Coalescent

Chapter 1

I have come to stay in Amalfi. I can’t face going back to Britain — not yet — and to be here is a great relief after the swarming strangeness I encountered in Rome.

I’ve taken a room in a house on the Piazza Spirito Santo. There is a small bar downstairs, where I sit in the shade of vine leaves and drink Coke Light, or sometimes the local lemon liqueur, which tastes like the sherbet-lemon boiled sweets I used to buy as a kid in Manchester, ground up and mixed with vodka. The crusty old barman doesn’t have a word of English. It’s hard to tell his age. The flower bowls on the outdoor tables are filled with little bundles of twigs that look suspiciously like fasces to me, but I’m too polite to ask.

Amalfi is a small town nestling in a valley on the Sorrento Peninsula. This is a coast of limestone cliffs, into which the towns have been carved like seabird nesting grounds. People have adapted to living on a vertical surface: there are public staircases you can follow all the way to the next town. Nothing in Italy is new — Amalfi was a maritime power in the Middle Ages — but that sense of immense age, so oppressive in Rome, is absent here. And yet much of what shaped the horror in Rome is here, all around me.

The narrow cobbled streets are always crowded with traffic, with cars and buses, lorries and darting scooters. Italians don’t drive as northern Europeans do. They just go for it: they swarm, as Peter McLachlan would have said, a mass of individuals relying on the unwritten rules of the mob to get them through.

And then there are the people. Just opposite my bar there is a school. When the kids are let out in the middle of the day — well, again, they swarm; there’s really no other word for it. They erupt into the piazza in their bright blue smocklike uniforms, all yelling at the tops of their voices. But it’s soon over. Like water draining from a sieve, they disperse to their homes or to the cafй s and bars, and the noise fades.

And, of course, there is family. You can’t get away from that in Italy.

Amalfi used to be a center for making rag paper, a technique they learned from the Arabs. Once there were sixty mills here. That number has dwindled to one, but that one still supplies the Vatican, so that every papal pronouncement can be recorded forever on acid-free rag paper, now made fine enough for a computer printer to take. And that surviving Amalfi mill has been operated without a break by the same family for nine hundred years.

The swarming crowds, the thoughtless order of the mob, the cold grasp of ancient families: even I see visions of the Coalescents everywhere I look.

And I see again that extraordinary crater, collapsed in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo, with the plume of gray-black tufa dust still hanging in the air above it. Workers from the offices and shops, clutching cell phones and coffees and cigarettes, peered into the hole that had suddenly opened up in their world. And the drones simply poured out of the crater, in baffling numbers, in hundreds, thousands. Obscured by the dust, they looked identical. Even now there was a kind of order to them — but nobody led. The women at the fringe would press forward a few paces, blinking at the staring office workers around them, and then turn and disappear back into the mass, to be replaced by others, who pushed forward in turn. When it reached the edge of the road, the flowing mob broke up, forming ropes and tendrils and lines of people that washed forward, breaking and recombining, probing into doorways and alleyways, swarming, exploring. In the dusty light they seemed to blur together into a single rippling mass, and even in the bright air of the Roman afternoon they gave off a musky, fetid odor.

I suppose I’m trying to compensate. I spend a lot of my time alone, in my room, or walking in the hills that loom over the towns. But a part of me still longs, above everything else, to go back, to immerse myself once more in the Coalescents’ warm tactile orderliness. It is an unfulfilled longing that, I suspect, will stay with me until I die.

How strange that my quest to find my own family would lead me to such mysteries, and would begin and end in death.

Chapter 2

It began at a strange time for everybody, in fact. The news had just emerged about the Kuiper Anomaly, the strange new light beyond the sky. London is the place to be when a story like that breaks, the kind of massive, life-changing news that you want to share with your friends, at the office watercoolers or in the pubs and coffee bars, and chew over the latest wrinkles.

But I had to go home, to Manchester. It was duty. I had lost my father. I was forty-five.

My father’s house, the family home where I had grown up, was one of a short street of identical suburban properties: a neat little semidetached, with scraps of lawn at the front and back. Standing in the drive on a dazzling, bright September morning, I tried to keep control of my emotions, tried to think like a stranger.

When they were built in the fifties, not long before my birth, these little houses must have seemed desirable compared to the back-to-back terraces of the inner city, and a hell of a lot better than the tower blocks that would follow in a few years’ time. But now, in the first decade of the new century, the brickwork looked hasty and cheap, the little flower beds were subsiding, and some of the exterior work, like the plaster-covered breeze blocks that lined the driveways, was crumbling. Not much of the street’s original character remained. There were plastic-framed double-glazed windows, rebuilt roofs and chimney stacks, flat-roofed bedrooms built over the garages, even a couple of small conservatories tacked on the front of the houses opposite my father’s, to catch the southern light. After nearly fifty years the houses had mutated, evolved, become divergent.

The people had changed, too. Once this had been a street of young families, with us kids playing elaborate games that paused only when the occasional car came sweeping in off the main road. One car to a household then, Morris Minors, Triumphs, and Zephyrs that fit neatly into the small garages. Now there were cars everywhere, cluttering every drive and double-parked along the pavement. Some of the small gardens had been dug out and paved over, I saw, to make even more room for the cars. There wasn’t a kid to be seen, only cars.

But my home, my old home, was different from the rest.

Our house still had the original wooden concertina-style garage doors, and the small wooden-framed windows, including the bay at the front of the house where I used to sit and read my comics. But I could see how the woodwork was chipped and cracked, perhaps even rotten. There had once been an ivy, an extravagant green scribble over the front of the house. The ivy was long gone, but I could see the scars on the brickwork where it had clung, palely weathered. Just as when my mother had been alive — she’d gone ten years earlier — my father would only do the most basic renovation. He did most of his work for the building trade, and he said he had enough of building and decorating during the week.

One of the few nods to modernity I could spot was the silver box of a burglar alarm stuck prominently on the front wall. Dad’s last burglary had been a few years back. It had taken him days to notice it, before he had discovered the neatly broken lock on the garage door, and the smashed window in the car he rarely used, and the neatly coiled turd on the floor. Kids, the police had said. Panic reactions. My father had been defiant, but he had been troubled by the draining of his own strength, and his inability to fight back as he always had before against the cruel selfishness of others. I had paid for the alarm and arranged for it to be installed. But, I’m ashamed to say, this was the first day I’d actually seen it in place.

Alarm or not, a single windowpane in the front door gaped, broken and unrepaired.

“George Poole. It is George, isn’t it?”

I turned, startled. The man standing before me was bulky, balding. He wore clothes that were vaguely out of joint, perhaps too young for him — bright yellow T-shirt, jeans, training shoes, a chunky-looking cell phone stuck in a chest pocket. Despite his bearlike size you instantly got an impression of shyness, for his shoulders were hunched as if to mask his height, and his hands, folded together in front of his belly, plucked at each other.

And despite the graying hair, high forehead, and thickened neck and jaw, I recognized him straight away.

“Peter?”

His name was Peter McLachlan. We had been in the same year at school, for most of our careers in the same classes. At school he was always Peter, never Pete or Petey, and I guessed he was the same now.

He stuck out his hand. His grip was tentative, his palm cold and moist. “I saw you drive up. I bet you’re surprised to find me standing here.”

“Not really. My father used to mention you.”

“Nice duffel coat,” he said.

“What? … Oh, yeah.”

“Takes me back to school days. Didn’t know you could buy them anymore.”

“I’ve a special supplier. Caters for the style-challenged.” It was true.

We stood there awkwardly for a moment. I always did feel awkward with Peter, for he was one of those people who could never relax in company. And there was something different about his face, which took me a couple of seconds to cue in on: he wasn’t wearing the thick glasses that had always been inflicted on him as a kid in the seventies. I couldn’t see the telltale eye widening of contacts; maybe he’d had laser surgery.

“I’m sorry about breaking your window,” he said now.

“That was you?”

“It was the night he died. Your father didn’t come to the door when I brought him his evening paper. I thought it was best to check …”

“You found him? I didn’t know.”

“I would have had to go into the house to fix the window, and I thought I shouldn’t until you — you know.”

“Yes.” Moved by his thoughtfulness, I gently slapped his shoulder. I could feel muscles under his sleeve.

But he flinched. He said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“I’m sorry you had to find him.” I knew I had to say more. “And thanks for checking on him.”

“Didn’t do him much good, I’m afraid.”

“But you tried. He told me how you used to look out for him. Mow the lawn—”

“It wasn’t any trouble. After all, I got to know him when we were kids.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t been in there yet, have you?”

“You know I haven’t if you saw me park,” I said a bit sharply.

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

“I don’t want to trouble you anymore. I should do this.”

“It’s no trouble. But I don’t want to impose …”

We were circling around the issue, still awkward. In the end, of course, I accepted the offer.

We walked up the drive. Even the tarmac was rotten, I noted vaguely; it crackled softly under my weight. I produced a key, sent me by the hospital that had notified me of the death. I slid it into the Yale lock, and pushed the door open.

There was a noisy bleeping. Peter reached past me to punch a code into a control box set in an open cupboard in the porch. “He gave me the code,” he said. “The burglar alarm. In case of false alarms, you know. That’s how I was able to turn it off, when I broke the window to get in. In case you were wondering how … I was a key holder. But he had a deadbolt and a chain, which was why I had to break the window—”

“It’s okay, Peter,” I said, a little impatient. Shut up. He never had known when to do that.

He subsided.

I took a breath and stepped into the house.

Here it all was, my childhood home, just as it had always been.

In the hall, a hat stand laden with musty coats, a telephone table with a seventies-era handset and a heap of scribbled names, numbers, and notes piled up in a cardboard box, notes in Dad’s handwriting. In an alcove Dad had carved out of the wall, a small, delicate statue of the Virgin Mary. Downstairs, the dining room with the scarred old table, the small kitchen with greasy-looking stove and Formica-topped table, the living room with bookshelves, battered sofa and armchairs, and a surprisingly new TV system, complete with VCR and DVD. The narrow staircase — exactly fifteen stairs, just as I’d counted as a child — up to the landing, where there was a bathroom, the master bedroom and three small rooms, and the little hatchway to the attic. The wallpaper was plain, but it didn’t look as shabby as I’d expected, or feared. So Dad must have decorated since I’d last visited, five or six years ago — or had it done, perhaps by Peter, who stood on the doormat behind me, a great lumpen presence. I didn’t want to ask him.

It all felt small, so damn small. I had a fantasy that I was a giant like Gulliver, trapped in the house, with my arms stuck in the living room and kitchen, my legs pinned in the bedrooms.

Peter was looking at the Virgin. “Still a Catholic household. Father Moore would be proud.” The parish priest, kindly but formidable, when we were both kids; he had given us our First Communions. “Do you practice?”

I shrugged. “I’d go to Mass at Christmas and Easter with my dad, if we were together. Otherwise I guess you’d call me lapsed. You?”

He just laughed. “Since we know so little about the universe, religion seems a bit silly. I miss the ritual,

though. It was comforting. And the community.”

“Yes, the community.” Peter was from Irish Catholic stock, my mother’s family Italian American. Both clichй s, in our way, I thought. I stared up at Mary’s plaster face, frozen in an expression of pained kindness. “I suppose I was used to all this stuff as a kid. Faces staring down at me from the wall. Seems vaguely oppressive now.”

Peter was studying me. “Are you okay? How do you feel?”

Irritation flared. “Fine,” I snapped.

He flinched, and pressed his forefinger to the space between his eyes, and I realized he was straightening nonexistent glasses.

I was suddenly ashamed. “Peter, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not here to make you feel sorry. This is your time.” He spread his big hands. “Everything you do now, you’re going to remember for the rest of your life.”

“Christ, you’re right,” I said, dismayed.

I walked the few paces to the kitchen door, which was open. There was a musty smell. A cup, saucer, and plate sat with bits of cutlery on the table. The plate was covered with cold grease and dried flecks of what looked like bacon. There was a little puddle of liquid in the bottom of the cup, on which green bacterial colonies floated; I recoiled.

“I found him in the hall,” Peter said.

“I heard.” Dad had suffered a series of massive strokes. I picked up the cup, saucer, and plate and carried them to the sink.

“I don’t think the fall itself hurt him. He looked peaceful. He was lying just there.” He pointed to the hall. “I used his phone to call the hospital. I didn’t go into the rest of the house. Not even to clean up.”

“That was thoughtful,” I murmured.

I looked out of the kitchen window at the small back garden. The grass needed cutting, I noted absently, and the pale spires of ant colonies towered amid the green. In one corner of the garden, where they would get the most light, were the skeletal forms of the azaleas, my father’s pride and joy, cherished for years — Christ, decades. But at this time of year they were as barren and stark as at midwinter.

I looked down at the sink. Clean dishes, looking dusty, were racked up, and there was a stink of staleness from the drain. I turned on the taps and tipped the mold out of the cup into the drainer. The cold tea poured away, and green bacterial spots slid silently, but there was still plenty of scum clinging to the cup. I looked for washing-up liquid, but couldn’t see any, even in the small, crammed cupboard under the sink. I pulled the cup out of the water again and looked into it, feeling foolish, futile, ensnared.

Peter was standing in the kitchen door. “I’ll bring over some Fairy Liquid if you like.”

“Fuck it,” I snarled. I stepped on the pedal of the bin in the cupboard and threw in the dirty cup. But the bin was half full and stank, too, of what might have been rotten fruit. I got to my knees and began to root in the cupboard, pulling aside cardboard boxes and yellowed plastic bags.

“What are you looking for?”

“Bin liners. The whole damn place is a mess.” Everything seemed old, even the cans and plastic dispensers of cleaning stuff in the cupboard, old and dirty and crusted and half used up but never thrown out. My searching was getting more violent; I was scattering stuff around the floor.

“Take it easy,” Peter said. “Give yourself a minute.”

He was right, of course. I forced myself to back up.

He had left this, my father had, this little set of dirty dishes. He’d never come back to finish the tea. He’d just stopped, his life cutting off at that moment, like a film breaking. Now I had to tidy this stuff away, a chore I used to loathe as a kid: He never would clean up after himself. But when it was done, there would be no more, no more dirty cups and greasy crockery, not ever. And as I worked my way through the house, room by room, I would be fixing messes that he would never make again.

I said, “It’s as if he’s dying, a little bit more. Just by me doing this.”

“You had a sister. She was older than us, wasn’t she?”

“Gina, yes. She came over for the funeral. But she went back to America. We’re going to sell the house; we share it fifty-fifty, according to Dad’s will—”

“America?”

“Florida.” My maternal grandfather had been a GI, an Italian American, stationed briefly in Liverpool some time before the war. You might say my mother was a premature war baby, conceived during that stay. After the war the GI had not fulfilled his promise to come back to England. I told Peter all this. “But there was a happy ending,” I said. “My grandfather got back in touch sometime in the fifties.”

“Guilt?”

“I suppose. He was never a true father. But he sent money over, and took Mum and Gina over to the States a few times, when Gina was small. Then we inherited some property in Florida, left to my mother by a cousin she’d met over there. Gina went to work over there, took the house, raised a family. She works in PR — I’m sorry, it’s a complicated story—”

“Family stories are like that.”

“Episodic. No neat narrative structure.”

“That makes you uncomfortable.”

It was a perceptive remark I wouldn’t have expected from the Peter I’d known. “I suppose it does. It’s all kind of a tangle. Like a spider’s web. I felt as if I got myself out of it, by building a life in London. Now I have to get tangled up again.” And I resented it, I realized, even as I tried to finish these few last chores for my father.

Peter asked, “Do you have kids of your own?”

I shook my head. It occurred to me I hadn’t asked Peter a single question about himself, his life since school, his circumstances now. “How about you?”

“I never married,” he said simply. “I was a policeman — did you know that?”

I grinned; I couldn’t help it. Peter the school dork, a copper?

Evidently he was used to the reaction. “I did well. Became a detective constable. I retired early …”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Other things to do.” I would find out later what those “other things” were. “Look, let me help. Go see to the rest of the house. I’ll sort this out — I can fill a bin liner for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s okay. I’d like to do it for Jack. If I find anything personal I’ll just leave it.”

“You’re very thoughtful.”

He shrugged. “You’d do the same for me.”

I wasn’t sure if that was remotely true, and I felt another layer of guilt pile up on already complicated strata. But I didn’t say any more.

I started upstairs. Behind me I heard a dim bleeping, the baby-bird sound of Peter’s cell phone calling for attention.

My father’s bedroom.

The bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a dent in the pillow where his head had lain. There was a waist-high basket nearly full of dirty clothes. On the small bedside cupboard, where an electric lamp was alight, a paperback book lay facedown. It was a biography of Churchill. It was all as if my father had left it a moment ago, but that moment had somehow been frozen, and was now receding relentlessly into the past, a fading still image on a broken video.

I turned off the lamp, closed the book. I poked about the room listlessly, unsure what to do.

The dressing table before the window had always been my mother’s domain. Even now the rows of family photographs — my graduation, smiling American grandkids — looked just as when I’d last seen them, perhaps as she’d left them. The dust was thicker behind the photographs, as if Dad had barely touched this corner since she’d gone. There was some mail scattered on the surface, a few bills, a postcard from Rome.

Cancer had taken my mother. She had always been a young mother, just nineteen when I was born. She still seemed young when she died, right to the end of her life.

On his last night my father had emptied his pockets here, never to fill them again. I threw a grimy handkerchief into the laundry bag. I found a little change and some bills, which I absently pocketed — the coins felt heavy and cold through the fabric of my pocket — and his wallet, slim and containing a single credit card, which I also took.

The dresser had two small drawers. In one was a bundle of mail in opened envelopes, from my sister, my mother, my younger self. I pushed the letters back into the drawer, a task for later. In the other drawer were a few checkbook stubs, a couple of bank account passbooks, and bank statements and credit card bills, held neatly together with treasury tags. I swept all this stuff up and crammed it into my jacket pocket. I knew I was being a coward in my priorities: closing down his financial affairs was something I could do on remote control, easily, without leaving my comfort zone.

Suits hung in the wardrobe. I riffled through them, evoking a smell of dust and camphor. They were cut to Dad’s barrel-shaped frame and would never have fit me, even if they hadn’t been old, worn at cuffs and shoulders, and indefinably old-mannish in their style. He had always folded his shirts and set them one on top of another in the shallow drawers of the wardrobe, and there they were now. Shoes, of patent leather and suede, lay jumbled up on top of each other in the bottom of the wardrobe: he had been wearing his slippers when they took him to the hospital. There were more drawers full of underwear, sweaters, ties, tiepins and cufflinks, even a few elastic armbands.

I explored all this, touching it hesitantly. There was little I would want to keep: a few cufflinks, maybe, something I would associate with him. I knew I should just sweep up all this stuff, cram it into bin bags, and take it to an Oxfam shop. But not today, not today.

Gina had already said she didn’t want any of this old stuff. I resented her not being here, for running back to the Miami Beach sun and leaving me to this shit. But she always had kept herself out of the family fray. Peter McLachlan was a better son than she was a daughter, I thought bitterly.

I was far from finished, but enough for now. I got out of there.

On the landing walls were more Catholic ornaments, more Marys — even a Sacred Heart, a statue of Jesus with His chest exposed to show His burning heart, the realization of a particularly gruesome medieval “miracle.” I wondered what I should do with all the Catholic tokens. It would seem disrespectful, if not sacrilegious, to just dump them. Perhaps I could take them to the parish church. I realized with a start that I had no idea who the priest was; no doubt he was decades younger than me.

I glanced up at the hatchway to the access to the attic space. It was just a little square panel cut out of the ceiling. If I wanted to go up there I ought to find a ladder.

The hell with that. Bracing against the wall of the stairwell, I managed to get one foot on top of the banister rail and lifted myself up. This was how I used to climb into the attic as a kid. I could see spiderwebs, and bits of unevenness in the ceiling paintwork that cast fine shadows from the landing window light. I pushed at the hatch. It was heavier than I remembered, and, evidently a long time undisturbed, had glued itself into place. But it came loose with a soft ripping noise.

I poked my head up into the attic. It smelled dusty but dry. I reached up to a switch mounted on a cross beam; the light, from a bulb dangling from a rafter, was bright but reluctant to spread far.

I set my hands on the edge of the frame. When I tried the last step — kicking off the banister rail and pushing up with my arms — I was suddenly aware of my greater bulk, and feebler muscles; I wasn’t a kid anymore. Just for a second it felt as if I wouldn’t make it. But then my biceps took the strain. I hauled my belly up through the hatch, and sat heavily on a joist that ran across the roof, breathing hard.

Boxes and trunks receded into the shadows like the buildings of a gloomy miniature city. There was a sharp smell of burning, as the dust on the bulb was incinerated. Looking down into the brightness of the house was like a vision of an inverted heaven. I was rarely allowed up here when I was small, and even as a teenager never allowed to fulfill my ambitions of turning it into some kind of den. But I had always loved the sense of remoteness I got when I passed out through the skin of the house into this other world.

I swung up my legs. The roof was low; I had to crawl over the boards I had nailed down over the ceiling insulation in my twenties, when it had emerged that fiberglass insulation wasn’t good for you. Soon my hands were filthy and my knees were starting to ache.

Most of the boxes contained Dad’s stuff — he had been an accountant, his last few years working independently, and there were files from his various employers, even a few musty old accountancy training manuals. I doubted I would need to keep any of this stuff; it was more than eight years since he had retired. In one box I found a small red clothbound book, an ancient, battered, and much-used set of log tables: Knott’s Mathematical Tables (Four-Figured). The binding of the little volume was actually fraying. And here, too, was a slim cardboard box that contained a slide rule, wooden, with scales marked in pasted-on paper. I could barely see the tiny numerals, but the plastic of the slider was yellow and cracked. I put the rule back in the box and set it aside with the log tables, meaning to take them down later.

I moved deeper into the loft. I found one box marked XMAS DECORATIONS — WILMSLOW,1958 — WILMSLOW,1959 — MANCHESTER, 1960 … and so on, down through the years, right up until, I saw, the year of my mother’s death. In a box of assorted junk I found a couple of stamp albums and a half-filled box of first-day covers, plastic board games in ugly seventies-era boxes — and a scrapbook of pictures, original sketches, photographs patiently clipped out of magazines and comics, all pasted onto thick gray paper. My sister’s, from her own childhood years. It was a cobbled-together depiction of a family legend, a tale told by grandfathers and great-aunts: the story of a girl called Regina, who had supposedly grown up in Britain in the time of the Romans, and when Britain had fallen she had fled to Rome itself. And we were Regina’s remote descendants, so the story went. I’d grown up believing it, until maybe the age of ten. I put the book aside; perhaps Gina would like to see it again.

Then I came to a box that caught my eye: TV21S, read the label. (GEORGE). With some eagerness I hauled the box back to the light and opened it up. Inside I found a pile of comics — “ TV Century 21, Adventures in the 21st Century — Every Wednesday — 7d.” They were neatly stacked, from a very grubby and fragile issue number 1 downward. This was, of course, the comic that had been spun out of the Gerry Anderson science fiction puppet shows during the sixties, and a monumental part of my young life. I had thought my parents had burned this stack when I got to around twelve, with my uncertain adolescent acquiescence.

I opened one at random. The comic was a broadsheet. The much-thumbed paper was thin, delicate, and all but rubbed away along its spine. But the full-color strips within were as bright as they had been in 1965. I found myself in issue 19, in which the Kaplan, the leader of the Astrans — aliens oddly like huge jelly beans — is assassinated, JFK-style, and Colonel Steve Zodiac, commander of the mighty spacecraft Fireball XL5, is assigned to find the killers and avert a space war.

“Mike Noble.” It was Peter; he had stuck his head through the hatch.

“Sorry, I was lost again.”

He handed me a mug of tea. “My mug, my tea, my milk. I guessed you don’t take sugar.”

“Right. Mike who?”

“Noble. The artist who drew Fireball for TV-Twenty-one — and later Zero X, and Captain Scarlet. Always our favorite.”

Our? … But, yes, I remembered that a shared interest in the Anderson shows, and later all things science- fictional and space-related, had been an early hook-up between me and Peter, links that had overcome my reluctance to be associated with the school weirdo. “I thought my parents burned this lot.”

Peter shrugged. “If they’d told you they were up here they’d never have gotten you out of the attic. Anyhow, maybe they meant to give them back to you someday, and just forgot.”

That sounded like Dad, I thought sourly.

“Do you have a complete run in there?”

“I think so,” I said dubiously. “I think I kept buying it right until the end.”

“Which end?”

“Huh?”

He clambered a little higher — I saw he had brought a stepladder — and perched on the rim of the open hatch, legs dangling. “ TV Twenty-one went through a few changes as sales began to fall. In nineteen sixty-eight — issue one ninety-two — it merged with another title called TV Tornado, and began to run more non-Anderson material. Then, after issue two forty-two, it merged with a Joe Ninety comic and began a second series from number one …”

“The last issue I remember buying had George Best on the cover. How do you know all this?”

“I researched it.” He shrugged. “You can reclaim the past, you know. Colonize it. There’s always more you can find out. Structure your memories.” He sighed. “But for TV Twenty-one it has gotten harder with time. There was a surge of interest in the eighties—”

“When our generation reached our thirties.”

Peter grinned. “Old enough to be nostalgic, young enough to form irrational enthusiasms, rich enough to do something about it. But now we’re passing through our forties, and …”

“And we’re becoming decayed old fucks and nobody cares anymore.” And, I thought, we are being picked off one by one by the demographics, as if by a relentless sniper. I flicked through the comics, looking at the brightly colored panels, the futuristic vehicles and shining uniforms. “The twenty-first century isn’t turning out the way I expected, that’s for sure.”

Peter said hesitantly, “But there’s still time. Have you seen this?” He held up his cell phone. It was a complex new toy from Nokia or Sony or Casio. I didn’t recognize it; I’ve no interest in such gadgets. But the screen was glowing with a bright image, a kind of triangle. “Just came in. The latest on the Kuiper Belt. The Anomaly.”

Two days after the discovery, everybody on Earth within reach of a TV probably knew that the Kuiper Belt is a loose cloud of comets and ice worlds that surrounds the solar system, stretching all the way from Pluto halfway out to the nearest star. And a bunch of astronomers, probing that chill region with radars or some such, had found something unusual.

Peter was explaining earnestly that the image on his screen wasn’t a true image but had been reconstructed from complicated radar echoes. “It’s the way you can reconstruct the structure of DNA from X-ray diffraction echoes—”

The little screen gleamed brightly in the dark of the loft. “It’s a triangle.”

“No, it’s three-dimensional.” He tapped a key and the image turned.

“A pyramid,” I said. “No — four sides, all of them triangles. What do you call it?”

“A tetrahedron,” Peter said. “But it’s the size of a small moon.”

I shivered in the cold gloom, feeling oddly superstitious. It was an awful enough time for me already, and now there were strange lights in the sky … “Something artificial?”

“What else could it be? The astronomers got excited just from their detection of straight-line edges. Now they’re seeing this.” His pale eyes were bright, reflecting the blue glow of the little screen. “Of course not everybody agrees; some say this is just an artifact of the signal processing, and there’s nothing there but echoes … There’s talk of sending a probe. Like the Pluto Express. But it might take decades to get there.”

I looked down at the comics. “They should send Fireball,” I said. “Steve Zodiac would be there in a couple of hours.” Suddenly my vision misted, and a big heavy drop of liquid splashed from my nose onto a colored panel. I wiped it off hastily. “Shit. Sorry.” But now my shoulders were shaking.

“It’s okay,” Peter said evenly.

I fought for control. “I hadn’t expected to fucking cry. Not over a fucking comic.”

He took my mug, still full, and headed down the stairs. “Take as long as you want.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said, and so he did.

When I got over my spasm I clambered down out of the loft, bringing only the slide rule and log tables with me. I’d intended to head back to my city-center hotel, comforted that at least I’d pushed through the barrier, at least I’d been inside the house, and whatever else I turned up couldn’t distress me as much as today.

But Peter had one more surprise for me. As I came down the stairs I saw he was hurrying out of the door carrying what looked like a cookie tin, a deep one.

“Hey,” I snapped.

He stopped, looking comically guilty, and actually tried to hide the damn tin behind his back.

“Where are you going with that?”

“George, I’m sorry. I just—”

Instantly my innate suspicion of Peter the school weirdo was revived. Or maybe I just wanted to act tough after crying in front of him. “You said you wouldn’t touch anything personal. What’s this, theft?”

He seemed to be trembling. “George, for Christ’s sake—”

I pushed past him and snatched the box out of his hands. He just watched as I pulled the lid off.

Inside was a stash of porn magazines. They were yellowed, and of the jolly skin-and-sunshine Health and Efficiency variety. I leafed through them quickly; some were twenty years old, but most of them postdated my mother’s death.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“I wanted to spare you.”

“He hid them in the kitchen ?”

Peter shrugged. “Who would have thought to look there? He always was smart, your dad.”

I dug deeper into the box. “Smart, but a randy old bugger. It’s porn all the way down — wait.”

Right at the bottom of the tin was a picture in a frame. It was a color photograph, very old, cheap enough for its colors to have faded. It showed two children, age three or four, standing side by side, grinning at the camera from out of a long-gone sunny day. The frame was a cheap wooden affair, the kind you can still pick up in Woolworth’s.

Peter came to see. “That’s the house. I mean, this house.”

He was right. And the faces of the kids were unmistakable. “That’s me.” The girl was a female version of me — the same features, the blond hair and smoky gray eyes, but more delicate, prettier.

Peter asked, “So who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How old did you say your sister was?”

“Ten years older than me. Whoever this is, it isn’t Gina.” I carried the photograph toward the daylight, and peered at it long and hard.

Peter’s voice had an edge to it. Perhaps he was taking a subtle revenge for my accusation of theft. “Then I think your father was hiding more from you than your comics.”

A click sounded from the living room. It was the video recorder. The machinery of my father’s home continued to work, clocks and timers clicking and whirring mindlessly, an animated shell around the empty space where Dad had been.

Chapter 3

Everything started to go wrong for Regina on the night the strange light flared in the sky. Looking back, she would often wonder at how the great events of the silent sky were so linked to the business of the Earth, the blood and the dirt of life. Her grandfather would have understood the meaning of such an omen, she thought. But she was too young to comprehend.

And the evening had started so well, so brightly.

Regina was just seven years old.

When she heard that her mother was getting dressed for her birthday party, Regina abandoned her dolls and ran whooping through the villa. She scampered all the way around three sides of the courtyard, from the little temple with the lararium — where her father, looking exasperated, was making his daily tribute of wine and food to the three matres, the family gods — and through the main building with the old burned-out bathhouse she was forbidden ever to enter, and then to her mother’s bedroom.

When she got there Julia was already sitting on her couch, holding a silver mirror before her face. Julia brushed a lock of pale hair from her forehead and murmured irritably at Cartumandua, who stepped back from her mistress, combs and pins in her hands. The slave was fifteen years old, thin as a reed, with black hair, deep brown eyes, and broad, dark features. Today, though, her face was a sickly white and slick with sweat. There were two other slave women here, standing by with colored bottles of perfume and oils, but Regina didn’t know their names and ignored them.

Regina ran forward. “Mother! Mother! Let me fix your hair!”

Cartumandua held back the comb, murmuring in her thick country accent, “No, child. You’ll spoil it. And there is no time—”

It was just as she had spoken to Regina when she was a little girl, when Cartumandua had been given to her as her companion and guardian. But Regina didn’t have to take orders like that from a slave. “No!” she snapped. “Give me the comb, Cartumandua. Give it to me!”

“Sh, sh.” Julia turned and took her daughter’s small hands in her delicate, manicured fingers. She was wearing a simple white tunic, soon to be replaced by the evening’s elaborate garments. “What a noise you’re making! Do you want to frighten all our guests away?”

Regina gazed into her mother’s gray eyes, so much like her own — the family eyes, eyes filled with smoke, as her grandfather always said. “No. But I want to do it! And Cartumandua says—”

“Well, she’s right.” Julia pulled at Regina’s own unruly mop of blond hair. “She’s trying to fix my hair. I can’t go into my birthday party looking as if I’ve been held upside down by my ankles all day, can I?” That made Regina laugh. “I’ll tell you what,” Julia said. “Let Carta finish my hair, and then you can help with my jewelry. How would that be? You’re always so good at picking out the right rings and brooches—”

“Oh, yes, yes! Wear the dragon.”

“All right.” Julia smiled and kissed her daughter. “Just for you I’ll wear the dragon. Now sit quietly over there …”

So Regina sat, and Julia turned back to her mirror, and Cartumandua resumed her work on her mistress’s hair. It was an elaborate style: the center was braided, drawn back, and wrapped around, while another braided piece rose directly from Julia’s forehead to be pulled back across the head. The silent attendant women anointed the hair with perfume and oils, and Cartumandua inserted jet pins, dark against Julia’s bright golden hair, to keep it all in place.

Regina watched, rapt. It was a complicated style that took time and care to assemble, and needed the focused attention of a whole team of assistants — which was, as Regina had heard her mother say in one of those adult conversations she didn’t really understand, why she wore it in the first place. Other people might be burying their money in the family mausoleum, but she was going to wear the family’s wealth and let everybody know about it. And it was fashionable on the continent, at least according to the images on the most recent coins to reach Britain from the continental mints. Julia was determined to keep up with the latest styles, even if she was stuck out here in the southwestern corner of Britain, about as far from Rome as you could get without falling off the edge of the world.

Regina loved parties, of course. What seven-year-old didn’t? And Julia gave plenty of them, lavish affairs that illuminated the villa here on the outskirts of Durnovaria. But even more than the parties themselves, Regina loved most of all these elaborate preparations: the subtle scents, the soft clinks of the bottles in the hands of the silent slaves, the hissing of the combs through her mother’s hair, and Julia’s instructions, soft or firm as required, as she expertly commanded her little team in their complex task.

As the styling continued Julia smiled at Regina and began to sing, softly — not in her native British tongue, but in Latin, an old, strange song taught her by her own father. Its words, about mysterious vanished gods, were still baffling to Regina, despite her own fitful attempts to learn the language at her grandfather’s insistence.

At last Julia’s hair was finished. Cartumandua allowed the attendants to approach with their bottles of perfume and cream. Some of these little bottles were carved in elaborate shapes; Regina’s favorite was a balsarium in the shape of a bald-headed child. Julia selected a face cream of sandalwood and lavender on a base of animal fat, a little white lead for her cheeks, soot to make her eyebrows contrast strikingly with her blond hair, and one of her most precious perfumes, said to come from a faraway place called Egypt. Regina was under strict instructions never to play with any of this stuff, for it had become so hard to find; until things got back to normal, so her mother said, and the big trade routes that spanned the Empire opened up again, this was all the stock she had of these wonderful things, and they were precious.

