While Virgil dies in Brindisi, he does not know that in the north of Spain someone orders engraved in stone a line of his anticipating death. This is a legionnaire who, in the snowy dawn, watches an iron sun rise through groves of holm oaks. A cold wind blows, stinking of rotten meat, scorched horn, smouldering slags of gold in which the barbarians rummage with their spears. A silence whiter than the snow, the frozen breath from the mouths of the dead horses, fall upon his skeleton as ...