Chapter 18

For days Artorius marched them along the old roads, far to the west. At night they slept in the open, perhaps sheltered by a hastily constructed lean-to, their only bedding the spare clothing they carried with them. Every day Regina woke to a rough breakfast of salted meat. She was always stiff and cold despite the mildness of the midsummer nights.

Eventually, though, Regina found herself recognizing the countryside. It was a land crowded with hills, green and rounded — a human-scale landscape, very unlike the wastes of the border country around the Wall.

Her geography remained sketchy, little better informed than by Aetius’s map drawn in the dirt. But this was, she realized slowly, home. Blown by the winds of fate, she had sailed in a great circle, and come back to where she had started. Still, she had no idea exactly where the site of the family villa was: she had left at age seven, after all, and there was nobody left alive, Carta or Aetius, who might know. Perhaps it was best not to know; she could not bear to see it a ruin.

And there were changes. Even here the country seemed far from friendly: on every hilltop, walls loomed and the smoke of fires curled into the air. It had become a land that bristled with defenses, like a hedgehog’s quills.

Artorius’s proposed new capital was a fort built on a brooding hill — what he called, in the old language, a “dunon.” Artorius had already assembled a community of a few hundred people, scraped together from across the country, and the place was alive with activity. Regina did not know what the hill might have been called in the days of the Romans; it seemed to have no Latin name. But some of the locals called it by the name of a nearby stream. It was the Caml hill, or the Caml fort.

On their first full day at the dunon Regina’s people were assigned to fetching stone from what was called a “quarry.” Artorius told Regina he would spare her this toil. She had made a good impression on him with her defiance, and she could stay here with him in his capital; perhaps he could find her a different role.

Brica encouraged her to accept. “He seems to like you, Mother, Jove knows why. You need to play on that for all it’s worth.”

“Oh, I will,” Regina said. And she would. From the moment of Brica’s birth she had been determined to do whatever it took to ensure the survival of her family. But she refused Artorius’s offer; she was not yet ready to be separated from those with whom she had spent two decades on the hillside farm.

So they marched out in a group of about thirty, under the command of one of Artorius’s lieutenants. It would be a two-day walk south, and they spent another night in the open.

About midday on the second day, she found herself approaching the wall of a town. It sparked more memories of her childhood: this must be Durnovaria, the center of local civic society. To her childish eyes it had seemed a magical place, clean and bright, surrounded by mighty walls, and full of tremendous buildings fit for giants. But now the town had been abandoned for more than twenty years. The wall had been stripped of its tiles, exposing a core of mortared rubble and red binding bricks. The gate where the road passed through the wall had once been a complex multiple archway, but now the arches had collapsed.

Inside the wall everything was covered in a blanket of green. Most of the buildings had vanished into rubble and vegetation. There was much evidence of fire — perhaps the chance result of lightning strikes on long-abandoned buildings choked by dead leaves. Their plots were covered with a layer of dark, weed-choked earth, the residue of collapsed wattle-and-daub walls, now heavily overgrown. A few of the monumental stone structures survived, still immensely strong, but they were ruined giants, burned out, roofless, overrun with creepers and with shrubs and ivy growing out of cracks in the walls. Even the hard road surface was coated by a mulch of weed debris and dead leaves, and trees were sprouting, ash and alder, their roots cracking open the cobbled surface and exposing the earth once more to the sun. She glimpsed creatures from the forest — voles, field mice — and even the animals that lived off those small colonists, like foxes and kestrels. It was as if, after years of abandonment, the original owners of the land were moving back in. But the place was eerily silent — there wasn’t even birdsong.

As they passed through the town some of the younger people in the party averted their eyes from the monumental ruins and muttered prayers to the god of the Christians and other deities. But Regina quietly mourned. These ivy-covered stones spoke to her about the depth of the generation-long holocaust that was assailing Britain more eloquently than any historian, even Tacitus, could ever have. And how strange it was, she thought, that none of this had been inflicted by the Picts or the Saxons — none of the raiders had yet come this far west, in numbers sufficient to do this kind of damage. The town had collapsed all by itself. It was all as Aetius and Carausias had once foreseen, that once people stopped paying their taxes, the towns had no purpose, and had fallen in on themselves. Or perhaps Amator had been right, that the town was simply a relic of a thousand-year-old dream, from which humankind was now coldly waking.

Their destination proved not to be the town itself but a graveyard that sprawled over a hillside nearby.

It was vast, so densely packed with tombs it was like a pavement of tile, sandstone, and marble; there must be thousands buried here. People were already working: they were prizing up gravestones, slabs of sandstone or marble, with picks of wood and iron. The work was under the direction of a couple of Artorius’s soldiers. They did not hang back from the labor but joined in themselves, stripped to the waist in the summer heat.

“So this is our ‘quarry,’ “ Regina said. “A graveyard, which we are desecrating for bits of stone.”

Brica shrugged. “What does it matter? The dead are dead. We need the stones.”

Regina felt a sense of shock. If at age seven, or even age seventeen, she could have seen herself now and learned what she must do to stay alive, she would have been horrified. And she felt a pang of sadness that Brica, still so young, saw nothing difficult about it. How we are fallen, she thought.

Strangely, a small farmstead had been established at the center of the graveyard, complete with a barn and a couple of granary pits. A woman was selling food to the workers in return for nails and other bits of iron. Perhaps the bones of the dead had made the ground rich for vegetables, Regina thought morbidly.

Neither Regina nor Brica had the muscle for digging up gravestones, so they were put to work fetching pails of water from a stream for the workers to drink and wash off their dust. They moved among the opened graves, stepping over smashed-up stones.

Regina stopped by one grave whose stone was intact enough for its Latin inscription to be read. “DIS MANIBUS LUCIUS MATELLUS ROMULUS… ‘May the underworld spirits take Lucius, born in Spain, served in the Vettones cavalry regiment, became a citizen, and died here aged forty-six.’ And here is the grave of his daughter — Simplicia — died aged ten months, ‘a most innocent soul.’ I wonder what poor Lucius would think if he could see what we are doing today.”

Brica shrugged, hot, dirty, not much caring. “Who are all these people? Were they to do with the town?”

“Of course they were. These were the citizens — there are the dead of centuries here, perhaps.”

“Why weren’t they buried inside the town?”