Finally it was time to select the jewelry. As Julia slid a selection of rings onto each finger, most of them set with precious stones and intaglios, Regina demanded that she be allowed to bring her mother the dragon brooch herself. It was a very old British design, but rendered in the Roman style, a swirl of silver that was almost too big for Regina to hold in her small hands. She approached Julia with the marvelous brooch held out before her, and her mother smiled, the white lead on her cheeks shining like moonlight.

It was midsummer, and the afternoon was long. The sky was blue as a jackdaw’s egg and free of cloud, and it stayed bright even when the sun had long disappeared.

By the slowly dimming light, the guests arrived, walking, riding, or in their chaises. Most of them came from Durnovaria, the nearest town. Some of them stood in the balmy summer air of the courtyard, around the fountain that had never worked in Regina’s lifetime, while others sat in couches or basket chairs, talking, drinking, laughing. They began to pick at the food set out on the low slate tables. There were round loaves of fresh-baked bread, and bowls of British-grown fruit like raspberries, wood strawberries, and crab apples. In addition to salted meat, there were plenty of oysters, mussels, cockles, snails, and fish sauce — and, obtained at great expense, some figs and olive oil from the continent. The highlights were showy extravagances of culinary labor: dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, sausages with damsons and pomegranates, peahens’ eggs in pastry.

The guests loudly admired Julia’s latest decor. In the main hall the plaster walls were painted with blocks of purple or gray veined with blue, and the dado was an elegant design of small rectangles outlined in green. Regina had learned that the old design — nature-themed, with imitation marbling, garlands, and candelabra all adorned with ears of yellow barley — was now seriously out of fashion on the continent. Her father had complained loud and long about the expense of repainting the walls, and the difficulty of finding workmen these days. Her grandfather had just raised his thick eyebrows and said something about how absurd it was to paint one half of a villa when the other half had burned down and you couldn’t afford to fix it …

But to Regina’s young eyes, the new design looked much better than the old, and that was all that mattered.

The entertainment started soon after the first guests arrived. Julia had hired a storyteller, an old man — perhaps as old as fifty — with a great ferocious gray-black beard. He told a long and complicated story,

entirely from memory, about how the hero Culhwch had sought the hand of the daughter of the giant Ysbadden. It was an ancestral tale of the olden days before the coming of the Caesars. Few people listened to him — even Regina was too excited to stay for long, though she knew it was a good story — but the old man would patiently tell and retell his stories all night, and as the party wore on, and as the drink had its effect, his deep voice would attract more attention. At the start of the evening, though, the musicians were more popular. They played a mixture of instruments from Britain and the Continent, bone flutes and panpipes, harps and citharas and tibias, and their bright music drifted like smoke on the still air.

Julia’s father, Regina’s grandfather, was here. Aetius was a towering soldier who, after adventures abroad, was now stationed at a mysterious, magic-sounding, faraway place called the Wall. And having traveled the length of the diocese of Britain for his only daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday party, he stomped around the villa and grumbled loudly at all the expense — “It’s as if the Rhine never froze over,” he would say mysteriously.

Marcus, Regina’s father, was a thin, clumsy man with severely cut dark hair and a drawn, anxious- looking face. He was dressed in his toga. This formal garment took skill to wear, for it was very heavy and you had to walk correctly to make the drapery fall easily, and Marcus wasn’t used to it. So he walked about slowly and ponderously, as if he were wearing a great suit of lead. No matter how carefully he took each step — and he didn’t dare sit down — the precious toga dragged on the floor, or folded and flapped awkwardly, or fell open to reveal his white tunic underneath.

But Marcus proudly wore his Phrygian cap, pointed forward at the front, which marked him out as an adherent of the cult of Cybele, old-fashioned but popular locally. Four hundred years after the birth of Jesus, Christianity was the religion of the empire. But in the provinces Christianity remained a cult of the cities and villas, with the countryside people — who comprised most of the population — still clinging to their ancient pagan ways. And even among the elite, older cults still lingered. Cybele herself was a mother goddess who had come from Anatolia, imported into Rome after a conquest.

If Marcus was always going to be awkward in polite company, Julia herself was every bit the hostess. She wore a long stola over a long-sleeved shift, tied at the waist. The thick material of the stola, brightly colored blue and red, fell in heavy folds, and she wore a mantle over her shoulder, pinned in place with the wonderful dragon brooch. Not a hair seemed out of place, and to Regina she lit up every room more brightly than any number of bronze lamps or candlesticks.

As for Regina herself, she flitted through the rooms and the courtyard, where the oil lamps and candles glimmered like fallen stars. She was shadowed by Cartumandua, who was under strict instructions about the foods Regina could eat and what she could drink ( especially since the infamous incident of the barley ale). Everywhere Regina went people bent to greet her, the faces of the women thick with powder, the men greasy with sweat and the effects of wine or beer, but everyone smiling and complimenting her on her hair and her dress. She lapped up their attention as she recited her Latin verses or prayers to Christ, and danced to the bright music. One day, Regina knew, she would become a lady as grand and elegant as her mother, with her own retinue of slaves — none so clumsy and sallow as Cartumandua, she was determined about that — and she would be the center of attention at her own parties, every bit as lavish as her mother’s, perhaps even at this very villa. And as the evening wore on, she just wished she could somehow drag the sun back up above the horizon, to put off the dread hour of bedtime a little longer.

But then her grandfather pulled her aside. He took her out through the folding doors at the end of the dining room and onto the terrace, amid the rows of apple trees and raspberry canes. The tiled floor was crumbling, but the view of the countryside was beautiful. The sky was darkling, and the first wan summer stars were poking through the blue; she could just see the pale river of stars that, at this time of year, ran across the roof of the sky. Regina had learned that the Latin word villa meant “farm”: she could make out the silhouetted forms of the barn and the granary and the other outbuildings, and the fields where the cattle grazed during the day. In the rolling hills beyond the villa’s boundary, a single cluster of lights twinkled. It was a delightful night.

But Aetius’s face was stern.

Aetius was a big man, a slab of strength and stillness, out of place in this glittering setting. She had expected Aetius to come to the party wearing his armor. But he had on a simple tunic of unbleached wool, with strips of color at the hem and sleeves. He wore a soldier’s shoes, though, thick wooden soles strapped to his immense feet with strips of leather. Though he wore no weapon, Regina could see the scars cut deep into the muscled flesh of his arm.

Marcus had told her that Aetius had served in the field army, and had spent four years in Europe under the command of Constantius, a British military commander who had taken his army over the ocean so that he could make a play for the imperial purple itself. Constantius had been defeated. The field army was dissipated or absorbed into other units, and never returned — save for isolated figures like Aetius, who now served with the border forces. Marcus had muttered gloomily about all this, and the weakened state of the army in Britain. But Regina understood little, and had a sunnier outlook than her grumpy old father anyway, and she thought the story of Constantius was rather exciting. An Emperor from Britain! But when she asked about his adventures Aetius just looked at her, his pale gray eyes sunken and dark.

Now he crouched down on his haunches to face Regina, holding her small hand in one huge paw.

She stammered nervously, “What have I done wrong?”

“Where is Cartumandua?”

Regina glanced around, realizing for the first time that the slave girl was not in her customary place, a few paces behind her. “I don’t know. I didn’t get rid of her, Grandfather. It’s not my fault. I—”

“I’ll tell you where she is,” he said. “She’s in her room. Throwing up.”

Regina began to panic. Being told off by Aetius was a lot worse than any admonishment from her mother, and definitely from her father; if Aetius caught you, it really did mean trouble. “I didn’t do anything,” she complained.

“Are you sure? I know what you used to do,” he said. “You would make her run around in circles, until she was dizzy. Your mother told me about it.”

It was shamefully true. “But that was a long time ago. It must be — oh, it must be months ! I was just a little girl then!”

“Then why is Carta ill?”

“I don’t know,” Regina protested.

His eyes narrowed. “I wonder if I should believe you.”

“Yes!”

“But you don’t always tell the truth. Do you, Regina? I’m afraid you’re becoming a spoiled and willful child.”

Regina tried not to cry; she knew Aetius regarded that as a sign of weakness. “My mother says I’m a good girl.”

Aetius sighed. “Your mother loves you very much. As I do. But Julia isn’t always — sensible.” His grip on her hands softened. “Listen, Regina. You just can’t behave this way. Life won’t be the same when you grow up. I don’t know how things will be — but for sure they will be different. And Julia doesn’t always understand that, I don’t think. And so she doesn’t teach you.”

“Are you talking about Constantius?”

“That buffoon, among other things, yes—”

“Nobody tells me anything. I don’t know what you mean. Anyway I don’t care. I don’t want things to be different.”

“What we want makes very little difference in this world, child,” he said levelly. “Now, as to Carta. You must remember she is a person. A slave, yes, but a person. Did you know she has the name of a queen? Yes, the name of a queen of the Brigantes, a queen who may have confronted the Emperor Claudius himself.” The Brigantes were a tribe of the old days, as Regina had been taught, and it had been Claudius who had brought Britain into the Empire, long, long ago. “But now,” said Aetius, “that family of royalty is so poor it has had to sell its children into slavery.”

“My parents bought Carta for me.”

“Yes, they did. But Carta is still the daughter of a princess. And you’re lucky to have a slave attendant at all. Once there were slaves for everything. You would have a slave to call out the time for you — a human hourglass! But now, only your mother, and a few others, believe they can afford slaves. Anyhow you mustn’t hurt Carta.”

“But I didn’t.”

“And yet she is ill.”

Regina thought back and remembered how pale Carta had looked during Julia’s dressing. “But she was ill before the party. I saw her. Go ask her what’s wrong.”

“She was?” Still doubtful, Aetius released her hands. “All right. If you are lying, you know about it in your heart … Oh. ” His eyes widened, his huge head tilted back, and he looked up into the sky.

Startled, she looked up, too. It took her a moment to spot the light in the sky. It was right in the middle of the great band of stars — a new star, brighter than any of the others, flickering like a guttering candle. People drifted out of the villa, drink and food in their hands, and their chatter faded as they gazed up at the strange light, their faces shining like coins in the last of the twilight.

Despite the warmth of the evening, Regina suddenly felt cold. “Grandfather, what does it mean?”

“Perhaps nothing, child.” He folded her in his arms, and she pressed her slim warmth against his strength. She heard him mutter, “But it is a powerful omen, powerful.”

During the night, after all the guests had gone home, Regina heard shouting. The raised voices, oddly like the cawing of crows, carried across the still air of the courtyard to Regina’s room. It wasn’t unusual for her mother and father to argue, especially after wine. But tonight it sounded particularly vicious.

With that going on, she found it impossible to sleep. She got out of bed, and crept along the corridor to Cartumandua’s room. The night sky, glimpsed through the thick glass of the windows, seemed bright. But she avoided looking out; perhaps if she ignored that strange light, she thought, it would go away.

When Regina had been smaller she had often come into Carta’s room to sleep, and though it had been some months since she had done so it still wasn’t so unusual. But when Regina appeared in the doorway Carta flinched, pulling her woolen blanket up over her chest. When she saw it was Regina she relaxed, and managed a smile, dimly visible in the summer twilight.

Regina crossed to the bed, the tiled floor cold under her bare feet, and crawled under the blanket with the slave. Vaguely she wondered whom Carta had thought had come to her room, whom she was afraid of.

Even here she could hear the drunken yelling of her parents. Though it wasn’t cold, Carta and Regina clung to each other, and Regina muzzled her face into the familiar scent of Carta’s nightdress.

“Are you better now, Carta?”

“Yes. Much better.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“What for?”

“For making you sick.”

Cartumandua sighed. “Hush. I’ve been ill, but it wasn’t your fault.”

“You’ve been stealing food again,” said Regina, softly admonishing.

“Yes. Yes, that’s it. I’ve been stealing food …”

Regina didn’t notice the strained tone of her voice, for, cradled in Carta’s arms, she was already falling asleep.

In the morning, there was no sign of her mother. Not that that was so unusual after a party. Servants and slaves moved to and fro, emptying lamps and cleaning away pots and sweeping floors. They looked tired; it had been a long night for them, too. The day was hot, much more sultry than yesterday, and Regina wondered if a storm was going to break.

Regina ate the breakfast of fruit and oats brought to her by Carta. There would be no schooling today, as a treat for her mother’s birthday. Carta, who seemed just as pale as yesterday, tried to distract Regina with games. But today her terra-cotta dolls and little animals of carved jet seemed childish and failed to engage her attention. Carta found a wooden ball, but they could find no third to make up a game of trigon, and throwing the ball back and forth between the two of them was dull. Besides, it was too hot for such exercise.

Bored, restless, Regina roamed, trailed by a weary Cartumandua. She didn’t find her mother, or Aetius, but at length she came across her father. He was in the living room, surrounded by his papyrus rolls and clay tablets. He was talking to a tenant, a thickset bearded man wearing a dun-colored tunic and breeches. Regina peered through an unglazed window; Marcus didn’t notice her.

Marcus looked as pale as Carta, and, hunched over his columns of figures, more strained than ever. Midsummer was the end of the rent year, and it was time for Marcus to collect the rent he was due for his land, as well as the Emperor’s taxes. But things weren’t going well.

The farmer said in his thick brogue, “We haven’t seen the Emperor’s man for a year or more — probably two.”

Marcus said doggedly, “I have kept the tax you paid me and will render it up duly at the next visit. Even if the system is sometimes — ah, inefficient — you must pay your taxes, Trwyth. As I must. You understand, don’t you? If we don’t pay our taxes, the Emperor can’t pay his soldiers. And then where would we be? The barbarians — the bacaudae — the Saxons who raid the coasts—”

“I’m no callow boy, Marcus Apollinaris,” the farmer growled, “and you show me no respect by treating me like one. And we haven’t seen a soldier for nearly as long, either. None save that grizzle-haired father of your wife.”

“You must not speak to me this way, Trwyth.” Regina could see her father was shaking.

Trwyth laughed. “I can speak to you any way I want. Who’s to stop me — you?” He had a small sack of coins in his hand; he hefted it and slipped it back into a pocket of his breeches. “I think I’ll keep this, rather than let you add it to your hoard.”

Marcus tried to regain control of the situation. “If you prefer to pay in kind—”

Trwyth shook his head. “I hand over half my yield to you. If I don’t have to grow a surplus to pay you and the Emperor, I just have to feed myself, and what a relief that is going to be. And if you go hungry, Marcus Apollinaris, you can eat the painted corncobs on your walls. You let me know when the Emperor next comes calling, and I’ll pay my respects. In the meantime, good riddance!”

Marcus stood unsteadily. “Trwyth!”

The farmer sneered, deliberately turned his back, and walked out of the room.

Marcus sat down. He tried to work through the lists of figures on his clay tablet, but quickly gave up, letting the tablet fall to the floor. He hunched over and plucked with his fingers at his face, chin and neck, as if for comfort.

Regina couldn’t remember any tenant speaking to her father like that, ever. Deeply disturbed, she withdrew. Cartumandua followed her, just as silently, her broad face impassive.

They walked aimlessly around the courtyard. Still it was unbearably hot; still there was no sign of her mother. More than ever Regina wanted something to take her mind off her parents and their incomprehensible, endlessly disturbing problems. She almost missed her lessons: at least her thin, intense young tutor with his scrolls and slates and tablets would have been company.

After completing three futile circuits of the courtyard, still trailed by a passive Cartumandua, a strange impulse took hold of Regina. When she came to the doorway to the old bathhouse — instead of passing it as before — she just turned and walked through it.

Carta snapped, “Regina! You aren’t supposed to be in there …”

And so she wasn’t. But neither was her mother supposed to be in bed when the sun was so high, neither was a tenant like Trwyth supposed to withhold his taxes from the Emperor, neither were peculiar lights supposed to flare in the sky. So Regina stood her ground, her heart beating fast, looking around.

The roof of the bathhouse had burned off, but the surviving walls, though blackened and their windows unglazed, still stood. They surrounded a small rectangular patch of ground, thick with grass, weeds, and small blue wildflowers. This forbidden place, out of bounds for her whole life, was like a garden, she realized, a secret garden, hiding in the dark.

“Regina.” There was Carta, in the doorway, beckoning her back. “Please. Come back. You’re not supposed to be in there. It’s not safe. I’ll get in trouble.”

Regina ignored her. She stepped forward gingerly. The soil and the grass were cool under her bare feet. Rubble, broken blocks of stone from the walls, cluttered the floor under the thin covering of soil, but she could see them easily, and if she avoided them she was surely in no danger. She came to a patch of daisies, buttercups, and bluebells. She crouched down in the soil, careless of how her knees were getting dirty, and began to pick at the little flowers. She had a vague notion of making a daisy chain for her mother; perhaps it would cheer her up when she eventually awoke.

But when she dug her fingers into the thin layer of earth, she quickly came to hard, textured stone beneath. It must be the floor of the bathhouse. She put her flowers aside and scraped away the soil with her hands. She exposed little tiles, bright colors — a man’s face, picked out in bits of stone. She knew what this was; there was another in the living room. It was a mosaic, and these bits of stone, brick red and creamy white and yellow-gold and gray, were tesserae. She kept scraping, shuffling back on her knees, until she had exposed more of the picture. A young man rode a running horse — no, it was flying,

for it had wings — and he chased a beast, a monster with the body of a big cat and the head of a goat. Eager to see more, she scraped at more of the soil. Some of the picture was damaged, with the little tiles missing or broken, but -

“I thought I’d find you here. The one place you aren’t meant to be.” The deep voice made her jump. Aetius had come into the bathhouse through a rent in the ruined wall at the back. He stood over her, hands on hips. He wore a grimy tunic; perhaps he had been riding.

Cartumandua said, “Oh, sir, thank the gods. Get her out of there. She won’t listen to me.”

He waved a hand, and she fell silent. “You’ll be in no trouble, Cartumandua. I’ll be responsible.” He knelt down beside Regina and she peered into his face; to her relief she saw he wasn’t being too stern. “What are you doing, child?”

“Grandfather! Look what I found! It’s a picture. It was here all the time, under the soil.”

“Yes, it was there all the time.” He pointed to the young man in the picture. “Do you know who this is?”

“No …”

“He’s called Bellerophon. He is riding Pegasus, the winged horse, and he is battling the Chimaera.”

“Is there more of it? Will you help me uncover it?”

“I remember what was here,” he said. “I saw it before the fire.” He pointed to the four corners of the room. “There were dolphins — here, here, here, and here. And more faces, four of them, to represent the seasons. This was a bathhouse, you know.”

“I know. It burned down.”

“Yes. There was a sunken bath just over there, behind me. Now, don’t you go that way; it’s full of rubble now, but the bath’s still there, and if you fell in you’d hurt yourself and we would all be in trouble. We used to have water piped in here — great pipes underground — our own supply from the spring up on the hill.” He rapped at the mosaic. “And under the floor there is a hollow space, where they used to build fires under the ground, so the floor would be warm.”

Regina thought about that. “Is that how it all caught fire?”

He laughed. “Yes, it is. They were lucky to save the villa, actually.” He ran his finger over the lines of Bellerophon’s face. “Do you know who made this picture?”

“No …”

“Your great-grandfather. Not my father — on your father’s side.” She dimly understood what he meant. “He made mosaics. Not just for himself. He would make them for rich people, all over the diocese of Britain and sometimes even on the continent, for their bathhouses and living rooms and halls. His father, and his father before him, had always done the same kind of work. It’s in the family, you see. That was how they got rich, and could afford this grand villa. They were in the Durnovarian school of design, and … well, that doesn’t matter.”

“Why did they let it get all covered over?” She glanced around at the scorched walls. “If this bathhouse burned down all those years ago, why not rebuild it?”

“They couldn’t afford to.” He rested his chin on his hand, comfortably squatting. “I’ve told you, Regina. These are difficult times. It’s a long time since anybody in Durnovaria or anywhere near here has wanted to buy a mosaic. In the good days your father’s family bought land here and in the town, and they’ve been living off their tenants’ rent ever since. But they really aren’t rich anymore.”

“My mother says we are.”

He smiled. “Well, whatever your mother says, I’m afraid—”

There was a scream, high-pitched, like an animal’s howl.

Regina cried out. “Mother!”

Aetius reacted immediately. He picked her up, stepped to the doorway over the scattered dirt, and thrust Regina at the slave girl. “Keep her here.” Then he strode away, his hand reaching to his belt, as if seeking a weapon.

Regina struggled against Cartumandua’s grip. Carta herself was trembling violently, and it was easy for Regina to wriggle out of her grasp and run away.

Still that dreadful screaming went on. Regina ran from room to room, past knots of agitated servants and slaves. She remembered that her father had been in the living room with his tenant and his figures. Perhaps he was still there now. She ran that way as fast as she could. Carta pursued her, ineffectually.

So it was that while Aetius was the first to reach Julia, his daughter, Regina found Marcus, her father.

Marcus was still in the living room, on his couch, with his tablets and scrolls around him. But now his hands were clamped over his groin. Red liquid poured out of him and over the couch and tiled floor, unbelievable quantities of it. It was blood. It looked like spilled wine.

Regina stepped into the room, but she couldn’t reach her father, for that would have meant walking into the spreading lake of blood.

Marcus seemed to see her. “Oh, Regina, my little Regina, I’m so sorry … It was her, don’t you see?”

“Mother?”

“No, no. Her. She tempted me, and I was weak, and now I am like Atys.” He lifted his hands from his groin. His tunic was raised, exposing his bare legs, and a meaty, bloody mess above them that didn’t look real. He was smiling, but his face was very pale. “I did it myself.”

“You fool.” Aetius stood in the other doorway now, with his strong arm around Julia. Julia was hiding her face in her hands, her head bowed against her father’s shoulder. “What have you done?”

Marcus whispered, “I have atoned. And like Atys I will return …” His voice broke up as if there were liquid in his throat.

“Mother!” Regina ran forward. She was splashing in the blood, actually splashing in it, and now she could smell its iron stink, but she had to get to her mother. Still she kept on, running across the room, past the couch with the grisly, flopping thing that was her father.

But Julia twisted away and fled.

Aetius grabbed Regina and folded her in his arms, just as he had the night before, and no matter how she struggled and wept, he wouldn’t release her to follow her mother.

Chapter 4

I stayed in Manchester another seventy-two hours.

I retrieved my father’s boxes of business material from the loft, and found a few more files downstairs. He’d actually carried on working after his nominal retirement, doing bits of bookkeeping for friends and close contacts. Much of this work concerned small projects in the building trade.

I spent the best part of a day checking through all this material, trying to close down any loose ends. There were actually some bits of work my father hadn’t completed, a few fees he hadn’t collected, but they were all for small amounts, and everything was resolved amicably. I came away with a short list of requests for the return of some material. Most of the contacts were his friends — I knew a couple of them myself — and most hadn’t heard of the death. The round of calls was painful, and the friends’ reactions brought back the immediacy of it all.

I checked through Dad’s most recent bank statements. Most of the statement lines were unremarkable. But I did find a few orders for foreign checks. Some of these were for more than a thousand pounds, and they went out every month, usually in the first week. I had no idea what they were for. I considered calling the bank branch, and wondered if they would tell me what was going on.

But then I came to a month earlier in the year, without the regular foreign payment. It wasn’t like Dad to be so untidy as to leave this gap. On an impulse I checked his check stubs. And sure enough, one stub showed how he’d bought a thousand pounds’ worth of euros from a travel exchange desk in one of the Manchester stations — that transaction showed up in the statement. On the back of the stub he had written, in his neat hand, “March pmnt. To Mry Qn of Vgns, overdue.” I imagined him parceling up the currency and pushing it into the post — an unwise way to handle money, but fast and effective.

“Mry Qn of Vgns.” To the eye of a Catholic boy that cryptic note unraveled immediately: Mary Queen of Virgins. But I had no idea who this was — a church, a hospital, a charity? — nor why Dad had been handing over so much money to them for so long. I found nothing else in his correspondence to give me any clues. I put it to the back of my mind, with a vague resolution to follow up the lead and close down the contact.

The personal stuff was more difficult than the financial matters, of course.

There were photographs around the house: the framed family-portrait stuff on the dresser, the big old albums in their cupboard in the dining room. I flicked through the albums, moving back in time. Soon the big glossy colored rectangles gave way to much smaller black-and-white images, like something prewar rather than early sixties, and then they petered out altogether. There were surprisingly few of them — only one or two of me per year of my childhood, for instance, taken at such key moments as Christmas, and family summer holidays, and first days at new schools. It seemed an odd paucity of images compared to the screeds people produce now. But then, I realized, glimpsing through these portals into sunny sixties afternoons long gone, that my memories of great moments, like the day the training wheels came off my bike, were of my father’s face, not of a magnifying lens.

I tried to be brisk. The Catholic tokens went to the parish. I gave most of Dad’s personal stuff to the charity shops. I kept back the photographs, and a few books that had some resonance for me — an ancient AA road atlas mapping a vanished Britain, and some of his Churchill biographies — nothing I’d ever read or used, but artifacts that had lodged in my memory. I didn’t want this stuff, but of course I couldn’t bear to throw any of it out, and I knew Gina would take none of it.

I swept it all into a trunk and hauled it into the boot of my car. My boxed-up TV21 collection went in there also, thus beginning a migration from one attic to another. I wondered what would happen to all this junk when I died in my turn.

I kept out the little picture of my “sister,” though.

I had the phone disconnected, sorted out such details as the TV license, but left the utilities running, billed to my account, to keep the house dry and intact, the better to present it to prospective buyers. On the last morning I cut the grass, knocked over the anthills, and did a little brisk weeding. It seemed the right thing to do. I was going to miss those big old azaleas. I wondered about taking a cutting, but I didn’t know how to. I didn’t have a garden to grow it in anyhow.

I engaged a house clearance firm — “friendly and sympathetic service,” according to the Yellow Pages. A surveyor with an undertaker’s doggedly glum manner came, glanced efficiently over the furniture and utilities, and made an offer for the lot. It seemed ruinously low. Part of me, loyal to the notion of what my dad’s reaction would have been, was inspired to fight back. But I just wanted shut of the business, as the surveyor surely calculated, and the deed was done.

The last step was to place the house with a real estate agent, where a kid with spiky gelled hair and a cheap suit lectured me about “market stress” and how long it would take to get an offer. We were, of course, negotiating over the sale of the home where I’d grown up; I suspected the Gelled Arsehole sensed my vulnerability. But fuck it. I signed the forms and walked away.

I left the keys with Peter. He promised to check over the place until it was sold. I felt uncomfortable with this — I didn’t like the idea of becoming entangled in some kind of debt to him — but unless I was to house-sit myself I needed somebody to do what he was offering.

I didn’t quite know why I was uncomfortable about Peter. There had always been something needy about him. And if Peter wanted to work his way back into my life, he had found an angle to do it. Perhaps, I thought, he imagined we would become Internet pen pals, swapping reminiscences about TV21. Perhaps, like the Gelled Arsehole, Peter had spotted my vulnerability and was exploiting it for his own ends.

Or maybe I was just being uncharitable. Whichever, as I set off back to London, I drove away watching him waving with a handful of keys.

When I got back to work, there was nothing for me to do, literally. Which tells you all you need to know about my career.

I worked for a smallish software development company called Hyf — a bit of Anglo-Saxon that is apparently the root of hive, for we were all supposed to be busy busy bees. We were based near Liverpool Street, in the upper floor of what used to be a small rail station, long disused. The office was open-plan, save for a small hardware section where minis hummed away in blue-lit air-conditioning. It was an environment of neck-high partitions, trendy curved desks that made it impossible to get close to your PC without stretching out your arms like a gibbon, and everywhere a flurry of polystyrene Starbucks containers, yellow stickies, postcards from skiing holidays, and the occasional bit of “comedy” Internet porn.

Walking down the central aisle under the pleasing architecture of the Victorian-era curved roof, I hurried along. I found I didn’t want much to speak to anybody — and nor did they to me; most had probably already forgotten the reason I had been away. As usual there was a whole series of scents as I walked down that aisle. The combative mix of cigarette smoke and air-freshener sprays was overlaid with a strong coffee stink and the stale scents of yesterday’s lunch. Sometimes, when I worked in there late at night, I could swear I picked up a subtle and unmistakable almond whiff.

I was privileged enough to have an office, one of a set arrayed along the side walls of the office, for I was a manager, in charge of “test coordination,” as we called it. I hung up my jacket and dug a bottle of Evian water from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I booted up my PC and waited for it to download my intranet mails. I riffled through the snail mail: just a few flyers from software utilities vendors.

Vivian Cave walked into the office next to mine. She was late thirties, perhaps forty, a midheight graying blonde. She spotted me through the glass walls that separated us, gave me a half smile, and raised an invisible glass to her lips. Drink later? I waved back. Sure.

The PC screen speckled with icons. I found a total of thirty-two mails, after four working days away. Just eight a day? And most of them were routine stuff about Internet viruses, an offer to sell an unused snorkel set, and a mighty eleven mails with soccer score updates sent to the rest of the office by one diligent observer working late during a European Champions League match. But nothing from my line manager, or the software development project managers whom I was supposed to work with.

No work for George today. I knew I should launch myself into the online reports, or storm around the office setting up meetings. With a role like mine, fighting for work was part of the job.

I kicked the door closed, sat down, and sipped slowly at my Evian.

I’d been here three years. It wasn’t the first job of its kind I’d taken. I’d drifted into positions like this much as I’d drifted into my career in software development in the first place.

Leaving school, fairly bright but hopelessly unfit, I’d had vague TV21 dreams of becoming a scientist — an astrophysicist maybe, probing the far reaches of the universe, or a space engineer, building and controlling rockets and spacecraft. I was bright enough for college, but a few “down-to-Earth” harangues from my dad the accountant had made me see the wisdom of keeping my options open.

I got a place at Warwick University, where I read math. It was a bright, friendly place, the math faculty at the time was sparky and innovative — the home of then-trendy catastrophe theory — and I soon found myself forgetting the ostensible reasons I’d gone there. Working my way tidily through the groves of axioms, postulates, and corollaries, I quickly hit my intellectual limits, but I discovered in myself a deep appreciation of logic and order.

In my last year I traipsed around the milk round of potential employers, trying to find something that would plug into that interest in mathematical logic. I found it in software development — which brings a wry smile to the lips of all my acquaintances who have ever found themselves staring at a blue screen with a baffling error message.

But software ought to be logical. The math underlying relational databases, for instance, accessed by virtually every Internet user every day, is pure and beautiful. There is a whole discipline called “formal methods” in which you set out what you want to achieve and write a program that is a self-proof that it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do.

That was the dream, as I began my career — first in Manchester, and then, inevitably, in London, the center of everything in Britain. When I could afford it I took a small flat in Hackney, and started a gruesome daily traveling routine by bus and Tube. But as I started work, first in the software development departments of large corporations and then in independent development houses, I soon found that rigor was expensive — less so than the cost of fixing all the bugs later, but an upfront cost virtually nobody was willing to pay.

Eventually I drifted into testing, the one place where you are supposed to be rigorous. For a while I prospered. The fashion was for development methods that were, if not formal, at least structured and so open to inspection. I would draw up my test plans covering every conceivable condition the software could take, with predictions of how it should react. I turned up errors at every level from typos in the code to compilation into machine code to fundamental design flaws — but that was okay; that was the job, and it was satisfying to make things better.

But there was a constant pressure to cut costs on testing, which higher-level managers could never quite figure the benefit of, and endless turf wars between competing teams of developers and the testers come to rip to pieces “their” code. I started to be bypassed by development managers who could boast they were delivering something of direct benefit to the end user — and who, unlike me, had significant budgets and teams to run.

Not only that, they were all tall men. It’s always tall men who get on in management hierarchies, no doubt some deep primate thing. I’m a man but was never that tall, so was stuffed from the start. My trace of a Manchester accent didn’t help, either.

And then, in the nineties, a new wave of software development techniques came along. The new languages were much lower level than some of those in the past: that is, closer to the machine. As a developer you could deliver all sorts of fancy miracles. But your code would be dense and highly interconnected: difficult for an outsider to read, hard to test, all but impossible to maintain. In the wine bars and pubs of post-yuppie London I would rage against this retreat from the mathematical high ground to a kind of medieval craftsmanship, and the lower standards it would bring. But the tide was against me, even as giant applications in the stock exchange and the health service crashed and burned, even as every user of PC software howled with rage at errors so fundamental they should never have gotten past the most elementary level of inspection.

Long before I was out of my thirties my career was stalling. I still had choices, even stable employment of a sort. Testing was never going to be fashionable, but you could hardly run a respectable software development shop with no testing effort at all.

And so here I was at Hyf. I was aware that I was really a kind of totem, a personalized embodiment of the company’s illusory commitment to “high-quality deliverables.” But I’d stayed there, for three years already. Whatever I thought of the job I had bills to pay and a pension to build up. And, just sometimes, I managed to get some work done that satisfied my need to carve order from chaos — a need, as I was going to find out, that went deep in me and my family, indeed.

If I sat up in my chair I could see the end wall of the office, a slab of Victorian brickwork capped by the curving roof of the old station structure. I was struck now how good the brickwork was compared to my father’s house. A station clock maybe six feet across was set into the wall, a translucent disc marked with big Roman numerals and two spearlike hands. The back was faced over with glass that revealed the works, which still operated. Sales types would use it to impress clients. I stared at the big minute hand long enough to see it wobble its way through two, three, four minutes. It was a relic of vanished days, I thought, days of heroic engineering. There have always been engineers in my family.

It struck me suddenly how young everybody was here — everybody but me, that is. None of them was interested in the brickwork.

The big station clock reached eleven-thirty, and I hadn’t done a damn thing all morning. In the afternoon, I told myself, I would resume the good fight. For now, I shut down the computer, gathered my jacket,

and walked out for an early and long lunch.

It was a gray day, unseasonably cold for mid-September. I bought a small orange juice and an avocado and bacon sandwich from a Pret A Manger. I walked as far as Saint Katherine’s Dock before settling to a bench and eating.

Then, restless, cold, reluctant to go back to work, I walked toward Liverpool Street.

On impulse I stopped into a cybercafй. It was half empty, despite the time of day, and the customers were either eating or chatting rather than logging on. I bought my time credits and a tall latte, and sat at an empty terminal, placing myself as far from anybody else as possible.

