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 piece 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.