But it had not been enough. Not even Nectovelin had anticipated the savagery and relentlessness of Vespasian's charge. The legate had fought more than thirty battles, and taken more than twenty towns. And Nectovelin had not anticipated how effectively the Romans could lay siege. Vespasian had been supported by the Roman fleet which had tracked its way along the south coast; the sight of the great silent ships had struck fear into those who watched from the land.
And now the conquering Romans were destroying this fort.
It was in fact a very ancient place. There was a kind of track extending around the rim of the hill, a rutted ditch. The local people talked of the old days when they would appease their gods by walking around the sacred track, repairing the causeway, making offerings. Children, digging in the dirt on summer afternoons, would often find shaped bits of stone, metalwork in bronze or iron-even, occasionally, a human bone. This hill had been occupied and venerated for a time beyond counting; the fort that topped it was only the latest manifestation.
But now the Romans had come and it was the end. The legionaries pushed the ramparts into the ditches, and levered the big stones out of the tall gateways, ensuring the fort could never be used again. The hill would be abandoned, its purpose forgotten, to become a brooding puzzle for later generations, ancient causeway, ruined ramparts and all. Romans always finished what they had started.
'…I know you.' The words were in Latin, but Nectovelin had picked up a little in his years with Agrippina. He looked up dully.
The legate himself stood over him: Vespasian. He didn't wear his dress uniform now, as he had that night in Camulodunum, but scuffed and bloodstained armour plates. Dirt and sweat smeared his forehead. Vespasian had always had a seriousness about him, and Nectovelin sensed that now. Vespasian killed in great numbers; that was his job. But he didn't relish it.
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 corvees, 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.