I logged onto my home email account, got into a search engine, and typed “Mary Queen Virgins” into the query line.

Of course I could have done this at work; most people would, I suppose. But my strict but useless sense of what was right tripped me up. I had always felt uncomfortable purloining the firm’s resources, from computer time to paper clips, always aware that in the end somebody somewhere would have to work a little harder to make up for my petty theft. Or perhaps it was just that I wanted to keep my private affairs out of the office.

Most of the results were dross: straightforward crank sites put up by religious nuts of one kind or another, a remarkably large number of churches with similar names, and the usual irritating clutter from the high schools and colleges that have developed the antisocial habit of placing the entire contents of their course materials on the public Internet, thus baffling every search engine yet devised. I skimmed past most of this stuff. I felt confident I could discard anything from outside Europe — in fact from outside the single-currency Euro zone, since I knew my father had once used euros.

At last I hit on a major-looking site. “THE PUISSANT ORDER OF HOLY MARY QUEEN OF VIRGINS — About Us — Information — Contact Us — Site Map — Genealogy Resources …” The URL showed it was based in Italy.

I dug into the link, and found myself facing a WELCOME screen. The wallpaper behind the lettering and icons was the face of the Madonna, taken from a medieval painting I didn’t recognize, a beautiful, sad, impossibly young visage. Beside her was a kind of corporate logo, a twist of chrome: it might have been an extended infinity symbol, or an outline of two fish face to face. The background colors were pale blue and white, colors I had always associated with my mother’s statues of the Virgin, and, just looking at the screen I felt oddly rested, oddly at home. As did, no doubt, every other Catholic boy logging on from around the world.

I poked around in the site. There were plenty of smiling female faces and beautiful old buildings. It was a busy design, I thought with my software professional’s eye, but it seemed to be comprehensive, with language options in English (the default), Italian, Spanish, French, German, and even Japanese, Chinese, and some Arabic tongues.

The order, it seemed, was an ancient Catholic grouping based in Rome itself. They were making money by offering a subscription genealogy service — something like the famous Mormon site, to which they had links, but if anything more comprehensive. Since I was calling from a UK address I was offered a range of British-focused resources, including a deeds database spanning from 1400 to 1900, five hundred maps of the UK, Ireland, and Europe, a charter of baronial pedigrees that went as deep as the thirteenth century, and information from censuses up to the end of the twentieth century. There was even a Titanic passenger list. They had 350 million names indexed and cross-referenced over five hundred years, boasted the pop-ups.

I skimmed through most of this stuff, wondering what it had to do with my father. As far as I know he had never been much interested in family trees — and certainly, if he had been paying a thousand quid a month for these services, he hadn’t had anything to show for it.

But then my eye was caught by a user ID in the contact line: casella24. My mother’s maiden name had been Casella.

I fired off a quick email, telling casella24 of my father’s death, and asking for details of his contacts with the order. Always assuming I had the right place.

I finished my coffee, logged off, and made my way back to work.

At the end of the afternoon Vivian took me out for the drink she had promised.

We made our way to a bar just off Liverpool Street. Called the Sphinx, the place had been made over several times during my working life in London. Now it was done out in faux brickwork painted a dull yellow, and specialized in acrid Egyptian coffee. It actually had loose sand scattered on the floor. But somehow the atmosphere worked.

Over the long bar was a series of TV screens. Most of them were tuned to music and sports, and somewhere a tinkling pop song was playing. But one screen carried a news channel. The newsreader was a girl with an achingly beautiful face, and over her shoulder was an image I recognized: it was the glistening tetrahedron that had been found in the Kuiper Belt. Evidently the Anomaly was still news, even days after my conversation with Peter. I felt vaguely surprised to see it again. The association brought back unwelcome memories of Manchester.

Vivian ordered a glass of house white and sipped it slowly. She asked me about the funeral. I tried to tell her something of my feelings of dislocation.

“Midlife crisis,” she said immediately. “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“I always looked forward to the twenty-first century. I just didn’t plan on being old in it. I mean, look at these arseholes …”

The gathering in the bar was a typical London noncommunity. There were some small groups at the tables scattered over the sandy floor, but an awful lot of people were alone, at the tables or the bar or walking across the floor — alone, that is, save for their cell phones, which they worked persistently.

“So young, and so fucking arrogant, as if they own the place. They walk around as if London were built yesterday, a playground just for them. And look at the way they thumb away at those damn phones.” I mimicked texting. “Another few years and kids will be born that are all giant thumbs and no brains, hopping around on knuckle joints.”

“You’re ranting, George,” Vivian said with her usual even good humor. “Maybe you’re right about the phones, though. It is an odd way to live, isn’t it, to ignore the people physically with you while contacting friends who might be hundreds of miles away? You’d think the new technology would bring us together. Instead it seems to be pushing us apart.”

That was why I’d always liked talking to Vivian. I didn’t know anybody else who would make such observations.

She was a solid-framed woman who wore business suits that were crumpled enough to show she didn’t take herself too seriously. She looked healthy; I knew she used a gym, and as a mother of two small daughters her home life must be active enough. Her hair was close-cropped over a broad face, with a small flattish nose and pale brown eyes. She had no cheeks, no chin, and would never have been called beautiful save by a lover, but in the frankness and humor of her gaze I had always known I was in the presence of a solid, grounded personality. To put it another way she was one of the few human beings to have slipped through Hyf’s recruitment filter.

I said, “My father never had a cell phone. Didn’t need one, he said, even though I tried to give him one for emergencies. You know, in case he fell … Didn’t have a computer, either. Enjoyed his DVD, though.”

“He wasn’t a Luddite like you, then,” she said.

“No. He was just selective.”

She sloshed her wine around her glass. “My parents died a few years back. Ten years ago, actually.”

“How?”

“Car accident. It was a mess to sort out, as they’d gone together. Their wills were out of date … Well. I think I know how your sister feels. I wanted to just run from the whole thing. But oddly, it wasn’t such a bad time in the end. People come together, you know.”

I tapped my thumbnail against the bottle’s foil label. “You’re not counseling me, are you, Viv?”

“No. Just telling you how I felt.”

“But it was different. You were younger. I feel — shit, I suddenly feel old. It’s as if now he’s gone, the lid is off my generation, antiquity-wise. Do you know what I mean?”

She laughed. “So what do you want to do?”

I snorted. “What can I do? I’m trapped.”

“By what?”

“By my routine. The choices I’ve made, good or bad, that have landed me here. By the way I’ve slowed down.” I slapped my belly. “By this. The way I get out of breath, and ache in the mornings. Even the way I get pissed on a couple of bottles of beer at lunchtime. I’m trapped by myself.”

“There are always choices, George.” She put her glass down on the table and leaned toward me, rumpled, kindly, earnest. “I wasn’t counseling you before, but I am now. I think you need to reconnect. I went back to face what had happened to Mum and Dad.”

“I did go back.”

“Well, I think you need more. Take some time off. I bet you’re owed some vacation. And you wouldn’t be missed for a while,” she said dryly. “Maybe you ought to talk to — uh—”

“Linda?” My ex-wife. We’d divorced before I’d come to work for Hyf; Vivian had never met her. “Don’t think so.”

“She’s going to know you better than anybody else. Or go see your sister in Texas.”

“Florida.”

“Wherever. Spoil your nephews a little.” She snapped her fingers. “Why don’t you follow up this business of your missing sister?” I’d told her about that. “A little mystery to solve to occupy that analytical brain of yours — and nice deep family connections to soothe your heart …”

I felt uncomfortable. “There’s probably nothing. Maybe she was adopted.”

“Why would that have happened?”

“Or maybe she died,” I said brutally. “And they wanted to spare me.”

“Well, even if so,” she said gently, “you surely want to know.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Ask your sister in Florida,” she said. “She’s, what, ten years older? She ought to know something. And if this kid was three or four in the photo, maybe she’ll have been to school somewhere. A prep school maybe.”

“But which one?”

“I’d start with the one your older sister went to. Du-uh. ” She rattled her fingernails on the table. “Come on, George, snap out of it; get that brain working again.”

“But it’s all a mess, Viv. Christ, families. They all lied to me throughout my life. Even Gina!”

“Unresolved issues,” she said. “So resolve them. Reconnect with the past.” There was an edge to her voice now. You’ve had as much sympathy from the world as you’re going to get, George; stop whining.

“You know, that’s pretty much what Peter said. That I should ‘reclaim the past.’ “

She frowned. “Who’s Peter?”

At that moment I found myself looking at the TV carrying the news channel. The pretty newsreader had gone, but the image of the Kuiper Anomaly remained. And there, beside it, was a chunky, high-browed face, talking rapidly. It was Peter McLachlan.

I pointed. “Him,” I said.

Chapter 5

Regina, her hand firmly clasped by Cartumandua, was allowed to attend the anointing of her father’s body.

Jovian touched the dead man’s eyes, formally closing them. Jovian was her uncle, her father’s brother, from Durnovaria. He was a big, doleful man, a bronze worker, with big hands scarred by splashes of liquid metal, and he wore a Phrygian cap, just as her father had done. As the body was washed and anointed, Jovian stood over it, singing a soft Latin lament. The air was filled with powerful scents, like very strong perfume. But Regina knew that somebody had already cleaned up her father’s body, for there was not a trace of all the blood she had seen before.

When the cleansing was done, Marcus was dressed in his toga. It took several men to lift him as the woolen sheet was draped over him, for his body was stiff, his limbs like bits of wood.

After that the funerary procession formed up. Eight men carried Marcus on a kind of litter. Musicians went before him. They played double pipes and a cornu, a kind of curved trumpet with a sweet, sad voice. Everybody else, including Regina, had to follow on behind. Lit up by candles and lanterns, the procession filed out of the grounds of the villa and over a hardened track through the fields.

As they walked, Regina glimpsed her mother for the first time that day. With her hair coiffed and her dress immaculate, Julia looked as elegant as ever, but she kept her face hidden behind scented cloth. Regina wanted to run to her, but Carta kept a firm hold of her hand.

They came to the mausoleum. This was a little stone building, like a temple. There were only three tombstones here, marking the deaths of Regina’s grandfather and grandmother, her father’s parents — and one small, poignant plate that marked the infant death of a little girl, born to Marcus and Julia some years before Regina’s own birth, taken by a coughing sickness in her first month. She had been the “sweetest child,” according to her stone. Regina wondered if any toys had been put in the ground for her to play with in the afterlife.

A coffin had already been placed in the ground, ready for Marcus. It was a lead box, its walls elaborately molded with scallops, an oceanic motif to symbolize the crossing to the afterlife.

Carta murmured soothing nonsense words. But Regina didn’t feel distressed. This little scene, the lanterns and musicians and mourners gathered around a hole in the ground, was too strange to be upsetting. And besides, the awkward thing on the litter didn’t seem to have any connection to her father.

Jovian placed a coin, a whole solidus, in his brother’s mouth, payment for the ferryman. Then the body was lowered, a little clumsily, into the coffin. Marcus was wearing his best shoes, Regina noticed. Well, you couldn’t go into the afterlife without shoes. Under Aetius’s orders, Marcus was placed facedown.

One by one the mourners came up and dropped tokens into the coffin. There were remembrances of Marcus’s life, like farming tools, and even a handful of tesserae from an unfinished mosaic; and there were objects to ease the passage to the afterlife, a vial of wine, a haunch of pork, some candles, a little bell to ward off evil.

Regina got a little upset now, for she had brought nothing to give her father. “Nobody told me!” she hissed to Carta, only to be admonished for making a noise.

She pulled away from Carta and looked around the mausoleum. In grassy corners she found some mayweed, poppy, and knapweed. The petals were closed and heavy with dew, for it was night. Still, she picked the wildflowers and dropped them into the grave. Perhaps they would open in the afterlife, where it was surely light all the time.

A load of chalk, pale in the starlight, was dumped into the coffin, to preserve the body. Finally the coffin lid was lowered and the heaps of earth beside the open grave briskly returned. The soil smelled damp and rich. A simple tombstone was placed over the fresh earth — smaller than her grandfather’s, for, as she had been told, such things were very expensive nowadays. She bent to read its inscription, but the writing was fine and in Latin, and it was too dark.

At the end of the burial, the mourners departed for the funerary banquet back at the villa. Regina looked for her mother. She couldn’t see her.

But Aetius was here. He got to his haunches and faced Regina. He had something in his hand that he hid from her; she wondered if it was a toy, a present. But his broad face was dark.

“Little one, you have to understand what has happened here. Do you know why your father died?”

“I saw the blood.”

“Yes. You saw the blood. Regina, Marcus followed a goddess called Cybele.”

“Cybele and Atys. Yes.”

“It’s a strange business. On Cybele’s birthday you drench yourself in the blood of sacrificed bulls, and dance yourself into a frenzy.” His hard soldier’s face told her what he thought of such foolishness. “But the most significant thing the priests of Cybele do is castration.” He had to explain what that meant. “They do it to themselves. They have special forceps that stanch the blood flow. It is an act of remembrance of Atys, who castrated himself as punishment for a moment of unfaithfulness.”

She tried to work all this out. “My father—”

“He castrated himself. Just like Atys. But he didn’t have any priests’ forceps,” Aetius said grimly.

“Why did he do that? Was he unfaithful?”

“Yes, he was.” Aetius kept his eyes on Regina’s face.

Regina was aware of the stiffness of Cartumandua beside her, and she knew there was much she did not yet understand.

“But he didn’t mean to kill himself.”

Aetius cupped Regina’s face. “No. He wouldn’t have left you behind, little one. And anyhow he probably thought that even if he did die he would be resurrected, just like Atys … Well. Your father even now is finding out the truth of that. And I suspect he may not be sorry to be gone. At least he won’t have to face recalcitrant farmers anymore. It was all getting a little difficult for him …”

“Grandfather?”

It was as if he had forgotten she was there. “Whether he meant it or not, he is gone. And you, little Regina, are the most important person in the family.”

“I am?”

“Yes. Because you are the future. Here — you must take these.” Now he opened his hand, and, to Regina’s shock and surprise, he showed her the matres, the three little goddesses from the lararium, the family shrine. They were figures of women in heavy hooded cloaks, crudely carved, little bigger than Aetius’s thumb. Aetius shook his head. “I remember when my own father brought these back — they are just trinkets, really, produced in their thousands by the artisans along the Rhine — but they became precious to us. The family is the center of everything for all good Romans, you know. And now you must take care of our gods, our family. Give me your hand now.”

As she opened her palm to take the goddesses, Regina couldn’t keep from flinching. She thought the matres might burn her flesh, or freeze it, or crumble her bones. But they were just like lumps of rock, like pebbles, warm from Aetius’s grasp. She closed her fingers over them. “I’ll keep them safe for my mother.”

“Yes,” Aetius said. He stood up. “Now you must go with Carta and pack up your things. Your clothes — everything you want to take. We’re going on a journey, you and I.”

“Is Mother coming?”

“It will be exciting,” he said. “Fun.” He forced a smile, but his face was hard.

“Should I take my toys?”

He rested his hand on her head. “Some. Yes. Of course.”

“Grandfather—”

“Yes?”

“Why did you make those men put my father facedown in the coffin?”

But he wouldn’t reply, saying only, “Be ready first thing tomorrow — both of you.”

Excited, clutching the goddesses, Regina tugged at Carta’s hand, and they began to make their way back to the villa.

It was only much later that Regina learned that laying a corpse facedown in a coffin was a way of ensuring that the dead would not return to the world of the living.

The next day, not long after dawn, Aetius sacrificed a small chicken. Seeking omens for the journey, he inspected its entrails briskly, muttered a prayer, then buried the carcass in the ground. He cleaned his hands of blood by rubbing them in the dirt.

A sturdy-looking cart drew up in the villa’s courtyard.

Of course Regina was only half packed, even with Carta’s help. When Aetius saw the number of boxes and trunks that lay open around her room, he growled and began to pull out clothes and toys. “Only take what you need, child! You are so spoiled — you would never make a soldier.”

She ran around picking up precious garments and games and bits of cheap jewelry. “I don’t want to be a soldier! And I need this and this—”

Aetius sighed and rolled his eyes. But he argued until he had reduced her to just four big wooden trunks, and, in the final heated stages, allowed her a few more luxuries. A beefy male slave called Macco hauled the boxes out to the cart.

Carta helped her dress in her best outdoor outfit. It was a smart woolen tunic, woven in one piece with long sleeves and a slit for her neck. She wore it over a fine wool undertunic, with a belt tied around her waist.

Aetius stood before her stiffly, clenching and unclenching a fist. Then he knelt to adjust her belt. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he said gruffly. “You look like a princess.”

“Look at the colors,” Regina said, pointing. “The yellow is nettle dye, the orange is onion skins, and the red is madder. It’s all fixed with salt so it will never fade.”

“Not ever? Not in a thousand years?”

“Never.”

He grunted. He straightened and glanced up. “Cartumandua! Are you ready?”

Carta was wearing a tunic of her own, of plain bleached wool, and she carried a small valise.

Regina asked, “Is Carta coming, too?”

“Yes, Carta is coming.”

“And Mother — shall I go and find her?”

But Aetius grabbed her arm. “Your mother isn’t coming with us today.”

“She’ll come later.”

“Yes, she’ll come later.” He clapped his hands. “And the sun is already halfway across the sky and I hoped to be a speck on the horizon by now. Hurry, now, before the day fades altogether …”

Regina ran outside and clambered onto the carriage. It was a simple open frame, but it had big wooden wheels with iron rims and complicated hubs. She was going to ride in front, with Aetius, so she could see everywhere she went. Cartumandua would be in the back, with Macco, the burly slave, and the lashed-down boxes.

Regina noticed Macco strapping a knife to his waist, under his tunic. She snapped, “Put that down, Macco, right now. Nobody is allowed to carry weapons except the soldiers. The Emperor says so.”

Macco had a heavy shaven head, and broad shoulders his loose tunic couldn’t conceal. He was a silent, gloomy man — Julia had always called him “dull” and ignored him — and now he glanced up at Aetius.

“What’s this? Wearing weapons? Quite right, Regina. But I am a commander in the army, and if I say it’s all right for Macco to have a knife, the Emperor isn’t going to mind.”

Regina pulled a face. “But he’s a slave.”

“He’s a slave who would lay down his life for yours, which is why I’ve chosen him to come with us. Now hush your prattling.”

She flinched, but subsided.

So it was in a stiff silence that the little party finally set off. Aetius sat beside Regina, a mighty pillar of muscle, his face as rigid as an actor’s mask. Regina looked back once, hoping to see her mother, but nobody came to wave them off.

That minor disappointment soon faded, as did her sulk over being ticked off in front of Macco, because the ride, at the beginning at least, was fun. It was another fine day. The sky was cloudless, a pale blue dome, and the horses trotted comfortably along, snorting and ducking their heads, the musky stink of their sweat wafting back to Regina.

Soon they reached the broad main road, heading east. The road cut as straight as an arrow across the green countryside. It was built by and for walking soldiers, and was uneven, and the ride was bumpy. But Regina didn’t care; she was too excited. She bounced in her seat, until Aetius, horse switch in hand, told her to stop.

Aetius tried to explain that they would travel east, all the way to Londinium, and then cut north.

“When will we see Londinium?”

“Not for a few days. It’s a long way.”

Her eyes widened. “Will we ride through the night? Will we sleep in the cart?”

“Don’t be silly. There are places to stay on the way.”

“But where—”

“Never mind your prattle.”

They encountered little traffic. There were a very few carriages, pulled by horses, donkeys, or bullocks, a few horse riders — but most of the traffic was people on foot. Many pedestrians carried heavy loads, bundled in boxes or cloth, on their heads or shoulders. Aetius pointed to one rider in a bright green uniform whose horse trotted at a bright clip, quickly overtaking the carriage. Aetius said he was from the Imperial Post, the cursus publicus. Along the roadside there were many small stations with stables and water troughs, places where a post rider could change his horse.

Sometimes the people walking along the road would peer at the carriage with an intensity that frightened Regina. At such times Macco was always alert, gazing back with his blank, hard face, the hilt of a weapon showing at his waist. Regina would stare into the faces of the people, hoping to glimpse her mother.

They passed one girl who couldn’t have been much older than Regina herself. Walking with a group of adults, she was bowed down under a great bundle strapped to her back. She had heavy-looking black leather boots on her feet; they dwarfed her thin, dirty legs.

Regina said, “Why doesn’t she get a carriage? She could put her stuff in the back. I certainly wouldn’t like to carry my luggage along the road like that …”

Aetius grimaced. “I doubt if anybody other than Hercules could carry your luggage, child. But I’m afraid she doesn’t have a choice.”

“Because she’s poor.”

“Or a slave. And look, over there.” A group of people, shuffling behind a slow-moving carriage, were bound together by ankle chains. “Carriages and horses are faster, but not everybody can afford a horse.”

She frowned. “Are slaves cheaper than horses?”

“Yes. Slaves are cheaper than horses. Look at the countryside. I bet you’ve never been so far from home before, have you?”

She had no idea if she had or not. She looked around at fields and hedgerows. There were a few buildings scattered here and there, small square huts and a few roundhouses with timber frames and thatched roofs; in the distance she saw the bright red roof tiles of something bigger, probably a villa.

It was farming country. Much of the Roman diocese of Britain was like this. Nobody knew for sure how many people lived in Britain south of the Wall, but there were thought to be at least four million. Only perhaps one in ten of the population lived in the villas and towns. The rest worked the land, where they cultivated wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, vegetables, and herbs, and raised their cattle, sheep, and goats. Many of them had worked this land for generations, since long before the coming of the Romans: Regina might have been traveling through the landscape of five centuries earlier.

It was this way from end to end of the Empire, across two thousand miles, from Britain to the Middle East. The Empire was the most materially sophisticated civilization the western world had yet seen — but the overwhelming majority of people lived off the land, as they had always done.

Aetius spent a long time trying to explain some of this, but he got stuck on the meaning of the word million. Regina’s attention drifted, distracted by the sway of the horses, the clatter of the wheels, the buzzing of flies.

“Oh, stop fidgeting,” Aetius snapped. “If only I could just order you to sit still …” He pointed with his switch at a little cylindrical pillar set beside the road. “Well, what’s that? Do you know?”

She knew very well. It was a waystone. “It tells you how far it is to the nearest town, and who the Emperor is.”

He grunted. “Somehow I doubt that poor Honorius has gotten around to painting his name on the stones … But, yes, that’s the idea. Now, the stones are set every thousand paces or so along each main road. And if you count them, you’ll know how far we’ve come, won’t you?”

“Yes!” She rubbed her nose. “But what if I fall asleep? Or what if it’s dark?”

“If you fall asleep I’ll count for you. And don’t rub your nose. You have to start now. That’s one…”

“One.” Solemnly she folded a finger back as a marker, and peered along the road for the next pillar. But it seemed an awful long time coming, and by the time she saw it she had forgotten what she was supposed to be doing, and had let her finger fold out again.

Her grandfather seemed determined to keep up her schooling, and as they rattled along he told her the story of the road itself. The soldiers from the army of Emperor Claudius had first come this way, surveying the route. The road had been built by the soldiers themselves, and people drafted in from the countryside.

“How much did they get paid?”

“Paid? Hah! Everybody was a barbarian in those days, child. You didn’t get paid. Look. You put down a gravel core, and lay on a surface of crushed limestone. You use stone slabs where you can find them. The water drains out into those side ditches — can you see? …”

She was good at pretending to listen, while being occupied with her own thoughts. But eventually she drifted asleep, slumped against Aetius’s sturdy form, dreaming fitfully about the little girl in her hobnailed boots.

She dozed through the day, or listened to Aetius’s complicated talk, or played word games with Cartumandua. They stopped only to water and feed the horses; the passengers ate on the move in the cart, bread with fish and meat.

The last time Regina woke up that day, the cart was pulling into a courtyard. As Aetius and the others jumped down and began to unload, Regina stood up on her seat, stretched and massaged a sore rump, and looked around. The light was fading from the sky, and high, thin clouds had gathered. To her right she could see a wall, tall and formidable, a great curtain of slate gray two or three times her height that curved away across the ground.

She pointed. “There’s a town! Is it Durnovaria?”

Aetius snorted. “We’ve come a little farther than that. Haven’t you been counting the waystones? We passed twenty-three — not a bad pace after a slow start. That is Calleva Atrebatum.”

“Aren’t we going to stay there? … What’s this place? Is it a villa?”

It was no villa but one of the mansiones, a way station designed to support the messengers of the Imperial Post. It was here, Aetius said, that they would spend the night, for it was safe enough, and he would “swim to Hades before I give over any more ‘gate tax’ to any more swindling landowners in any more towns.”

The station turned out to be comfortable enough. It even had a small bathhouse, where Aetius retired with a pitcher of wine and a plate of oysters, bought for a price that made him groan out loud.

After a day spent largely sitting on a wooden board, Regina was too full of energy to sleep. And so, after she had eaten, despite the lateness of the hour, she, Macco, and Carta played trigon, a complicated three- person game of catch-the-ball. Regina ran and laughed, burning up her energy, and her voice echoed from the station’s plaster walls. Macco stayed as silent as ever, but his smile was broad.

The next day Aetius was again up and ready to go not long after dawn. It didn’t take long to reload the carriage, and soon the four of them were on the road again — though not before Aetius sniffed the air and inspected the clouds and the trees and the birds, seeking omens for their journey.

They continued to head steadily east. The road ran straight and true, unchanging, the way markers sliding past one by one. But the landscape changed slowly, becoming more hilly, and some of the plowed-up fields gleamed white with chalk.

Some of the villas looked abandoned, though, even burned out. On one farm, close to the road, Regina recognized a vineyard, rows of vines set out on a south-facing hillside. But though the vines were green and heavy they looked untended, and the nearby buildings were broken down. Aetius did not comment on the abandoned vineyard, and Regina thought nothing of it. If she had, she would have said that things must always have been this way. She did want to go see if there were any grapes, but Aetius ignored her pleas.

That night they again stayed in a way station.

And the next morning, soon after the start, when they passed over the crest of a hill, Regina glimpsed Londinium itself. The town was a marvelous gray-green sprawl of buildings contained within a far-flung wall. A shining river ran through it. Smoke rose everywhere, thin threads that spiraled to the sky. Regina thought she saw a ship on the river, a green-sailed boat that sparkled in the low morning sun, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Are we going on a ship?”

“No — child, I told you already. We aren’t stopping in Londinium. We’re going on. Don’t you listen?” Aetius seemed to be getting angry. But Carta put her hand on Regina’s shoulder, and he subsided.

They turned their backs on Londinium, heading north. Regina looked back at the city as it receded. “I’ll go there one day,” she said. “I’ll go far beyond it, too! I’ll go all the way to Rome!”

Aetius grimaced, and hugged her with his massive arm.

For Regina, after the city, this third day turned out to be the most difficult so far. The sky lidded over with gray cloud, and although the sun was gone the temperature rose steadily. They were all soon sweating uncomfortably, and they had to stop frequently to allow the horses to drink.

Aetius, apparently trying to compensate for the absence of Regina’s tutors, chose this difficult day to lecture her on the essentials of Roman Britain.

Britain was a diocese within the Praetorian Prefecture of Gaul. So the vicarius, the governor of Britain, reported to the prefect of Gaul, who reported to the Emperor. Similarly there was a hierarchy of towns, from the lesser market towns, up through the local and provincial capitals, to Londinium, the capital of the diocese.

The most important activity of the central administration was the collection of taxation and the spending of government funds. Most of the tax money came from the countryside, because that was where most people lived. Landlords, like Regina’s father, collected the Emperor’s taxes from his tenants, along with his own rent. The tax revenue paid the salaries of the army and the sailors of the British fleet, who kept Britain safe from the barbarians who would otherwise swarm from the north and across the sea.

People grumbled about the taxes they had to pay. But most of the money collected came back into circulation. And the fact was the vast volumes of foodstuffs, animals, clothing, metalwork, pottery, and other goods bought by the government to supply the army and its other agencies was central to the working of the economy …

Aetius struggled to explain: “It’s like a wheel, Regina. It goes around and around, a great wheel of money and goods, taxing and spending, keeping everyone safe and wealthy. But if a wheel comes off its hub—”

“We’d fall over.”

“Exactly. Everything would fall over. Now then, when my old chum Constantius took us soldiers away for his adventure in Europe, some people in the towns decided they didn’t need to pay his taxes anymore, and threw out his collectors and officials, and said they would collect the money for themselves and keep it for their own towns, rather than give it all to some distant Emperor they never saw. But while people will pay up for an Emperor, especially if he has an army to collect for him, they’re a lot less willing to pay some fat fool of a local landowner …”

Regina was a bright child, and capable of understanding a great deal. But at seven she was an experienced enough student to know that while Aetius might be a fine soldier he was no teacher. He was boring.

And as the day wore on and the heat continued to stifle, Regina got more and more uncomfortable. It had been days now since she had seen her mother. Aetius never mentioned Julia, and Regina was wary of asking. She missed her mother even so, and wondered where she was. She grew withdrawn, sullen.

Eventually Aetius relented and let Regina sit in the back with Carta. They tried to play ludus latrunculorum — “soldiers,” a fast-moving game a little like chess played only with rooks — but the rattling of the carriage knocked the colored glass counters away from their squares. So they settled for par impar, a simple game of odds and evens, played with pebbles held in the hand.

That night they stayed at yet another way station. The next day they made another early start, but Regina found it increasingly hard to sit still.

Things came to a head when, about midday, the weather abruptly broke, and an immense storm lashed down from a gray lid of sky. Aetius insisted they kept going, but soon they were all soaked through. Regina was cold and frightened; she had never been exposed to such elemental rage before.

When the storm finally let up she pushed away from Aetius and jumped down from the carriage. “I won’t go any farther! I want to go home, right now! Turn around and take me home! I command you!”

Aetius was angry, placating, demanding, but he got nowhere; and when his will broke against her seven- year-old stubbornness, he stomped around the road, fists bunched.

Cartumandua, with some courage, intervened. Soaked herself, she clambered down to the road surface and brushed at Regina’s hair, calming her down. She said to Aetius, “Sir, you can’t speak to her as if she’s one of your legionaries. And you can’t expect her to sit there day after day on that wooden bench and listen to you lecture about procurators and prefects.”

“She needs discipline—”

“It’s not natural. You need to give her time.”

“But every heartbeat we stand here in the road is wasted time.”

“The Wall has stood for three centuries, and I daresay it will still be there if we take a few days more. If you don’t make allowances, I don’t think we’ll get there at all.”

He walked back grudgingly. “Catuvellaunian princess or not, you are a feisty one for a slave.”

She dropped her head submissively. “I’m just trying to help.”

Aetius crouched down before Regina. “Little one, I think we have some negotiating to do …”

They continued the journey, but after that to a different pattern. They would ride a while, and break a while, generally long before Regina got too bored or uncomfortable — although Aetius retained the right to keep on if he was ill at ease with the countryside, or the company they kept on the road. Their pace dropped, from fifty or sixty waystones a day to less than forty.

But for Regina, though she lost count of the days, and had only the dimmest idea of where they actually were by now, the trip became much easier — even fun again, as the days settled into a new routine.

As they worked steadily north the countryside changed character.

Though the road still arrowed past farmsteads, there were far more roundhouses of the old British type, rather than the rectangular Roman-style buildings. The towns here were more like bristling forts, with tall walls and looming watchtowers. Here and there Regina saw plumes of dust and black smoke rising up. Aetius said they were mines. Once they passed a man driving muzzled wolves along the road; he was a trapper, hoping to sell these animals to a circus.

In the roadside dirt Aetius sketched a map of the island of Britain, and slashed a line from southeast to northeast, from the Severn to the Humber. “Southeast of this line there are plains and low hills. Here you’ll find fields and citizens, with everything run from the towns — under the greatest town of all, Londinium, capital of the diocese. Northwest of this line there are mountains, and barbarians, and tribes and chiefs who run their own affairs and have barely heard of the Emperor, and pay his taxes with the utmost reluctance. To the southeast there are a thousand villas, but none at all in the northwest. That is why, to the northwest, the diocese belongs to the army.” But Regina continued to have only a dim grasp of the country’s geography, or indeed of where they were.

In the final days, as the endless northward journey continued and they rattled across high, bleak moorland, Aetius told her something of his family’s past.

“We were all Durotriges. Your father’s people were aristocrats — landowners — even before the Romans came,” he said. “ My people — and your mother’s — were farmers, but they were warriors.” He glanced back at Cartumandua. “The Catuvellaunians call themselves a great warrior people. But when Claudius came they rolled over and bared their arses to him …”

Regina gasped at this language, shocked and delighted, and Carta colored.

“But we fought back. While the Emperor Claudius was still in Britain, one of his generals, Vespasian, had to fight his way west, taking hill fort after hill fort, supported by the fleet tracking him along the coast. It was a mighty feat of generalship — and later Vespasian himself would become Emperor — but, by my eyes, we made him earn that throne. And that is why the men of the Durotriges became such good soldiers for the Empire.”

“Like you, Grandfather.”

He said gruffly, “You’d have to count my lumps. But, yes, I’ve been a soldier all my adult life. As was my father, and his before him. But things have changed. There have always been barbarians—”

“In the north, and beyond the sea.”

“Yes. They aren’t soldiers but professional savage fools, farmers, bound to the land. They could not even mount a genuine campaign. They were no match for the Empire — not until the barbarica conspiratio.”

It had come more than forty years earlier, a great barbarian conspiracy, a coordinated attack on Britain by the Picts across the Wall from the north, the Franks and Saxons from across the North Sea, and the Scotti from Ireland. Defenses designed to hold against an attack from any one of these enemies had been overwhelmed. There was much muttering of espionage, for the British military commanders on the northern frontier and the coasts were ambushed and killed.

“It was a terrible time,” Aetius muttered. “I was not fifteen years old — no older than you, Cartumandua. For a time the countryside was full of roaming bands of barbarians — and, I have to say, of deserters from the army itself. Even Londinium was sacked. It took the Emperor two years to restore order. My own view is we’re still trying to recover from that great shock.”

Carta spoke up again. “Sir, she is only a child.”

Aetius said grimly, “She needs to hear it even so, Cartumandua, and to hear it again until it sinks in. Let me say this. Six years ago I was on the Rhine — Gaul’s great river frontier. In the middle of winter it froze over, and into Gaul swarmed the Vandals and the Alans and the Suebi and Jove knows who else. They just walked across the damn river, as cool as you please. We couldn’t hold them — we fell back and fell back. And they are still there now, crawling around the prefecture, far inside the frontier. I was glad to get a posting back to Britain and away from all that, I can tell you … I suspect this poor child will spend much of her life seeking a place of safety.”

