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worth the trouble of feeding such captives and keeping them alive for the few weeks it would take to get them to market.
    Captured soldiers were a different matter. They were usually strong and difficult to control once taken. Worse, they were liable to kill themselves, which took away all the profit, so the raiders preferred to just slaughter them on the spot if they were far from a dealer or a market. Babies were killed as a practical matter. Few would survive a march, and often a nursing mother would be weakened by her infant and a valuable prize would be lost if she died, too. 
    Fortunately, wholesale slavers usually showed up if they knew of a skirmish, or else they would arrange to meet the Gael to take captives off his hands, and they were used to handling even reluctant slaves. This raid had been good, with plenty of females and older children and those twins, too, so Filwen was pleased. He sent back to his ships a coffle of weeping women, tied together at the neck, and planned to continue west to intercept the great north-south Roman road that linked Londinium to the garrisons at Lincoln and Eboracum and continued north to the Wall of Hadrian.
    When his scouts warned him that Roman infantry had been sighted, Filwen promptly doubled back to his ships, knowing his war band could not face organized troops.  Before the legionaries reached the great white headland, the raider’s sails were to the south, vanishing in the haze. 
    Over the next few days, auxiliary troops who had been called in by the signal station crew fruitlessly scoured the hinterland while the raiders sailed south to the great river Humber, turning into it around the narrow sand spit that curved like a bird’s bill.
    They gazed curiously at the abandoned jetties on the Ouse once occupied by Roman navy detachments, and three times a raiding party went ashore to pillage, plundering several villages and two fine villas. At the last, in the hamlet of Selletun, a house slave named Mullinus revealed the hiding place of his master’s hoard of silver rather than have his backside roasted on the glowing charcoal of the kitchen brazier.  Filwen would have roasted the man anyway, but Mullinus claimed to be able to read and write. Filwen, unlettered, could not test the slave’s claim, but reasoned that if the man told the truth he could bring a price at auction.
    The Selletun mansion was the last place to burn, as the raider, conscious that  the settlement was within a half day’s fast march of the provincial capital Eboracum, opted to retreat down river before troops came to investigate the smoke plumes.  The two Gallic ships went out on that afternoon’s ebb tide, the Humber’s silty current rushing them past marshy shores and into the German Sea. Then the steersmen headed the heavily-loaded vessels east and south and so, in two more days, they fetched up across the sea, at the pharos whose light guided the way into Forum Hadriani, its slave market and shipyards.

 
     
    IV. Hadriani
     
    Filwen the Bastard liked the slave corrals. He liked to see the hatred, fear or despair with which once-proud freemen faced their futures, standing naked on the block as they were sold under the crown, the mocking wreath symbol of their status that showed they were for sale. In more impromptu markets, the official supervising the sale would set a spear in the ground, to signify that slaves were being sold under public authority.
    Because the sale was in a province, not in Italy itself, there was no need to whiten the slaves’ with chalk as a sign they had come across the sea and were liable to import taxes, but all wore a tablet around their neck describing their age, character and any defects or tendencies, such as theft, or readiness to run away. It also listed skills like carpentry or brick making, that the slave possessed, detailed his native country and name, and offered a six-month guarantee he was free of disease.
    Any slave without such a warranty was made