I tried the frank grin. 'I'm getting the worst of this!'

Some trickster must have grinned at her like that before. 'You are getting what you deserve.' She sounded like another high-handed girl I often quarrelled with.

'Veleda, what Vespasian sent me here to say is vital to all of us. It cannot be bandied about like a cheap exchange of insults in a drunken shouting match. You speak for your nation-'

'No,' she interrupted me.

'You are the venerated priestess of the Bructeri-'

Veleda smiled quietly. Her smile was completely private, with no shared human contact. Its effect was to make her seem untouchable. She said, 'I am an unmarried woman who dwells in the forest with her thoughts. The gods have given me knowledge-'

'Your deeds also will never be forgotten.'

'I have done nothing. I merely provide my opinions if people ask for them.'

'Then your mere opinions have given you great powers of leadership! Deny ambition if you will, but you and Civilis nearly ruled Europe.' And nearly ruined it. 'Lady, your opinions lit the whole world like a lightning storm. Perhaps you were right, but now the world needs rest. The fight is over.'

'The fight will never be over.'

The simple way Veleda spoke alarmed me. Had she been a conventional power-seeker, these boisterous warriors would have sneered at her and Civilis would have seen her as a rival instead of a partner. She might have roused the rabble once or twice with furious oratory, but probably the Bructeri themselves would have seen her off. Even the hero Arminius had been defeated by his own people in the end. A leader who would not seek the trappings of leadership would be beyond comprehension in Rome. Here, her very rejection of ambition increased her strength.

'It's over,' I insisted. 'Rome is herself. To fight now is to run against bedrock. You cannot defeat Rome.'

'We did. We will.'

'That was then, Veleda.'

'Our time will come again.'

However confident I sounded, Veleda too felt secure. She was turning away once more. I refused to be silenced by a woman presenting her back to me. All my adult life women had been treating me like a bathhouse scraping-slave who hadn't earned his tip.

With nothing to lose, I tried making it personal. 'If this is the vaunted Gallic Empire, I'm not impressed, Veleda. Civilis has bunked off, and all I see here is a clearing in the forest with the kind of tawdry sideshow that turns up at every horse fair. Just another girl with a yearning for show business, trying to make a name for herself-and what's more, discovering that success means all her hangdog relations expect her to find them a job in her retinue: I'm sorry for you. Yours look even worse than my own.' From their impassive faces the lady's relations were either dumber than I thought, or had not shared her Latin tutor. She herself now faced up to me. Family feeling, I dare say. I carried on more quietly: 'Excuse the jibes. My people may be low, but I'm missing them.' She did not appear to have taken my point that Romans were human too. Still, I had her attention, probably.

'Veleda, your influence rests on your successful prophecy that the Roman legions would be destroyed. An easy feat. Anyone who watched the struggle to be emperor could see the Roman stake in Europe was at risk. With only two straws to draw, you picked the lucky answer. That won't work now. Rome has full control again. Once Rome was revived, Petilius Cerialis marched his men along the western bank of the Rhenus from the Alps to the Britannic Ocean, and Rome's enemies fell back before them all the way. Where is your triumphant Civilis nowadays? In the sea, probably.'

The official version of our own commander's fighting prowess may have pleased his urbane mistress in Colonia but it cannot have impressed a shrewd, scornful woman who could see the Cerialis flagship moored on her personal landing-stage. Yet Veleda knew as well as I did that he may have been disorganised, but even Cerialis had won.

'I hear,' said the prophetess as if she hoped to enjoy my discomfiture, 'our kinsman Civilis has dyed his hair red again.'

Well that was an unexpected bonus. I had not dared hope for news. And it didn't sound as if the rebel was in hiding here.

'He's not with you?'

'Civilis only feels at home on the western bank of the river.'

'Not even on The Island?'

'Nowadays, not even there.'

'Rome will barber Civilis. The question is, resourceful prophetess, will you now have the courage to see that the legions were not defeated, and help reconstruct the world which we all so nearly lost?'

I ran out of appeals. The prophetess was still so calm I felt like a man eating grit. 'The decision,' she told me, 'will be made by the Bructeri.'

'Is that why they are here? Veleda, give up your fanatical life of opposing Rome. The Bructeri, and other peoples, will listen to you.'

'My life is irrelevant. The Bructeri will never give up opposing Rome!'

Looking around the Bructeri, I was surprised they had ever listened to anyone.

Veleda stayed as aloof as a Greek oracle or a sibyl. Her routine with the tower was just as much of a fake as their terrifying rituals at Delphi or gumae. But Greek and Roman prophets envelop destinies in riddles; Veleda used the open truth. Her best ploy, I thought, was that, like an orator who voices the people's secret thoughts, she drew on deep feelings which already existed. They believed they were making their own choices. We had seen it here: she was hosting this gathering as if she intended to play no part in the coming arguments. Yet I still believed that the prophetess would achieve the result she wanted. It would be the wrong result for Rome. And Veleda's belief in it looked unshakeable.

This time my intervention was over. Veleda's rare public appearance was ending. She began to move and her supporters regrouped to protect her from being detained.

Once again she turned back to me. It was as if she read my thoughts: that if big decisions were about to be made at this gathering, we might have arrived at the right time. She took pleasure in telling me I would have no chance of affecting events: 'You and your companions are a gift to me. I have been asked to endorse a fate which you can probably guess.' For the first time she looked curious about us. 'Are you afraid of death?'

'No.' Only angry.

'I have yet to decide,' she announced cordially.

I managed to fight back one final time: 'Veleda, you demean yourself and your honoured reputation by slaughtering an old soldier, his servant, and a group of innocent boys!'

I had offended everyone. The chief who brought us felled me with a stupendous blow.

Veleda had reached her tower. Her male relations assembled at the foot of it, facing out towards the company. As the slim figure glided away alone into her retreat, the shadow of the great Roman doorway fell across her golden hair. The signal-tower abruptly swallowed her. The effect was sinister.

It roused all the more anxiety if you were lying on the grass with your pride lopped and a pain in your head, facing the thought of a grisly death in a Bructian sacred grove.