Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth by M. C. Scott

the century camps. The crushed snow was blue now in the late afternoon shadows, and freezing to ruts that made walking hard. He had us group into our tent-units and run at a jog-trot, with a distance of no more than twenty paces between each group.
    In full armour, carrying our supplies of food and water, our mattocks, our mess kit – everything – we could walk twenty miles a day, forty if we were forced to double time. That evening, we wore our armour, but no helmets; carried no shields, but only our swords and daggers, wound around with fleece. We wound more wool on our forearms to act as shields, and kept our heads warm with the felt caps we had made in the harshest of the weather. Travelling light like this, even in the dark, I had no doubt that we could march the eight miles to the enemy camp before midnight; certainly that was our goal.
    Syrion and I ran with Lupus at the head of the main group because we knew where the enemy units were waiting in ambush. Horgias, setting off earlier, had taken the other four men of our unit along the goat track, promising to reach the ambush places ahead of us.
    We reached the first of their camps around time for the evening meal. It was nestled in trees, lower down towards the snow line than I think was legal, but they’d been there for over two months and Silvanus had not made them move it.
    Their tents were set tight together in a square with branches across them to keep the snow off. A large fire was kept lit in the centre, and the men bunched around it, lightly armoured as we were, but with helmets on. They were still, silent, waiting. The fire’s light blinded them to movement in the shadows as we backed away thirty feet.
    There, I knelt in the snow beneath the first rank of trees and gave the call of the owl which was our signal for every man to halt where he stood. We waited a moment and heard Horgias call back, except that his call was not so much an owl as a man trying to sound like a wolf, and failing.
    The men around the fire were expecting some such. Hearing it, they jeered amongst themselves and, gathering their weapons, rushed up towards the place where Horgias had seen eight men lying in ambush.
    What they would have found there, if all had gone according to plan, was eight men bound and gagged, each one with the sign of the wolf carved on to the leather of his armour straps as a reminder of who had taken them.
    We didn’t stay to find out, but passed their camp at a dead run, and all were safely beyond it long before the main mass of the enemy returned carrying their newly freed comrades to the fire to warm away their frostbite.
    They didn’t send anybody after us. I don’t know what Horgias whispered in the ears of the fallen IVth as he tied the rawhide knots, but it was enough to frighten them into stillness, at least for the first part of the night.
    We continued on, running into the changing light. To our left, the sun slid down until it pierced itself on the mountain’s highest spikes, spilling bloody light down the snow and leaving a long purple bruise along the ridge.
    At the same time, the moon rose on our right, one day off full. It cast silver across the snow and ice, almost as bright as day, so that we could see our way as well as before.
    The first century of the IVth had come this same route on a night of no moon, when the clouds sat on the ground and spilled snow waist deep in places. My respect for them grew greater, not less, as we travelled along the same path, even when Horgias and Tears and the other men tied the third enemy unit and whooped their wolf call high above the mountain as they carried on ahead of us.
    Cadus was waiting for us on the path as we approached the last camp before our target, dressed in mountain clothes with none of the regalia of the parade ground, except that he carried his helmet under his arm, the plume crisping in the night air.
    Under the moon’s light, his hair seemed paler than I remembered it, strung through