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  As well as his staff officers, Vespasian was accompanied by a younger man, obviously one of the Durotriges serving as an interpreter. He was clean, his tunic unmarked, and he showed no shame in this burning fortress of his people. The young man asked a question in the tongue of the Durotriges.

  Nectovelin answered, ‘I am of the Brigantians.’ The young man switched easily to that tongue.

  ‘I know you,’ Vespasian said again through his interpreter. ‘That night in Camulodunum. You were the buffoon who tried to kill the Emperor.’

  ‘And but for bad fortune I would have succeeded.’

  Vespasian smiled. ‘Bad fortune? But you boasted of your Prophecy. I remember digging into your sweating armpit to find it. Where is your Prophecy now? Did it foresee this?’

  Nectovelin thought of the ancient fort, now being kicked apart by Roman legionaries. He thought of the Catuvellaunian farmers who had pulled on their grandfathers’ chain mail and had gone into battle expecting a clash of champions, only to be met by a Roman meat-grinder.

  ‘No, it didn’t tell of this,’ he said. ‘But the Prophecy tells of freedom for every human being, long after you are dead, Roman.’

  ‘But not for you.’

  ‘No, not for me. I die for that freedom, and for Coventina’s rocky heart.’

  And with that Nectovelin thrust his arms through the net. He ripped the skin off one hand, and felt a finger break on the other, but he got his hands through the mesh and around Vespasian’s throat, before a staff officer stepped forward with his stabbing sword and skewered his belly.

  XXV

  On her release from the Emperor Claudius’s household, Agrippina, aged twenty-four, found employment as a bookkeeper. She worked for a moneylender, a fat, pleasant man called Marcus Crassus Cerealis, whom she eventually married.

  Despite her education in Gaul, Agrippina found life in Rome very strange. It wasn’t just the scale and clamouring bustle of this world capital, but the small things. In Eburacum she had grown up amid big extended families, where marriages were fluid and children were the responsibility of everybody in the roundhouse, and women had much the same power as men. Now she was stuck in a set of tiny partitioned-off rooms, with Cerealis who, despite his mild nature, clearly expected her to raise him a family alone.

  But this was the life she had chosen, and she stuck to it. In time she bore Cerealis two healthy girls, whom she raised in the Roman manner.

  She never left Rome again, but always followed events in her native Britain.

  Aulus Plautius served as Britain’s first governor for four years. In that time he established a new province, Britannia, across the south-east corner of the island. The old nations became mere administrative units, civitates, within the Roman province. Camulodunum, once the capital of a Catuvellaunian empire, was made a colony of veteran troops, the first true Roman town in Britain, and renamed Colonia Claudia. The exploitation of the British began immediately, with the systematic extraction of the province’s surplus agricultural wealth. There were levies of corn and labour corvées, and soon a formalised tax system was imposed.

  Caratacus, remarkably, continued to lead resistance in the west for eight years. As Nectovelin had understood, he became popular among all the nations of Britain as the one man who had not given up before the Romans-even if he never actually won a battle. Agrippina was shamed that his final betrayal was at the hands of her own queen Cartimandua, who was keen to cooperate with the Romans. She saw Caratacus brought to Rome and paraded through the city. The Romans rather liked his defiance, now that he was safely defeated, and they saw in him qualities they believed they had lost. Agrippina was dismayed that Caratacus would survive in memory not for who he was but only as an element in the Romans’ own story of themselves. His usefulness over, Caratacus was pardoned and pensioned off, and she never heard of him again.

  As time passed, the tapestry of history was woven thread by thread. Secretary Narcissus eventually fell foul of the complicated internal politics of the imperial family. Agrippina, who had always feared the Greek might take revenge for the humiliation of that night in Camulodunum, quietly rejoiced in his fall. She was more saddened by the death of Claudius, said to have been poisoned by his manipulative new wife. She thought it was ironic that the frail Emperor had survived assassination in faraway Britain only to be murdered in his own bed by his family.

