“You’re slow, much too slow…” he heard echoing as consciousness suddenly left him.

The gargling cry of a camel he heard first, then as his eyes opened stones and gravel heaved past. Tight hands gripped him at arm and thigh. Dwyrin saw dim blue sky flash past, then the edge of a post cracked against his forehead. Old blood was in his mouth. Another pair of hands dragged his arm up and into a heavy leather thong. His eyes suddenly focused on his other hand as it too was bound into a heavy black leather loop. Beyond it he saw the great roof of the mess tent and the other pavilions. A cold wind slid between his bare legs.

Two boys not much past his age stood at either side of the wooden frame he now hung from. To his left a short, tan, black-haired boy with a long face and thin nose, dressed in plain white shirt and trousers, was staring at him with guarded dark eyes. To his right he glimpsed a shorter and broader boy, also in plain white, with a broad round face and short blond hair. He too wore a closed look on his face, though otherwise he had the look of a merry fellow.

One of his legs was dragged back and a wire-cored rope flipped around it three times. Dwyrin felt fear fill his body and corrode what passed for his returning consciousness.

He knew what was going to happen next. The centurion hadn’t been kidding. He was on a whipping frame, and soon some twenty-year veteran with arms like tree trunks was going to come out with a snake-lash studded with metal hasps and give him thirty or forty full strokes and his back and legs would disappear in a red mist. He gagged and a small groan escaped him.

A sharp slap brought his head around, eyes wide. A young woman stood close to him, dragging his head back with a dark tan hand.

“Shut up,” she hissed. Her hair was dark and thick as pitch and tied back in a dull red fillet around her head. Her face, like that of the boy on the left, was thin and lean. Her eyes were a dark brown, with graceful black eyebrows above. She shook him again, her white shift falling back from a firm tan arm, and pushed his head back against the edge of the frame.

“If you squeal like a pig, Celt, I’ll make sure you never have a moment’s peace here, see? You’re in our five now, and if you make us look bad, I’ll skin you myself.”

The girl pushed him back and then squatted down to tie his other leg to the frame. Across the little space behind the mess tent, Blanco and Colonna were sitting on a bench, drinking from heavy earthenware cups. Two wooden plates sat next to them on the bench, the remains of their morning gruel clinging to the edges. They were deep in some discussion, heads bent close.

Above the tents and the patchwork quilt of ropes, wires and threaded nets and cloth that depended from them, Dwyrin glimpsed the high peaks of the Tauris. The sun glinted from broad spearheads of snow and ice. The wind from the east bore their chill. There was a coughing sound.

Dwyrin forced his eyes to remain open, his head to turn, slowly, to the sound of crunching gravel that heralded someone’s approach. The dark-haired girl stepped back from the frame, to the side of the boys, now drawn together in a knot.

Blanco and Colonna put down their mugs and stood up, saluting as the tribune paced into the little square. As the night before, he wore stained trousers and a rumpled shirt.

His spectacles lent him a distracted air. He returned the salutes.

The tribune glanced around at the preparations and sniffed. He walked to the back of the mess tent and banged on the doorpost with his fist. One of the cooks stuck his head out the canvas flap.

“Something hot, lad,” the tribune said. He turned around then, leaning against the post. He signed to Blanco and then settled back.

Blanco stepped out into the square, hands behind his back, and cleared his throat. “The legionarius Dwyrin Mac-Donald, having failed to maintain his issued kit, gear and horse in good order and condition, must abide by the law, wherein five and twenty strokes of the lash will suffice to maintain discipline,” he intoned.

Then he stepped back and signed to the girl in the bound hair. She stepped to the side of the frame and back a little, and shook out a long length of rawhide thong, weighted at the end, and showed it to a pale Dwyrin with a peculiarly ritualized motion. Then she went around to the back of the frame.

Dwyrin gritted his teeth and tensed his back.

Behind him, he heard the lash slither out, shaken free from the girl’s hand. Its tip rattled across the stones and gravel. Then he felt it gathered up again in her hand. Her feet shifted on the gravel. Dwyrin’s mind began yammering prayers. His hands were sweaty in the loops at the end of the ropes. The wind slid across his skin, raising goose-bumps.

“One,” Blanco rumbled.

Dwyrin flinched.

The lash rapped hard against his back and the side of his neck, then lifted away. Dwyrin rebounded from the end of the ropes.

“Two.”

Dwyrin gasped, the trail of fire across his back now lit and surged through him. The second stroke fell and his teeth ground down. Muscles and nerves howled in pain. He gasped again, fighting against the enormous scream that was rising up within his body.

“Three.”

A long gargling cry slid between his teeth, and Dwyrin felt the disgusted eyes of the girl on him.

Blood hissed in his ears as the lash lifted up, whistling, from his naked back. Again he flung forward against the ropes. A long, mewling cry bubbled from his lips and he bit down on it. His tongue spiked with pain. The hot spark at the back of his brain spun and flashed. Across the little sandy square Blanco looked up from the bench with interest. At his side the two young boys tensed, greyhounds at the leash. From the edge of his vision, in the flickering gray haze, he could catch their forms shifting in and out of awareness, first a sharp green and then a pale blue.

The girl flipped the snake back in her hand and adjusted the leather strap on her forearm. Sweat beaded under the red fillet. She tossed her hair back out of her eyes. She squinted. The sun had now risen fully over the peaks of the Tauris and slanting rays spilled across the camp. Tentpoles and banners were picked out in the hot light.

Dwyrin hung limp, eyes filled with tears.

Gods, don’t let her see me cry, he raged at his body. It trembled and twitched at every sound. His mind scrabbled at nerves and muscles, willing them to be still. He heard the scrape of gravel under the girl’s foot as her shoulder rolled back to propel the braided snake against his raw back.

The spark roiled and spun in darkness, drawing red rage into its heart. Blanco spread his feet and balanced himself, now poised at the edge of the circle. Colonna was sitting again, a slow smile creeping across his face. The cook appeared at the back door of the kitchens and scattered the mess boys back to their duties. Then she too leaned there, her face in shadow still under the plain lintel of the door. Her dress was blue and long, Dwyrin saw through the rip pling pain, bordered with curling red and yellow flowers. The details seemed clear and fine in his sight.

“Five,” Blanco growled from the bench. Dwyrin’s body betrayed him again, tensing forward, flexing the lines, and then it cast back. The lash was across his back in a bar of white fire. This time the girl had put her shoulder into the blow. The spark whistled down now into inner darkness, growing huge in his mind. Nerves screamed, grating raw stone and branch across^him.

“Six.”

“Seven.”

His voice, distantly, was a high, girlish scream, but his heart was black and filled with darkness. Blanco was smiling now, his eyes half closed, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. And Colonna was leaning back against the dull gray planks of the kitchen wall, his eyes sparkling.