Regina sniffed. “This poor child understands every word you say, you know.”

Aetius looked at her, astonished. Then he laughed, and clapped her on the back. “So now I’ve got you to contend with, as well as the Vandals and the Picts and the Saxons …”

“Look.” Behind Regina, Cartumandua stood up and pointed. “I can see it.”

Aetius reined in the horses. Regina stood on her seat, shielded her eyes with her hands, and stared until she saw it, too.

A line of darkness stretched across the world, from one horizon to another, rising and falling over the contours of the moorland. Along that line, smoke rose up everywhere, and mud-colored buildings huddled. Suddenly she knew exactly where she was, exactly how far she had been brought: from one end of the country to the other.

She wailed, “ It’s the Wall. What are we doing here? Aren’t we going to a villa, or a town?”

“No,” said Aetius grimly. “This is where we will live now, here at the Wall. It won’t be so bad—”

“This is a place for dirty, stinking soldiers. Not for me !”

“You’ll just have to make the best of it,” he growled warningly.

Carta hugged her. “Don’t worry, Regina. We’ll be fine here, you’ll see.”

Regina sniffed. “We won’t be here forever, will we?”

Carta looked at Aetius. “Why, I—”

Regina asked, “Just until things get back to normal?”

Aetius looked away.

Carta said, “Yes. Until things get back to normal.”

Regina looked about more brightly. “Where’s my mother?” None of the adults would reply. “My mother isn’t here, is she?”

Aetius sighed. “Now, Regina—”

“You promised me.”

His mouth opened and closed. “Well, that’s jolly unfair. I promised no such thing.”

“Liar. Liar. ”

Carta tried to subdue her. “Oh, Regina—”

“She doesn’t want me. She’s sent me away.”

“It’s not like that,” Aetius said. “She loves you — she will always love you. Look — she asked me to give you this.” From a fold of his tunic he produced the precious silver dragon brooch.

She dashed it from his hand; it fell to the coarse grass, where it gleamed. She turned on Cartumandua. “And don’t you dare pick it up, Carta! I never want to see it again.”

Cartumandua flinched from the command in her voice.

And that was when the tears came, in a sudden flood, sudden as a rainstorm. Aetius folded her in his arms, and she felt Carta’s small hand on her shoulder. She wept for her mother and herself, as the carriage clattered its way the last few paces toward the Wall.

Chapter 6

I took Vivian’s advice and set off in search of my sister.

I booked some overdue leave. I had no trouble getting it through my line manager, or even through the Nazi killer robots who ran Human Resources. But I saw the way their gazes slid away from me as I handed over the forms and explained my vague plans. My days at Hyf were numbered. To hell with it.

I drove north, listening to news radio all the way. Along with the sports and the useless traffic bulletins, the main topic of the day was undoubtedly the Kuiper Anomaly. Absorbed with my own affairs, I just hadn’t noticed the way this thing had continued to mushroom in the public consciousness.

Reaching Manchester at around ten that evening, I drove to the city center, to the hotel I’d stayed in before. I actually parked the car. But I didn’t get out. I remembered what Vivian had said: reconnect. I shouldn’t be here.

I turned the car around and drove out to the suburbs. I canceled my hotel reservation with my cell phone.

There was a real estate agent’s sign outside my father’s house. I hesitated to disturb Peter, but when I knocked on his door he was awake — I heard the hum of PC cooling fans; perhaps he was working — and he was happy enough to give me a key. I let myself into Dad’s house. Inside it was warm and clean, but of course it was stripped of furniture; somehow I hadn’t been able to imagine it this way. There were pale patches on the wallpaper where furniture had stood for years. Empty or not it still managed to smell musty.

To my chagrin I finished up knocking on Peter’s door again. I borrowed a sleeping bag, pillow, and flask of tea. I spent the night on the thick carpet of my old bedroom. Lulled by the sound of distant trains passing in the night, immersed in a familiar ambience, I slept as well as I had in years.

In the morning, around eight, Peter showed up. It was a bright, fresh morning, the sky a deep blue. He brought soap, towels, a glass of orange juice, and an invitation to come over for breakfast. I accepted, but I promised myself I’d get to the shops and stock up as soon as I’d eaten.

Set on the other side of the road, Peter’s house was a mirror image of my father’s, the staircase and rooms eerily transposed from left to right. I went in there with some trepidation: this was the domain of Peter the solitary weirdo, after all. Well, it was plainly decorated, so far as I could see, with bland pastel paint hiding old wallpaper. The furniture looked a little old, and certainly wasn’t modish, but it wasn’t shabby. There were bookcases everywhere, even in the hall. The books seemed neatly ordered, but not obsessively so.

Peter wore a gray sweat suit of soft fabric, and thick mountaineer’s socks — no shoes or slippers.

We consumed Alpen and coffee in the kitchen. I told him I’d seen him on TV, and we talked about the media frenzy over Kuiper. Peter said it was all to do with positive feedback.

“It’s like that Mars story a few years back. You know, where they found fossil bacteria in a meteorite—”

“Thought they found.”

“And Clinton zipped himself up long enough to pronounce that NASA had discovered life on Mars. Suddenly it was everywhere. The story itself became the story.” It was the nature of the world’s modern media, he told me. “The days when news was controlled by a few outlets, the big networks, are long gone. Now you have CNN, Sky, Internet news sites: thousands of sources of news at local, national, and international level. And they all watch each other. A story sparks into life somewhere. The other outlets watch the story and the reaction to it, and pick up on it …” He was overfamiliar with this stuff, and tended to talk too rapidly, using specialist jargon, words like mediasphere. He showed me an editorial he’d clipped from the Guardian decrying the bubble of hysteria over Kuiper. “There’s even news about news, which itself becomes part of the story. It usually finishes with a spasm of self-loathing. ‘What This Hysteria Says About Our Society.’ Pathological, really. But it shows the kind of world we live in now. We’re all densely interconnected, like it or not, and this kind of feedback loop happens all the time.”

Densely interconnected. For some reason that phrase appealed to me. “But the fuss about Kuiper has been good for you,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s been good for me.”

Cradling our second mugs of coffee, Peter led me into his living room. Beyond a big double-glazed picture window, a garden glowed green in the soft light of the autumn morning. The room obviously served as an office. In addition to a music stack and wide-screen TV with various recorders and set-top boxes, there was a large table given over to computer technology: a big powerful-looking desktop, a laptop, various handhelds, a scanner, a joystick, and other bits of gear I couldn’t recognize. The desktop was booted up. There were books and stacks of printouts on the desk and on the floor.

All this looked like the environment of a freelancer working at home. But there was no sense of style, and a certain lack of ornamentation and decoration — no photographs, for instance — a lack of personality.

The only exception was in the little alcove over the fireplace. In my home my parents used to keep silly souvenirs in there — tiny wooden clogs from Amsterdam, a little Eiffel Tower, other family knickknacks. Peter had set up a little row of die-cast model toys. Intrigued, I asked, “May I?” Peter shrugged. I reached up and brought down a fat green aircraft. It was a Thunderbird Two, heavy and metallic-cold. I turned it upside, trying to see a manufacturer’s date. Something rattled in its pod. On the edges of the wings and along the base the paintwork was chipped and worn away.

“It’s a Dinky original. Nineteen sixty-seven,” Peter said.

I cradled it in my hands like a baby bird. “I never had one of these. My parents got me a plastic snap- together substitute.”

“Without a detachable pod? I sympathize.”

“They didn’t understand. This must be worth something.”

He took it back and restored it to its place. “No. Not without the original box, and it’s hardly in mint condition.”

“Much loved, though.”

“Oh, yes.”

I stepped toward the big gear-laden table. I could smell Johnson’s Pledge, I realized, and it struck me that the Thunderbird toy had been free of dust. Up on the desktop screen was what looked like a prototype Web page. It was complex, crowded, and partly animated; it showed stanzas of music that cycled rapidly, along with a kind of binary code I didn’t recognize. Peter stood awkwardly beside the table, big hands wrapped around his coffee cup.

“This is your work? — Peter, I hate to admit it, but I don’t know a damn thing about what you do now you’re retired from the cops.”

He shrugged. “After the funeral you had other things on your mind.” There was a note in his voice, a subtext. I’m used to it. “But you got interested when you saw me on TV. Well, that’s okay. I make a living from Web design, mostly corporate sites, and game design.”

“Games?”

“Web-based, multiuser. I was always good at computer games. It’s something to do with a facility for spotting patterns in patchy and disparate information, I think. It made me a good copper, too. That and being out of control.”

“Out of control?”

He grinned, self-deprecating. “You knew me, George. I was never much in control of anything about my life. I was always awkward socially — I could never figure out what was going on, stuff other people seemed able to read without thinking about it.” He was right about that. In later years, we, his friends, even speculated he might be mildly autistic. He said, “You see, I’m used to being in situations where I don’t know the rules, and yet making my way forward anyhow. Decoding a chaotic landscape.”

“So is this one of your games?”

“It’s a personal project.”

I pointed at the screen. “I see music, but I don’t recognize it. Some kind of encryption system?”

“Sort of, but that’s not the purpose.” He seemed briefly embarrassed, but he faced me, determined. “It’s a SETI site.”

“SETI?”

“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

“Oh, right.”

He talked quickly. “We’ve spent forty years now listening for radio whispers from the sky. But that’s twentieth-century thinking. If you were an ETI, and you wanted to learn something about the Earth, what would you study? What better than the Internet? It’s by far the largest, most organized information source on the planet.”

I said carefully, “You imagine aliens are logging on?”

“Well, why not? You’d learn a lot more about humankind than by sticking a probe up the rectum of a farmer from Kansas.” He seemed to sense what I was thinking. He grimaced. “Let’s just say I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Earth since the first showing of Fireball XL-Five. Haven’t you?”

“I suppose so. But you’ve stayed interested. You’ve become — um, an expert on this stuff.”

“As much as anybody is. I’m plugged into the right networks, I suppose. My name is known. Which is how I got on the TV.”

“And your site is designed to catch their attention?” I peered at it. “It looks a little busy.”

“Well, I doubt an ETI is going to be interested in snazzy Web page design. The site is information-rich, though — you’re looking at the works of Chopin, here, rendered in compressed binary — and encoded in forms that ought to make it easy for the ETIs to pick up. Bait, you see. And if the ETIs do find my site -

look, this is a long shot, but it’s cheap to set up and maintain … and the payoff would be of incalculable value. Isn’t it worth trying? I’m not alone in this,” he said, a bit defensively. “There’s a network of researchers, mostly in the States …”

He told me something of a bizarre-sounding online community of like minds. “We call ourselves the Slan(t).” He had to write that down for me. “ Slan is an old science fiction reference — made up to date, you see … It sums up how we see ourselves. The Slan(t)ers are a new kind of community, a bunch of outsiders, the fringe united by new technology.”

“I bet there are a lot of Californians.”

He grinned. “As it happens, yeah. It was set up long before I joined.” He said there was no hierarchy to Slan(t); it was all “bottom-up.” “It’s a self-organizing community. The hardest thing to model online is social interaction — the kind of unconscious feedback we humans give each other face to face, feedback that moderates behavior. So we devised a system where we would moderate each other’s contributions to the clickstream. If you are uncivil, or just plain uninteresting, your scores go down, and everybody sees.”

“A bit like eBay.”

“Like that, yes.”

“Plenty of scope for bullying.”

“But that’s antisocial, too, and there are always plenty of people who would mark the bully down accordingly. It works. It is homeostatic — actually another example of feedback. But this time it’s negative feedback that tends to make a system stable, rather than drive it out of control.” He talked on, describing the Slan(t)ers’ projects.

I felt awkward. This was the kind of conversation we’d had as kids at school, or later as booze-fueled students: excitable, complex, full of ideas, the more outlandish the better. Peter had always been good at that, because he’d learned to be. Whereas other fat kids, it’s said, get a break from bullying by being funny, Peter’s defense was to have wilder ideas than anybody else. But now it wasn’t the same. We weren’t kids anymore.

And there was something else I couldn’t quite read in the way he spoke, this big, clumsy man with folded hands and his habit of adjusting invisible spectacles, talking earnestly. I had the impression of shadows, ranked behind him in the electronic dark, as if Peter was just a front for a whole network of densely interconnected, like-minded obsessives, all working for ends I didn’t understand.

Anyhow Slan(t) sounded like one giant computer game to me. “Interesting.”

“You don’t really think so,” he said. “But that’s okay.”

“But now,” I said, “perhaps we do see the aliens, in the Kuiper Anomaly. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying on TV?”

“That’s obviously a gross signature of something out there. Yes, it’s exciting.” His face was closed. “But I have a feeling that the origin of the Anomaly is going to turn out to be stranger than we think. And besides, it’s not the only bit of evidence we have.”

“It isn’t?”

“Perhaps there are traces out there, if you know how to look. Traces of life, of other minds at work. But they’re fragmentary, difficult for us to recognize and interpret. But I, well, as I told you I have this facility for pattern matching.”

I looked into my coffee cup, wondering how I could get out of the conversation politely.

But he had rotated his chair until he faced the desktop, and was briskly working a mouse. Images flickered over the screen. He settled on a star field — obviously color-enhanced — the stars were yellow, crimson, blue, against a purple-black background. Around a central orange-white pinpoint were two concentric rings, like smoke rings. The inner one was quite fine, but the outer, perhaps four times its diameter, was fatter, brighter. Both the rings were off-center, and ragged, lumpy, broken.

I searched for something to say. “It looks like a Fireball XL-Five end credit.”

Sometimes he lacked humor. “ Fireball was in black and white.”

“Tell me what I’m seeing, Peter.”

“It’s the center of the Galaxy,” he said. “Twenty-five thousand light-years away. A reconstruction, of course, from infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, radio images, and the like; the light from the center doesn’t reach us because of dust clouds. The sun is one of four hundred billion stars, stuck out in a small spiral arm — you know the Galaxy is a spiral. At the core, everything is much more crowded. And everything is big and bright. It’s Texas in there.” He pointed at the image. “Some of these ’stars’ are actually clusters. These rings are clouds of gas and dust; the outer one is maybe a hundred light-years across.”

“And the bright object at the center—”

“Another star cluster. Very dense. It’s thought there is a black hole in there, with the mass of a million suns.”

“I don’t see any aliens.”

He traced out the rings. “These rings are expanding. Hundreds of miles a second. And the less structured clouds are hot, turbulent. It’s thought that the big rings are debris from massive explosions in the core. There was a giant bang about a million years ago. The most recent eruption seems to have been twenty- seven thousand years ago. The light took twenty-five thousand years to get here — it arrived about two thousand years ago; the Romans might have seen something … If you look wider you can see the debris of more explosions, reaching much deeper back in time, some of them still more immense.”

“Explosions?”

“Nobody knows what causes them. Stars are simple objects, George, physically speaking. So are galaxies, even. Much simpler than bacteria, say. There really shouldn’t be such mysteries. I think it’s possible we’re seeing intelligence there — or rather stupidity.”

I laughed, but it was a laugh of wonder at the audacity of the idea. “The Galaxy center as a war zone?”

He didn’t laugh. “Why not?”

I felt chilled, but I had no clear idea why. “And how does Kuiper fit into this?”

“Well, I’ve no idea. Not yet.” He pulled up an image of his own face on CNN. “I’m hoping that if I can tap into the interest in Kuiper, I’ll get resources to push some of these questions farther. For instance, there may be links between the core explosions and Earth’s past.”

“Links?”

“Possibly the explosions tie in with extinction events, for instance.”

“I thought an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs.”

“That was a one-off. There have been eighteen other events. You can see it in the fossil record. Eighteen that we know of …”

I lifted my mug to my lips, but found it drained of coffee. I put the mug on the computer table and stood. “I ought to start my day.”

He looked at me doubtfully. “I’ve gone on too long. I’m sorry; I don’t get much chance to talk; most people wouldn’t listen at all … You think I’m a crank.”

“Not at all.”

“Of course you do.” He stood, looming over me, and grinned. Again there was that disarming self-

deprecation, and I sensed, uncomfortable again, that he really was glad to have renewed his connection with me, regardless of my reaction. “Maybe I am a crank. But that doesn’t mean the questions aren’t valid. Anyhow, you’re the one with the abducted sister.”

“That’s true. I ought to go.”

“Come back and tell me what you find.”

Chapter 7

Magnus sat cross-legged, hunched over the little wooden game board.

Magnus was a great bear of a man with a head the size of a pumpkin, it seemed to Regina, a head so big his helmet seemed to perch on top of it. But then, his helmet wasn’t actually his but had been passed on to him from another soldier, just as had his sword and shield. Meanwhile his cowhide boots and his woolen tunic and his cucullus, his heavy hooded cloak, had all been made in the village behind the Wall, nothing to do with military issue at all. That awkward secondhand helmet had a dent in it, big enough to have held a goose’s egg. Regina wondered sometimes if the mighty blow that had inflicted the hollow had been the cause of the original owner’s “retirement.”

For all his bulk Magnus was a patient man, which was why Aetius approved of him as a companion for Regina. After five years on the Wall she thought she knew her way around, but some of the rougher soldiers, she had been told in no uncertain terms, were not suitable companions for the prefect’s twelve- year-old granddaughter.

Magnus was a good man, then. But he was so slow. His great ham of a hand hovered briefly over the board, but then he withdrew it.

“Oh, Magnus, come on,” Regina pleaded. “What’s so difficult ? It’s only a game of soldiers, and we’ve barely started. The position’s simple.”

“We haven’t all got a prefect’s blood in our veins, miss,” he murmured laconically. He settled himself more comfortably, his spear cradled against his chest, and resumed his patient inspection of the board.

“Well, my backside is getting cold,” she said. She jumped to her feet and began to pace up and down along the little tiled ridge behind the battlements.

It was a bright autumn day, and the northern British sky was a deep, rich blue. This was a sentry’s lookout point, here on the wall of the fortress of Brocolitia — in fact, strictly speaking Magnus was on sentry duty right now — and she could see across the countryside, to the farthest horizon in every direction. The land here was rolling moorland, bleak even at the height of midsummer, and as autumn drew in it was bleaker still. There was no sign of life save for a single thread of black smoke that rose toward the sky, far to the north, so far away its source was lost in the mist that lingered even now, so close to noon.

And if she looked to left or right, to east and west, she could see the line of the Wall itself, striding away across a natural ridge of hard, black rock.

The Wall was a curtain of tiled brick and concrete, everywhere at least five times a man’s height. A steep-sloped ditch ran along the north side. It was clogged with rubbish and weeds — and in some places the detritus of battles, broken sword blades and dented shields and smashed wheels; sometimes the hairy folk from the north would creep down to scavenge bits of iron. To the south, beyond the line of the road that ran parallel to the Wall, was another broad trench called the vallum. The vallum had been filled in here and there, to provide easier access between the fortresses on the Wall itself and the muddy little community of huts and roundhouses that had, over the generations, grown up to the south.

It was thrilling to think that the Wall’s great line was drawn right across the neck of the country. On a clear day she could see the sentries walking back and forth along its length, all the way to the horizon, like ants on a bit of string. And while on the north side there was nothing but moorland, heather, and garbage, on the south side there was a whole string of communities, inhabited by the soldiers and their families, and those who lived off them. It was like a single town, some of the soldiers said, a Thin Town eighty miles long, a belt of drinking and whoring and cockfighting and gambling, and other vices she understood even less.

But much had changed during the Wall’s long lifetime — so she had learned from Aetius’s dogged teaching. The threat the Wall faced had evolved. Compared to the scattered, disunited tribes faced by Hadrian who’d built the Wall in the first place, today’s great barbarian nations, like the Picts to the north of the Wall, were a much more formidable proposition.

Once, Aetius said, the Empire’s military might had been like the snail of a shell: break through it and you were into the soft, defenseless core of the settled provinces. After the disastrous barbarian incursions of the recent past, that lesson had been learned well. For all its imposing presence, today the Wall was only part of a deep defensive system. Far behind the line of the Wall there were forts in the Pennines and farther south, from where any barbarian incursion could be countered. And north of the Wall itself there were more forts — though few of them manned these days. More effective were the arcani who worked among the northern tribes, spies spreading dissension and rumor and bringing back information about possible threats.

Regina had grown to love the Wall. Of course it showed its age. Much of this old fortress had been demolished or abandoned, for much smaller units were stationed here now. And time had inevitably ravaged the great structure. Some of the repair work was visibly cruder than the fine work of earlier generations — in places the old stonework had even been patched up with turf and rubble. But the barbarians had always been pushed back, the Wall reoccupied, the damage by friend or foe repaired, and so it would always be. In the five years since Aetius had brought her here, enclosed by its massive stones, she had come to feel safe, protected by the Wall and the power and continuity it represented.

Conversely, though, she was prone to anxiety over the future. Overall there were far fewer soldiers in Britain than in the past, Aetius said: perhaps ten thousand now, compared to fifty thousand before the disastrous imperial adventure of Constantius, which had stripped Britain of its field troops. Two nights ago a red glow had been easily visible in the night sky to the east, and in the morning there was a great pall of smoke, coming from the direction of the next fortress to the east, Cilurnum. Troops had been dispatched there to find out what had happened, and hadn’t yet returned — or if they had, Aetius wasn’t saying so to her. Well, there was nothing she could do about that.

Regina shivered, and rubbed her arms to warm up. The Wall might be a safe place, but it was uncomfortable. The great masses of stone retained the cold all through the day. After five years here, though, she had gotten used to the brisk climate and needed nothing more to keep her warm but her thick woolen tunic. And she had learned never to complain about the rigors of life here, so stripped-down compared to life in the villa, which she still remembered brightly. She had no wish to be called a spoiled child again, even though she knew that as the granddaughter of the prefect she was given special privileges.

“… Ah,” Magnus said.

She walked back to him. “Don’t tell me you’ve moved at last, O Great General.”

“No. But your grandfather’s come out to play.” He pointed.

On the southern side of the Wall, Aetius had led his cohort out of the fortress and was drawing them up on parade. Aetius stood straight and tall, an example to his troops. But Regina understood how much effort that cost him, for at sixty-five years old he was plagued by arthritic pains.

The soldiers’ helmets and shields gleamed in the sun, and most of them wore the chill, expressionless bronze parade masks that had so terrified her when she first saw them. But their lines were ragged, with many gaps, and Aetius, waving his arms with exasperation, called out the names of the missing: “Marinus! Paternus! Andoc! Mavilodo! …”

Regina knew how infuriating Aetius found such ill discipline and lack of professionalism. Aetius had once served with the comitatensis forces, the highly mobile, well-equipped field army. Now he found himself the prefect of a cohort of the limitaneus, the static border army, and things were very different. These frontier troops had been on station here for generations. Indeed, nowadays most of them were drawn from the local people. According to Aetius, the limitaneus troops had become thoroughly indolent, even immoral. He raged at their habit of bringing actors, acrobats, and whores into the fortress itself, and their tendency to drink and even sleep when on watch.

All this was cause for concern, to say the least. Without a meaningful comitatensis in the country, these ragtag troops were all that stood between civilized Britain and the barbarians. And it was up to Aetius to hold them together.

Aetius consulted a clay tablet and called out a name. One unfortunate trooper stepped forward, a burly, harmless-looking man who didn’t look as if he could run a thousand paces, let alone fight off a barbarian horde.

“I was only drinking wine to wash down horehound to get rid of my cough, Prefect.”

“Do we not treat you well? Do you not enjoy medical attention even the citizens of Londinium would not be able to obtain? And is this how you repay us, by dereliction of duty?”

Regina knew that Aetius’s scolding was harder for the miscreant troopers to bear than the lashings that would follow. But now the fat soldier lifted up his arm and shook it, so his bronze purse rattled. “And is this how the Emperor repays me ? When was the last time you were paid, Prefect?”

Aetius drew himself up. “You are paid in kind. The temporary lack of coin—”

“I must still buy my clothes and my weapons, and bribe that old fool Percennius to give somebody else the latrine duty.” There was laughter at that. “And all for the privilege of waiting for a poke up the arse from some Pict’s wooden spear. Why do you think Paternus and the others have run off?”

Regina stared; she had never seen such defiance. She was uneasily reminded of how that farmer had stood up to her father.

But Aetius was not Marcus.

Aetius took a single step forward and slammed his gloved hand against the man’s temple. To the clang of bone on metal, the man fell sideways into the dirt. Grunting, he rolled on his back — and, Regina saw, he actually touched the hilt of the short sword at his waist. But Aetius stood over him, fists bunched, until he dropped his hand and looked away.

The rest of the troop stood utterly silent.

Aetius pointed at two of them. “You and you. Take him. A hundred strokes for drinking on guard, and a hundred more for what he has had to say today.”

The men didn’t move. Even from here Regina could feel the tension. If they were to disobey Aetius’s order now … She felt a hot flush in her belly, and wondered if that was fear.

The two troopers, with every show of insolent reluctance, moved to their fallen colleague. But move they did. Aetius stepped back to let the man stand. His arms held behind his back, he was walked toward the whipping post. The tension bled out of the scene. But Regina still felt that odd warmth at her center.

One of the troopers, glancing up, pointed at her. “Look! Septimius — look at that! The red rain has begun …” The other troopers looked up at Regina, and began to point and laugh. Aetius railed at them, but their discipline was gone now.

She felt heat burn in her cheeks. She had no idea what she had done.

Magnus was at her side. He put an arm around her and tried to pull her away. “Come now. Put my cloak around you. It’s all right.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. And then she felt warmth on her legs. She looked down and saw blood, dripping out from beneath her tunic. She looked up in horror. “Magnus! What’s happening to me? Am I dying?”

For all his strength he looked as uncertain and as weak as a child; he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Women’s matters,” he gasped.

Now the soldiers were catcalling. “I’ve waited all these years for you to blossom, little flower!” “Come sit on me, your old friend Septimius!” “No, me! Me first!” One of them had lifted his tunic to pull out his penis, like a floppy piece of rope that he shook at her.

Regina grabbed Magnus’s heavy, musty-smelling woolen cloak and wrapped it around her. Then she clambered down the ladder to the ground and ran over the vallum toward the settlement, hiding her face.

For all Aetius raged at them, the soldiers kept up the baffling, terrifying barrage.

In their five years together at the Wall, Aetius had tried to tell Regina something of the world beyond the Wall. “There’s been an awful lot of trouble for everybody. It all started the night the Rhine froze over, and the barbarians just walked into Gaul. But for Britain that wretch Constantius was the one who nailed down the coffin lid …”

The problems went Empire-wide, said Aetius. When the Empire had been expanding, new wealth had always been generated, from booty and taxation. But those days were long gone. And with the new, better-equipped, more powerful barbarian enemies, just as economic pressure increased, so did pressure on the borders, and more money had had to be found to pay for the defense of the realm. For a generation there had been problems and instability throughout the western provinces. Sometimes Aetius talked nostalgically about the great Stilicho, military commander in the western provinces, who had protected Britain. Aetius seemed to worship this Stilicho, even though, it turned out, he was a barbarian, Vandal-born. Barbarian or not, he had been the effective ruler of the west, under the ineffectual Emperor Honorius. But even the greatest generals grow feeble — and make lethal enemies at court.

And in Britain, since Constantius’s adventure, the problems had been particularly acute.

After Constantius’s subjects had thrown out his hierarchy of officials and tax collectors and inspectors, the cycle of taxation and state spending had broken down. Not only that, there was no mint in Britain,

and after the expulsion of the moneymen there was no way to import coins from the rest of the Empire. Suddenly there weren’t even any coins to circulate.

As everybody hoarded what they had left, people returned to barter. But with its lifeblood of coinage cut off, the economy was rapidly withering.

“There’s just no money to pay the troops. You know, I heard that before I was posted here the soldiers even sent a deputation across the ocean to try to get the back pay they were owed. They never returned.”

“They must have found some other place to live.”

“Or had their throats slit by barbarians. We’ll never know, will we? The people in the towns actually wrote to the Emperor himself and asked for help. This was only a few years ago. But by then, so it is said, Rome itself had been sacked by the barbarians. Honorius wrote back saying that the British must defend themselves as best they could …”

Aetius was worried about Regina’s future. That was why he lectured her about politics and history and wars. He thought it was important to equip her for the challenges of her life.

And Aetius was obviously worried about his own future, too. If you completed twenty years’ military service you could become one of the honestiores — the top folk in society. A career as a soldier was a way for a common man to retire to a nice house in the town or even a villa. But there was no obvious successor to Aetius, here in his station on the Wall, and he had no contact with the diocese’s central command. If he stepped down, the troops would fall apart; he knew that. And besides there was nowhere for him to retire to. He had to hang on.

“Look,” he would say, “this nonsense in Gaul has to stop. Rome is already back on its feet, and when he gets the chance the Emperor will reassert his authority here.”

“And things will get back to normal.”

“Britain has been lost to the Empire before — oh, yes, many times — and each time won back. So it will be this time, I’m sure.” And when that happened, at last, when the tax collectors returned and the coins started to circulate once more — when the soldiers were properly paid and equipped and there was a secure place for him to retire — Aetius could allow his own career to end.

As it turned out, however, for Aetius it was all going to end much sooner than that. And far from everything returning to normal, Regina would have to suffer another great disruption.

After her humiliation before the soldiers, Regina fled to Cartumandua.

Carta was cooking a haunch of pork wrapped in straw. She had hung a big iron cauldron from a tripod and was using tongs to load in fire-hot rocks from the hearth; they sizzled as they hit the water. Her house was a wooden shack, built in the rectangular Roman way. The “kitchen” was just a space around a hearth built in a stone-lined pit, around which you would squat on the ground.

When Regina came bursting in, weeping, Carta dropped the tongs and ran to meet her.

“Carta, oh Carta, it was awful!”

Carta held Regina’s face to her none-too-clean woolen smock, and let her weep. “Hush, hush, child.” She stroked Regina’s hair as she had when Regina was a pampered child of the villa, and Cartumandua a young girl slave.

Carta herself was still only twenty. Aetius had long made her a freedwoman, and allowed her to seek out her own destiny in this little below-the-Wall community, but she still had room in her life for Regina.

When Regina had calmed down enough to show her the blood, Carta clucked disapprovingly. “And nobody told you about this? Certainly not that old fool Aetius, I’ll bet.”

Regina gazed in renewed horror at the dried blood. “Carta — I’m afraid I’m dying. There must be something terribly wrong.”

“No. There’s nothing wrong — nothing save that you’re twelve years old.” And Carta patiently explained to her what had happened to her body, and helped her clean herself, and showed her how to pad herself with a loincloth tied with cords.

In the middle of this Severus came in, carrying a bundle of firewood. He was a soldier, a heavyset man, his stubble grimed with dirt. He glared at Regina. She had never seen him performing strictly military duties. He only ever worked around the little village, carrying food, repairing buildings, even working in the fields where oats were grown and cattle fed. In the shadow of the Wall the lines between the soldiers and the rest of the population had gotten very blurred, especially since marriage between the locals and the soldiers had been made legal.

Regina didn’t like Severus. She had always hoped that Carta would take up with Macco, the stolid, silent slave who had accompanied them from the villa. But one night Macco had slipped away, apparently gone to seek his freedom in the countryside beyond the Emperor’s laws. For Severus’s part he seemed somehow jealous of Regina’s relationship with Carta, which long predated his own attachment. Regina wasn’t even sure what Severus’s relationship with Carta was. They certainly weren’t married. Regina thought he gave her some measure of protection, in return for companionship. It wasn’t an uncommon arrangement.

But Carta was in control. Now she just waited until he dropped the wood and went away.

Carta made them both some nettle tea, and they sat on mats on the ground. Regina tried to describe how the soldiers had taunted her — now she was no longer afraid of dying, that seemed worst of all — and Carta comforted her, but told her such attention was something she was going to have to get used to. Slowly Regina calmed down.

Regina glanced around at the smoke-stained walls. The hut was wattle and daub, just mud and straw stuffed into the gaps in a wooden frame.

Carta said, “What are you thinking now?”

Regina smiled. “About my mother’s kitchen. It was so different. I think I remember a big oven with a dome on it.”

Carta nodded. “That’s right. You could put charcoal in it and seal it up. It made perfect bread — that wonderful dry heat. And then there was a raised hearth.”

“I could never see over the top of that. I wonder if it’s still there.”

“Yes,” Carta said firmly. “I’m sure of it. You know your grandfather put the villa in the hands of a steward.”

“But in these times you can’t be sure of anything,” said Regina.

Carta giggled girlishly. “Oh, my. You sound like an old woman! You can trust your grandfather to look after your family’s property. He’s a good man, and family is everything to him. You are everything … Won’t he be worried about you? Maybe I should send a message—”

Regina shrugged. “Let him worry. He should have told me about the bleeding.”

Carta snorted. “I think he’d rather face a thousand blue-faced Picts than that.”

“Anyway he saw which way I came. If he’s worried he’ll come after me.”

Carta sipped her tea. “He doesn’t often come here, to the shadow of the Wall.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t fit. For one thing he’s older than anybody here.”

“What? That can’t be true.”

“Think about it,” Carta said, eyeing her. “You know a good few people here. You’re popular here, as you are everywhere! How many men over forty do you know? How many women over thirty-five?”

None, Regina thought, shocked — even though, she was sure, much older people had been commonplace in her parents’ circle of friends, with wrinkles and white hair, the badges of age.

“Why is it like this?”

Carta laughed. “Because we don’t live in villas. We don’t have servants and slaves to clean our teeth. We have to work hard, all the time. It’s the way it is, little Regina. Only the rich grow old.”

Regina frowned. Even now, she resented being spoken to like that by a slave — even a former slave — even Carta. “There was no shame in the way we lived,” she said hotly. “Our family was civilized, in the Roman way.”

To her surprise Cartumandua gazed at Regina coldly. She said, “ ‘The allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naпvetй the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.’ “

“What’s that?”

“Tacitus. You’re not the only one who’s learning to read, Regina.” She got up and walked to her cauldron, and poked at the haunch of meat with a long iron skewer.

It was evening, a few days after Regina’s humiliation on the Wall. By flickering candlelight, she was reading, in halting Latin, from the historian Tacitus. “ ‘Good fortune and discipline have gone hand in hand over the last eight hundred years to build the Roman state, which destroyed will bring down all together …’ “ She had asked for Tacitus after Carta’s mild reprimand. This was a speech said to have been given three centuries earlier to rebelling tribes in Gaul by Petillius Cerialis, soon to be governor of Britain.

