“Because it wasn’t allowed. Unless you were a very young baby, in which case you didn’t count as a person anyhow … That was the law.”

“The Emperor’s law. Now we make up our own laws,” Brica said.

“Or some thug like Artorius makes them up for us.”

“He isn’t so bad,” Brica said.

Regina read another gravestone. “ ‘A sweetest child, torn away no less suddenly than the partner of Dis.’ “

“What does that mean?”

Regina frowned, trying to remember her lessons with Aetius. “I think it’s a quotation from Virgil.” But the poet’s name meant nothing to Brica, and Regina let it pass.

Some of the graves had evidently once held wooden coffins, now long rotted away, and these graves were filled only with a scatter of bones. But in some of the grander tombs coffins of lead-lined stone had been used. These were prized out of the ground, roughly opened, and the grisly contents dumped back into the yawning ground so that the lead could be salvaged. Occasionally there were grave goods: bits of jewelry, perfume bottles, even tools — and, in one small and pathetic grave, a wooden doll. The workers would snatch these up, inspect them briefly, and pocket them if they looked like they were worth anything. There was no great stench, save for the scent of moist open earth. These bodies were decades old at least, and — except for those corpses tipped out of the more robust lead coffins — the worms had done their work.

Toward the end of the day the broken gravestones were loaded into carts, or set on people’s backs, for the haul back to Artorius’s capital.

On their return to the dunon, Artorius again came to seek out Regina. He insisted that she not spend another day at the gruesome cemetery-quarry, but come with him to inspect his developing capital.

“I value your opinion,” he said, his grin confident and disarming. “Intellect and spirit are all too rare these sorry days. You are wasted digging up bones.”

“I am no soldier.”

“I have plenty of soldiers, who are all trained to tell me what I want to hear. But you, as I know very well, have no fear of me. I know, above all, that you are a survivor. And survival is what I am intent on: the first priority.”

So she agreed. After all, she had no real choice.

They walked around the dunon. The hill was flat-topped, a plug of landscape. To the east was a ridge of high ground, but from the hill’s upper slopes there was a long view to be had of the plains to the west.

The plateau itself rose up to a summit, where a beacon bonfire had been built. Some of the flatter ground had been given over to cultivation, but there would be little farmland up here. Artorius’s capital would be fed by farmsteads on the plain outside the fort. Part of the bargain behind this was that the farmers would be able to huddle inside the walls in times of danger. In a lower part of the plateau a wooden hall was being built to house Artorius himself. The burned-out remains of a much older building had been cleared — perhaps the home of some chieftain of pre-Roman times.

They walked around the edge of the plateau. A perimeter wall was being constructed — or rather reconstructed, she saw, based on the foundations of some ancient predecessor. It would be five paces thick, a framework of wooden beams filled with stones, most of them coming from the Durnovaria cemetery. Already the framework skirted most of the plateau, and work had begun on a large, complex gate in the southwest corner. Regina was impressed with the scale of all this, and the efficiency of Artorius’s organization.

“You are able to command the work of hundreds.”

Artorius shrugged. “They tell me that the emperors once commanded a hundred million. But one must start somewhere.”

There had been rain, and the grass-coated slopes of the hill were intensely green. The slopes were surrounded by lines of banks and ditches. Men were working their way over the forested banks, cutting down trees with their iron axes and saws and hauling the trunks to the summit of the hill.

They were making the rings of ditches into a defense system. Artorius pointed. “There are four lines. See how we look down on the earthworks? The Saxons will have to run up that slope, arriving exhausted, and then down this face below us, where they will offer an easy target to our arrows or spears. The banks are overgrown with trees — three or four centuries’ growth, I suppose, quite mature — and the slopes need to be cleared to avoid giving cover to any assailants, but we can deal with that.”

“It is a lucky arrangement of ditches and ridges to be so useful.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Luck has nothing to do with it. I thought you understood — Regina, there is nothing natural about those ditches. Everything you see was dug out by hand — by our ancestors, in fact, in the days before the Caesars.”

She could scarcely believe it. “This is a made place?”

“It certainly is. It looks crude, but is well thought out. The fort is a machine, a killing machine made of earth and rock.” He scratched his chin. “The work required to assemble even our paltry new wall is enormous. To have sculpted the hill itself — to have built those banks and ditches — defies the imagination. But, once built, it lasts forever.”

“And yet the Caesars cleared out this place, as mice are cleared from a nest.”

He eyed her. “I have had little opportunity to study history.”

She told him what she remembered of her grandfather’s stories: of how the Durotriges had resisted the Roman occupation long after more wealthy kingdoms had fallen or capitulated, and how the general Vespasian, destined to become Emperor himself, had had to fight his way west, dunon to dunon.

“Dunon to dunon,” he mused. “I like that. Although one must admire the achievements of Vespasian, who won a huge victory, far from home, indeed having crossed the ocean itself …”

“But now the Caesars have gone,” she said.

“Yes. But we endure.”

Only one new structure had been built on the hill in the Roman days, a small temple. It had been a neat rectangular building with a tiled roof, surrounded by a colonnaded walkway. Artorius and Regina stood and inspected what was left.

“Now the temple is destroyed, the columns mere stumps, the tiles stolen, even the god’s statue looted,” said Artorius. “But at least that god was here. So in successive ages this was a place of defense, and of worship. Perhaps I have selected an auspicious place for my capital.”

She let her face reflect her scorn.

He pursed his lips. “You mock me again. Well, you are entitled to. I have little to show, in the present. But I have past and future on my side.”

“Past?”

“My family were kings, based in Eburacum. When the Romans came, yes, they became clients of the Empire. They were equites.” These were the class from whom, in the early days of the Roman occupation, the town council had been elected. “My ancestors ruled their lands well, and contributed to the wealth and order of the province. I myself would have been a soldier — an officer in the cavalry, that was my destiny — but …”

“But by the time you grew up there was no cavalry.”

He laughed ruefully. “There was only the limitaneus left, the border army. And in some places it was so long since they had been paid they had eaten all their horses!”

She smiled. “And the future?”

“I have three goals, Regina. The first is to make this place safe.” He waved an arm. “Not just the dunon, but the area it will rule. Safe from the Saxons and Picts and bacaudae and whoever else might wish to harm us. I am confident I can achieve that. Next I must restore order — not for just this generation but the next, and the next. We need a civic structure, invisible, yet as strong as these walls of wood and stone.