Regina made more marks on her wax tablet, and moved on.

Of all the industries that had sprouted here on the dunon’s plateau, the most significant was iron: fully half the manufactory area of the plateau was given over to its complex production. Myrddin ruled his little empire of iron and fire and charcoal as if he were king of the underworld. As she approached the forges, two of Myrddin’s helpers — unfree, recent arrivals both of them — were working on a charcoal clamp. Myrddin insisted on training up his clamp workers personally, and from the look of the hollow, sleepless eyes of these two men, his training regime had been as brutal and unrelenting as ever.

This clamp was a few days old and several paces across. A mound of timber had been covered with a thick layer of damp leaves and bracken, turf, and soil. Fire had been started inside with embers poured into a hole in the top, and then the mound was capped off, so that the wood within could only consume itself. Running the clamp was a skilled job. A constant watch had to be kept on it by day and night, for as the wood turned to charcoal it would shrink, and the clamp could collapse on itself — and if air got in the whole thing would go up in an unproductive blaze. When the burning was done the mound had to be dismantled carefully, and the charcoal doused with water, for while hot it had a tendency to erupt into flames spontaneously. There were many such clamps, some much larger, in operation day and night beyond the hill fort, for Myrddin’s works demanded a constant and heavy supply of charcoal. You could smelt some metal ores with wood fires, but only charcoal could provide the high temperatures needed for iron.

Myrddin himself ran the next stage in his process. His shaft furnace was just a tube of wattle and daub,

vitrified by repeated firings. By the time Regina arrived the furnace had been running since early morning, and two more unfree were laboring mightily at their animal-skin bellows. They were naked save for loincloths, and their bodies were slick with sweat and soot. Myrddin was supervising the day’s first charge of charcoal and ore.

He preferred charcoal made from alder, which he said burned hotter than any other sort, and ocher, a relatively easy ore to smelt. The furnace would be worked all day, and then allowed to cool; by tomorrow Myrddin would be able to pull out a bloom, a dense, irregular mass of metal and impurities. This would be subject to repeated hammering and heating until the last of the slag was gone. It took several blooms for Myrddin to produce one of his ingots, a flat bar about the size of a sword blade, ready for further work. All this had baffled Regina — it seemed an awful lot of work for a small piece of iron — until Artorius had gently explained that even charcoal ovens were not hot enough actually to melt iron, and Myrddin’s elaborate practices were necessary to coax the iron out of its ore.

Though she despised the way Myrddin used his secret knowledge as a source of power, she could not deny the reality of that knowledge. Watching his careful, almost delicate work as he constantly inspected and assessed his furnaces and clamps, she thought she could see something of the centuries, or millennia, of trial and error and constant study that had led to the development of such techniques.

And the end product was iron, the most precious resource of all, pieces of iron that, remarkably, had not existed before. Piled up in Myrddin’s workshops were some of the final products of all this industry: carpenters’ tools like adzes and saws, tools for the farmers like harness buckles and sickles and reaping knives, weapons for warriors like swords and knives — and even tools for Myrddin’s own use, like tongs and an anvil. It was Myrddin’s proudest boast that he was the only craftsman who produced all his own tools.

But Myrddin was Regina’s enemy.

When he spotted her, he greeted her with a kind of snarling smile. “Here to check up again, Regina? Tap, tap, tap with your stylus … a shame we can’t eat your words, or nail our soles to our shoes with your letters, eh? But at least we can wipe our arses on your scrolls …” And so on. She endured it, as always, and walked on.

A young apprentice called Galba was working at a forge, and Regina paused.

He wore a sleeveless tunic, and his bare arms were pocked with hot-metal scars, already a little like Myrddin’s. He was working a piece of iron — a short blade, perhaps for a knife — in the forge, while an unfree toiled at the bellows. Galba would thrust the blade into the furnace until it became red hot, beat it into shape while still heated, and then quench it quickly with water. It seemed that the fire didn’t just make the iron soft enough to work; something about the charcoal in the furnace made the iron stronger. And sometimes the iron, beaten flat, would be folded over and beaten again, the invisible layers adding strength. There were many subtleties to Myrddin’s art, which Galba and other apprentices were learning slowly.

The blade appeared to be done. Galba quenched it once more and set it aside. Then he noticed Regina. “Madam — good day — would you like me to call your daughter?”

“If you please,” she said stiffly.

He went into the back of the workshop, calling Brica’s name. Regina sat on a low wooden bench and waited.

As Artorius’s kingdom had grown, so it had become necessary to find efficient ways to shape it, and to run it.

Despite Regina’s own inclinations the order that was emerging had little to do with imperial forms, but was based on older Celtae structures. The center of it all was the dunon itself. The hill fort provided facilities for trade and exchange, a religious center, a resident population of craftsmen with growing expertise — and, most importantly, administrative control.

Artorius’s nation was divided into three classes. The nobles included the soldiers, but also jurists, doctors, carpenters, bards and priests, and metalworkers like Myrddin. Artorius’s rule was moderated by a meeting on every feast day of the oenach, an assembly of the nobles. Below the nobles were the free commoners, the lesser craftsmen and the farmers, who were actually the productive level of society. It was their rents, taxes, and tithes that sustained Artorius’s nascent government, and paid for his army and their campaigns. Finally, the lowest level were the unfree: former criminals, slaves, and late-arriving refugees who found no free land to farm. Their fate was simply to serve, and they provided the bulk of the labor.

The basis of society was the family. According to the old tradition the property and other rights of a man extended to his derbfine, his descendants as far as his great-grandchildren, through four generations. Basic rights were assured by each person having an “honor price,” a level of compensation to be paid in case of injury, insult, or death. But the system extended only to the free; the unfree had no rights, and no views that were listened to at higher levels.

It was a crude system, of course, a barbaric structure to regulate the relationships of a warrior people, with nothing like the sophistication of Roman law. But any attempts Regina made to reform the ancient code were resisted, especially by Myrddin, who seemed to have appointed himself a kind of keeper of the truth here in Artorius’s kingdom. Perhaps more civilized forms would emerge with time.

Still, in this great project, Regina had found a place.

She had never forgotten the lessons Aetius had taught her. Aetius would say that it was information as much as sword blades that had enabled the emperors to take and hold such a vast territory: not just military knowledge, but records of wealth and taxes, payments and savings, gathered by the officials in the towns and transmitted by the cursus publicus along the great network of roads, which had been built as much to carry facts as soldiers’ feet.