She was in Aetius’s chalet, one of a row in this little community in the lee of the Wall. It wasn’t grand, just a hut of four rooms built of wattle and daub to the rectangular Roman plan. But it had a tiled floor and a deep hearth, and was cozy and warm. It had been erected when long-stay soldiers had first been allowed to marry and raise families. It was here, during an earlier tour of duty with the border troops, that Aetius had brought his bride Brica, and here that Julia, Regina’s mother, had been born.

Its centerpiece was the lararium, the family shrine that Aetius and Regina had built together after their flight from the villa. The three crudely carved matres in their hooded cloaks sat at the center of a little circle of gifts of wine and food. But this was a soldier’s shrine, and there were also tokens to such abstract entities as Roma, Victoria, and Disciplina, as well as a coin bearing the head of the latest Emperor anybody had heard of, Honorius.

And it was in his chalet that, at Aetius’s insistence, Regina had continued her education. He expected her to become fluent in both her native language and in Latin — and to know the difference; Aetius despised what he called the “muddle,” the patois of Latin-flavored British much favored by the ordinary people of the behind-the-Wall community. He had her read Tacitus and Caesar, historians and emperors and playwrights, from his store of fragile, ancient papyrus scrolls. She learned to write with styli on tablets of wax on wood, and with ink made of soot and a pen of metal. Later, he promised, he would train her in the art of rhetoric. But he believed in combining the best of the British and Roman traditions, and he also had her memorize long sagas of heroes and monsters in the old British style.

“ ‘At present, victor and vanquished enjoy peace and the imperial civilization under the same law on an equal footing. Let your experience of the alternatives prevent you from preferring the ruin that will follow on revolt to the safety that is conferred by obedience …’ “

There was some disturbance outside. Shouting, what sounded like singing. No doubt the soldiers were getting drunk again. But Aetius didn’t react, and Regina knew she was safe with him.

Aetius sat in his favorite basket chair, sipping beer. “Yes, yes … the same law on an equal footing. The law is above all of us — the landowners, the senators, even the Emperor himself, whoever that is right now. That is the genius of the old system, you see. It doesn’t matter who is in charge. It is the system itself that has spread so far and sustained itself, even though we have had soldiers and administrators and even emperors chosen from among those who would once have been called barbarians. The system persists, while we come and go.”

Standing there, holding the fragile papyrus in her hand, she said, “Like an anthill. The Empire is like an anthill, and we are all just ants, running around.”

He slammed his wooden tankard down on the arm of his chair. “Ants? Ants? What are you talking about, girl?”

“But an anthill organizes itself without anybody telling it what to do. And even when one ant dies another takes her place — even the queen. That’s what the Greeks say, and they studied such things. Isn’t your Empire just like that?”

“Rome is not an anthill, you foolish child! …”

So they argued on, both aware of and enjoying their roles, she mischievously provoking, he spluttering and snapping —

The door was thrown open with a crash.

In the doorway, framed by darkness, stood a soldier. He staggered into the room, visibly drunk. When he saw Regina he grinned.

Aetius seemed as shocked as Regina. But he took a step forward. “Septimius,” he said, his voice like thunder. “You’re drunk. And you should be on watch.”

Septimius just laughed, a single bark. “Nobody’s on watch, you old fool. What does it matter? I haven’t been paid. You haven’t been paid. Nobody cares anymore.” He took a lurching step into the room. He was still staring at Regina, and she could smell the drink on his breath. He was, she remembered, the soldier who had exposed himself to her when she bled on the Wall.

She backed away, but she found herself pressed against the table and, in the confines of this little chalet, couldn’t retreat any farther.

Aetius took a measured step forward. “Septimius, get out of here before you make things much worse for yourself.”

“I don’t think I will be taking any more floggings from you, old man.” He turned to Regina. “You know what I want, don’t you, miss? You’re just ripe for the plucking—” He reached for her. Regina flinched away, but Septimius grabbed her small breast and pinched it hard.

Aetius barreled into him, shoulder-first. Septimius was slammed against a wall, and the whole chalet shook with the impact. Aetius staggered upright. “You keep away from her, you piece of filth—” He hurled his fist, his mighty fist like a boulder.

But Septimius, drunk as he was, ducked underneath the punch. And as he rose, Regina saw a flash of steel.

“Grandfather — no !”

She actually heard the blade go in. It rasped on the coarse wool of Aetius’s tunic. Aetius stood, staring at Septimius. Then dark blood gushed from his mouth. He shuddered and fell back, rigid, to the floor.

Septimius’s mouth dropped open, as if he were aware for the first time of where he was, what he had done. He turned and ran into the night. Aetius lay on the floor, breathing in great liquid gurgles.

There was blood on the floor, blood pooling as it once had from her father’s body. Regina forced herself to move. She ran to Aetius, and lifted his heavy head onto her lap. “Grandfather! Can you hear me? Oh, Grandfather!”

He tried to speak, coughed, and brought up a great gout of dark blood. “I’m sorry, little one. So sorry.”

“No—”

“Fool. Been a fool, fooling myself. It’s over. The Wall. They’ll leave now, the last of them. No pay, you see, no pay. Cilurnum fell, you know. You saw the fire on the horizon. Cilurnum gone …” He coughed again. “Go with Carta.”

“Cartumandua—”

“Go with her. Her people. No place for you here. Tell her I said …”

She asked the question that had burned in her young heart for five years. If he died, he could never answer it, she might never know. “Grandfather — where is my mother ?”

“Rome,” he gasped. “Her sister is there, Helena. So weak, that one. Wouldn’t even wait for you …” He grabbed her shoulder. His palm was slick with blood. “Forget her. Julia doesn’t matter. You’re the family now. Take the matres.”

“No! I won’t go. I won’t leave you.”

He thrashed in his spreading pool of blood, and more crimson fluid gushed from the ripped wound in his chest. “Take them …”

She reached out and grabbed the little statues from their shelf in the lararium. At last he seemed to relax. She thought he wanted to say more, but his voice was a gurgle and she could make out no words.

Suddenly something broke in her. She pushed away his head, letting it fall to the floor, and ran to the broken doorway, clutching the statues. She looked back once. His eyes were still open, looking at her. She fled into the night.

Chapter 8

Somewhat to my surprise, the head of Saint Bridget’s, the school Gina had attended, was welcoming, initially anyhow. She listened to my tale of the photograph, though she was obviously skeptical about my story of a missing sister.

She had me sit in her office, on an armchair before her big polished desk. Ms. Gisborne was a slim, elegant woman of maybe fifty-five, with severely cut silver-gray hair. Over a business suit she wore a black academic gown lined with blue — the school colors, as I vaguely remembered from my sister’s day. The office was well appointed, with a lush blue carpet, ornate plasterwork around the ceiling, a trophy cabinet, a large painting of the school on the wall opposite big windows, lots of expensive-looking desk furniture. It had the feel of a corporate boardroom; perhaps this sanctum was used to impress prospective parents and the local sponsors that seem essential to the running of any school these days. But an immense and disturbingly detailed Crucified Christ hung from one wall.

My chair, comically, was too low. I sat there sunk in the thing with my knees halfway up my chest, while the head loomed over me.

She didn’t remember Gina — in fact, Ms. Gisborne was actually about the same age as my older sister — but she had taken the trouble to find some of her reports. “She came over well: a bright, pretty girl, natural leader …” The kind of thing people had always said of Gina. But she held out little hope of tracing any record of any younger sister, and clearly thought it odd that I should even be asking. “There was a preschool department here in those days — for the under-fives, you understand — but it has long since closed down. The school’s gone through a lot of changes since then. I’ll see if Milly can find the records, but I’m not optimistic. It’s all so long ago — no offense!”

“None taken.”

While we were waiting for the secretary to go down into the dungeons, Ms. Gisborne offered me the choice of a coffee, or a quick tour of the school. I felt restless, embarrassed, foolish, and I knew I would quickly run out of conversation with the headmistress of a Catholic school. I chose the tour. I had a little trouble hauling my bulk out of the tiny chair.

Out we walked.

The school was a place of layered history. A frame of two-story Victorian-era buildings enclosed a small grassy quadrangle. “We encourage the students to play croquet in the summer,” said Ms. Gisborne lightly. “Impresses the Oxbridge interviewers.” The corridors were narrow, the floor hardwood with dirt deeply ground in. There were immense, heroic radiators; huge heating pipes ran beneath the ceiling. We walked past classrooms. Behind thick windows rows of students, some in blue blazers, labored at unidentifiable tasks.

“It all reminds me of my own school,” I said uncomfortably.

“I know how you feel; many parents of your generation feel the same. Narrow corridors. Oppressive ceilings.” She sighed. “Doesn’t create the right atmosphere, but not much we can do short of pulling it all down.”

We passed out of the central block. The peripheral buildings were newer, dating from the fifties through to more recent times. I was shown a custom-built library constructed in the eighties, a bright and attractive building within which there seemed to be as many computer terminals as bookshelves. The students worked steadily enough, so far as I could see, though no doubt the presence of the head was an encouragement.

Ms. Gisborne kept up a kind of sales patter. Once the school had been run by a teaching order of nuns. During the comprehensivization of Britain’s schools they had left, or been driven out, depending on your point of view. “Although we still have contacts with them,” Ms. Gisborne said. “And with a number of other Catholic groupings. Since Gina’s time, as I said, we have closed down our preschool section, and merged administratively with a large boys’ school half a mile away. We now provide what would have been called sixth-form support in your day — sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Our academic record is good, and …”

I suspected she was as bored with me as I was of her, and that half her mind was elsewhere, engaged with the endless, complex task of running the place.

The most spectacular new building turned out to be a chapel. It had a concrete roof of elaborate curves. It turned out this was intended to model the tents within which Moses’s flock lived while crossing the desert. Beneath that startling roof the interior space was bright, littered with fragments of red and gold from the long stained-glass windows, and there was a smell of incense.

I felt oddly uncomfortable. The school still retained its profoundly religious core, within a shell of reform and renovation, persisting through the decades, an old, dark thing surviving.

Ms. Gisborne seemed to sense my unease, and from that moment in the chapel she grew oddly hostile.

“Tell me — when was the last time you were in a church?”

“Two weeks ago, for my father’s funeral,” I said, a bit harshly.

“I’m sorry,” she said evenly. “Was your parents’ faith strong?”

“Yes. But I’m not my parents.”

“Do you regret having had a Catholic education?”

“I don’t know. It was such a huge part of my life — I can’t imagine how I might have turned out if I hadn’t.”

“You will have left school with a strong moral sense, a sense of something bigger than you are. Even if you reject the answers, you keep the questions: Where did I come from, where am I going? What does my life mean? ” She was smiling, her face strong and assured. “Whether you turn away from the faith or not, at least you have been exposed to its reality and potential. Isn’t that a legacy worth taking away?”

“Do you think your secretary will have finished by now?”

“More than likely. You know, I’m surprised you came here, searching for this mysterious ’sister.’ “

“Why? Where else would I go?”

“To your family, of course. To Gina. Perhaps you aren’t very close. Pity.” She led the way out of the chapel, back across the compound to the main block.

The secretary, Milly, had indeed come up with a stack of old preschool records. Forty years old, they were sheets of yellowed paper, some ruled into columns by hand, closely handwritten or typed, and kept in battered-looking box files. Somewhere there must be similarly dusty fossils of my own school career, I realized bleakly.

Ms. Gisborne riffled through the boxes briskly, running a manicured nail down rows of names. I could see she was getting nowhere. “There’s nobody with the surname Poole in here,” she said. “You can see I’ve looked a year or two to either side of—”

“Perhaps you could try another name. Casella.”

She frowned at me. “What’s that?”

“My mother’s maiden name. Maybe that was how she registered the child.”

She sighed and closed the box file. “I fear we are wasting our time, Mr. Poole.”

“I have the photograph,” I said plaintively.

“But that’s all you have.” She didn’t sound sympathetic. “There are many possible explanations. Perhaps it was a cousin, a more distant relative. Or simply another child, a playmate, with a chance resemblance.”

I struggled to say what I felt. “You must see this is important to me.”

She stared at me, an intimidating headmistress faced by an awkward student. But she turned back to the first of her box files and began again.

It took her five more minutes to find it. “Ah,” she said reluctantly. “ Casella. Rosa Casella, first attended nineteen sixty-two …”

I found my breath was short. Perhaps on some level I hadn’t quite believed in the reality of this lost sibling after all, even given the photograph. But now I had a kind of confirmation. Even a name — Rosa. “What happened to her?”

Ms. Gisborne riffled through a couple of pages. “When she reached primary school age she was transferred — ah, here we are — to an English-language school in Rome …” She read on.

I sat there feeling, of all things, jealous. Why should this mysterious Rosa have had the benefit of an education in some fancy Roman school? Why not me?

Abruptly Ms. Gisborne dropped the pages back in the box file and closed it with a snap. “I’m sorry. This is too irregular. I shouldn’t be telling you this. The connection is only through what you claim was your mother’s maiden name—”

I guessed at another connection. “This school in Rome. Was it run by a Catholic order?”

“Mr. Poole—”

“The Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins?”

“Mr. Poole.” She stood up.

“It was the Order, wasn’t it? That was the name you just read.” It was a strange situation. I couldn’t understand her sudden hostility when we had gotten to the records of the Order. It was as if she were defending it — but why I had no idea. Perhaps she had something to hide. I stabbed in the dark. “Does this school have links to the Order, too? Is that why you’re suddenly so defensive?”

She walked to the door. “Good day to you now.” As if by magic Milly opened the door, apparently waiting to throw me out.

I stood up. “Thanks for your time. And you know — you’re right. I will go see Gina. I should have gone there first.” I smiled, as coldly as I could. “And if I find out anything that embarrasses your school and its murky past you can be sure I’ll broadcast it.”

Ms. Gisborne’s face was as expressionless as a statue’s. “You are an unpleasant and flawed man, Mr. Poole. Good day to you.”

And as the big school door was closed against me, unpleasant and flawed was just how I felt — along with a big dose of good old Catholic guilt.

Guilty or not, on the way home I used my cell phone to book a flight to Miami.

Chapter 9

The journey south from the Wall, through a dismal, closed-in British autumn, was a blur, a bad dream. It was nothing like the adventure with Aetius, five years earlier. This time the three of them — Regina, Cartumandua, and Severus — weren’t even riding in a proper carriage but in a crude, dirty, stinking cart used for carrying hay and cattle muck. In five years the road had decayed badly, with the roadside ditches clogged with weeds and rubbish, the waystones tumbled, smashed, or stolen, and potholes where the locals had prised cobbles out of the surface for building materials. The way stations and inns seemed a lot more run-down, too.

But Regina didn’t care.

She sat in the back of the cart with Cartumandua, wrapped in her cucullus, hunched over on herself, with the three matres clutched to her belly. She didn’t talk, wouldn’t play games, and was reluctant to eat. She wasn’t even afraid, despite Severus’s constant, gloomy warnings of the danger they faced from bacaudae. These wanderers who plagued the countryside were refugees from failed towns and villas, or barbarian relics of beaten-back invasions, or even former soldiers who had abandoned their posts. The bacaudae were symptoms of the slow breakdown of the diocese’s society, and all had to be assumed a threat.

She slept as much as she could, though her dozing was interrupted by the jolting of the cart. At night she lay on straw-stuffed pallets, or sometimes just on blankets and cloaks scattered on dirt floors, listening to Severus’s drunken fumblings at Cartumandua. Sometimes she stayed awake all through the night, until the dawn came. At least she was alone in the dark. And if she stayed awake she had a better chance of escaping into the oblivion of sleep during the misery of the day.

But when she did sleep, each time she woke she was disappointed to be back in this uncomfortable reality, the endless, meaningless, arrow-straight road surface, and to the fact that she was alone now, alone save for the matres — and perhaps her mother, who had abandoned her to go to Rome.

At last they approached a walled town. The town was set beside a river, on a plain studded with farmsteads. Beyond the town a hillside rose steeply, with a scattering of buildings on its flanks and at its summit.

The town’s wall was at least twice Regina’s height. It was faced with square tiles of gray slate, but in places the slates had decayed away or had been stripped off, exposing a core of big rubble blocks set in concrete, interspersed with layers of flat red bricks. It would have been dwarfed, of course, by the great northern Wall.

They came to a gate, a massive structure with two cylindrical towers topped with battlements. There were two large entrances through which the road passed, and two smaller side passages, evidently meant for people. But the side passages were blocked with rubble, and one of the big archways had collapsed.

A man stood before the gate, blocking their way. He wore the remnants of a soldier’s armor, strips of tarnished metal held in place over his chest by much-patched leather bands. He was armed — but only, comically, with what looked like a farmer’s iron scythe. Severus negotiated. As a former soldier he had a basis of contact with the gatekeeper, and they shared dull, incomprehensible details of assignments and ranks and duties.

From the walls other men watched, men armed with swords and bows. They peered down speculatively at Regina and Carta. Regina stayed hunched inside her cloak, trying to make herself shapeless and insignificant.

Old soldier or not, Severus had to pay a toll to be allowed into the town, at which he grumbled loudly. The cart rattled through the gateway, jolting over debris. The wall was thick enough that the gateway was a kind of tunnel, and the clatter of the horses’ hooves echoed briefly.

When they emerged into the light again, they were inside the town — but Regina’s first impression was of green. Away from the road almost every bit of land was farmed, given over to orchards and vegetable gardens. Animals wandered: sheep, goats, chickens, even a pig rooting at a broken bit of the roadway. People bustled, adults and children walking or running everywhere, all of them dressed in simple woolen tunics and cloaks. There was a strong stink of animals, of cooking food, and a more powerful stench underlying it all, the stench of sewage.

It wasn’t like a town at all. It was a slice of countryside, cut out by the wall. But here and there grander structures — arches, columns — loomed out of the green, and threads of smoke lifted to the sky.

Under Severus’s direction the cart nudged forward cautiously through the crowd.

Carta murmured to Regina, “Well, we have arrived. Do you know where you are?” When Regina didn’t answer, she said, “Do you even care?”

“Verulamium,” Regina snapped. “I’m not stupid.”

Carta smiled. “But I would call it Verlamion. This was the town of the Catuvellauni, my people. In the days when we battled Caesar himself, under our great king Cymbeline …”

“I know all that. So you’ve come home.”

“Yes.” Carta leaned and faced her. “But it is my home,” she said. “I am no slave now.”

“Am I to be your slave, Cartumandua?”

“No. But you are a guest here. You will remember that.”

Regina turned away, not wanting to be with Carta, not wanting to be here in Verulamium, not wanting to be anywhere. But even she was impressed when the cart pulled up at a grand town house, set at the corner of two intersecting streets. A central courtyard was bordered by an open cloister lined by slim columns. In the courtyard itself was a small hut that might have been a porter’s lodge, but it was boarded up. There were some signs of dilapidation, but the white-painted walls and the red-tiled roofs were mostly intact.

Three people came out of the buildings. An older man and a woman were similarly dressed, in plain woolen tunics, but the younger man wore brighter colors. The woman, it turned out, was a servant, called Marina. She helped Severus remove the horses’ harness, and led them away to a small stable outside the main compound.

“Marina is a servant, but not a slave,” Carta murmured in Regina’s ear. “Remember that.”

The older man, beaming, embraced Carta. But he seemed to shun Severus. He turned to Regina and bowed politely. “Cartumandua wrote to tell me all about you. You’re very welcome in our home. I am Carta’s uncle — the brother of her mother. My name is Carausias …” He was a short, stocky man, shorter than Carta, with the big, callused hands of a farm laborer. He had Carta’s dark coloring, deep brown eyes, and broad features, though his neatly cropped black hair was shot with gray, and his wide nose was flattened and crooked, as if it had been broken.

“And this is my son. His name is Amator.”

The boy was about eighteen. His tunic was short and extravagantly colored, and he had it pinned over one shoulder by a silver brooch, leaving the other shoulder bare. He had the family coloring, and his features, as wide and blunt as Carta’s or her uncle’s, could not have been called handsome. But as he bowed to Regina, wordless, his gaze was intense.

She felt something stir inside her: something warm, even exciting — and yet tinged with the fear and disgust she had first known when confronted by Septimius’s drunken lust. She turned away, confused. She was aware of the boy’s gaze following her.

As Carta, Severus, and the others unloaded the cart, Carausias took her to the room where she would sleep. It had a plain tile floor and green-painted walls. To Regina’s dismay there were two beds in here, along with small cupboards and trunks. “Will I share with Carta?”

“Well, no.” Awkwardly he said, “Carta and, umm, Severus will want to be together. I’ve opened up another of the rooms for them, where the roof isn’t too bad … You will share with Marina.”

“With the servant ?”

He stiffened. “Marina is a good woman, and she is clean and quiet. I am sure you will be fine.” He hesitated. “Look — Carta has told me what happened. I know things have been difficult.”

“I am grateful for your hospitality—”

He waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. I will ask Marina to sleep elsewhere, just for a while, until you find your bearings. Even the kitchen, perhaps. She’s a good soul; she won’t mind … You can have the room to yourself for a bit. How would that be?”

She took a step into the room. “Thank you.”

“Would you like to rest? If you need to bathe—”

“No.”

“When it’s time to eat—”

“Could I eat in here? In my room?”

Carausias seemed taken aback, but he spread his broad hands. “I don’t see why not. I’ll send Carta to talk to you later.”

“Yes. That will be fine …” She shut the door on the kindly little man, and receded into the darkness and silence with relief.

She curled up on one of the couches — the one that smelled more fresh — and slept until Carta came, with a small bowl of water for her to wash and clean her clothes.

That first day she emerged only to use the latrine in the little bathhouse. Carta brought her food, mildly reminding her that she would be welcome to eat with the family. Regina stirred from the couch only to set up her lararium, just an improvised little shrine in an emptied-out cupboard, with the three matres standing sullen and silent at its center. She lit a candle beside them, and gave them bits of her food and the watered-down wine that came with it.

They wouldn’t indulge her forever.

On the second day Carta forced Regina out of the room, and walked her in a slow circle around the courtyard, showing her the layout of the house.

“Here we have the triclinium—” It was the Latin word for a ‘dining room,’ deriving from the couch that ran around three sides of the room. The mosaic floor was intact, and the walls’ painted designs, mock pillars, and glimpses of fabulous gardens, were clean and neat, though they looked faded. In one corner of the compound was a still grander room, but it was cluttered by low tables and cooking implements, pots, pans, and heaps of crockery and cutlery; a row of narrow-based amphorae leaned against one wall. “This was a reception room,” Carta said a little wistfully. “Now it’s a kitchen. It even had underfloor heating, but Carausias says you just can’t get the workmen to maintain it. Anyhow the cooking keeps it warm enough. And the courtyard faces south, you know; in the summer it’s quite a sun trap …”

There were private rooms along the two remaining sides of the courtyard, a small bathhouse, and a narrow staircase that led down to the family shrine. The house was a grand place, if not as grand as her parents’ villa had been. But it had obviously seen better days. Many of the rooms were boarded up, and one showed signs of a fire.

As they walked she saw a flash of color, a lithe movement on the far side of the courtyard. It was the boy, Amator. He had been tracking them, watching her with that heavy, liquid gaze.

Regina repaired to her room as soon as she could get away from Carta.

On the third day there was a knock on the door. She opened it, expecting Carta again. It was Carausias. He smiled at her, his hands folded over his belly. “May I come in?”

“I—”

Before she could resist he had stepped through the doorway. He glanced around at the room, her little piles of clothes and effects, and nodded respectfully at her lararium. “I’m terribly sorry, my dear, but I’m afraid Marina needs her room back. She’s hardly comfortable sleeping in the kitchen. And besides she’s out of clean clothes.”

“Fine,” Regina snapped, and she sat on her bed, arms folded. “Let the servant back in. I’ll sleep in the kitchen. Or in the stable with the horses.”

“Now, that’s absurd.” He crouched before her, his features softened in the gloom. “We only want to make you feel welcome. Welcome and safe.”

“I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be with you.”

He looked hurt. “Then where do you want to be?”

“In Rome,” she said. “With my mother.”

He sighed. “But Gaul is full of barbarians, my dear. I don’t think anybody is going to be traveling to Rome for some time. Not until things settle down. And in the meantime,” a little more sharply, “perhaps it’s time you made the best of it.”

She laughed at him. “What best ? There is no best. I’m stuck here in this dump. And—”

“But this dump is all that’s available,” he said, his voice steady but firm. “Listen to me now.

“Not long ago I and my wife and my son, all of us, were servants, like Marina. We worked on a villa, not far from the town walls. When the troubles began, things got difficult for the owners. They were extravagant, and they didn’t want to stop their spending, even when their savings ran low. They tried to sell us — sell us all, to work as farm laborers — but we were not slaves. In the end the owners fled, taking everything of value from the villa — the money, the jewelry, the pottery, even much of the furniture. But they abandoned the buildings, and the land. And us.

“And so we took over. We began to work the land ourselves. We brought in our relatives and friends to live on the farmsteads. We soon had a surplus, which we brought into the town to buy goods for ourselves. This is only three harvests ago.

“After the second year we had accumulated enough to be able to buy this town house, from an owner desperate to flee to Londinium. Though stewards still run our villa, it is safer for us within the walls.

“We have done well. There are only ten houses like this left within the walls of the city, and of those, three are empty. No doubt things will settle down, when the Emperor overcomes his troubles. But in the meantime, we will do what we Catuvellaunians have always done. We will work hard, and we will support each other, and we will get by.”

He stood up. “You are not even Catuvellaunian. But Carta has brought you here. I am inviting you to become part of this family, this community. You will have to work hard, for we all must work. If you do, you are welcome. If not — well, we can’t even afford another servant. You must understand this.” He stood over her, waiting.

At length she said, “The kitchen.”

“What?”

“I’d like to go to the kitchen. Please.”

He seemed nonplussed. But he said, “Very well.” He held out his hand.

Marina was working in the kitchen, making lunch for the family. There was a rich smell of fish sauce, which Marina was mixing into a salad of legumes and fruit. She was a stolid, cheerful-looking woman of about thirty. She wore her brown hair pulled back in a simple bun. She smiled at Regina, apparently not offended at this stranger who had stolen her room for so long.

Regina looked around. Shelves had been fixed to the walls over grand, fading paintings; on them were stacked mortars, colanders, cheese presses, and beakers, flagons, platters, and bowls of metal, glass, and pottery. The amphorae leaning against the walls had once, according to their inscriptions, contained olive oil, dates, figs, fish sauce, and spices from the east. Now, much repaired, they contained nuts, wheat, barley, oats, and the flesh of animals and fish, salted, pickled, or smoked.

There was no oven, but a hearth had been set up in the middle of the mosaic floor, and a chimney cut crudely into the ceiling. No fire burned today, but soot stained the paintwork of the ceiling and upper walls. Many of the mosaic’s tesserae had been cracked or charred by the heat. A gridiron was set over the charred patch, with a large cauldron suspended from a chain above it. Regina could see that the mosaic had featured a girl, slim and pale, surrounded by leaping dolphins.

Marina nodded to a quern stone, set up in the corner of the room. “We need flour. I’ll bake some bread later. Do you know how to use the stone? …”

And so Regina, under Marina’s instructions, sat on the floor and began to grind wheat. The familiar, eternal smells and sounds of the kitchen soon immersed her, and as she worked at the stone, her muscles tingling with the unaccustomed effort, she felt her obsessive thoughts dissolve.

She hardly noticed when the tears started.

Marina did, though. The servant came to embrace her, patting her back, making sure she didn’t make a mess of the few gritty handfuls of flour she had managed to produce.

The next day Carausias took Regina for a walk through the town. They were to go shopping in the Forum.

They set off in bright midmorning — it was a cold, clear, crisp October day — but Carausias warned Regina she had to be alert. “You were protected in your villa, and even on the Wall. But in the town it’s different. People don’t behave very nicely. There are plenty who’ll slit your purse — or slit your throat for their trouble …”

Regina listened. But she had found her way around the Thin Town, and had endured similar warnings from Aetius since the age of seven.

The town, surrounded by its walls, was shaped like a lozenge. It was crisscrossed by a grid pattern of streets, dominated by the road from the north that passed through the town toward Londinium in the south. A great arch spanned the Londinium road. Regina stared at this monument of carved marble, more ornate than any single structure she had seen in her young life. But ivy and lichen clung to its face, obliterating the inscription on the lintel, and a bored-looking crow hopped about on its guano-streaked carapace.

Near the arch the road passed close by a very strange building. It was an open space bounded by a semicircular wall several times her height, with steps leading up to its parapet. It was, said Carausias, the theater. When she asked if she could climb the steps, he agreed, smiling indulgently.

The steps were wooden, and were old and broken. At the parapet she found herself looking down into a bowl. Sloping terraces were covered by semicircular rows of wooden seats, now broken and stained. At the front was a stage like a little temple, fronted by four slim columns. The only performers on the stage right now were mice, a pair of which scuttled from pillar to pillar.

Carausias followed, wheezing a little with the exertion. “You could seat four hundred people in here. And the plays — some of them went over my head, but I liked the fabula togata, the comedies, like The Accusation and What You Will. And then there were the farces — my late wife was especially fond of The Vine Gatherers — how we laughed at that one, where the fellow with the grape basket falls over, and …”

None of this meant much to Regina. She only knew what a play was through her readings with her grandfather. The theater was full of rubbish, a compost of rotting food waste and rubble and smashed pottery and even what looked like the bloated corpse of a donkey, all littered by the dead leaves of autumn. The garbage was rising like a slow tide up the bank of seats, and when the wind turned, a stench of rot hit her.

Carausias sighed, plucked her sleeve, and led her down the stairs.

They cut down a side street, heading for the Forum. This street was lined with shops. They were long, narrow buildings, set very close together, with workshops and dwellings in the rear sections. Peering inside, Regina recognized a butcher’s store, a carpenter, and a metalworker; the butcher’s was doing the briskest business. But several of the shops were closed up.

Carausias said regretfully, “Here, only a few years back, you could buy the finest pottery — imported if you want, even Samian, but the stuff from the west country and the north was just as good and a lot more affordable. Now you can’t get new pots no matter what you pay; we just have to make do and mend, until the Emperor sorts himself out.” He eyed her. “What about you, Regina? Have you thought how you’d like to occupy yourself when you’re older? Perhaps you could learn pottery. I bet this shop could be bought for a song …”

Regina had no idea how pottery was made, but imagined it must involve sticky messes of clay and a lot of hard work. She said politely, “I don’t think I’d be enough of an artist for that, Carausias.”

They reached the Forum. It was an open square, crowded with stalls of canvas and wood. People thronged, buying and selling, immersed in a cloudy stink of spices, meat, vegetables, and animal dung. Chickens ran clucking, chased by grimy-faced children.

But around this melee the Forum was surrounded on three sides by small temples and colonnaded walkways. And on the fourth side was a great hall, constructed of brick, flint, and mortar, and roofed with red tile. It loomed over the rest of the town. Regina gaped. Aside from the Wall itself she had never seen anything built on such a scale.

Carausias gently tucked his finger under her chin and closed her mouth. “Now, you must be careful, for if the villains see you are distracted—”

“Is it a temple?”

“No — although the Basilica does host a shrine to the Aedes, the tribal god, as well as shrines to the Christ and the Emperor. Look — can you read the inscription up there?”

She squinted, trying to make out the chipped Latin markings: “TO THE EMPEROR TITUS CAESAR VESPASIAN, SON OF THE DEIFIED VESPASIAN…”

“This is the Basilica. It is here that the town council meets, that the court settles disputes, that offices of tax and census operate — there are schoolrooms, too.”

Under the imperial administration, the towns had been the center of local government. Nowadays, though the tax system had pretty much imploded after the rebellion during Constantius’s reign, the local landowners kept up the court system and were discussing ways to raise levies to keep up the town’s amenities, like the sewers, the baths, and the Basilica itself, which were slowly falling into disrepair. These would all be temporary measures, of course, Carausias continued to insist, until the Emperor resolved his difficulties.

“But people ought to show a little more civic responsibility,” he complained. “Nowadays people will sink endless amounts of money into their villas or town houses, while they let the sewers of Verulamium go to ruin. There has always been a tension in your Roman between civic responsibility and a veneration of the family, living and dead. In times of hardship he retreats to the family, you see. But how does he think the soldiers who protect him will be paid, if not for taxes, and how will taxes be collected, if not for the towns? Eh, eh? And that’s why I pay for keeping up sewers and water pipes and all the rest. I know where my interests lie …”

Regina wasn’t much interested in this.

Carausias and Regina moved through the Forum, checking the stalls. They were particularly seeking spices, olive oil, and above all pottery. But they found little but local produce. Much of the commerce was conducted in kind — meat for vegetables, a bit of secondhand pottery for some shoe nails — though some people, including Carausias, used handwritten scrips.

The fruits and vegetables on display looked poor to Regina. She fingered a bunch of spindly, discolored carrots. Carausias said dismissively, “You get folk from the town moving out into fields not tilled since their great-grandfathers were alive. They haven’t the first idea. And this is the result …” Regina put down the carrots guiltily. They had come from a stall manned by a thin woman with sallow, dirty skin, and protruding teeth. A swollen-bellied child clung to her leg.

When they had done their shopping, mostly unsuccessfully, Carausias led her back to the Londinium road, and they walked away from the Forum, heading farther southeast.

They came to a temple. It was set in a place where the main road forked, and it had been shaped by its location into a V shape, a triangular courtyard before a purple-painted building.

There was a scent, like wood smoke. Regina sniffed. “That’s lovely.”

“Burned pinecones.” Carausias watched her carefully. “Do you know what this place is? What about the inscription?” Set over the main entrance to the courtyard, it was a dedication to the dendrophori of the town. “That word means ‘branch bearers’ …”

“I don’t understand.”

Carausias touched her shoulder. “Child, Cartumandua told me what became of your father.”

She felt her face close up.

“This is a temple to Cybele, who is popular here. I myself come here to worship … If you would like to come inside—”

“No,” she snapped.

“You should make your peace with the gods — and with your father’s memory — and with yourself.”

“Not today.”

“Well, perhaps that is wise. But the temple will always be here, waiting for you. Shall we go and see what Marina has prepared for supper? And we still have water to fetch …”

He took her hand and they walked together, back through the grubby bustle of Verulamium, toward home.

At Carta’s insistence she had brought her scrolls and tablets with her from the Wall. Carta said that she should try to keep up her studies, for it was surely what Aetius would have wanted.

