereas the bones of your lost legions are still lying in the sand of my homeland and they’ll never be free.’
    Sabinus could not bring himself to rise to the argument; the lads had fought well and deserved to let off a bit of steam. He looked around for their prisoner, who was trussed up on his stomach still unconscious.
    ‘Right, let’s get him up on a cross and get home. Lykos, dig a hole to plant it in right here.’
    Ludovicus and Hieron appeared out of the wood a short time later carrying two sturdy, freshly cut branches. With the tools that they had brought along especially for the purpose they cut two joints in the timber, then laid the cross out and started to nail it together. The noise brought the prostrate prisoner to; he raised his head to look around and started to scream as he saw the cross. Vespasian saw that he was a little younger than he.
    ‘Sabinus, don’t do this to him, he can’t be more than fourteen.’
    ‘What do you recommend then, little brother? Smack his wrists, tell him he’s a naughty boy and not to steal our mules again and then send him back to his owner – who will crucify him anyway, if he has any sense.’
    The terror that he’d just felt at the prospect of losing his life at so young an age made Vespasian sympathise with the young thief’s plight. ‘Well, we could take him back and keep him as a field slave. He looks strong enough and