Song of the Legions

Tales of the Empire 2:

Captain Varro of the Fourth army is about to have the worst day of his life. Wounded in battle and fearing for his life and his future, he stumbles upon a plot that reaches deep into the past and into the roots of everything in which he believes.

Accompanied by a young engineer from his unit and the daughter of his commander in chief, he begins to unpeel layers of treachery and murder that threaten not only himself, but the people that he loves.

Ironroot is a tale of treason and revenge set in the world of the Interregnum, some twenty years after the events of that book.

Tales of the Empire 1:

For twenty years civil war has torn the Empire apart; the Imperial line extinguished as the mad Emperor Quintus burned in his palace, betrayed by his greatest general. Against a background of war, decay, poverty and violence, men who once served in the proud Imperial army now fight as mercenaries, hiring themselves to the greediest lords.

On a hopeless battlefield that same general, now a mercenary captain tortured by the events of his past, stumbles across hope in the form of a young man begging for help. Kiva is forced to face more than his dark past as he struggles to put his life and the very Empire back together. The last scion of the Imperial line will change Kiva forever.

For nearly 2,000 years the secret of Rome’s missing Ninth Legion has been shrouded in mystery, its ultimate fate argued over by generations of historians. The loss of an entire Legion – numbering around 5000 men – has been spun variously from a catastrophic defeat to an almost supernatural “mass vanishing”.

“The Eagle Has Fallen” is an unravelling of that mystery. We reveal how the loss of the Ninth Legion was a truly catastrophic event: the devastating news was suppressed by Hadrian to safeguard his reign in a classic conspiracy cover up.

It was the first in a chain reaction of disasters which forced Rome to halt expansion and to create the largest frontier wall ever built in the Roman Empire. Written sources and new archaeology indicate where the Ninth met its end in the tribal lands of northern Britain.

Author Brian Young has spent some six years researching and writing about this incredible mystery.

Following on from two recent movies, “The Eagle” and “Centurion”, there is enormous fresh interest in the disappearance of the Ninth Legion. This is the story of Romes most mysterious vanished Legion.

The might of Rome was waning – the annihilation of the Ninth was the writing on the wall. This was the beginning of the end.

Beased on a true documented incident.

There is an important secret to the way the Carthaginians build their galleys. Each is identical to all of the others. They are built to a standard design and each piece is marked. You can take one apart and use it as a set of templates to build more. One unlucky Carthaginian captain is forced aground by the Romans and he and his crew and his galley are captured. Rome uses his galley to build a fleet of 225 identical ships in less than 45 days and use this to challenge Carthaginian naval supremacy. But will Roman skill and ingenuity be enough against the experienced crews of the oaken galleys they face. Its 217BC and Rome takes what it believes is its chance.

When the falcon has flown, the mountain lion will charge from the east, and all Byzantium will quake. Only one man can save the empire . . . the Haga!

1046 AD. The Byzantine Empire teeters on full-blown war with the Seljuk Sultanate. In the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia, a land riven with bloodshed and doubt, young Apion's life is shattered in one swift and brutal Seljuk night raid. Only the benevolence of Mansur, a Seljuk farmer, offers him a second chance of happiness.

Yet a hunger for revenge burns in Apion's soul, and he is drawn down a dark path that leads him right into the heart of a conflict that will echo through the ages.

Tales of the Empire 3:

The desert nomads have a saying:

"When something is broken it should never be discarded. So long as the pieces remains, the whole can be remade."

A time of trials, war and terror is coming to the desert city of M'Dahz, the Empire's southern bastion. As the Empire's government falters and crumbles, the people suffer.

But Samir, Ghassan and Asima, childhood friends and citizens of M'Dahz, are about to discover that while people change the world, the world also changes people and that the best and worst of folk are forged in hardship.

The Danubian frontier is weaker than ever, and a storm is gathering in the north . . .

Deep winter, 376 AD: Emperor Valens has withdrawn the field armies from Moesia and Thracia to fight in the Persian War. The impoverished limitanei legions left behind to defend the banks of the River Danubius are now all that stand between the war-hungry Goths and heart of the Eastern Roman Empire.

For Numerius Vitellius Pavo and the men of the XI Claudia, the brief from Emperor Valens is simple: to avoid war with the Goths at all costs while the Roman defences are so weak. But in the frozen lands north of the Danubius a dark legend, thought long dead, has risen again. The name is on the lips of every warrior in Gutthiuda; the one who will unite the tribes, the one whose armies will march upon the empire, the one who will bathe in Roman blood . . .

The Viper!

Arthur is now Supreme Commander of Armies in Britannia and just about to lead his first major engagement, north of Hadrian's Wall against the Picts; he is eighteen years old. His battles and victories will make Bedwyr the Fox a hero. Fighting with a crippled left arm, the Fox tells of his one-armed struggle to stay alive in his first Pictish battle; the greatest of his young life.

The Roman Empire is crumbling, and a shadow looms in the east…

376 AD: the Eastern Roman Empire is alone against the tide of barbarians swelling on her borders. Emperor Valens juggles the paltry border defences to stave off invasion from the Goths north of the Danube. Meanwhile, in Constantinople, a pact between faith and politics spawns a lethal plot that will bring the dark and massive hordes from the east crashing down on these struggling borders.

The fates conspire to see Numerius Vitellius Pavo, enslaved as a boy after the death of his legionary father, thrust into the limitanei, the border legions, just before they are sent to recapture the long-lost eastern Kingdom of Bosporus. He is cast into the jaws of this plot, so twisted that the survival of the entire Roman world hangs in the balance…