At first she tried. She would study in the courtyard of the house, or in her room when Marina was working. But she had to work alone. There was nobody here who could tutor her. For all his obvious business acumen and firm grasp of people, Carausias was no more educated than his niece, and beyond telling anecdotes of half-remembered plays from a decade before, he could not help her. He certainly couldn’t afford to hire a tutor.

Gradually she got bored with her solitary studying. And as the weeks wore on, the days shortening as winter approached, the work came to seem less and less worthwhile. Who was ever going to care if she remembered lists of emperors and their accession dates or not? Nobody in Verulamium was sure who the current emperor was.

And then there was Amator to distract her.

One day, as she was trying to study in her room, Amator came wandering in. “Study, study, study,” he teased her. “All you ever do. You’re so boring.”

“And you are a lazy clod with nothing better to do than annoy people,” she shot back, repeating one of his father’s taunts.

He strolled to Marina’s bed. Grinning at her, he got to his knees and felt about in the space beneath the pallet. “Aha!” he proclaimed in triumph, and he pulled out a bit of bloody rag. It was one of the loincloths Marina used to pad herself during her periods. He sniffed the dried blood and rubbed it against his cheek. “Ah, the scent of a woman …”

Regina was laughing, and outraged. She put down her papyrus and came after him. “That’s disgusting! Give it back—”

But he wouldn’t, and they chased around the room for a while. They had developed a way of chasing without touching, of coming close but not quite into contact, a game with subtle, unspoken rules.

At length he yielded, threw himself down on Marina’s bed, and tucked the bloody little relic back where it had come from.

“She’ll know,” said Regina.

“So what if she does? It’s only Marina.” He got up again and walked to her lararium, in one corner. “I’ve never taken a proper look at this before.” He picked up one of the matres. “By Cybele’s left nipple, how ugly.”

“Put it down.”

“And how cheap—”

“Put it down.”

He looked up, startled at her tone. “All right, all right.” He put down the little statuette — not in the right place; she promised herself she would fix it later. He said, “So every day you waste good food and wine on these bits of nonsense …” He eyed her. “But have you ever seen a real god?”

“What do you mean?”

For answer he beckoned her, and tiptoed out of the room. Of course, she followed.

Amator had his own chores to complete. Carausias was trying to train him to run the villa, the cause of much conflict between the two of them. But he always seemed to have plenty of spare time, and he seemed happy to spend a lot of it with Regina. When he discovered she liked “soldiers” he proclaimed himself an expert, dug out an old set from some corner of the house, and set it up in the courtyard where they would play. Or he would play ball-catching games with her, or simply chase her through the colonnades, or in the open spaces beyond the town walls. Gradually, almost tentatively, a relationship had built up between them.

But there was an edge to Amator. At eighteen he was so much older than she was. Perhaps she enjoyed the undercurrent of danger that she sensed about him, a boy who knew so much more than she did, had surely done so much more, and yet was so inexplicably interested in her. Amator was mysterious, disturbing, somehow enchanting — but above all he was fun, and he always seemed to dress with color and style, unlike the drab townsfolk.

Cartumandua maintained a frosty silence about all this.

They walked around the courtyard until they came to the head of the stone stairs that led to Carausias’s shrine.

She stepped back. “No. I mustn’t go down there. Carausias wouldn’t like it.”

“Well, Carausias doesn’t like being bald and fat and old, but he’s got to live with it. Come on — unless you’re scared.” He set foot on one step, then another, and was suddenly trotting down and out of sight.

After a heartbeat’s hesitation, she followed.

The shrine was just a pit in the ground. She could hear Amator scratching, and then he held up a candle. His face seemed to hover in the dark.

In the uncertain light she could see that above the stonework of this little underground shrine there was a layer of darker earth. When she probed at it, it crumbled, and left black on her fingers, like soot. Later she would discover that twice during its short history Verulamium had been burned to the ground, and these burned ash layers were relics of those catastrophes.

An arched hollow had been cut into the wall. In it stood a little statuette, apparently bronze, of a man riding a horse. His outsized head bore a crested helmet. Small offerings had been laid out before him, perhaps fragments of food.

“Behold,” said Amator mock-sepulchrally. “Mars Toutatis, the warrior god of the Catuvellauni. Held to be the Mars of Rome, while that was politically convenient. What now — do you think he will become the Christ? Will we have to carve a chi-rho above his head?”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” she whispered.

“Or what? Is his horse going to piss down my leg?”

“We shouldn’t be down here.”

“I daresay you’re right. But nobody is going to know.” He bent forward and blew out the flame. The darkness was complete, save only for the faintest of diffuse daylight glows from the stairwell. She could sense his heavy warmth, less than a hand’s breadth from her, and his breath was hot on her cheek.

He backed away, his tunic rustling softly. “Now we share a secret.” He laughed, and his feet clattered on the stairs. She followed him into the daylight, but when she reached the ground, he had gone.

Chapter 10

Miami Airport was a thoroughly unpleasant place. The queues of grimy adults and unhappy kids before the immigration barriers were as long and slow moving as I could remember in any American airport.

I’d taken many trips to the States over the years, for work, vacations — and in pursuit of my sister. After going to work in America some fifteen years before, Gina had come home only a handful of times, most recently, and even then grudgingly, for our father’s funeral. Her two boys were the only kids in the family — that I knew of, I reminded myself, thinking of Rosa. They had quickly become precious to me, no doubt through some mixture of sentiment and genetic longing. But to get to see them, every time I had to endure these red-eye flights and the ferocity of U.S. immigration controllers.

Outside the terminal, the weather seemed unseasonably humid and hot for October. Nobody was there to greet me, of course. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Miami Beach. I was only maybe twenty miles from my sister. But taking a hotel room was my habit. I’d long learned not to put unnecessary pressure on Gina by actually having her put me up, despite my having flown around the world to see her.

I generally stayed at Best Westerns, but for this trip I’d decided to spend a little money, and had used the Internet to find a room at a big spa hotel on the coast. The hotel’s air-conditioning was merciless, of course, and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees as I stepped through the sliding doors to reception. But I was pleased with the plush, sweeping interior, the atrium done out in tiles of chrome and purple, the huge sunken bar, the glimpses of chlorine-blue pools beyond wide glass doors. Meeting rooms in bays clustered around the atrium; evidently the hotel relied a lot on corporate business, and I wondered if Gina got much work here.

My room was on the twelfth floor. I turned on the TV and briskly unpacked. The room was big, expansive, with a balcony that gave a view of the sea — at least it did if you crowded right up against the rail, and peered past the flank of the building and across a busy highway. It was late afternoon, but as always after a transatlantic flight it was eerie to see the sun still stranded so high above the horizon. I’ve always found flying tough.

I knew I should shower, have a drink, sleep as long as possible. But I felt restless, vaguely disturbed; right now my life seemed to be too complicated to let me relax.

I put on a fresh shirt, grabbed a handful of dollars, made sure I had pocketed my magnetic room card, and went out to the elevator.

I walked through the bar, through those big picture-window glass doors, and out to the pool area, a complex miniature landscape of white concrete. The heat was heavy, steamy, and my English trousers,

shoes, and socks felt ridiculously heavy. For sure I wished I had brought a hat.

There were only a few people by the pool. A group of thirty-something women, bronzed, in bikinis, a little overweight, had gathered on sun loungers and were cooing over images in a digital camera — housewives attending the hotel’s health club, perhaps.

There was an ungated gap in the rear wall of the pool area. I passed through and walked down a short path edged by long grass. I found myself on a boardwalk, a long wooden walkway standing over the sand and grass on low stilts. It stretched to my left and right, to north and south. Before me, beyond a broad stretch of pale gold sand, was the sea. There was a breeze in my face, hot but blustery. I could see nobody swimming, and a red flag fluttered over a small stilted structure, maybe a Coast Guard station. Hurricane Jonathan was rattling around the west Atlantic; it wasn’t expected to touch down on land but was creating swell and wind.

I wasn’t planning to swim anyhow.

I knew that if I walked south I would approach the town center, so I turned that way and set off. I walked briskly past a series of gargantuan hotels, great art deco confections of concrete in shocking pink or electric blue, like spaceships parked along the Atlantic coast. The boardwalk was easy on the feet, but I seemed to be the only stroller. A few people passed me, or overtook me, joggers or speed-walkers, mostly young professional-looking types, dressed in Lycra or sweat suits, tiny headphones clamped to their heads, their faces closed, unseeing. At regular intervals there were little open kiosks, with big buttons you could press to call for police help.

This was my first time in Miami Beach. Gina had moved here only nine months earlier. She ran a small company in partnership with her husband of fifteen years, a New Yorker called Dan Bazalget. They had met in New York during an electronics product-launch event; they had both been working in PR, for the same company on different sides of the Atlantic. They had already been in their forties, with the complicated pasts you acquire by that age; Gina had a childless divorce behind her, and Dan actually had a twenty-year-old daughter, whom I’d never met. But once they had glommed onto each other they had soon gone into business together, and then sailed into parenthood, producing two fine boys as easily as shelling peas, despite Gina’s age. Now, based on Gina’s Florida inheritance, they sold something called “conference visioning and management” — coordinating probably unnecessary conferences for senior business types.

My father the accountant had always mocked Gina’s job title. “I mean, can you take a degree in ‘conference visioning’?” he would ask. Well, actually, yes, you could. I didn’t begrudge Gina her thoroughly modern choice of career or her commercial success — not much, anyhow, given the usual sibling-rivalry envy for a sister who in every aspect of her life had always seemed to do better than I ever had.

When I had passed most of the big hotels I cut inland, passing through an alleyway. I crossed Ocean Drive, where even the police officers wore skintight shorts, to reach a main street called Collins Avenue. I bought a small tourist map for a few dollars from a drugstore and briskly toured Miami Beach’s highlights. There was an art deco area, a small district peppered with ornately decorated buildings — hotels, private homes, banks, bars, some set behind heavy security gates. The most beautiful building of all seemed to be the town’s main post office, a pointlessly grand edifice across whose magnificent floor queues snaked desolately.

I couldn’t quite get the city into focus. There was a faint sense of sleaze about the place, of a past of dirty money and menace — and yet somebody had made a determined effort to clean it up, as witness the alarm buttons on the boardwalk. And I knew my sister well enough to know she wouldn’t bring her kids to a place she couldn’t make them safe. Still, I was relieved to get back to the boardwalk, and the huge physical presence of the sea.

I never watch American TV. Those constant ad breaks make me feel hyperactive, as if I’ve been taking too much sugar. I ordered up a movie, a comedy, and a room service “snack,” bigger than most Sunday lunches back home, with a half bottle of Californian Chardonnay. I was asleep before the movie was over.

“George. Lovely to see you, et cetera.” She took my shoulders and actually gave me an air-kiss, her left cheek brushing mine, her lips missing me by a good couple of inches. Automatically I shaped up for a second kiss on the right, but I’d forgotten that’s the European way — in America you get just the one.

Well, that was about as much affection as I generally got from Gina.

She said, “As you can see I took time off work to see you, though Dan couldn’t get away. The boys are on their way home from school. I secured them a half day off.” Her accent was vaguely mid-Atlantic.

“I appreciate that …”

Her house was modern, the walls wooden, perhaps a little sun-bleached around the front door. The rooms were filled with light, lined with bookcases and TVs — it seemed there was a set in every room, and in most a computer — and there was a bright but slightly irritating smell, perhaps of pine-scented air freshener. This was a big, sprawling homestead set in an extensive acreage of finely cut lawn, over which sprinklers hissed, even at this hour, eleven in the morning. There is always so much space in America, so much room.

But the first thing I saw when I walked into her hallway was Dad’s grandfather clock.

It was a big, moth-eaten, unmistakable relic, whose heavy, tarnished pendulum and time-stained clock face had made it a kind of focal point of our childhood. I hadn’t noticed it missing in my clear-out visits to the house in Manchester. But now here it was — it looked as if it might even have been renovated — and I realized that Gina must have taken it from Dad, presumably with his consent, before he died.

She saw me looking at the damn clock. We both knew what it signified. It wasn’t that I wanted the clock, or would have stopped her taking it, but I would have appreciated some discussion over this bit of our shared heritage. It wasn’t a good start to the visit.

She took me to a breakfast room, sat me at a polished pine table, and loaded a coffee percolator. We sat and talked, inconsequentially, about the continuing fallout from our father’s death: the sale of the house, his business affairs. She didn’t ask me about my own life, but then she never did.

She looked her age, midfifties, but good with it. She looked physically relaxed, the way you do if you work out just enough. She’d let her thick blond hair fill with gray, and it was swept back from her temples and forehead, a little severely. I always thought of her face as a far more beautiful version of mine, her features more delicate, her chin smaller, her nose not quite so fleshy. Now wrinkles spread around her eyes and mouth, and her skin was a little weather-beaten, polished by the Florida sun. But she still had the family eyes, limpid and clear gray, what one of her boyfriends used to call smoke-filled.

We ran out of facts to swap, and the silence was briefly awkward.

She said, “It’s good of you to come. It’s important to be with family at a time like this. Et cetera.”

“So it is,” I said. It was true. For all the unending tension between us, as I looked into that face that was so like my own, I felt a certain peace I had lost since Dad’s death.

But she broke the spell by saying sharply, “I know you think I should have stayed longer after the funeral.”

“You’ve got your life to live here. It was easier for me to handle it.”

“I suppose it was,” she said. It was a coded put-down, of course. You had the time because, by contrast with me, you don’t have a life. That’s sibling rivalry for you.

I pulled her scrapbook about Regina out of my jacket pocket and put it on the table. “I found this at home. I don’t remember you making it.”

“Before your time, I suppose.”

“I thought you might want it.”

She pulled the dog-eared little book toward her. She didn’t pick it up, but turned the pages with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. It was as if I had presented her with her afterbirth pickled in a jar. She said coldly, “Thanks.”

I was irritated, with her and myself. “Shit, Gina. Why do we find it so hard to get on? Even at a time like this. I’m not here to fight—”

“Then why?” she said coldly.

“For Rosa,” I said without hesitation. I was satisfied to see how her smoke-filled eyes, so similar to mine, widened.

That was when the boys burst in, to our mutual relief.

“George!” “Hey, Uncle George …”

Michael was ten, John twelve. They were wearing summer gear, T-shirts, shorts, and huge, expensive- looking trainers. Michael had some kind of complicated Frisbee under his arm. I actually got a hug from Michael, and a punch on the shoulder from his older brother, hard enough to hurt. From those two I took whatever I could get.

I could see their gazes wandering around the kitchen. “Go to my hire car and take a look in the boot.”

“The trunk,” they chorused.

“Whatever. Go, go.”

I always enjoyed playing the indulgent uncle, if only because I had a knack of spotting presents that suited my nephews’ tastes. John always seemed a little duller than his brother, and would be content with computer games and the like, passive entertainments. But little Michael was always a tinkerer. Once I found an old Meccano set — an antique from the sixties, from my own childhood, but in mint condition. Michael had loved it.

My gifts didn’t work quite so well this time. I’d bought them both robot-making kits. You’d put together a motor and wheelbase with a processor you could command via a PC interface, so producing a little beetlelike creature that could scuttle around the room, avoiding chair legs. The beetles could even learn simple tasks, like how to push a table-tennis ball up a ramp. But in the better American schools they build critters like this for homework. The boys dutifully played with the kits for a while, though.

We ate lunch, a simple but typically delicious fish salad — my sister was annoyingly good at everything -

and Gina sent us all outside the house.

Over the immense back lawn we chased Michael’s Frisbee back and forth. He had modified it: it had a series of round holes carved neatly around its perimeter. It shot through the air like a spinning bullet. More engineering: later Michael showed me a whole collection of modified Frisbees, kept in a box under his bed.

He was actually working through a series of experiments in a systematic way, using a bunch of stuff from junk shops and friends’ lofts, trying to design a better Frisbee. At first he had done what you’d expect a kid to do, cutting out smiley faces, building on cabins for model soldiers, installing gigantic fins. But he’d quickly progressed to experiments focused on improving the Frisbees’ actual aerodynamic performance. He had cut out patterned holes, or notched their edges, or scratched spirals and loops into their surfaces. He was even keeping a little log on his computer, with a scanned-in photograph of each change, and results given as objectively as he could, such as records of greatest distance achieved. I was impressed, but I felt kind of wistful, for I would have loved to have been around to share this with him.

I found flying that damn Frisbee hard work, however. When the boys had been smaller it had been easy for me to keep ahead of them. But now John was nearly as tall as me, and both of them were a hell of a lot more athletic. I was soon puffing hard, and embarrassed at my lack of competence with the Frisbee. And tensions between the two of them soon emerged. They made up a catching game with rules that quickly elaborated far beyond my comprehension, and when John infringed a rule — or anyhow Michael thought he did — the bickering started.

Anyhow, so it went. Running around that sandy lawn, with the Atlantic breakers rumbling in the background, I worked as hard as I could while the boys barely broke a sweat, and it was with relief that I welcomed the next milestone in the day, which was Dan’s arrival home from work.

“Hey, boys.” He left his briefcase at the back door of the house and came bounding out onto the lawn to join in the Frisbee game. “George! How’s the mother ship?”

“England swings, Dan.”

He asked about my flight and my hotel, and I was gratified that Michael started telling him about my robot kit. We played for a while. Then we took a walk along the beach — sandy and empty, a private stretch reserved for the estate of which this house was a part.

As the boys ran ahead, still impossibly full of energy, Dan and I walked together. Dan Bazalget was a big man, built like a rugby player. I knew he had played football at college, thirty years before, and his bulk seemed too large for his short-sleeved white shirt. His face was broad, his eyes small. He was bald, and had shaved the remnant fringe of his hair, so that his head gleamed like a cannonball.

Dan was good at conversation. He asked me about the aftermath of Dad’s death, and unlike my sister drew me out a little about the state of my life, my work. But there was always an odd reserve about him, his deep brown eyes unreadable. He would look at me and smile, ostensibly generous, neither judging nor caring. To him I was surely just an appendage of his wife’s past, neither welcome nor unwelcome in his life, just there.

As the sun began its journey down the western sky, we returned home for dinner, the boys running ahead, still whooping, hollering, and fighting.

The meal was strained. The kids picked up on the tension and were subdued. Gina was polite enough during the meal, and her gentle chiding of her children for lapses in manners and so forth was as calm and efficient as ever. But her smiles were steel and fooled nobody.

Before the dessert she went to the kitchen, and I joined her, ostensibly to stack dishes and help make coffee.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For springing that on you about Rosa. It wasn’t fair.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She loaded her dishwasher with as much aggression as her expensive crockery would allow her.

“But I know she exists, Gina. Or at least existed.” I told her about the photograph.

She sighed and faced me. “And now you’re asking me.”

“ You must know. You must have been — what, twelve, thirteen? You saw her born, growing up—”

“I don’t want to think about this.”

“I need you to tell me the truth,” I said, my voice harder. “I think you have a duty, Gina. You’re my sister, for Christ’s sake. You’re all I’ve got left. Et cetera. I even know where they sent her — to some kind of school, run by a religious order in Rome. The Puissant Order of—”

“Holy Mary Queen of Virgins.” I knew she must have known, but it was still a shock to me to hear those words from her lips. “Yes, they sent her there. She was about four, I think.”

“Why send her away — why to Italy, for God’s sake?”

“Remember I was only a kid myself, George … Take a guess. The simplest reason of all.”

“Money?”

“Damn right. Remember, I was about ten when you were born. It had been a long gap. Mum and Dad had taken a long time trying to decide if they could raise another kid. You know how cautious Dad was. Well, along you came, but they hadn’t banked on twins — you and Rosa.”

“We were twins?” Shit, I hadn’t known that. Another kick in the head.

“And then, just after you two were born, they ran into trouble; Dad lost his job, I think. The timing of it all was one of God’s little jokes. They didn’t tell me much, but it was going to be a struggle: I remember they talked about selling the house. They wrote to relatives, asking for help and advice. And then this offer came in, from the Order. They’d take in Rosa, school her, care for her. Suddenly, with just you, they were back to the position they’d bargained for when they decided to have a second kid.”

I felt a complex melange of emotions — relief, envy. “Why her, not me?”

“The Order only takes girls.”

“Why didn’t she come back?”

She said, “Maybe the Order has rules. I don’t know. I wasn’t privy to the discussions.”

I wondered briefly why, if my parents had always been as hard up as they claimed, my dad had continued to send money to the Order, long after Rosa must have completed her education.

“They never told me about Rosa,” I said. “Not a word.”

“What good would it have done? … I swore it would never happen to me,” Gina said suddenly.

“What?”

“Being so poor you have to send your kid away. Et cetera.” She was staring at the wall.

For once I thought I could read her. I’d only been seeing this from my point of view. But Gina had been old enough to understand what was happening, though of course she’d only been a helpless kid herself. When Rosa was sent away, she must have been afraid it would be her next.

Impulsively I put a hand on her arm. She flinched away.

She said, “Look, Mum and Dad believed they were doing the best for Rosa. I’m sure of that.”

I shook my head. “I’m no parent. But I don’t see how any mother could send her little kid away to a religious order full of strangers.”

She frowned. “But they didn’t. How much do you know about the Order?”

“The name. Rome.” Apart from a request that I keep up Dad’s payments, which I’d refused, the Order hadn’t responded to my emailed requests for information. “Oh, the genealogy business.”

“George, that’s not even the half of it. The Order are family. Our family. That’s how Uncle Lou made contact with them in the first place.”

“Lou?” He was actually our mother’s uncle, my great-uncle.

“He was in the forces — the American forces — during the war. He was in Italy at the end, and somehow found them. The Order. And he found out they saw us as a kind of long-lost branch of the family.”

“How so?”

“Because of Regina.”

“Who? … Not the Roman girl. That’s just a family legend.”

“Not a legend. History, George.”

“It can’t be. Nobody can trace their family tree that far back. Not even the queen, for God’s sake.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Anyhow Lou always kept the contact to the Order, and later when Mum and Dad got into trouble—”

I eyed her. “Dad sent money to this damn Order. Do you?”

“Hell, no,” she snapped back. “Look, George, don’t cross-examine me. I don’t even want to talk about this.”

“No, you never did, did you?” I asked coldly. “You left it all behind, when you came here—”

“Yes, away from that cramped little island with its stifling history. And away from our murky family bullshit. I wanted my kids to grow up here, in the light and the space. Can you blame me? But now it’s all chased me here …” She became aware she was raising her voice. Only a screen separated this part of the kitchen from the dining area.

“Gina, do you think all families are like ours?”

“One way or another,” she said. “Like huge bombs, and we all spend the rest of our lives picking our way through the rubble.”

“I’m going after her.” I was making the decision as I spoke. “I’m going to find Rosa.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s my sister. My twin.”

“If you think that will help you sort out your screwed-up head, be my guest. But whatever happens, whatever you find, don’t tell me about it. I mean it.” She actually shut her eyes and mouth, as if to exclude me.

“All right,” I said gently. I thought fast. “What about Uncle Lou? Is he still alive? Where does he live?”

He was alive, and lived, it turned out, not far from Gina. “Florida is heaven for the elderly,” she said dryly.

“You have his address? And you must have a contact for the Order. An address — maybe an intermediary … Dad gave you a damn grandfather clock. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have given you a contact for your sister. Come on, Gina.”

“All right,” she said dismissively. “Yes, there’s a contact. A Jesuit priest in Rome.”

“Have you checked it out?”

“What do you think?”

“But you’ll give me the addresses.”

“I’ll give you the fucking addresses. Now,” in flat, brutal Mancunian, “piss off out of my kitchen.”

The boys hadn’t heard what we said, but they had picked up the tone of our voices. We ate our summer puddings in awkward silence. Dan just looked at me, evaluating.

Chapter 11

“… The notion that man has been innately flawed since the Creation is nothing but an artifact of our own difficult times. Just as the wise farmer gathers his harvest and sets aside his store for the winter, so a just man will, through good works, love and the joy of Christ, earn his passage to God’s eternal kingdom …”

The voice of the Christian philosopher was thin and high, and only fragments of what he had to say carried to Regina on the soft breeze that swept over the hilltop. The crowd pressing around her did their best to listen to what was said, and to the replies of the rival thinkers who rejected this “heresy of Pelagius,” preferring the depressing notion that humans were born into the world with ugly, flawed souls.

She suppressed a sigh, her attention drifting. It had come to something, she thought, when the most exciting event in her life was a debate between two splinter sects of the followers of the Christ. She didn’t actually like the Christians; she found their intensity, and their habit of praying with arms spread, hands raised, and faces lifted, disturbing and off-putting. But at least they knew how to put on a show.

And at least the little Christian community, here on the hill, was flourishing. It was outside Verulamium itself, close to the gaudy shrine that had been constructed over the presumed grave of Alban, the town’s first martyr — indeed, it was said, the first Christian martyr in all of Britain. A group of wooden roundhouses, rectangular huts and even a little area set aside as a marketplace had gathered around the focal point of the shrine. You could see how marble from one of the old town’s arches had been cut up and reused to build the shrine itself, the only stone building here; inscriptions in Latin, a language that few spoke anymore, had been sliced through unceremoniously and then scratched over with the chi-rho, the symbol of the Christians.

This hilltop village was still small and, in its rough unplanned clutter, hardly a Roman community. But pilgrims came from afar to visit Alban’s martyrium, bringing their wealth with them. Even today, listening to this dry stuff about the nature of sin, there might have been forty people — a big gathering for Verulamium nowadays — and many of them were brightly dressed for the occasion, in jauntily dyed tunics and cloaks. People had brought their children, who played at their feet. There was even a seller of roast meat working the crowd, adding to the odd carnival atmosphere.

She looked back down the hill to the old town itself. From here she could easily trace the lines of its walls, the lozenge shape sketched on the plain by the river, and she could make out the neat gridwork of the street layout, connected up to the roads that marched away to north, south, and west. There was plenty of activity, carts and pedestrians passing along the main roads and through the gates, and a bustle of activity around the stalls in the Forum. But she could see how stretches of the wall had been broken down, and how, even in the six years she had been here, the green had risen like a tide, encroaching the center of the town and flooding the broken-down shells of abandoned buildings.

Carausias complained of how the community around the shrine was drawing the last blood out of the old town. But Regina cared nothing for that. Why should she bother about the upkeep of public buildings, or the problems of paying soldiers, or keeping bacaudae out of the town? She was seventeen years old. All she wanted was to have fun. And the fact was, such excitement as there was to be had was up here on the Christians’ hill.

“… Who would ever have thought that my little Regina would grow up to be a student of theology?”

It was Amator. At the sound of his voice Regina whirled.

He stood close, not a hand’s breadth away. He was dressed in a bright tunic of yellow and green, and he wore an elaborate scarf of what looked like silk, pinned at his throat by a small brooch. His thick black hair, brushed back from his tanned face, was heavy with powder and oil. At his side was a man she did not recognize: perhaps about the same age, he was a thickset fellow wearing a tunic in the barbarian style, made of leather and wool and studded with a big, crudely constructed silver brooch.

Regina had not seen Amator for three years, not since he had left for Gaul — to “make his fortune,” as he had said. And yet his gaze had the same searching intensity it had always had, and she couldn’t help but respond with a surge in her belly, a flush she could feel spreading to her cheeks. But at seventeen she wasn’t a child anymore. And by now he wasn’t the only man who had ever looked at her that way.

She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “You made me jump.”

“I bet I did. And have you missed me, little chicken?”

“Oh, have you been away?” Regina lifted her finger and drew it down Amator’s cheek. His eyes widened; he almost flinched at her touch. “The sun has changed you.”

“It shines more strongly on southern Gaul.”

“It has turned your face to old leather. Shame — you were so much better looking in the old days.”

Amator glowered.

The friend laughed. “She has the measure of you, Amator.” His accent was thick, almost indecipherable. “You have run your sword through him, madam; every morning he spends an enormous time plastering his cheeks with cream and powder to restore his pale color.” This other turned out to be called Athaulf; he bowed and kissed her hand, his gaudy barbarian jewelry glinting. “A pretty face and a sharp tongue,” he said.

Amator said, “But you, Regina — you have become still more beautiful — but perhaps I shouldn’t have left you alone so long, if this dry-as-dust theology is the highlight of your life.”

She sighed. “Life has been a little duller since you left, Amator,” she admitted. Duller, and lacking the edge, the sparkle, the frisson of danger that she had always associated with Amator.

“Well, now I’m back …”

“Back to work,” Athaulf reminded him. “Hard though it is to drag myself away from this young lady, aren’t we due to meet those landowners?”

“So we are, so we are. I’m a man of business now, Regina. Business, property, wealth, great concerns beyond the ocean. And so I must deal with old corpses like my father, when I would much rather be flirting with you.”

“But your business won’t take all day,” she said, as coolly as she could.

“Indeed it won’t.” He glanced at Athaulf. “Tell you what. Why don’t we have a party?”

She clapped her hands, though she was aware she must look childish. “Oh, wonderful! I will tell Carausias and Cartumandua and Marina — we will prepare the courtyard—”

“Oh, no, no,” he said gently. “We don’t want to be depressed by that gloomy lot. Let’s make a party of our own. Come to the bathhouse. Shall we say a little after sunset?”

“The bathhouse — but nobody goes there anymore. There’s no roof!”

“All the better, all the better; nothing like a little faded grandeur to make the blood flow. After sunset, then.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Unless you need to catch up on your theology.”

“I’ll be there,” she said evenly. “Have a good day, Amator. And you, sir.” With that she turned and walked away, letting her hips sway, aware of their silence as they watched her.

But once out of their sight she ran down the hill, all the way home.

Even in the few years she had lived here it had gotten a lot harder to make her way through the streets of Verulamium.

Some of the abandoned houses, roofless and gutted by fire, had begun to crumble seriously. Serious looting for tiles and building stone had advanced that decay, although that had tapered off as most new buildings were wattle and daub, and nobody had much use for stone. There were plants sprouting on top of walls and ledges. What had once been gardens and orchards were choked with weeds: dandelions, daisies, rose bay willow herbs. On some, longer abandoned, the shrubs and saplings grew waist-high, or higher. As the population of the town had continued to fall, nobody even used these bits of wasteland for pasture. The few new buildings, just wattle and daub with crudely thatched roofs, had mostly been built on the surface of the old streets, where the risk of falling masonry was least. So you had to step off the road and dodge around the houses, clambering over piles of rubble, and passing by broken drains and clogged sewers that nobody ever got around to fixing, and trying to avoid the children and chickens and mice that ran everywhere.

In one place she walked past a grave, crudely dug into the raw earth and marked with a wooden slab. Strictly speaking burial inside the town walls was still against the law, just as under the rule of Rome. But the magistrates rarely met, or if they did nobody listened to their pronouncements.

Even the great Basilica was affected by the general decay. Its walls still stood, but after its final abandonment by the landowners and their councils, its roof had collapsed, and birds nested in the glass- free frames of its gaping windows. But the building still had its uses. Even without the roof, the great walls provided some shelter from the weather — and a miniature village had grown up in there, on the floor of the great hall itself, with roof posts and beams driven into the walls to support small wooden lean-to shacks. It was an extraordinary sight. If you wanted proof of the Emperor’s gross dereliction of his duty to sort things out, Regina thought, it was in this single image of lean-tos huddling timidly in the lee of the mighty walls. When things got back to normal there would be an awful lot of work to do to put all this back together again.

Still, the Forum, the beating heart of the town, was as crowded as ever. Regina plunged into its noisy, smelly melee with a will.

Regina was popular with the Forum vendors, if only because she was younger than most of them. There were few young people to be seen in town nowadays, and fewer still with money. The town had never been able to sustain its own population numbers; infant mortality had always been too high for that. But because there was no work for them to do anymore, the flow of immigrants from the countryside had long dried up. Anyhow Regina played on her youth and energy for all it was worth, ruthlessly haggling with middle-age men who should have known better.

The stalls nowadays sold mostly fruits, vegetables, and meat from the local farmsteads, gardens, and orchards. There were very few manufactured goods for sale. But sometimes there were treasures to be found. A shipment of brooches or scents or fabrics from the continent might find its way here, or the contents of a town house or villa would be sold off by its owners, who had decamped in search of a better life elsewhere.

Today, in her rummage through the stalls, she was lucky. She found a shawl made of bright yellow wool that its vendor swore had come all the way from Carthage, and even a set of rings — only bronze, but one of them was set with an intaglio, a cut stone once used by some grand lady to seal documents. She was able to pay for all this in coin, though she had to pass up a pretty iron brooch in the shape of a hare, for its vendor insisted on payment only in kind.

After that, bursting with energy, she raced back to the town house. Everybody knew Amator was home, and Carausias was beaming that his son, so long away, had returned. Regina yelled for Cartumandua. On a day like today it was only Carta, trained by Julia herself at the villa, who could help Regina prepare for her party.

Regina ran to the room she still shared with Marina, and threw her purchases onto her bed. She rummaged through her cosmetics and jewelry. She was running out of space on the little wooden shelves she used to store her things, so she shoved the three little matres out of the way and spread out her newest brooches, trying to decide which was the brightest. Beside the jewelry the matres looked like what they were, just dull lumps of crudely carved stone.

Once she had finished her chores in the kitchen, Carta came to help Regina with her toilet. She brought hot water, towels, and a scraper to cleanse Regina’s skin. She used tweezers, nail cleaners, and ear scoops to ensure that every part of her was perfect, and she patiently braided her hair. And she dripped perfume onto her skin, scooping it out of little bottles with a bronze spoon. Meanwhile Regina went through her growing collection of hairpins and enameled brooches, beads of glass and jet, and rings and earrings, trying to decide what to wear.

But as she prepared charcoal — she ground it up in one of her own most precious possessions, a tiny mortar and pestle small enough to be held between thumb and forefinger — Carta let Regina know how much she disapproved. “To spend good money on brooches and hairpins and shawls! You know what Carausias is saving for …”

Things had gone from bad to worse in Britain. It was just as Aetius had tried to explain to her, long ago. There had been a great wheel of state taxation and spending, with the towns at the hub; but now that wheel was shattered. The towns had lost their key functions as center of revenue collection, administration, state expenditure, distribution, and trade. And now that money was disappearing altogether, nobody could buy fancy pottery or ironware or clothing, and the towns’ manufactories had all but collapsed, too. Carausias and the other landowners had a deepening dread that the towns were simply becoming irrelevant to the lives of the people in the countryside, on whom, in the end, everything depended.