  The British meanwhile chafed under the rule of their ‘two kings’, the governor and procurator who jointly managed the new province. When Agrippina was forty the brutal reign of Claudius’s stepson Nero provoked a revolt in Britain under an Iceni woman called Boudicca, who burned retired soldiers, lawyers, tax collectors and their families in their new temples. Her name meant ‘she who brings victories’–if she had been Roman she might have been called ‘Victoria’. Braint had been right, Agrippina thought, that it would take a woman to give the Romans a real fight. Boudicca had no vision beyond destruction, and failed to concentrate her energies on military targets, and in the end she fell–but not before tens of thousands had died, and the Roman hold on Britain trembled, just for a moment.

  After Nero the imperial succession was bloody, and a civil war broke out between rival claimants. For Agrippina it was a terrifying time, a throwback to the days of Julius Caesar when strong men backed by private armies had battled for power. Indeed the still-young empire was nearly destroyed in the process. The crisis was resolved when an old acquaintance of Agrippina’s, Vespasian, came out of retirement to become the third emperor in a year. With the competence and ruthlessness he had once shown in Britain, he soon restored order in Rome.

  Meanwhile under Cartimandua, who seemed to be emulating Cunobelin of the Catuvellaunians, Agrippina’s people the Brigantians, still independent of Rome, grew rich on trade with the new province to the south. There was a flowering of culture, she sensed from the letters she received from home, of literacy and music and art and education. But sprawling Brigantia was only ever a loose federation, difficult to control, and when even the queen’s husband Venutius grew restive, unease about Cartimandua’s Roman policy penetrated even her own bedroom. In the end Cartimandua had a reckless affair with her husband’s armour-bearer, and Venutius’s fury ignited civil war.

  The Romans, under Vespasian’s strong governors, rescued Cartimandua, and then moved into Brigantia for good, pinning it down under a network of forts and roads. They established a legionary fortress in Agrippina’s old birthplace of Eburacum. After that, a generation after their first landing in south-east Britain, the Romans pushed further north still, into the misty highlands of Caledonia.

  Meanwhile Agrippina’s family was denuded of males by all this turmoil, and lacked heirs. Aged fifty she found herself bequeathed a majority stake in the family’s quarrying business. Agrippina had no interest in overseeing this herself–but Cunedda had had a son, born in Camulodunum. Through an exchange of letters she transferred her holding to him, a last gesture to a long-dead lover.

  Under the solemn calm of Vespasian’s rule, Agrippina watched over her growing children. She made fitful efforts to recover Nectovelin’s Prophecy, which Claudius had lodged in the vault of the Sibylline oracles, but these came to nothing. And she tried, even as she turned them into strong Roman maidens, to tell her daughters something of where their blood came from. She told them long stories from her own childhood of ancestral Brigantians, who had ruled with bronze or stone, in ages when only sheep had ruled Rome’s seven hills.

  But her body betrayed her. A racking cough grew steadily worse, until she woke one morning to find she had been coughing up blood.

  She tried to leave her business affairs in order for the benefit of her bereft, helpless husband. Her children were both in their early twenties, they had grown into proud, strong, well-educated Roman women, and she had few concerns about them. Fifty wasn’t a terribly young age to die, she told her daughters. Besides she felt her years had been crowded enough for two lifetimes.

  But she had one last piec
e of unfinished business.

  XXVI

  Though always favoured by his commander Vespasian, and despite his little bit of notoriety following his time in Britain, Marcus Allius had never risen higher than centurion–nor, if truth be told, had he ever wanted to. He retired from the army as early as he could on a fat veteran’s pension, and bought himself a compact little vineyard a day’s ride from his native Rome. Just as he had always been a competent but never great soldier, so he proved a prosperous but never rich vintner. He raised a strong son who followed his father into the army.

  Aged fifty-five, over a quarter of a century after his British adventure and as healthy as he had ever been, Marcus looked forward to a long retirement.

  Then, one day, a slave sought him out bearing a letter.

  The note was from one Agrippina, British-born but resident in Rome. She had been present at the Roman landing at Rutupiae too, she wrote, and her letter concerned ‘unfinished business’.

