“She needs discipline—”
“It’s not natural. You need to give her time.”
“But every heartbeat we stand here in the road is wasted time.”
“The Wall has stood for three centuries, and I daresay it will still be there if we take a few days more. If you don’t make allowances, I don’t think we’ll get there at all.”
He walked back grudgingly. “Catuvellaunian princess or not, you are a feisty one for a slave.”
She dropped her head submissively. “I’m just trying to help.”
Aetius crouched down before Regina. “Little one, I think we have some negotiating to do …”
They continued the journey, but after that to a different pattern. They would ride a while, and break a while, generally long before Regina got too bored or uncomfortable — although Aetius retained the right to keep on if he was ill at ease with the countryside, or the company they kept on the road. Their pace dropped, from fifty or sixty waystones a day to less than forty.
But for Regina, though she lost count of the days, and had only the dimmest idea of where they actually were by now, the trip became much easier — even fun again, as the days settled into a new routine.
As they worked steadily north the countryside changed character.
Though the road still arrowed past farmsteads, there were far more roundhouses of the old British type, rather than the rectangular Roman-style buildings. The towns here were more like bristling forts, with tall walls and looming watchtowers. Here and there Regina saw plumes of dust and black smoke rising up. Aetius said they were mines. Once they passed a man driving muzzled wolves along the road; he was a trapper, hoping to sell these animals to a circus.
In the roadside dirt Aetius sketched a map of the island of Britain, and slashed a line from southeast to northeast, from the Severn to the Humber. “Southeast of this line there are plains and low hills. Here you’ll find fields and citizens, with everything run from the towns — under the greatest town of all, Londinium, capital of the diocese. Northwest of this line there are mountains, and barbarians, and tribes and chiefs who run their own affairs and have barely heard of the Emperor, and pay his taxes with the utmost reluctance. To the southeast there are a thousand villas, but none at all in the northwest. That is why, to the northwest, the diocese belongs to the army.” But Regina continued to have only a dim grasp of the country’s geography, or indeed of where they were.
In the final days, as the endless northward journey continued and they rattled across high, bleak moorland, Aetius told her something of his family’s past.
“We were all Durotriges. Your father’s people were aristocrats — landowners — even before the Romans came,” he said. “ My people — and your mother’s — were farmers, but they were warriors.” He glanced back at Cartumandua. “The Catuvellaunians call themselves a great warrior people. But when Claudius came they rolled over and bared their arses to him …”
Regina gasped at this language, shocked and delighted, and Carta colored.
“But we fought back. While the Emperor Claudius was still in Britain, one of his generals, Vespasian, had to fight his way west, taking hill fort after hill fort, supported by the fleet tracking him along the coast. It was a mighty feat of generalship — and later Vespasian himself would become Emperor — but, by my eyes, we made him earn that throne. And that is why the men of the Durotriges became such good soldiers for the Empire.”
“Like you, Grandfather.”
He said gruffly, “You’d have to count my lumps. But, yes, I’ve been a soldier all my adult life. As was my father, and his before him. But things have changed. There have always been barbarians—”
“In the north, and beyond the sea.”
“Yes. They aren’t soldiers but professional savage fools, farmers, bound to the land. They could not even mount a genuine campaign. They were no match for the Empire — not until the barbarica conspiratio.”
It had come more than forty years earlier, a great barbarian conspiracy, a coordinated attack on Britain by the Picts across the Wall from the north, the Franks and Saxons from across the North Sea, and the Scotti from Ireland. Defenses designed to hold against an attack from any one of these enemies had been overwhelmed. There was much muttering of espionage, for the British military commanders on the northern frontier and the coasts were ambushed and killed.
“It was a terrible time,” Aetius muttered. “I was not fifteen years old — no older than you, Cartumandua. For a time the countryside was full of roaming bands of barbarians — and, I have to say, of deserters from the army itself. Even Londinium was sacked. It took the Emperor two years to restore order. My own view is we’re still trying to recover from that great shock.”
Carta spoke up again. “Sir, she is only a child.”
Aetius said grimly, “She needs to hear it even so, Cartumandua, and to hear it again until it sinks in. Let me say this. Six years ago I was on the Rhine — Gaul’s great river frontier. In the middle of winter it froze over, and into Gaul swarmed the Vandals and the Alans and the Suebi and Jove knows who else. They just walked across the damn river, as cool as you please. We couldn’t hold them — we fell back and fell back. And they are still there now, crawling around the prefecture, far inside the frontier. I was glad to get a posting back to Britain and away from all that, I can tell you … I suspect this poor child will spend much of her life seeking a place of safety.”
Regina sniffed. “This poor child understands every word you say, you know.”
Aetius looked at her, astonished. Then he laughed, and clapped her on the back. “So now I’ve got you to contend with, as well as the Vandals and the Picts and the Saxons …”
“Look.” Behind Regina, Cartumandua stood up and pointed. “I can see it.”
Aetius reined in the horses. Regina stood on her seat, shielded her eyes with her hands, and stared until she saw it, too.
A line of darkness stretched across the world, from one horizon to another, rising and falling over the contours of the moorland. Along that line, smoke rose up everywhere, and mud-colored buildings huddled. Suddenly she knew exactly where she was, exactly how far she had been brought: from one end of the country to the other.
She wailed, “ It’s the Wall. What are we doing here? Aren’t we going to a villa, or a town?”
“No,” said Aetius grimly. “This is where we will live now, here at the Wall. It won’t be so bad—”
“This is a place for dirty, stinking soldiers. Not for me !”
“You’ll just have to make the best of it,” he growled warningly.
Carta hugged her. “Don’t worry, Regina. We’ll be fine here, you’ll see.”
Regina sniffed. “We won’t be here forever, will we?”
Carta looked at Aetius. “Why, I—”
Regina asked, “Just until things get back to normal?”
Aetius looked away.
Carta said, “Yes. Until things get back to normal.”
Regina looked about more brightly. “Where’s my mother?” None of the adults would reply. “My mother isn’t here, is she?”