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decent field workers are hard to come by, and very expensive.’
    ‘Bollocks. The little bastard has run away before; who’s to say he won’t do it again? Anyway we need to nail one up and he had the misfortune to get caught. Would you feel better if he was lying over there, full of arrows, and we had an old, grizzly one to crucify? What difference would it make? They’ve all got to die. Come on, let’s get him up.’
    Vespasian looked over at the hysterical boy, who had fixed him with a pleading stare, and, realising that Sabinus was right, turned away.
    Pallo and Hieron lifted the screaming captive, fighting for all he was worth – which was not much – on to the cross.
    ‘Please, mercy, please, I beg you, masters. I’ll give you anything. I’ll do anything, anything. I beg you.’
    Pallo slapped him around the face. ‘Quit your snivelling, you little shit. What have you got to give anyway, a nice tight arsehole?It’s vermin like you that murdered my father, so I wouldn’t even give you the pleasure of one last hard fucking.’
    Spitting at him he cut his bonds and he and Lykos pulled his arms out and stretched the struggling youth over the cross. Hieron and Baseos held his legs as Ludovicus approached with a mallet and nails. He knelt by his right arm and placed a nail on his wrist, just under the base of the thumb. With a series of crashing blows he drove the half-inch-wide nail through the wrist, home into the wood, splintering bones and tearing sinews. Vespasian had not thought it possible for any creature, let alone a human, to make the noise that the boy emitted in his torment. It was a cry that pierced his very being as it rose from a guttural roar to a shrill scream.
    Ludovicus moved on to the other arm and quickly skewered it to the cross. Not even Pallo was enjoying it any more as nails were forced through each of the writhing boy’s feet. The cry stopped abruptly; the boy had gone into shock and just stared at the sky, hyperventilating, his mouth frozen in a tortured grimace.
    ‘Thank the gods for that,’ Sabinus said. ‘Get him up, then haul the two dead mules over here and leave them under the cross; that should leave a clear enough message.’
    They lifted the cross into the hole and supported it whilst wedges were hammered in around the base. Soon after they’d finished the cries started again, but this time intermittently as the lad ran out of breath. The only way he could breathe was by pulling himself up by his wrists whilst pushing down on the nails through his feet; however, that soon became too painful to endure and he would let himself slump down again, only to find himself suffocating. This ghastly cycle would carry on until finally he died in one or two days’ time.
    They rode away up over the hill with the cries echoing around the valley. Vespasian knew that he would never forget the boy’s face and the horror that had been written all over it.
    ‘What if his friends come and cut him down, Sabinus?’
    ‘They may well come, but they won’t cut him down. Even in the unlikely event that he did survive he would never be able to use his hands again, or walk without a severe limp. No, if they come they’ll stick a spear through his heart and go home. But they’ll have learnt a lesson.’
    The screams followed them for what seemed like an age, and then were suddenly cut short. The boy’s friends had come.

CHAPTER III
     
    I T WAS STILL dark when Sabinus’ right foot connected with Vespasian’s left buttock, sending him rolling out of bed and on to the floor.
    ‘Get up, legionary,’ Sabinus shouted in his most centurion-like voice. ‘You need to make a fire now if you want any chance of a hot breakfast before we march at sun-up.’
    Vespasian sat up and looked around. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked groggily.
    ‘I mean that if you want breakfast you had better make it now because we start the route march at dawn. Is that any clearer? Now get moving. There’s wood, kindling