Meanwhile, without pay — as Regina knew too well — even the standing armies of the north and the coasts had dispersed. It was said that some of their leaders were setting themselves up as kinglets in their own right. Seeking security, the Verulamium town council had even tried to contact the civitates, the tribes of the north and west who had always stayed somewhat independent of the Empire, content to pay the Emperor’s taxes. But there wasn’t much leadership to be had there, either, and there was much bloody conflict between factions and rival bands. It was as if Britain, amputated from the Empire, were withering like a detached limb. There was no obvious solution in sight, not until the Emperor returned to sort everything out.

In Verulamium things were peaceful for now, if a bit shabby, despite wild rumors from the countryside of roaming bacaudae and vicious barbarian hordes. But sometimes, even to Regina who tried not to think about all this, it felt like the calm before the storm.

Meanwhile Carausias was hoarding all the coinage he could get his hands on.

He hoped to secure passage for the family from Britain to Armorica. This was a British colony in western Gaul, where a cousin of Carausias’s had a villa. There the imperial mandate still ran strong, and it was a refuge for many of the elite and wealthy from Britain. And there, as Carausias put it, the family could “ride it out until things get back to normal.”

But Carausias needed coins. Whereas the economy of the towns was mostly run by barter nowadays, the captains of the few oceangoing ships that still called at Londinium or the other main ports would accept payment only in the Emperor’s coin — and, it was said, at exorbitant rates at that.

That was why Carta was scolding Regina. “It would break Uncle’s heart if he knew—”

“Oh, Carta, don’t nag me,” Regina said, pouting into her hand mirror to see if her black lip coloring was thick enough. “You can’t get this sort of stuff for a handful of beans. You have to pay for it. And it is my money; I can do what I want with it.”

Carta stood before her, mixing the charcoal with oil on a little palette. “Your allowance is a gift from Carausias, Regina. He means to teach you some responsibility with money. But it isn’t yours. You must remember that. You came here from the Wall with nothing but the clothes on your back …”

Which was true, as she had learned over the years. Poor Aetius had had nothing but his soldier’s salary and a few meager savings. Even his chalet under the Wall had, it turned out, belonged to the army. Nobody knew what had become of her family’s money. It wasn’t a pleasant subject to be reminded of. Sometimes Regina regretted throwing away that dragon brooch of her mother’s. She could never have borne to wear it, but at least she could have sold it, and had a little of her mother’s wealth.

But all this was a bother. “I know all that,” Regina said crossly. “I just want to have a little fun, just for one night. Is that so much to ask? …”

Carta sighed, put down her cosmetic palette, and sat with Regina. “But, child, yesterday was just one night, too. As will tomorrow be. And the next night, and the next … What about the future? You don’t keep up with your share of the chores, in the kitchen, cleaning, in the stables.”

Regina pulled a face. She found her future hard to imagine, but she was sure it wasn’t going to involve mucking out stables.

Carta said, “And what about your studies? Aetius would be disappointed if he could know that you’ve all but given them up.”

“Aetius is dead,” Regina said. But she said it brightly, as if it were a joke. “Dead, dead, dead. He died and left me all alone with you. Why should I care what he would have thought?” She got up and skipped lightly. “Oh, Carta, you’ve become such an old woman! I’ll deal with the future when it comes. What else can I do?”

Carta glared at her. But she said, “Oh, come here and be still. We aren’t done yet.” She bade her lean down and carefully painted the charcoal around her eyes. “There,” she said at last. She held up a hand mirror.

Even Regina herself was startled by the effect. The darkness of the charcoal paste made her eyes shine, while the pink of her light woolen tunic was perfect for bringing out their smoky gray. As she slipped on her new bronze rings Regina’s mood of anticipation deepened. Briefly she thought of Aetius, and the responsibility he had tried to instill in her. You are the family now, Regina … But she was seventeen, and her blood was wine-rich; surrounded by her jewelry and clothes and cosmetics she felt light, airy, floating like a leaf on a breeze, far above the earthy stonelike concerns embodied by the matres.

She said, “Carta, I hear what you say.” She took more steps around the room. “But I’m only dancing.”

Carta forced a smile. “And maybe I don’t dance enough. Dance, then. Dance for all you’re worth! But—”

“Oh, Carta, always a but !”

“Be careful who you dance with.”

“You mean Amator?” Her translucent mood turned to irritation. “You never did approve of him, did you?”

“He was too old, you too young, to be flirting the way you used to.”

“But that’s years ago. He’s different, Carta.” And so am I, she thought, in a dark warm secret core of herself, which contemplated possibilities she didn’t dare broach even in her own mind. “Carta, Amator is your cousin. You should trust him.”

“I know I should.” Carta eyed her. “Just be careful, Regina.”

“Carta—”

“Promise me.”

“Yes. All right, I promise …”

Carta surprised Regina by hugging her, briefly. They stepped apart, both a little embarrassed.

“What was that for?”

“I’m sorry, child. It’s just, made up like that, you look so beautiful. That fire in your eyes when you argue with me — you have spirit, and I can’t blame you for that. And — well, sometimes you look so like your mother.”

She couldn’t have said anything that would have moved Regina more. Regina touched her cheek. “Dear Carta. You mustn’t worry so. Now help me fix my hair; this bone pin just won’t stay in place …”

But Carta’s face, already lined though she was only in her midtwenties herself, remained creased with concern.

Amator and Athaulf met her at the old bathhouse, not long after sunset. Amator was carrying a great flagon of wine.

The bathhouse, like the Basilica, had long lost its roof. Domes, broken open like eggshells, gaped in the dark. Somebody had dug down through the fine mosaic floor of the main chamber, smashing the design and scattering the tesserae: perhaps it had been a Christian fanatic who had objected to some pagan image. Nobody knew; nobody cared.

With Amator and Athaulf was a girl called Curatia. Regina didn’t know her, but she knew about her. About Regina’s age, Curatia routinely went about dripping with as fine a collection of hairpins, jewelry, and cosmetics as you could find in Verulamium. But, so went the gossip, she lived alone, and had no obvious means to pay for such things — none save her popularity with a variety of men, some old enough to be her father … Regina felt faintly disturbed to find such a girl here; immediately the evening seemed soiled.

But Curatia had brought a lyre. When she played, with her black hair cascading over the strings, Regina had to admit her music was quite beautiful. And once she had begun to sip Amator’s wine, Regina began to feel much more relaxed about the girl’s presence. It was a balmy autumn evening, the fragments of mosaic and the wall paintings that had survived the weather were poignant and beautiful, and even the weeds and saplings that grew waist-high looked fresh and pretty. And when Amator and Athaulf had set out the candles they had brought, on the floor, on the walls and in the gaping windows, the shadows became deep, flickering, and complex.

Amator and Regina sat together on a stretch of broken wall. Amator sifted rubble with his hand and dug out a collection of oyster shells. “Once people ate well here,” he said. He shrugged and let the shells drop.

“I’ve never eaten oysters,” Regina said wistfully.

“Oh, I have.”

Athaulf crawled around the half-ruined building, poking into crevices and cracks and feeling under the floor. “Did they really light fires under the floor? …”

“It’s called a hypocaust, you pig chaser!” Amator shouted out in Latin, waving his wine. He said to Regina, “You must forgive Athaulf. He’s still a ragged-arse barbarian at heart.”

Regina leaned against Amator’s legs. “I never heard a name like that. Athaulf. ”

“Well, he’s a Visigoth. And like all his kind his name sounds like you’re hawking to bring up phlegm …”

Visigoth he might be, but Athaulf’s family wielded power in Gaul. After the disastrous night on which the frozen Rhine had been crossed by the barbarians from Germany, Roman military commanders had managed to stabilize the province by giving the barbarians land inside the old border. Thus a Visigoth federation had been established in southwestern France, centered on Burdigala. Athaulf was a rich man, and a solid business partner for Amator.

Amator drank deeply of his wine. “Thus the Visigoths, who are barbarians, are employed on the Emperor’s payroll to keep down the troublesome bacaudae, many of whom are Roman citizens. Makes you think.”

“But I don’t want to think,” she said, and held up her cup for more wine.

“Quite right, too.”

Athaulf stood up in the rubble of the hypocaust. “Look! I found an iron hook!”

“It’s a strigil, you savage. It’s supposed to keep your skin clean. Oh, throw it away. Cura! Enough of that funeral music. We want to dance!”

With a whoop, Curatia abandoned her gentle dirge and launched into a lively rhythmic tune, an ancient British piece.

Amator yelled, dragged Regina to her feet, and took her in his arms. They started with formal steps, but soon, as Athaulf joined in, they clambered in and out of the old hypocaust and ran laughingly along the sections of broken walls.

As she danced in the ruins, and the cool autumn air mixed with the heady wine and the scent of the candles — and as Amator’s legs brushed hers, and his arm circled her waist — Regina could feel her intoxication growing, as if her blood were burning. This multileveled place, full of complicated light and Curatia’s shimmering, oddly wistful music, came to seem as unreal and enchanted as if they had been transported to a cloud.

Later, she found herself lying on a thick woolen blanket, cast over the stones of the broken wall. She was panting hard, the blood in her head singing from the whirling dance. Amator was lying beside her, propped up on his elbow, looking down at her. She could sense his old intensity in the way he looked at her. But that frisson of fear she had once felt had gone now, leaving only warmth.

“I wish this night would last forever,” she said, flushed and breathless. “This moment.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “So do I.” He lay beside her, his arm over her stomach, and she felt his tongue flicker at her ear.

She stared up at the silent stars. “She had such parties,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“My mother … Why did it all go wrong, do you think? The town. The way people lived. There are no barbarians here.”

“None save capering oafs like Athaulf.”

“But there aren’t. The ocean didn’t freeze over, like the Rhine, so the barbarians could walk in. And there was no plague, no great fire that burned everything up. It all just — stopped. And now Cartumandua can’t buy a new vase, because nobody makes them anymore, and money is useless anyhow …”

“It was all a dream,” he said softly. “A dream that lasted a thousand years. The money, the towns, everything. And when people stopped believing in the dream, it disappeared. Just like that.”

“But they will believe again.”

He snorted, and she could feel his hot breath on her neck. “Not here they won’t. Here they are pursuing a different dream, of a man on a cross, a martyr’s grave at the top of the hill.”

“No, you’re wrong. When things get back to normal—”

He leaned over her; his eyes were black pits, unreadable, deep, and welcoming. “Elsewhere the dream goes on.”

“Where?”

“In the south and the east. Around the coasts of the central sea, in Barcino and Ravenna and Constantinople, even Rome itself … There are still towns and villas. There are still parties, and wine, and perfumes, and people dancing. That’s where I’m going.” He leaned closer. “Come with me, Regina.” His hand moved beneath her tunic, and caressed her thigh.

Her blood was surging; his every touch was like fire. “I thought you didn’t like me,” she whispered. “I knew how you looked at me when I first arrived. But you never touched me. And then you went away.”

“Ah, Regina — would I pluck an apple before it is ripe? But—”

“What is it?”

“There has been nobody else?”

“No,” she said, averting her face. “Nobody else, dear Amator.”

He took her chin and made her face him. “Come with me, then, little Regina, little chicken. Come to Rome. There we will dance for another thousand years …” His face descended toward hers, and she felt his tongue probe at her lips. She opened her mouth, and he flowed into her, like hot metal.

At first there was pain, sharp and deep, but that soon transmuted to pleasure.

Amator rolled away from her, turning his head. She felt oddly cold, and reached for him. He came back, and filled her cup with wine.

After that, her thoughts became fragmentary.

There were only bits of clarity, scattered like the tesserae of the smashed mosaic. The sharpness of the pain of the rubble that dug in her back when he lay on her. The sense of bruising in her legs and belly as he thrust. A glimpse of Athaulf standing on the broken walls with his tunic raised, pissing noisily on the ground beyond, while the girl Curatia massaged his legs and bare buttocks.

And then the last time, a different weight, a different scent, a different sensation between her slippery thighs. When he pulled away, belching, not looking at her, this time it was not Amator but Athaulf. But she felt too broken, too disconnected to grasp at that thought.

The last memory of all was of a painful stagger through the streets of Verulamium, where with every pace she seemed to trip over some bit of rubble, her arm draped over Curatia, for Amator and Athaulf had gone.

After that it seemed just a moment before she woke in her bed — and was immediately assailed by the stink of vomit — but Marina was here, wiping at her brow, while Cartumandua’s face hovered beyond like a concerned, disapproving moon. Her head throbbed, her throat was sore with vomiting, her belly was filled with an empty ache, and between her legs was what felt like a single great bruise that spanned from one thigh to the other.

That first day she stayed in the dark, sipping the soup and water Marina brought her. Amator didn’t call for her, to take her to Rome.

The second day she got up and dressed. She felt a lot better, save for a lingering sickness at the base of her stomach — and a sharp pain between her legs, a pain she clung to, trying to keep her memories of Amator strong, despite that disturbing final image of Athaulf.

She emerged into bright daylight, and, somewhat sheepishly, sought out Cartumandua. To her relief Carta didn’t scold her, or remind her of her previous warnings, or of her promises. Carta gave her chores, cleaning tasks in the kitchen and the bedrooms. But she wouldn’t meet Regina’s eyes.

Regina tried to make a fuss of Marina. She made a special effort to clean out the room they shared, after the mess she had made of it. Oddly, though, she felt uncomfortable in the room in those first few days, and had trouble working out why — until she saw that the matres were still in the corner of their shelf, where she had so carelessly shoved them aside to make room for her jewelry. She restored the goddesses to their position. But they felt cold and heavy in her hands, and their small faces seemed to watch her.

She was not the same person as she was last time she had touched them, and never would be again. Somehow the matres knew it. And beyond their blank stone faces she saw Julia and Aetius and Marcus and everybody she had known staring at her in dismay.

She nursed the secret of Amator’s promise to take her away to the southern cities, a secret promise that made everything she had gone through worthwhile. But still Amator didn’t call. Still the pain in her belly lingered.

And as the days wore on, the bleeding didn’t come. She knew what that must mean. Her anxiety and sense of dread deepened.

It all came to a head on the night of the fire.

It had been a difficult night from the beginning.

After dinner Carausias had made a terrible discovery. He had wailed and wept. Then he had given way to anger. He stormed around the house, smashing furniture and crockery and even some of Carta’s irreplaceable pottery, despite the efforts of Carta and Severus to restrain him.

Regina had no idea what was troubling him. He had always seemed so strong, so solid. Frightened, she had retreated to her room where she lay on her bed.

She had dark troubles of her own. Her bleeding hadn’t returned. She longed to talk to Carta, to throw herself in her arms and ask for her forgiveness and help. But she could not. Then there was another secret, the secret that was lodged deep in her mind, as the growing child must be lodged in her belly, a secret truth she had tried to keep even from herself: that Amator would not come back for her, that he would never come back, that he had already taken all he wanted from her.

As she lay brooding, at first she imagined that the stink of smoke, the sound of screaming, was part of her own fevered imagination. But when red light began to flicker beyond her window, she realized that something serious was happening. She got out of bed, pulled on her tunic quickly, and ran to the door.

Carta, Carausias, and the others were standing in the courtyard. Their faces shone red, as if they faced a sunset. But the sun was long gone, and the light came from a great bank of flames, visible over the silhouetted rooftops. There was a great crash, more screams, and sparks rose up like a flock of tiny, glowing birds.

Regina ran to Carta and took her hand. “What is it?”

“I think that was the Basilica,” Carta said.

“It may have started there,” Carausias growled. “But it’s spreading fast. All those stalls in the Forum. The thatched roofs …”

“I think it’s coming this way,” said Carta.

Carausias’s voice was bitter. “Once there were volunteers to put out such fires. We’d have run with our bowls of water and our soaked blankets, and everything would be saved — or if not saved, rebuilt until it was better than before—”

Carta snapped, “Uncle!”

He turned and looked at her, eyes wide. “Yes. Yes. The past doesn’t matter anymore. We must leave. Even if the fire spares the house, the town is done after this. All of you, now, quickly …” He turned and ran into the house, followed by Severus and Marina.

Carta held Regina’s shoulders. “Get your things. Nothing but what you can carry, nothing but what you need.”

“Carta—”

“Are you listening, Regina?”

“Where will we go? Will we go to Londinium, and book the ship to Armorica? Perhaps we will meet Amator there—”

Carta shook her, sharply. “You must listen. Amator is gone. I don’t know where. And he took Carausias’s money.”

It was hard for Regina to take this in. “ All of it—”

“All of it. All the savings.”

“The ship—”

“ There will be no ship. Can you not listen, child? When the house is destroyed, we will have nothing.”

There will be no dancing, Regina thought stupidly, no more dancing. And when she thought of the growing mass in her belly she felt panic rise. “How will we live, Carta?”

“I don’t know!” Carta yelled, and Regina saw her own fear.

There was a fresh roar as another great section of building collapsed. From the streets outside the courtyard there came yells, screams, and a strange, twisted laughter.

“Time is running out. Go, child!”

Regina ran to her room. She dragged out the largest bag she thought she could carry, and scooped into it clothes, her perfumes, her pins, her jewelry, everything she could grab in those few frantic heartbeats.

It was only at the very last moment that she thought of the matres. She unfolded a tunic, carefully wrapped the little stone goddesses, and tucked them into the bag. They were small, but they made the bag unaccountably heavier. She hoisted the bag onto her shoulder and ran out into the courtyard.

Soon all of them had gathered, Carausias, Carta, Marina, and Severus, all laden with bags and bundles of blanket. By now the glow of the fire was bright as day, and the billowing smoke made it hard to breathe.

Regina thought she saw moisture in Carausias’s rheumy eyes. But he turned away from his house. “Enough. Let’s go.”

Half running, stumbling over the debris in the road, the four of them joined a ragged line of refugees who streamed out of the burning town through the northern gate and into the cold country beyond. Away from the town there were no lights, and the night was overcast. Soon they were fleeing into pitch darkness.

Chapter 12

Despite all the tension with Gina, I wanted to trace Uncle Lou. I stayed on in Florida a few more days, through the weekend.

A day after that unsatisfactory conversation with my sister I got an unexpected call. It was Michael, asking me if I wanted to come over to watch the space shuttle launch.

“Sure. I mean, if that’s okay with your mom. You’d better put her on …”

“Whatever,” said Gina.

So I drove over. The launch was scheduled for eight P.M.

“I didn’t know a launch was due,” I said. “Do they show it on TV?”

Michael said, “On NASA TV, yes. But you can see it from the porch.”

I felt a foolish prickle of wonder. “You can see a spaceship take off from your back door? …” I’d been to Florida many times, but that had never occurred to me.

The boy grinned. “Sure. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Gina said, “Don’t go sitting in the damp. And don’t stay out too long if it’s delayed, and you get cold—”

“We won’t,” I said. “Come on, kid.” I stood up and let Michael lead me by the hand, out through the darkened hall to the back door.

At the back of the house was a long covered porch. A couple of big swing benches hung from the roof, and big electric lamps were fixed to the wooden wall, banishing the night; beyond was just darkness.

“Shall we sit here?”

Michael said, “It’s kind of hard on your butt. Mom puts the cushions indoors to keep them dry.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Anyhow it isn’t the best view. Come on.” Still holding my hand, the boy made his way along a gravel path, barely visible to me, that sloped down toward the coast. He stepped confidently, secure in his little domain. I tried to follow without hesitation.

Gradually, as the house receded, a little island of light, the night opened up around us. The sky was black and huge, and speckled with stars. Behind me, inland, the lights of the city stained the scattered clouds orange-yellow. But when I looked east, toward the sea, there was only darkness. I could hear the ocean now, a low, restless growling.

Michael led me off the path a little way. I found myself walking on fine sand that slid into my shoes, so that I walked with a rasp. After a few paces Michael flopped to the ground. I somewhat gingerly lowered myself down, and found myself sitting on soft sand matted with coarse grass. The grass was prickly and a little damp with dew, and I knew my back would soon get stiff. But for now I was comfortable enough.

“My mom won’t let me go farther toward the sea at this time of night,” Michael said solemnly. A soft ripping noise told me he was tugging at the grass.

“Well, that’s sensible.” I spotted a light, far out on the breast of the sea. I pointed it out to Michael. “I wonder if it’s something to do with the launch. Don’t they have ships to pick up those solid-rocket boosters that drop off when the shuttle flies?”

Michael snickered. “I don’t think so. The recovery ships are a long way downrange.”

“Oh, right.”

Michael started talking briskly about shuttle launch operations, miming the assembly of the booster stack, and the liftoff from the Canaveral pads with his small hands. He parroted technical terms and acronyms, and when I gently tested him by asking about what lay behind the acronyms, he was always able to answer.

It was all of a piece with his work on the Frisbees. It hadn’t been so long — Christ, just a few years — since we had watched the Apollo 13 movie on TV, and we had chanted the countdown together, because that, said Michael, was the magic you needed to make a spaceship go. Later we had talked each other through the dreadful loss of the Columbia. Now his enthusiasm was still endearing, but his depth of knowledge was startling. To him, the shuttle was no longer a magical chariot, but a piece of engineering that you could pore over and take apart and understand — and maybe even make a better version of one day.

I suppressed a sigh. After all that he was only ten years old. Childhood is so long when you live it, but so brief when you look at it from outside. And my visits, the brief forays across the Atlantic at Christmas and in the summer, so precious to me, amounted to no more than a few days in total, spread over that evanescent decade.

Michael suddenly sat bolt upright. “Look! Look, there it is!”

And so it was, right on time. Looking to the north I saw a spark of light, supernova bright, climbing, it seemed, out of the sea. Its trajectory was already curving, a graceful arc, and I saw how the spark carved out a great pillar of smoke in the dense sea air, a pillar that itself was brightly lit from the inside. All this took place in utter silence, but the sense of power was astonishing — like something natural, a waterfall or a thunderstorm — it was startling to think that this mighty display was human-made.

We both erupted into cheers and applause, and hugged each other.

When we ran out of cheers I could hear more distant noise, a kind of crackle like very faraway thunder, or even gunfire. It might have been the sound of people cheering, strung out along this coast, or it might have been the sound of the shuttle’s ascent. As the shuttle climbed farther its light spread over the ocean, and a hundred reflected sparks slid over the gently swelling surface, tracking the rising spacecraft.

In the pale rocket light the face of Michael Poole Bazalget was like an upturned coin, but his mouth was set with a kind of determination, his eyes shadowed. I felt unaccountably disturbed. I wondered what this child, and his own children after him, would do with the world.

Chapter 13

The little party of refugees straggled up the hillside from the road.

The farmstead was just a huddle of buildings, lost on the hill’s broad flank. There were no lights. Regina saw the gaping holes of unglazed windows, decayed roofs, fields sketched out by drystone walls but choked with weeds. Beyond the buildings a forest, dense and dark, coated the upper hillside.

The place was abandoned.

There were five of them — Regina, Cartumandua and Severus, Marina, Carausias — and they stood in a huddle. Already the night was falling, the cold descending. They had been on the road for nearly a month, since the burning of Verulamium, a month they had spent walking ever west. They must look as lost and helpless, Regina thought, as the buildings themselves.

“They said they would wait,” Carausias said plaintively. “Arcadius was a friend of my brother — a close friend. They said they would wait for us.”

Severus broke away, snarling his contempt. “I’ve heard nothing but your whining and excuses, old man, all the way from Verulamium.”

Carta said wearily, “Severus, we’re all exhausted.”

“And because of this old fool’s sentimental stupidity we are stranded on this hillside. I told you we should have gone to Londinium.”

“We’ve been over this. There was nothing for us in Londinium.”

“Arcadius said he would wait,” Carausias repeated. He rummaged beneath his cloak. “I have the letters, the letters—”

Severus stalked off over the darkling hillside.

Marina said, frightened, “Severus, please.”

Carta held her back. “Let him go. He’d do no good here.”

“But what are we to do?”

Carta had no answer. Carausias walked purposelessly back and forth over the hillside, limping as he had done since the first day, despite the bandages that cradled his feet inside his leather shoes. It was as if they were all locked in their own heads.

Regina crouched down, hugging her knees to her belly. At least she was spared the cramps she had suffered almost continually since they had started their great trek from Verulamium.

Arcadius was a friend of the family who had a farmstead here, deep in the heart of the countryside to the west. It had always been the plan for Arcadius and Carausias to pool their resources and make for Armorica together. Because of Amator, Carausias had lost his money, and he admitted that it had been a year or more since he had been in contact with Arcadius, because of the unreliability of the post these days. But he was sure that Arcadius would wait for him, and would welcome them into his home.

That had been the promise that had sustained them through that first, terrifying night of flight from burning Verulamium — the first dismal hours when they had tried to sleep out in the open, keeping away from the stream of refugees, the crying children and limping invalids, the drunks — the promise that had kept them all going through the days and nights of their hike ever west, as Carausias and Severus had used the last of their money to buy a little food, water, and shelter from broken-down inns.

Then the countryside had been hostile. The collapse of the Roman province had affected most directly the one in ten who had lived in the villas and towns, many of whom were now trying to find a place in the countryside, like Regina and her party. But the farmers had been affected, too, however they had grumbled about tax. Without the need to produce a surplus to pay the Emperor’s taxes the farmers had cut their workload back to what was necessary to maintain their families. But with the towns declining there was no market to sell or trade what surplus there was, and there was nowhere to buy manufactured goods like pottery or tools. Iron goods in particular were in very short supply, for people had forgotten the ancient craft of iron making. Many farms were being operated at a more basic level than the farmers’ ancestors had achieved centuries before.

Anyhow there had been no place for Regina and her party: no hospitality, no offers of help from hungry, resentful, suspicious people, and they had used up the last of their money on overpriced inns. But it didn’t matter. Once they got here, to this hill farm and Carausias’s friends, everything would be all right.

But now here they were, and there was nobody after all. It was just another betrayal. As never before the future seemed a blank, black, terrifying emptiness. Regina wrapped her arms over her belly and the growing, hungry life it contained.

Carta sat beside her. “Are you all right?”

“None of us is all right,” Regina said. “What a mess.”

“Yes. What a mess,” Cartumandua said. “This farm must have been abandoned at least a year. Poor, foolish Carausias.”

“There’s nothing for us here.”

“But there is nowhere else to go, and we have no more money,” said Carta grimly. “It doesn’t seem such a bad location to me. There is water down there.” She pointed to a marshy area at the foot of the grassy hill, the thread of a sluggish river beyond. “The fields are overgrown but they have been worked before; they should not be difficult to plow. This hillside is a little away from the road. Perhaps we will not be such a target for the bacaudae.”

“What are you talking about? Who is going to plow the fields? How will we pay them?”

“Nobody will plow them for us,” Carta said doggedly. “ We will plow them.”

Regina stared at her. “You are making up stories. We have nothing to eat now. We’ll be lucky to live through the night. And, if you haven’t noticed, it is the autumn. What crops will we grow in the winter? And besides — Carta, I don’t want to be a farmer.”

“And I didn’t want to be a slave,” Carta said. “I survived that, and I will survive this. As will you.” She clambered to her feet and pulled Regina’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go and take a look at the buildings.”

Reluctantly Regina followed.

The farm buildings were clustered around a square of churned-up mud. There were three barnlike structures, with neat rectangular plans of the Roman kind, and the remains of a roundhouse, a more primitive building with a great conical roof of blackened thatch, and walls of wattle and daub.

Regina drifted toward the square-built structures, the most familiar. Once they must have been smart, bright buildings; she could see traces of whitewash on the walls and a few bright red tiles still clinging to the wooden slats of the roofs. But one had been burned out altogether, and the roofs of the others, all but stripped of tiles, had rotted through. She stepped through a doorway. The floor was littered with rubble and cracked by a flourishing community of weeds. Something scuttled away in the gloom.

Carta pointed at the roundhouse. “We’d be better off in this.”

Regina wrinkled her nose. “In that mud pie? I can smell it from here. And look at that rotting thatch — there are animals living in it !”

“But we have a better chance of repairing it,” Carta said. “Face it, Regina — how are we to bake roof tiles?”

“We could get them replaced.”

Carta laughed tiredly. “Oh, Regina — by whom? Where are the craftsmen? And how are we to pay them? … Regina, I know this is hard. But I don’t see anybody standing around waiting to help us, do you? If we don’t fix it ourselves — well, it won’t get fixed.”

Regina rested a hand on her belly. Carta’s realism and doggedness somehow made things worse, not better.

There was a call from the lower slopes of the hillside. Severus was returning, with something heavy and limp slung over his shoulder. Regina soon made out the iron stink of blood, and a deeper stench of rot. Grunting, Severus let his burden fall to the muddy ground. It was the carcass of a young deer. Its head had almost been severed from its body, presumably by Severus’s knife. Severus was sweating, and his tunic was stained deep with blood. “Got lucky,” he said. “Leg stuck in a trap. Already dying, I think. See?”

The deer had been very young, Regina saw. Its horns were mere stubs, and its body small and lithe. But one of its legs dangled awkwardly, and a putrid smell rose from blackened flesh.

Severus leaned over the limp corpse. With inefficient but brutal thrusts he dug his knife into the hip joint above the deer’s good hind leg. With some noisy sawing of cartilage and bone, he ripped the joint apart, and hung the limb over his shoulder. “We’ve got neighbors,” he said, pointing with his bloody knife. “I saw lights. A farmstead over that way, over the ridge. I’m going to see if they’ll trade.”

“Yes,” said Carausias urgently. “There are many things we need—”

“What I need is some wheat beer,” said Severus. “I’ve had enough of this for one night.”

Carausias called, “You can’t be so selfish, man!”

But Carta only said, “Come back alive.”

When he had gone, the others stood over the carcass. Blood slowly leaked out of its throat and into the mud.

Carausias whispered, as if he might wake the deer, “What do we do?”

At length Regina sighed. “I used to watch the butchers at the villa. We need rope …”

They dug through the garbage in the buildings until Marina found a mouse-chewed length of rope. To Regina’s horror the deer’s flesh was warm and soft; she had never touched anything so recently dead. But she got the rope tied around the deer’s remaining hind leg. She slung the rope over the branch of a tree. With the three of them hauling, they managed to drag the carcass into the branches.

The deer dangled like a huge, gruesome fruit. Blood, and darker fluids, flowed sluggishly from its neck and pooled on the ground.

Carta watched dubiously. “We should collect that blood.”

“Why?”

“You can cook it — mix it with herbs — stuff the intestines with it. I’ve seen it done. We shouldn’t waste anything.”

Regina felt her gorge rise. But she said, “We don’t have a bowl to catch it. Next time.”

“Yes.”

Regina stepped forward with Carausias’s knife. Calling on grisly memories from childhood, she reached up, plunged the knife into the deer’s skin under its belly, and with all her strength hauled the blade down the length of the carcass. Intestines slipped out, tangles of dark rope. She flinched back, trembling. Her tunic and flesh were splashed with dark blood, and her hands were already crimson to the wrists. She stepped behind the carcass and began to tug at the flaps of skin. “Help me,” she said. “After this we should cut off the other legs.”

Carausias built a fire in the ruins of the roundhouse. The wood they gathered was young and damp with dew, and they had trouble getting it burning. But when it was fully alight, and bits of the meat were cooking on an improvised spit, they huddled together around the light and warmth. The meat was tough, lean, almost impossible to bite into, and its bloody, smoky stink was repellent. But Regina was always aware of the speck of life inside her, and so she forced the meat into her mouth, and chewed it until it was soft, and swallowed it down.

“We are like savages,” Carausias said. “Barbarians. This is no way to live.”

“But barbarians have their arts,” Carta said. “Your butchery, Regina—”

“I was clumsy.”

“You will do better. There are older skills we must try to recall. For instance, we should keep the hide, cure it if we can. And preserve the meat. We have been lucky, but we are not hunters; it may be a while before we have another windfall like this one. We could smoke it, dry it in the sun, perhaps pack it in salt …”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But we will learn. And in future we should save the fat, too. Perhaps we could make tallow — candles—”

Carausias placed a hand on her shoulder. “Enough for tonight, niece.”

When the eating was done, Regina shrank into the deepest shade of the roundhouse roof she could find. With a corner of her cloak she tried to wipe the animal blood from her hands and face. Soon her skin was sore, and the cloth was starting to shred, but still the blood wouldn’t come off her skin.

Carausias came to her in the dark. He sat beside her and rested his hands on hers, stopping her obsessive scrubbing. “In the morning we will find water,” he said. “And then we will all get clean.”

“I don’t want this,” Regina hissed. “I don’t want to live like a, like a dog. Carta is so strong.”

“Yes. And that makes it worse, doesn’t it? Because by accepting it, she makes it real. But you are strong, too, Regina. The way you handled the deer—”

“I don’t want to be strong. Not like this.” She looked up at his kindly face, blood-streaked and obscure in the dark. “Things will get back to normal, won’t they, Carausias?”

He shrugged. “Even now, Rome spans a continent, a thousand-year-old imperium just a day’s sailing away, over the ocean. This has been a dreadful interval for us all. But why should we believe we live in special times, the end times? How arrogant of us, how foolish.”

“Yes. But in the meantime—”

“It will surely only be a few weeks before we see the post messengers clattering along the roads again. Until then, we must just get by.”

“Just a few weeks. Yes.”

The deer fed them for the first few days. They were able to supplement the meat with late-blooming berries. For water they had to trek several times a day to the marsh at the bottom of the hill; they carried the water home in a wooden bucket salvaged from the ruins of the farm.

But the first rains nearly doused their fire, and turned the floor of the roundhouse into a quagmire. Despite his attempts at bravery Carausias wept that night, bedraggled, cold, humiliated at how far he had let his family fall.

They had to repair the roof, Regina realized.

Severus said he could handle this. He clambered onto the roof, hauling branches of oak and hazel over the gaping hole. Regina felt optimistic: surely such a crude structure as this required only the crudest repairs. But when Severus shifted his weight unwisely, his heaping gave way, and he fell to the muddy floor in a shower of snapped branches. He got to his feet and kicked at the mess, swearing oaths to the gods of the Christians, the British, and the Romans, and stalked off in a sulk.

So Regina decided she would have to do it.

She walked around the little house, studying the roof’s structure. Its conical shape was built on several main rafters that had been leaned together and then tied off at the top to a central pole. There was more complicated woodwork, the remains of a ring beam and crisscross rafters. But the main problem was that two or three of the big rafters had gone.