  She had been able to consult Vespasian’s official biographer to find out which legion had been the first to land in Britain, that dark night in Rutupiae thirty years before, and which century had landed first, and which man of that century had been the first to set foot on British soil, whose name she thought she had heard. Agrippina summarised the steps she had taken to ensure that she and she alone took full responsibility for the crime that was about to take place–but she would already be dead by the time Marcus Allius opened the letter.

  Marcus looked up at the slave, to ask, ‘What crime?’

  The blade in the slave’s hand was the last thing he saw.

  II

  BUILDER AD 122-138

  I

  Brigonius agreed to meet the women from Rome outside the town of Durovernum Cantiacorum, on the road leading east towards Rutupiae at the coast.

  For a Brigantian it was a long way from home. But Brigonius reached the rendezvous early in the morning, well before the appointed hour, and had to wait. He found a milestone to sit on, set his battered old wide-brimmed hat on his head to keep out the sun, and let his horse chew on the tough, dirty grass at the roadside. As the day wore on he grew hot, his face itching under a beard still new enough to be a novelty. He was twenty-two years old.

  He was maybe half a mile down the road from the town. He inspected the place curiously. Durovernum was an island of wood and stone, of roofs of bright red tiles. It looked very strange to Brigonius, not at all like his own community of roundhouses at Banna–and nor was it like the Roman military architecture he had grown up with in the north, the endless box-shaped forts and watchtowers, like the one in Banna.

  He was used to Roman roads, though. The whole country was carpeted by them. This one ran straight as an arrow’s flight off to the east, its hard-packed gravel surface pressed flat. His quarryman’s eye noted how it had been resurfaced two or three times, so that it was raised proud of the surrounding farmland. Old or not the road was well kept, its drainage gullies swept clear, and with no sign of subsidence. The Roman soldiers who first built this did their job well, he grudgingly admitted.

  But it wasn’t soldiers who used the road today. For perhaps an hour in the early morning Brigonius was at peace, just himself, his horse, the road and the songs of the birds. But as the day wore on the road filled up with traffic: people on foot and horseback, or riding carts and wagons and litters. The townsfolk were bright, clean, well-fed, their clothes were brilliantly coloured, and their skins shone with cosmetic oils. Slaves walked beside their masters’ carriages, or carried them on litters and chairs. Everybody was streaming east. It was as if somebody had tipped up the town and poured out its inhabitants like oil from a pot, spilling them towards Rutupiae, where the Emperor was due to land today.

  Sitting on his stone beside this glittering crowd, Brigonius felt out of place, an ill-formed northern clod. But he had been summoned here, he reminded himself.

  He took Severa’s letter from his satchel and read it over again. It was written in a blue dye on a small, scraped-thin rectangle of wood, scored down the middle and folded over. His own name was written on the outside, with an address: Vindolanda, the large fort planted square in the middle of Brigantia, with which Brigonius did a lot of business. Inside, the Latin text had been written out in two orderly columns by a neat, somewhat cramped hand. But it opened with a generous greeting–‘From Claudia Severa to her friend Brigonius, greetings’–and signed off with a flourish–‘In the hope that this finds you in as good health and fortune as I and my daughter enjoy, C. Severa’–both in a different hand from the main text, which had presumably been written out under dictation by a scribe.

  Brigonius was literate. He needed to be. His father had died two years ago, leaving Brigonius, at just twenty, in sole possession of the family quarrying business. His main customer was the Roman army, who devoured cut stone for their forts and roads, their shrines and bath houses. And the army was a hive of writing, writing, writing; a soldier couldn’t fart, it seemed, without some junior officer making a note of it.

  So Brigonius was used to letters. But he had never received such a letter as this before. For one thing it had come all the way from Rome: a letter from Rome, addressed to him. His correspondent, Claudia Severa, lady of Rome, claimed a family connection to Brigonius, saying that an ancestor of hers had once known an ancestor of his.

  And the letter spoke of the Emperor’s coming visit to Britain. That was no news; everybody had been talking about it for months. But, Severa said, the visit would give their two families, Brigonius’s and Severa’s, the chance to grow very rich indeed. How did she know all this? Because of a prophecy, she said.

