It had not been hard for her to convince Artorius of the truth of this. Her very first attempts at record keeping rapidly bore fruit in exposing unpaid tithes and unjust levies. He had since granted her all the time and resources she needed.

She had pupils in her work — she, at least, was not jealous of her knowledge. She taught her pupils to read and write, and to argue and analyze in the forensic tradition of the Roman system. Literacy was very important to her. It was a peculiar horror to her that most Saxons couldn’t read. Records and literature were the memory of humanity: if the Saxons were ever to overrun this place her past would truly be lost, lost forever.

Aside from her moments of solitude with the calendar, this brief tour of inventory compiling was the most pleasurable part of her daily routine. She never forgot that all the dunon’s busywork was primitive compared to what had been available in the poorest of the towns in the old days, when the old continentwide trading routes had still worked, and there was little here that hadn’t been made on the spot. But they had come a long way since the time, only a few years ago, when she had scoured the rubble of abandoned villas in search of iron nails for her shoes. She felt she was in an island, a haven where civilization was slowly recovering, in the midst of the country’s devastation and collapse.

Brica came running out to her mother and kissed her on the cheek. They sat together on the bench.

“I heard you talk to Myrddin,” Brica said. “That old monster gives you a roasting every day.”

Regina shrugged. “I can’t take him seriously, not with a beard like that.”

Brica snorted laughter. “But he does know his craft. I think he just resents being watched over.”

To Regina, Brica showed an alarming lack of interest in the subtleties of human interaction. “It isn’t that,” Regina said slowly, massaging her daughter’s hands. “Not really. Myrddin is no fool, whatever else he is. He knows the value of record keeping as well as I do. His problem is not the record keeping but who’s keeping the records.”

“You?”

“Myrddin sees me as a rival for Artorius’s attention. He whispers in one ear about the glory of the Celtae and the magic of the old ways; I whisper in the other about record keeping and tax revenues. We are like two poles, like past and future.”

Brica grinned. “But you are the one who sleeps with the riothamus.”

“Yes. Though I think that if Myrddin thought he could lure Artorius to his bed he would cut himself a new hole—”

Brica’s mouth gaped. “Mother!”

Regina patted her hand. “Reassuring to know I can still shock you, dear. Anyhow, I think the riothamus likes having us both around, even having us fight, so he can take in contrasting opinions. The mark of a wise leader …”

Artorius still called her his queen, his Morrigan. But their relationship nowadays had little to do with the fierce love of gods — little to do with passion, in fact, for he rarely visited her bed, even in the rare intervals he broke off from his campaigning and alliance building to return to the fort by the Caml.

Artorius’s bold early notions of stepping down and submitting himself to election had long been quietly dropped. But he and Regina had privately spoken of his own eventual succession, and the need for him to find male descendants. It was unspoken between them, but it was obvious that she would not be the source of his children and the derbfine that would follow. She suspected he was also talking to other advisers, such as Myrddin — and perhaps he was already taking other women to his bed. But she cared nothing for that; her liaison with Artorius, in ensuring her own survival and Brica’s, was serving her purposes.

As Regina mused, Brica’s attention was drifting. Galba was moving about at the back of the manufactory, wiping his hands on a rag and joking with another worker.

Galba was short, stocky, with broad heavyset features; he had a pale complexion and thick red hair, which betrayed his people’s probable origin among the Picts north of the Wall. He was young — younger than Brica, who was now a venerable twenty-eight. He had come down from the north with his family, en route to Armorica. They had fallen afoul of Saxons, but a chance encounter with a party of Artorius’s soldiers had saved their lives. Galba’s family had taken over an abandoned farm only half a day’s a ride from here, and had become commoners in the new kingdom. Brica had met Galba at a feast on one of the farmsteads. She had prevailed upon Regina to bring the man into the dunon for a trial at the forge. Galba had acquitted himself so well that Myrddin had taken him on at the manufactory permanently.

And Galba’s move into the dunon had made Brica more than happy, too, to Regina’s chagrin. Galba was cheerful, sturdy, competent, and obviously attractive — but, to Regina, crushingly dull. In that way he was astonishingly like Bran, Brica’s farmboy first love, a relationship Regina had crushed long ago.

Now Galba came out of the workshop, softly calling Brica. Somehow he had managed to scorch a lank of soot-filled red hair at the side of his head. Brica took a knife and carefully began to saw at the blackened ends. Galba crouched a little so she could reach, and as she worked her body moved closer to his, her cheek resting on the side of his head.

They belonged together. It was a sudden, unwelcome truth, and yet it could not be denied. But Regina found jealousy gathering inside her. I can’t allow this, she thought suddenly.

Not for the first time, she found she had come to a decision intuitively, and had to unravel it retrospectively. She felt as hostile to Galba as she had once to Bran. Why?

Galba was now a larger part of Brica’s life than Regina was. So he should be. There were women younger than Brica who were already grandmothers. It was the way of things. A daughter matters more to a mother than a mother can ever matter to the daughter, for the daughter represents the future, and the future must predominate over the past. Regina should simply — let go.

And yet the past contained everything Regina valued in her life: the villa, her own mother, the towns, the fine things. Peace and order, richness and beauty. If she were to let Brica go into the arms of this cloddish boy, this apprentice smith who thought better with his muscles than with his head, then Brica’s future would count for everything, and Regina’s past for nothing. It was a tension between past and future — and it was a tension that resolved in her head, as suddenly as clouds might clear from the face of the sun, and a warm determination filled her.

I will stop this liaison, she thought, just as I got rid of Bran. I don’t know how yet, but I will find a way. I have to, for the sake of the past, which is more precious than the future, and which must therefore be preserved.

A braying of trumpets drifted from the west: it was a peal that announced the return of the riothamus and his army. All over the dunon work was abandoned, and everybody ran to the gate.

In the six years since Regina and Brica had been brought here, the predations of the rebellious Saxons from their fastnesses on the east coast had become a severe problem across southern Britain.

In her long conversations with Artorius about his diffuse foe, she had learned much about the Saxons. For a start they weren’t really “Saxons,” even though that was what everybody called them. After they had erupted from their homeland in the north of Germany, the Saxons had become sea pirates, traversing the Mare Germanicus, which facilitated links among Jutland, Frisia, and Francia. Now nobody could precisely say who or what they were — they were all kinds of Germanics — not that that mattered if you were on the receiving end of a Saxon blade.