Chapter 20

There was a nervousness about the hill fort today. Artorius was due to return from his latest campaign against the Saxons, and nobody knew how their loved ones had fared.

But Regina set this aside. After six years in the hill fort she had learned it was best to stick to orderly habits. So, first thing that morning, she went to her small room at the back of Artorius’s roundhouse. With a mug of bark tea at her side, she settled on a wooden stool and spread out her calendar.

The calendar was a bronze sheet, divided into columns, carefully inscribed by Myrddin with Latin lettering — she had insisted on Latin, despite the barbarian origin of the calendar itself. It had sixteen columns, each representing four months. This sheet covered a five-year cycle. In fact the sheet was one of a set that made up a complete nineteen-year calendar, and it was said that the Druids, who had devised this mighty tabulation, worked on much longer cycles still.

It was a calendar for farmers and warriors. Each year was divided into two halves, with a “good” half — mat — stretching from Beltane in the spring to Samhain in the autumn, and the “bad” half — anm — spanning the winter months. And then each month, of twenty-nine or thirty days, was itself split into good and bad halves. The mat months corresponded not just to the growing season but also to the annual campaigning season: for Celtae a good day was a day for war. But Samhain was approaching once again, and another campaigning season was almost done, to her relief. Regina understood the necessity for war, but hated the waste of life it represented, and every year longed for it to be over.

Anyhow the calendar was very intricate. But it worked — once she had gotten used to thinking like one of the Celtae rather than trying to translate back to the Roman equivalent; that had been the key. The point of the calendar was that each day, right through the complete nineteen-cycle, had a different divine flavor, which subtly determined the decisions to be taken, the combination of gods to be placated. In a way it was even comforting to believe that the shape of the universe, down to the day and the hour, had been shaped by ancient cosmic decisions. It reminded her of old Aetius, her grandfather, whom she had thought the most superstitious man she had ever met, until coming to Artorius’s capital; when it came to the old gods there had been nothing particularly rational about the Romans.

She would think like the Celtae, then. She could hardly have refused to use the calendar at all, for it had been the idea of Artorius himself. But she wouldn’t give up her bronze sheets and her Latin. The Druids maintained their centuries-spanning calendar entirely in their heads, but it took a Druid novice twenty years to memorize the oral law that lay at the heart of the old religions. Well, she was already in her late forties, and if she was granted twenty more years she could think of better things to do with her time than that.

With her scrutiny of the calendar done, her head full of properly regulated auguries and omens, she picked up her wax tablet and stylus and left her office for her daily inspection.

It was midmorning. The sunlit air was clear of mist, though it had a nip that foretold the winter to come.

The colony on the hilltop plateau had grown: nearly five hundred people lived up here now, and many thousands more in the farmed countryside nearby. This morning fires still burned in the huts and roundhouses, and the air was full of the rich scent of wood smoke, and the greasier scents of cooking. There was a great deal of bustle. People moved among the houses, and a steady column marched out of the compound’s open gate, or returned with such staples as wood, pails of water, and bales of hay. Children ran underfoot as they always did, cheerful, healthy, and muddy from head to toe.

As well as the great hall of Artorius there were now granaries and storage pits, seven large roundhouses, and simple rectangular buildings used by the craftsmen. Great capital this place may one day be, but there were always chickens and even a few pigs wandering the lanes, and there were still a few areas of green. At the back of Artorius’s own hall a small kitchen garden grew garlic, mint, and other herbs; the riothamus had started a fashion among his nobles for highly spiced food.

In the manufactories the day’s work had started.

Regina approached the carpenter’s. On the walls were arrayed hammers, saws, axes, adzes, billhooks, files, awls, and gouges, and wooden boxes of nails were stacked on the floor. Today Oswald — the head of the little manufactory, a great bear of a man with huge scarred hands — was working his new toy, a pole lathe. A rope ran from a beam above to a foot pedal, and when he worked the pedal the central spindle ran smoothly. He was still getting the hang of the device, but already the stool legs and wooden bowls he was turning out had a pleasing symmetry.

Meanwhile, in the pottery, the kiln had been fired up. One worker mixed clay with the crushed flint that helped avoid shrinkage and cracking, another shaped a pot by hand, a third prepared the kiln itself. The kiln was an updraft design, far advanced over the simple pit clamps Regina had used on the farmstead. Firing took a whole day, with the temperature raised and lowered in careful stages. Maybe one in ten of the pots still failed, but the rest was solid red earthenware. The potters were even learning how they could control the color of their product, from black through gray or red, by changing the amount of air available in the kiln. It was still coarse stuff — they had yet to master the technique of using a wheel — but it was solid and useful.

Regina’s old friend Marina ran the largest of the cloth works, from a big roundhouse she ruled as firmly as Artorius did his kingdom. The looms themselves, three sturdy frames taller than Artorius himself, were set just inside the entrance to the house, so the weavers could get the best light.

Regina liked to watch the weavers. The most skillful of them was another Marina — a docile sixteen-year- old, one of the old woman’s own grandchildren. Young Marina worked steadily. A warp, threads of spun wool, was suspended from a top bar and kept under tension by small triangular stones. Marina pulled the horizontal heddle bar toward her, opening up a gap between alternating warp threads. She pulled the weft, a horizontal thread, through the shed, and then released the heddle to pull the alternate threads backward, and then passed the weft back through the gaps. Every few passes Marina would pause to push her weaving sword, a flat wooden board, into the gap between the warp threads, and thus compacted the weft. All this was done fluidly and without pause, and her speed of working was remarkable; just standing here, Regina was able to see how the cloth’s crisscross pattern was emerging, row by row.

Regina had been proud of the success they had had with her own weaving experiments back on her farmstead, but all they had been able to produce was coarse cloth. This loom design had come from another of the experts Artorius had gathered up in his sweeps across the countryside, and the results were far better.

She passed a little time with old Marina. Marina liked to talk of old times in Verulamium, and Regina knew that the skill and loyalty of her granddaughter had been a great comfort to Marina since the death of poor Carausias a few winters before. But Regina escaped before Marina produced her foul-smelling buckets and asked her to contribute. Marina’s vegetable dyes needed a fixing agent, and the best fixer of all was stale urine: a vintage half a month old was generally thought to be just right.