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Something struck his arm, harder than he would have liked, and the one-time Lord of the Northern Tribes flinched involuntarily, dragging his thoughts back to the present. The king’s champion had reined his horse in alongside the mare that Calgus had been given, and pointed wordlessly at the king, who, staring at him through eyes that seemed to burn with anger, gestured to a man standing by his horse, the same hard-faced scout who had managed to ambush the Tungrian horsemen the evening before.

‘The time for gazing at a burning Roman fort and dreaming of glory is at an end, adviser, and the time to fight is upon us! My son is dead! My scouts found Scar and his Vixens to the north of here, all of them dead save my master of the hunt who was lying helpless with his spine broken. Before they granted him a clean and merciful death he told them that The Fang has been raided by the Romans, the eagle stolen and my son found dead at the hill’s foot! My son!’

Calgus felt his spirits sink, closing his eyes and slumping back into the mare’s saddle.

‘They have the eagle?’

Brem snorted furiously.

‘Not for long! I’ll run those bastards down and put them to the spear! Any that survive will be pegged out for the wolves with their bellies opened! My warriors are seething with anger, mad with the urge to revenge themselves on the men that burned their brothers in the forest, and I’ll send them north like a pack of dogs with the smell of blood in their nostrils!’

Calgus fought to stop himself cringing at the mention of the ambush he had suggested setting along the track that ran through the western end of the hills’ bowl. Men were still straggling in from the forest’s edge, but painfully few of them, and for every warrior who appeared out of the trees ready to fight, another two staggered up to their brothers with such serious burns that many of them appeared unlikely to survive, much less take any active part in any fighting. Few men had escaped the inferno without losing hair and beards, and those warriors who seemed fit to fight stood together in twos and threes, their hollow eyes silent witness to the shock they had suffered when, as it seemed from their stories, the encircled Romans had set fire to the forest and bludgeoned their way out of the trap that had been laid for them, effectively destroying several of the tribe’s clans in the process. He forced himself to focus on what the king was saying, a tiny part of his mind still musing on the potential for his dream of leading a coalition of tribes to liberate the province, with himself at its head and Brem’s part no more than a line in the great songs that would be sung for Calgus the Red, liberator of the Britons, for generations to come. The king clenched his fist, roaring a challenge at the men gathered around him.

‘We must find these men and destroy them before they can escape into the forest and we lose our chance to revenge ourselves upon them!’

The Selgovae’s brow furrowed.

‘My lord King, surely we can leave them to stew in the cauldron of their own forging? They must by now have exhausted whatever rations they carried with them, and they will have been through the same ordeal by fire that has so horribly burned our own men. Why not simply bottle them up and wait for them to surrender? After all, any chance of their being rescued by the men that were camped along the wall has just marched south …’

He stopped talking as the king shook his head, his face set hard. When he spoke his voice was the harsh bark of a man set upon violence.

‘Perhaps you can ignore the pain that these invaders have inflicted on me, Calgus, but I cannot! They killed my son, cut him down and threw him from the mountain as he fought to defend our fortress! No, they must be made to pay for the havoc they have visited upon my family and my people! I will lead my warriors to victory over them, grind their last scraps of resistance into the dirt and take their heads for my walls. I will prove that I am fit to be king by taking my revenge upon these invaders!’ The men around him nodded their agreement, and Brem shook his head at his adviser with a derisive sneer. ‘And besides, it is not the way of my tribe to shrink from battle when the enemy flaunts his presence on our land!’ He stared levelly at him. ‘Perhaps it is different for the Selgovae?’

Calgus laughed bitterly.

‘No different, my lord King, no different at all. Less than two years ago I stood on the battlefield listening to a man who played much the same role for me that I play for you now tell me just the same thing. My people would not tolerate leaving a single cohort of auxiliaries alive on a battlefield slick with the blood of half a legion, he told me. My warriors would think less of me if I were to do the sensible thing and leave them to stand and stare while we left the field with the legion’s eagle, and the head of its leader. And so I sent my men up a hill to take their heads, only to watch as their attack broke that cohort’s line like bloody waves upon a beach. And just as my men were finally getting to the point of overrunning that sorry, tattered last cohort, two fresh legions arrived on their flanks and put them to flight in an instant. My acceptance of that advice cost me thousands of warriors, ridden down and trampled as they fled from the legions’ bloody revenge, and I learned a bitter lesson, never to attack the Romans when they have time to prepare their defences. And Brem, just in case you doubt my story, it might help to add one more small piece of detail.’

He paused, shaking his head at the irony of the situation.

‘That cohort that managed to hold up my tribe’s attack until the legions could bring their terrible strength to bear? None other than the same cohort that we have at our mercy now, if only we have the discipline to wait for them to either surrender or make one last futile attempt to break through to the south. The same cohort that will surely kill your warriors in great numbers if you seek to attack them on ground of their own choosing.’

Brem shook his head again, waving a dismissive hand as if to push aside the Selgovae’s argument.

‘You don’t listen well, do you Calgus? I can still muster over two thousand spears even with the losses that we took in the forest, enough men to roll over a few hundred tired and hungry soldiers, I’d say.’ He raised his voice, challenging the clan leaders gathered around him. ‘We go to fight, my brothers! We’ll advance until we find our enemy, use our numbers to pin them down on all sides, and then pull them to pieces at our leisure. Our swords and spears will show these invaders what it means to enrage the Venicone people! Bring me my crown!’

The gathered nobles erupted into a riot of cheering acclaim, their fists punching the air as Brem put the circle of gold upon his head and bellowed orders to his men to follow him, jerking his head at his champion with a curled lip and a glance at Calgus. The grinning warrior took the mare’s bridle in his hand and then kicked his own horse forward to join Brem’s, pulling Calgus’s mount along beside him as the remaining mounted bodyguards closed in around them, knotting the mare’s reins to the saddle of the king’s massive war horse. Led by the royal party the war band formed into one dense mass and followed closely behind their ruler, their voices raised in the old songs of battle and victory, bellowing their imprecations at the sky as they worked themselves up into a killing frenzy.