It’s simplistic, but it works. Humanity tends not to change things that work.
         “Consurgas!” grated a voice. The words meant nothing to him, but the sword under his chin managed to convey the message succinctly.
He got up, slowly. A swordpoint to your throat tends to make you think far more carefully than normal.
         “Qui hic est?” grated the voice again, thrusting something blackened and circular in his face.
         “He wants to know what it is,” hissed a voice in his ear. “I’d advise you to tell me, or he’s likely to find an interesting place to put it.”
         “Interesting?” asked the blacksmith, his forehead beading with cold sweat.
         “Well…interesting for us, anyway.”
         The blacksmith grabbed the disc from the man with the frozen grin of someone who knows the rest of their life could be the next ten seconds. He rubbed frantically at it, willing it off. Something glinted under the black, reminding him of the glint that same morning from these men’s shields. He swallowed and kept rubbing.
         “Well?” asked the voice, quietly. The centurion tells me he is becoming impatient. He has told me to tell you to be quick, or else he will have you crucified.”
The blacksmith paused for a second.
         “You talk to them? But you are Spanish! Why are you betraying us?”
         “This is not betrayal. This is survival!” hissed the voice, so full of hate and venom the blacksmith shivered and stepped back. “Do you think I enjoy this? I was in your place not six months ago, except I was forced to watch my children and their mother be raped and nailed up. I do not enjoy this, but I don’t even have the courage to kill myself. So just shut up and tell me what the bangle is, alright?”
         “It’s a necklace of some sort,” said the blacksmith, looking hard at it. “A man came to me and asked me to get rid of it.”
         “What did he look like? Because if that’s what I think it is, and I have a pretty damn good idea what it is, the owner is in trouble.”
         “It’s not mine,” the blacksmith said quickly, “it was this man’s. He was big and my colour.”
         “No use. There are quite a lot of big men around these parts your colour. Would you be able to spot him in a crowd?”
         The blacksmith snorted, forgetting for a second the blade at his throat. “’Course I would! He’d stand out head and shoulders above any crowd, for a start!”
         “Good. Come over here.”
         There was a quick flurry of the foreign language, and then the blade navigated to his kidneys. A gentle prod was enough to propel him speedily across the square. A group of soldiers were standing around, looking threatening. Another had formed a jeering circle, prodding a large lump which was the focus of the circle. A snapped command lashed across them, and they came to attention with an impressively business-like stamp. The circle opened, and the object of their scorn became apparent.
         Wrapped in a large net, bleeding from a large wound on his head and a hundred tiny ones on his shoulders was a man who seemed to have been constructed.
         “That’s him,” whispered the blacksmith, hardly able to believe the huge Pìcaro had been captured. Behind him the centurion whispered to his translator.
         “Servus?”
         “Etiam”
         “Bonus”
         More snapped words in the foreign tongue. Then the circle moved in and grabbed the net. They hoisted it up and marched over to a waiting cage, into which Pìcaro, net and all, was unceremoniously thrown.
         “What will happen to him?” asked the blacksmith, unable to stop staring at the bound man.
         “He is a runaway slave. It is his master’s choice. He may be branded , he may be killed” The blacksmith could hear the resignation in the man’s voice.
         “And I?” he asked. He couldn’t help it. He knew he probably wouldn’t like the answer, but he had to ask anyway.
         “Nothing,” replied the man, his forced smile obvious in his voice. “You have aided the Roman people. You will not be punished.”
         “ Thank you, thank you,” murmured the blacksmith, attempting to crawl away.
         “You will instead be sold at one of the great slave markets in Rome, and spend the rest of your life serving your master.”
         The blacksmith leapt up, fists raised. “Not one man of my family has ever been a slave,” he shouted, his blood suddenly pumping in his ears. Death he could have dealt, and short-term humiliation was fine. But to spend the rest of your life being humiliated, and then be exiled from your family for eternity-it didn’t bear thinking about.