‘Just the horses,’ Magnus muttered back, restraining Castor and Pollux by the collars, ‘and the crackle of the fire, of course.’ Vespasian listened again; no human sounds came from the burnt-out farm. Smoke still wafted from smouldering timbers; here and there was the flicker of flaming wood but there was no sign of any Iceni in the firelight. Yet they must have been there because tethered in a small, still-intact orchard, twenty paces away, were half a dozen ponies of the shaggy sort favoured by Britannic horsemen; the saddles on the beasts confirmed the origins of their riders but of them there was no sign. ‘They must be asleep.’ ‘Tiring work, all this massacring.’ Vespasian looked at the bodies of the former occupants of the house, nailed by their wrists to the trunk of an oak tree: a man and wife and their three young children. Their heads had been removed and, judging by the wounds to their chests, so had their hearts. ‘I’d like to do the same thing to the savages that did that.’ ‘Another time, perhaps; let’s just take the horses and get away.’ Magnus moved forward at a crouch with his dogs.