  It was hard to know how to take all this. The mention of profit got his attention, but he recoiled from the talk of family histories and prophecies. The superstitious Romans were obsessed with past and future, with dead ancestors and presagings of time to come. Better to live in the present, he thought, and enjoy the now. As time wore on and he sat on this milestone with the smug Cantiaci citizens bustling past him, he wondered if he was wasting his time.

  But then the two women arrived. And within a heartbeat of his first meeting with Severa–or rather her daughter, Lepidina–all his doubts were dispelled.

  II

  Claudia Severa and her daughter arrived in a small carriage covered by an awning of bright red cloth. A servant, probably a slave, led two docile horses. Severa and Lepidina stepped down from the carriage with unreasonable grace, and walked towards Brigonius. The mother might have been forty, the daughter eighteen or nineteen. The two of them were very alike, both very pale, with strawberry-blonde hair piled high in exotic sculptures.

  The older woman wore a stola, a swatch of brilliant white cloth embroidered with purple. Under her loose clothing Severa’s figure was shapely, her bust prominent and her hips swaying as she walked. She was sensual, but she looked solid, almost muscular. This was a formidable woman, Brigonius thought immediately.

  The daughter, though, was slighter, slimmer, and she walked with a loose-jointed beauty. She wore a long skirt and tunic of pink and silver-grey, the colours somehow blending perfectly together, and she wore a scarf around her neck, some purple-pink fabric as light as mist. She was so delicate, so pale-white, she seemed only loosely attached to reality. Again he felt like a clod with his black hair and dark colouring, a lump of earth compared to this creature of air and fire.

  Severa was watching him. ‘You must be Brigonius,’ she said dryly.

  He was staring at the girl, still sitting on his milestone like a child. He clambered to his feet, making dust rise in a cloud. The daughter’s eyes widened as he revealed his full height. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I am Claudia Severa. My daughter, Lepidina.’

  The girl turned away coyly. He tried to fix his attention on Severa. ‘How did you know me?’

  ‘You weren’t hard to spot,’ Severa said. ‘I just looked for the beard. The Cantiaci go clean-shaven, you know, like all good Romans!’
/>   ‘I, ah—’

  The girl spoke for the first time. ‘You seem fascinated by me, Brigantius.’

  ‘Brigonius. I am a Brigantian. My name is Brigonius—’

  ‘Do you like my scarf?’ She touched it. Its colour perfectly complemented the grey of Lepidina’s tunic, and it cast reflected sunlight over the soft white flesh of her throat.

  He was staring again. ‘I’ve never seen material like it.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have. It’s silk. It comes from a land far to the east, even beyond the Parthians. Nobody knows how it’s made–imagine that!’

  He saw now that the scarf was fixed by a small brooch: a crossed-over curve of silver wire, a stylised fish perhaps. ‘That’s a pretty design. The fish.’

  Severa evidently hadn’t known the brooch was there. She glared at her daughter. ‘Cover that up, you little idiot!’

  With bad grace, Lepidina tucked the brooch out of sight.

  Severa walked around Brigonius, eyeing him up and down as she might a horse. ‘Well, you’re evidently a lust-addled fool, like all men. But you’re healthy enough, and you seem honest. I think we’re going to be able to do business, you and me. But first we’ve an emperor to greet. Will you ride with us to Rutupiae? We’ve room.’

  Lepidina, girlishly friendly now, linked her arm through his. She was soft and fragrant, like a scented cloud. ‘Oh, yes, do. We’ve got fruit and wine. It will be fun!’

  So Brigonius found himself sitting between mother and daughter in the shade of the carriage’s awning.

  The carriage joined the flow towards Rutupiae, the slave guiding Brigonius’s horse. As they rolled across the flat coastal plain, it wasn’t long before Brigonius caught the first whiffs of salty sea air–and through the awning he glimpsed the gleaming white shoulders of the monument at Rutupiae, a landmark visible for miles around. Meanwhile the air in the carriage was filled with the tickling scent of cosmetics, and the women plied him with a fine light wine and strawberries dipped in ground pepper.