None of Severus’s hasty gatherings would serve as new rafters, and they had no ax. But in the forest on the upper reaches of the hillside they were able to find long, fallen branches. It took Carausias, Regina, and Carta together to drag the branches down the hill. Then, together, they pushed their improvised rafters into place. Marina, reluctant but the lightest, was sent to climb up the thatch to the hut’s apex, where she tied the new rafters to the old. The complicated cross structure was beyond Regina for now. But she did have Marina tie light hazel branches to her new rafters, and they began expeditions to the marsh to pile up river reeds as thatch, great layers of it.

It was crude, ugly, but it worked.

Once the roof was waterproof things got better quickly. There were still whole dynasties of mice inhabiting the old thatch, but a few days of intensive smoking saw to that. The ruined roof had allowed the rain to attack the wattle-and-daub walls, but their basic structure of thin, interwoven hazel branches was still sound. Regina and Carta plugged the holes in the walls with mud and straw, pushing the stuff in from either side and smoothing it off with their fingers.

When at last they shut out the last of the daylight, they had a small celebration. They sat in a circle around their fire, with smoke curling out through the chimney hole in their new roof, and their deer-fat candles burned smokily. They ate the last of the deer’s liver, cooked with wild garlic Marina had found growing behind the huts. They felt they had done well; it was still only a few days since they had gotten here.

It was then that Regina felt ready to unwrap her precious matres from the length of cloth in which they had been carried. She set them in a crude alcove, to watch over the heap of dried reeds on which she now slept.

Next time they caught a deer, in a simple trap Severus had set, they were more efficient in using it. They kept the hide intact to cover the roundhouse floor, and even boiled the bones to extract the marrow.

Most of their food came from traps — mostly smaller game, especially hares. But they established a tentative trading relationship with the farm Severus had found beyond the ridge. The farmer, a tall, ferociously bearded, suspicious man called Exsuperius, was prepared to exchange their meat for winter vegetables like cabbage, and even clothing, worn-out tunics, cloaks, and blankets. The clothing, old and lice-ridden as it might be, was hugely welcome. Regina began to experiment with ways to wash their clothes in the river — wood ash, being slightly caustic, made a good cleansing agent.

But no matter how Carausias or Carta pleaded, Exsuperius would spare them no pottery, no footwear, and no tools — no saws or hammers or knives — no iron at all, in fact, not so much as a nail for their shoes.

Severus did his share, if grudgingly. As the strongest of them by far he would haul the heaviest loads, and he experimented with bigger traps and slingshots to bring down more game. But he was unreliable and short-tempered. He would barely speak to the rest of them, and he even seemed to neglect Carta.

Regina felt she would never understand Carta’s relationship with Severus. They never seemed happy together — there had never been any hint that Carta wished to have a child with Severus — and yet their relationship, now years old, somehow endured. It was as if neither of them hoped for anything better from life.

When she learned that Severus had kept trying to trade meat for beer from Exsuperius, Regina understood that he could not be depended on.

The days turned to weeks, and then to months. They watched every day for soldiers or post carriers to come along the road. But things did not get back to normal.

Little by little they made themselves comfortable. But every day she had to figure out something new: the business of survival was remarkably complicated. And life was relentlessly hard, every hour from dawn to dusk filled with hard physical labor. The frosts of winter came, and life grew harder yet.

Still, even though the new life in her belly grew relentlessly, Regina felt herself becoming stronger, the skin of her hands and feet and face hardening, the muscles in her legs and shoulders thickening. She ate ravenously, to feed her unborn baby and to keep out the cold. But she did not fall ill. Carausias suffered a good deal, though; his joints and back, already frail, never recovered from the long walk from Verulamium, and though he gamely tried to keep up his share of the work, his weakness was obvious.

And it was, to Regina’s horror, Cartumandua who became the most seriously ill of all.

It started with a pain in her belly. It persisted no matter what she ate, and even when she didn’t eat at all. When Regina touched Carta’s belly she found a hard lump, below her rib cage, almost like another, malevolent child.

None of them had any idea what could be ailing Carta. There was, of course, no doctor to call on. Regina even tried begging medicines from the bearded farmer. Exsuperius offered nothing save advice about letting Carta chew on willow bark. When Carta tried that she found the gathering pain would, if only briefly, be lessened. But gradually, day by day, Carta grew weaker and more sallow, and Regina felt a growing dread.

When the days were shortest, much of the marshy land froze. The daily chore of fetching water could never be skipped, but they had to walk farther to find a place where the water wasn’t frozen, or where the ice was thin enough to break. The water walks came to dominate their lives, the first thing Regina woke up thinking about each morning.

On one particularly bleak, gray midwinter morning, she and Marina made the first walk down to the marsh. They had dug a cesspit here. Regina squatted over the hole in the ground, her dress lifted up to expose her backside to the raw cold.

Suddenly she imagined how her younger self might have felt if she could have seen her crouching in this muddy pond. In her mother’s villa there had been a latrine close to the kitchen, so water from the kitchen could be used to flush. There were sponge sticks and vials of perfumed water to keep yourself clean, and the little room was always rich with cooking smells. And now, this. She had come to this pass step by step — and every step downward — she had been so busy staying alive that she had forgotten how far from home she had come.

But you had to shit. She squatted, strained, and finished her business as quickly as she could, cleaning herself with a handful of grass.

Today was misty but not as ferociously cold as it had been, and the marsh might be unfrozen at the center. So, carefully, she walked down to its rough shore and picked her way over frozen mud and puddles of sheer ice. She came to a patch of open, slushy water, where dead reeds, brown and lank, floated like hair. She bent and reached into the ice-cold water to pull the reeds aside. But she felt a sharp pain.

She pulled back her arm. Her palm had been gashed, and bright red blood, the brightest color in a landscape of gray and green-brown, dripped down her arm, mingling with the water that clung to her skin.

Marina came to her nervously. “What is it?”

“I think I’ve been bitten. Perhaps a pike—”

Marina inspected her hand. “That looks like no bite to me. You need to wash that off …”

“Yes.” Regina bent to peer into the water. Through the layer of reeds she could see no fish. But she did make out a bright gleam, like a coin in a well. More cautiously, with her good hand, she reached down and explored. It was hard to judge the depth of the murky water. She quickly found something hard and flat — a blade. Carefully she took hold of it between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it out.

It was a knife. Its iron blade was heavily rusted, but its hilt, of bright yellow metal engraved with swooping circular designs, seemed unmarked. “I think this is gold,” she said, wondering.

Marina was unimpressed. “Old Exsuperius would probably give you a bag of beans for the iron, nothing for the gold,” she said, businesslike.

“I wonder how it got here.”

“An offering,” said Marina unexpectedly. “To the river. When you die — you give it your armor, your weapons, your treasure. It’s what they always did, away from the towns. Like they did before … We probably pulled it up when we tugged on the reeds.”

A dead man’s hoard. It was an eerie thought, and Regina glanced around uneasily at the mist-laden, murky landscape.

In many parts of the countryside the touch of Roman rule had always been light. As long as folk kept the peace and paid their taxes, the Emperor had never very much cared what they got up to in their private lives. Perhaps a community in this remote farmstead had kept up the rituals of their distant forebears, and thrown their personal goods into the marsh as propitiations to the goddesses of the water and the earth. The rational corner of her mind wondered if it might have been better for these vanished warriors to hold on to their weapons, to keep their money and spend it on trade or defenses, rather than hurl it into this marsh so extravagantly. Then they might have resisted the Romans better.

Probably there were bodies here, too, hurled into the water. They would be the dead, not of her time, but of the strange times of the deeper past, before the legionaries and census keepers and tax collectors: not her dead, but the dead of other, alien folk, whose spirits might, somehow, still linger in the mists of this ancient, endlessly reworked landscape.

She was shivering. She tucked the little weapon into her belt.

Back at the roundhouse Carta poured urine over Regina’s hand to clean out her wound, and rubbed in honey, expensively bought from Exsuperius, to stop any infection. The next day it was brighter, and Regina’s odd superstitious fears were banished. But the brightness brought a deeper cold, and the marsh was frozen over, hiding its strange trove.

As winter turned to spring, Regina’s heavy belly slowed her down. But this was a community of three women, one old man, and the unreliable, lazy Severus, and there was no room for passengers.

Still, it wasn’t so bad. One way or another they never ran short of food, even during the worst of the winter. And as the days grew longer and warmer, despite the load in her belly, she felt stronger, oddly, than she ever had before.

And it seemed that as Carta had gradually weakened, the others had come to look to Regina for leadership. So she was the first off her pallet of reeds each morning, the first to take her turns with the water fetching, the first to check the traps, always setting an example with her own efforts.

She was poor at bending and lifting, and couldn’t climb onto the roof of the roundhouse. But she could work a foot plow. One morning she set to hauling it across one of the fields on the slope behind the farmstead. She had to dig its iron point into the soil, push it in with her foot, and then haul back on the handle, which was nearly as tall as she was, to break open the soil.

The iron plow with its bowed wooden handle had been a precious find, left under a heap of decaying sacking by the vanished Arcadius and his workers. They had used more of their hunted meat to buy seed stock for wheat, kale, and cabbages from Exsuperius. Now the time was coming — as she dimly recalled from her memories of life in the villa — to plow and plant.

With the foot plow, however, it was only possible to scratch a shallow groove in the ground. It was galling to remember how her father’s tenants had used ox teams to break the soil over vast areas, while she was reduced to this pitiful scraping. But Exsuperius, in one of his bits of taciturn advice, had told them to plow their fields twice, in a crisscross pattern, to break up the ground better. And she found that when she came to the second set of furrows the plow fairly slid into the already broken soil.

By midday, her muscles had thoroughly warmed up, and the sun shed a little warmth on her face.

After so many months she no longer felt quite so obsessively bitter about Aetius, and Marcus and Julia, and Amator — especially Amator — all the people who had, one way or another, abandoned her. As for her companions here on the farm, they had been thrown together by chance, and they were none of them perfect: Carausias an overtrusting old fool, Severus lazy, selfish, and sullen, Marina timid and lacking initiative, and Carta — dear Carta, now terribly weakened. These were not the people with whom Regina would have chosen to be spending the eighteenth year of her life. But they were her people, she was coming to see: they were the people who had taken her in after her grandfather’s death, who had sheltered her as best they could …

It was at that moment, just as she had reached the nearest thing to contentment she had enjoyed since that night with Amator, that the first contraction came. She fell to the ground, yelling for Carta, as waves of pain rippled over her belly.

What followed was a blur. Here were Marina and old Carausias, their faces looming over her like moons. They were too weak to carry her, so she had to get to her feet and, leaning heavily on their shoulders, limp to the house.

Carta’s face was yellow and drawn. She looked as if she could barely stand herself. But she placed her hands on Regina’s belly, and felt the pulsing muscles, the position of the baby.

Regina yelled, “It’s too early! Oh, Carta, make it stop!”

Carta shook her head. “The baby has its own time … Get her on the bed, Marina, quickly.” She lifted Regina’s tunic, grubby with dirt from the fields, and placed a wooden plank, scavenged from one of the other buildings, under Regina’s buttocks.

“Here. Take this.” It was Carausias, looming over her. He had brought her one of her precious matres. They, at least, had never abandoned her; she clutched the lumpy little statue to her chest.

The contractions were coming in waves now.

Carta snapped, “Regina, pull back your knees.” Regina reached down and, with a huge effort, hooked her fingers behind her knees and pulled her legs back and apart.

Carta forced a smile. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you plow that wretched field.”

“And who else was to do it? … Ow-w! Carta—”

“Yes?”

“You have done this before, haven’t you?”

“What, delivered a baby? Have you plowed a field before?”

With the next contraction the pain became unbelievably intense, as if she were slowly being torn apart.

Carta leaned closer. Even through her own pain Regina saw how pale she was, her white face glistening with oily sweat. “Regina, listen to me. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No, child,” Carta said sadly. “No, I don’t think it can. Your father … You remember how he died.”

It was an awful image to come wafting through her clouds of pain. “I could hardly forget—”

“It was me.”

“What?”

“I was the one he was unfaithful with. I was the reason he punished himself.”

Regina gasped. “Carta, how could you? You betrayed my mother—”

Carta’s bloodless mouth worked. “He gave me no choice.”

Marina screamed, “I can see its head!”

Carta pulled back to see. “Marina, help me …” She reached down to support Regina’s perineum, and cupped her hand around the baby’s head. “The cord is around its neck … Uncle, give me that knife. Now, you old fool.” Even through her own pain Regina could feel Carta’s hands trembling as she worked.

When the cord was cut, the baby’s body slid smoothly out, tumbling into Marina’s waiting arms with a last gush of fluid. Marina picked mucus from the baby’s button mouth. Carta stayed with Regina until the afterbirth had emerged, and then she packed her vagina with moss to stem the bleeding.

Regina, despite her weakness and exhaustion, had eyes only for her baby, which had begun to wail thinly. “Let me see …”

“It’s a girl,” Marina said, her eyes bright. She had wrapped the baby in a clean bit of blanket, and now she leaned down toward Regina so she could see the round pink face.

Carta said, “I think — I think …” And she fell back, slumping to the floor. Regina tried to see, but could not raise her head.

Carausias cried, “Cartumandua! Come, oh come, my little niece, we can’t have this.” He fumbled for a small flask; Regina knew it contained an extract of deadly nightshade, a heart stimulant bought at great expense from Exsuperius. He tried to pour droplets between Carta’s lips, but her face was like a wax mask.

Her goddess heavy on her chest, fear and rage flooded Regina. “No! No, you sow, you bitch, you cow,

you whore, Cartumandua! You won’t leave me, not you, too, you slave, not now!”

But Carta did not respond, not even to apologize. The baby’s crying continued, thin and eerie.

That evening Severus returned from his hunting. He saw the baby, the mess in the hut, Carta’s body.

Severus stayed that night and the next. He helped Carausias and Marina prepare the body, and he used the plow to dig a shallow grave in the rocky ground at the top of the hill. But when Carta’s body was buried, he walked away, taking nothing but the clothes on his back. Regina knew they would never see him again.

Chapter 14

“I followed General Clark as we climbed the steps of the cordonata toward the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill. And all around Rome the bells of the campanili rang out …”

Lou Casella, my mother’s uncle, my great-uncle, was over eighty. He was a short, stocky man, bald save for a fringe of snow-white hair, with liver-spotted skin stretched over impressive muscles. His voice was soft, husky, and to my ears, mostly educated by movies and TV, he sounded like a classic New York Italian American, something like an old Danny DeVito, maybe. He sat facing Lake Worth, sunset light glimmering in his rheumy familiar eyes — the family eyes, gray as smoke — as he told me how, in June 1944 at age twenty-two, he had entered Rome as an aide to General Mark Clark, commander of the victorious Fifth Army.

“In the place where I stood with Clark, Brutus, fresh from the murder of Caesar, once came to speak to the people. Augustus made sacrificial offerings to Jupiter. Greek monks prayed their way through the Dark Ages. Gibbon was inspired to write his great history. And now here we were, a bunch of ragged- ass GIs. But we’d made our own piece of history already. All I could see was faces, thousands upon thousands of Roman faces turned up toward us.

“And even then I knew that among those hopeful crowds I would find family …”

I had found Lou in a retirement home just off Seaspray Avenue in Palm Beach.

“What the hell kind of a coat is that?” he asked of my duffel. It was the first thing he said to me. “Where do you think you are, Alaska? Haven’t seen a thing like that since the army.”

It had taken me a while to trace him. The address Gina gave me was out of date. She wasn’t apologetic. “I haven’t seen him for ten years,” she said. “And anyhow you don’t think of people that age changing address, do you?”

Evidently Lou was an exception. His old address had been a rented apartment in Palm Beach. There was no forwarding contact, but Dan advised me to try the American Association of Retired Persons, which turned out to be a muscular lobby group. They were reluctant to give me his address, but acted as a third party to put us in touch. In all it took a couple of days before Lou finally called me at my hotel, and invited me over.

Lou showed me around his rest home. It was like a spacious hotel, every room sunlit, with dozens of white-coated staff and its own immense grounds. You could get permits for golf courses and private beaches. There was a daily program of exercise. As well as old-folk nostalgic social events like wartime picture shows and big-band dances, I saw notices for guest speakers from universities and other learned organizations on such topics as Florida history, coastal flora and fauna, art deco, even the history of Disney.

When I enthused about all this, Lou slapped me down. He called the place “the departure lounge.” He walked me to a dayroom, where rows of citizens sat in elaborate armchairs, propped up before a gigantic, supremely loud wide-screen TV. “They like reality shows,” he said. “Like having real live people here in the room with them. We do have a little community here. But every so often one of us just gets plucked out of here, and we all fight over his empty chair. So don’t get all nostalgic about being old. You’re fine so long as you keep fit, and you don’t lose your marbles.” He tapped his bare, sun- leathered cranium. “Which is why I walk three miles a day, and swim, and play golf, and do the New York Times crossword every day.”

I was impressed. “You complete the crossword?”

“Did I say complete? … So you want to talk about your sister.”

I’d told him the story on the phone. I’d brought a copy of the photograph, scanned and cleaned up by Peter McLachlan; Lou had glanced at it but didn’t seem much interested. “I want to close the whole business off,” I said.

“Or you’re picking a scab,” he said warningly. “I never met her, your sister. So if you want to know what she’s like—”

“Just tell me the story,” I said. I spread my hands, and tried to imitate his Godfather accent. “Picture the scene. Rome, nineteen forty-four. The liberating army is welcomed by a smiling populace—”

He laughed, and clapped me on the back. “Shithead. Christ, you are your father’s boy; he made the same kind of dumb jokes. All right, I’ll tell you the story. And I’ll tell you what was told to me by Maria Ludovica.”

“Who?”

“Your cousin,” he said. “Or whatever.”

Maria Ludovica. It was the first time I’d heard the name. It wouldn’t be the last.

We sat in a bright dayroom, and began to talk.

“When we had operations established, and we got the electricity back to the hospitals on the second day, and the phones working on the third, and so forth, I had time to look around a little … I knew the family had roots in Rome. I knew where my grandparents had come from — near the Appian Way — and it wasn’t hard to dig out some Casellas in the area. Whatever you say about those fascists, they kept good records.”

So young Sergeant Casella had ventured nervously down the Appian Way, the ancient road that led south out of Rome. In that hot autumn of 1944 the area was crowded with refugees, and everything was shabby, poor, dirty, deprived, despite the liberators’ best efforts.

He had found a “nest of Casellas,” as he put it, an extended family living under the stern eye of a black- wrapped widow who turned out to be a cousin of his father. “It was a small house in a kind of down-at- the-heel suburb. I mean it had been down-at-the-heel even before the damn occupation. And now there were, hell, twenty people living in there, stacked up. Refugees, even a wounded soldier—”

“All relatives.”

“Yep. And with no place to go. They made me welcome. I was a liberating hero, and family. They made me a vast meal, even though they had so little themselves. Aunt Cara produced this tub of risotto with mushrooms — dense and thick and buttery, though God knows where she got the butter from …” He closed his eyes. “I can taste it to this day. They asked me to help, of course. I couldn’t bend the rules, but I did what I could. I had my own salary, my own rations; I diverted some of that.

“They had some sick kids in there. Two boys and a girl. They were pale, hollow-eyed, coughing … I couldn’t tell what was wrong, but it looked bad. They had to wait in line for the civilian docs, and in those days medical supplies were scarcer than anything else, as you can imagine. I tried to get an army medic to come out, but of course he wouldn’t.”

“And so you turned to Maria Ludovica?”

“It was all I could think of.”

By this time Maria Ludovica had come looking for him. In an inverse of the family search Lou had performed, Maria, or others from the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, had inspected the new invaders of Rome for any family connections, and they had found Lou.

“Maria was really your cousin?”

“No. Something farther away than that. Remember it was my grandparents — your, uh, great- great — grandparents, I guess — who left Rome for the States in the first place. Hell, I don’t know what you’d call our relationship. But she was a Casella all right. Those gray eyes, you know — you have them,” he said, looking at me. “But she had black hair tied up around her head, cheekbones you could have eaten a meal off, and an ass — well, I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like that to a kid like you. But she was sexy like you wouldn’t believe. No wonder Mussolini couldn’t keep his hands off her.”

“Mussolini?”

“She was never a fascist — that’s what she told me, and of course she would say that to an American soldier in nineteen forty-four — but I believed her. It turns out she’d known the Duce since the thirties. She first saw him in October nineteen twenty-two, when he first came to power, and she joined in the March on Rome: four columns, twenty-six thousand strong, closing on the city. The army and the police just stood aside as all those blackshirts marched in. Maria was sort of swept up; where she came from, in Ravenna to the north, it was politic just to go along with it.”

“And she became — what, his mistress?”

“You might call it that. She met him face to face the first time on Christmas Eve in ‘thirty-three, when she was brought to Rome as one of the ninety-three most prolific women in the country.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Ninety-three women in black shawls, mothers of thirteen hundred little Italians, soldiers for fascism.”

I did the math quickly. “Thirteen each?”

He grinned. “They were heroes. But we’ve always been a fecund family, George. Our women stay fertile late, too.” That was true, I reflected, thinking of Gina. “The heroic mothers were taken on a tour of the city, and they saw the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where Maria kissed a glass case that contained a bloodstained handkerchief — the Duce had held it to a bullet wound in his nose after he survived an assassination attempt.” He winked at me. “But that wasn’t all she kissed.”

I spluttered.

“Come on, kid. I think we need a walk.”

And walk we did, at an impressively brisk pace, trotting around town on what I took to be one of his regular three-mile routes.

Palm Beach is set on a narrow tongue of land between the Atlantic, to the east, and Lake Worth, to the west. The city itself is set out according to a classic American grid layout, a neat tracing no more than

four blocks wide from coast to coast. We tramped south down the County Road, peering dutifully at landmarks like the town hall and the Memorial Park fountain, a water feature fringed by swaying palm trees under a powder-blue sky. Then we turned onto Worth Avenue, four blocks of overpriced shops: Cartier, Saks, Tiffany, Ungaro’s, stocking everything from Armani clothes to antique Russian icons, anything you wanted, nothing with a price tag. One of the shops boasted the world’s largest stock of antique Meissen porcelain. Outside the shops limousine engines idled.

Lou said, “So what do you think? A little different from Manchester?”

“Too bloody expensive.”

“Yeah, but if you were rich enough your head would work differently. You don’t spend to get stuff. You spend as a statement. But it hasn’t always been this way. I started to come here in the early sixties. We had a beach house, farther up the coast.”

“We?”

“Lisa, my wife. Two boys. Already growing up, even then.” He didn’t mention the wife and kids again; I inferred the usual story, the wife had died, the kids rarely visited. “It was a good place for the summer. But back then it was kind of different.” The town had been founded in the nineteenth century as a winter playground for the well heeled. In the twenties had come further development. “It was a winter town. In the summer they used to dismantle the traffic lights! Now, though, it stays open all year. Some say it’s the richest town in the Union.”

“So you’ve done well to end up here,” I said.

“ End up. You’re not around old people much, are you?”

“Shit. I—”

“Ah, forget it. Yes, I did okay. Stock options—” His talk drifted back to the Second World War. He had been a draftee. “I was lucky. Spared the fighting. I already had some business experience, helping my father run his machine shop as a kid. So I got staff positions. Logistics. Requisitions. The work was endless.

“The invasion of Italy was the biggest bureaucratic exercise in history. We were heroes of paperwork.” I grinned dutifully. “But it was good experience. I learned a hell of a lot, about people, business, systems. Stuff you learn in the army you can apply anywhere.

“I went back home after the war, but my father’s business felt too small, with all respect to the old man.” Having grown up in New York — he was old enough to remember the Wall Street crash — Lou took some positions in the financial industry. “But I got impatient with being so far from the action. After Italy,

moving funds around, buying and selling stocks, watching numbers on a ticker tape — it was all too remote. I’m not a miner or an engineer. But I wanted to work somewhere I could see things being built.”

So, after taking some kind of business degree, he had moved to California to work for none other than North American Aviation in Downey, California.

“It was North American built Apollo. You know, the moon ship?” I nodded. Evidently he was used to younger people never having heard of the program. “Not all of it,” he said. “Just the CSM — the command and service modules, the part that came back to Earth. I did well at North American. I was in the right place at the right time. We believed we could achieve anything, on any scale, if we worked hard enough, with our flow charts and schedules and critical paths. Why not? That was how we won the war, and how we managed Project Apollo. Four hundred thousand people, all across the country, all doing their tiny part — but all controlled from the center, all those resources pouring in, like building a mountain out of grains of sand, a huge mountain you could climb all the way to the moon.”

He was a solid character, intense, engaged, vividly real. In his anecdotes I glimpsed a postwar America growing fast, confident and rich, a time of technological growth and economic expansion — and I liked the idea that a relative of mine had been there at the fall of Rome, and had worked on Apollo. But I wasn’t enjoying the encounter. Beside him I felt pale, diminished, uncertain, maybe a bit intimidated. And young.

We turned off Worth onto Lake Drive South, which ran north along the coast of Lake Worth. Here the road was part of a bicycle trail, and in the low afternoon light there were people cycling, skateboarding, jogging.

“Here, you can buy me a Popsicle.”

It turned out he meant an ice lolly; we had come to an ice cream stall. I stumped up for two great gaudy confections, so sugary I couldn’t finish mine. But we sat on a stone bench and gazed out at the ducks paddling on Lake Worth. The flat western light made his face look like a bronze sculpture, all plains and grooves.

By 1943 the war was going badly for the Italians. Mussolini was removed and arrested, and an armistice signed. When the Allies landed at Salerno, the Germans found out about the deal. Rome quickly fell to the Nazis.

“The Order was involved in the resistance, in a quiet way,” Lou said. “So Maria Ludovica told me. The Germans tried to call up all the young men for work on factories or farms or mines, or on the defense lines they were building to oppose the Allied advance. And the city was full of escaped POWs. Lots of people to hide. We estimated that at one time, of a city of a million and a half or so, about two hundred thousand were being hidden, in homes, churches, even the Vatican.”

“And the Order—”

“They have a big complex there, big and old and deep. Not that I ever saw it.” I wondered, Deep? “Yes, the Order did their share. And it was not without risk. Family, huh — I guess we should be proud.”

Air raids began, even though Rome was supposed to be an open city, aiming at railway lines but hitting civilians in such customary friendly-fire targets as hospitals. “The gas and electricity went altogether,” said Lou. “They cut up the benches and trees in the parks for wood. The Order started selling meals, hundreds a day, at a lira a head.

“But then the citizens started to hear the heavy guns.

“Maria Ludovica came out to the Lungotevere to watch the Germans go. Armed to the teeth but dejected, bedraggled. Everybody was silent. Makes you think,” he said. “A Roman crowd, surrounded by all those ancient monuments, once again seeing the retreat of an occupying army.”

“And then you arrived.”

“Yep. I walked in after the tanks that came up the Porta San Giovanni. In the evening everybody lit a little candle in the window. It was, you know, magical.” And he told me how, on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, he had climbed the steps of Michelangelo’s cordonata with General Clark. “Not that the Romans were grateful,” he said with a grin around his Popsicle stick.

He leaned closer. “Maria never told me all of it, about Mussolini. Far too delicate for that. But I figured it out. He was kind of a brisk lover. He’d just nail you, right there on the floor of his office. He wouldn’t even take his shoes or trousers off. And when he was done he’d just send you right out of the room and get back to work.”

“What a charmer.”

“But he was Mussolini. Knew a lot of guys in the army who had similar habits, mind you …”

I half listened. I was trying to put this together, trying to figure out how old this Maria Ludovica must be. Say she was about twenty during the 1922 march. That would put her in her thirties when she’d become a “prolific woman,” and in her forties during the war. Was it really credible that a forty-year-old mother of so many children would be the selection of Mussolini, who had, I supposed, the whole of Italy outside the convents to choose from? And could such a woman really have been the sex goddess glimpsed by the callow young Sergeant Casella in 1944? Was Lou somehow conflating the memories of more than one woman? — but his stories seemed detailed and sharp.

“You know, Mussolini was going to build a giant statue of Hercules, as tall as a Saturn Five rocket, with the face of Mussolini and its right hand raised in a fascist salute. All they made was a head and a foot.”

He laughed. “ Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! What an asshole. But still, if he made a pass at you, you didn’t turn him away. I’m pretty sure that by letting the Duce poke her, Maria Ludovica earned a lot of protection for the Order in those years.”

“What was Maria’s connection to the Order? Did she start it?”

“Hell, no. Boy, don’t you know any of the family history?”

I frowned. “The story of the Roman girl—”

“Roman British, yes. Regina.”

“Just a legend. Has to be. The records don’t go back that far.”

He sucked on his Popsicle. “If you say so. Anyhow, for sure the Order was a lot older than Maria Ludovica.”

“And when you found the Casellas you turned to Maria.”

“She, the Order, knew about the Casellas. The Order itself was based not far away. But they hadn’t known about the sickness. When I got in touch, they came — Maria, and three other women. Medically trained, apparently. They wore these simple white robes. I remember cradling one of the boys while they crowded around with their stethoscopes and such. They were all three about the same age. And all similar, all like Maria, like sisters. And the family eyes, smoky gray. It was strange looking from one face to the other. They kind of blurred together, until you couldn’t be sure who was who.”

“And they helped the children.”

“They were short of resources, like everybody else. They treated one boy. He recovered. The other boy died. They took the little girl away.”

“What?”

He turned to me. “They took her away. Into the Order.”

“But they brought her back to her parents.”

“No.” He seemed puzzled by that. “They just took her in, and that was that.”

“And the parents didn’t mind? These people they’d never seen before, relatives or not, just turn up and take their kid away—”

“Hey.” He put a broad, heavy hand on my arm. “You’re raising your voice … You’re thinking about your sister.”

“There does seem an obvious parallel. Gina said you brokered that deal, too.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that. Your sister wasn’t sick. But she was in need — your whole family was. Your parents just couldn’t afford the two of you. They put out feelers in the family for help—” I could imagine how my father would have felt about that. “It got to me, by a roundabout route. And I thought of the Order.”

“How could any parent give up a child to a bunch of strangers?”

Lou’s gaze slid away from mine. “You don’t get it. The Order aren’t strangers. They’re family.” Again that heavy hand on my arm. “I knew I could trust them, and so did the Casellas in Rome, and so did your parents.”

I said nothing, but he could read my expression.

“Look, kid, you’re obviously mixed up about this. If you’ve come to me for some kind of absolution, you’re not going to get it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Or is blame the game? Your father isn’t around anymore, so you’re looking to come take a shot at me. Is that it?”

“I’m not here to blame you.”

“Nor should you. Or your parents, God rest them.” He jabbed a nicotine-stained forefinger at my chest and glared up at me. “We all did the best we could, according to the circumstances, and our judgment at the time. If you’re a decent person, that’s exactly what you do. We’re human. We try.”

“I accept that. I just want to know.”

He shook his head. “I suppose I’d be the same if I was in your shoes. But I warn you, you might be disappointed.”

I watched him, baffled. I was reminded of the headmistress. What was it about the Order that made people thousands of miles away want to defend it like this?

I gazed toward the setting sun. Anyhow, I knew now that this Order had taken my sister, as it had the little girl in 1944, and no doubt many other girls and maybe boys, relatives, over the decades — or centuries, I wondered coldly. But what I needed to know now was what they took them for. Lou was wrong. Trust wasn’t enough. Even being family wasn’t enough. I needed to know.

I asked him, “Do you send the Order money?”

“Of course I do.” He eyed me. “I guess your father did, but that must have stopped now. I guess it’s your turn. Do you want some bank account details? …” He searched for numbers in his billfold.

Chapter 15

In the dense, moist heat of noon, Brica’s gentle, lilting voice carried easily through the trees. “… The sidhe live in hollow hills,” Brica was saying. “They are invisible. They can be seen when they choose, but even then they are hard to spot, for they always wear green. They are harmless if you are friendly to them, which is why we drop bits of bread in the furrow when plowing, and pour wine on the ground at harvesttime …”

Not wishing to disturb her daughter, Regina approached as silently as she could. Not that that was so easy now she was forty-one years old, and already an old woman, and anyhow her forest skills would never match those of the younger folk.

“… But you must never eat sidhe food, for they will lead you into their hollow hills, which are entrances to the Otherworld, and you may never find your way out — or if you do, you might find a hundred years have passed, and all your family, even your brothers and sisters, have grown old and died, while you have aged only a day. But if a sidhe frightens you, you can always chase her away with the sound of a bell — but it must be made of iron, for the sidhe fear iron above all …”

Her daughter sat at the center of a ring of children, their faces raised intently. Nearby a fire flickered. Brica saw Regina, and held up a hand in apology. She had been due to meet her mother at the farmstead.

Regina was content to wait in the cool of the shade and let her heart stop thumping from the climb up the hillside from the farmstead. The sun was almost overhead now, and its light, scattered into green dapples by the tall canopy of trees, lit up the curl of white smoke that rose from the fire. Regina recognized the rich, strong scent of burning oak, stronger than beech or ash. She sometimes wondered what Julia would have thought if she could have known that one day her daughter would become an expert on the scents of burning firewood. But they had all had to adapt.

Brica, given an old British name after Regina’s own grandmother, shared Regina’s features — the pale, freckled skin, the somewhat broad nose, lips bright as cherries, the eyes of smoke gray. But at twenty- one years old she was more beautiful than Regina had ever been. Her face had a symmetry that Regina’s lacked, and there was a kind of exquisite perfection in the oyster-shell curl of her ears, the fine lines of her eyebrows. Even her one undeniable gift from her never-seen-again father Amator, her black hair, was thick and lustrous.

And she was very good at holding the children’s attention. This morning she had shown them how to start a fire, with a bit of flint and a scrap of char-cloth. It was their most essential skill of all, and one that the children were shown over and over again, just as Brica had been taught as she had grown up. And buried in the fables Brica told the children were warnings that might ensure their safety: even this tale of the sidhe, the fairies.

Few adults believed in supernatural beings moving among them. But you would sometimes glimpse strangers: a very odd kind of stranger, moving over the sparely populated hills, often wearing green — just as in the stories. These were humans, no doubt about that, and they carried tools of stone or bronze. And they were robbers. Rather like foxes, they would take chickens and the odd sheep, or even — if they could get it — bread or cake. It was said they were dangerous when cornered, but they would flee when challenged. And it was true that they were terrified of iron — especially iron weapons, Regina thought dryly, against which their flimsy bronze was little protection.

Nobody was sure where they came from. Her own theory was that the sidhe came from the west, perhaps the southwestern peninsula or Wales, or even the far north beyond the Wall. Perhaps in those distant valleys an old sort of folk had persisted — older even than the barbarian culture that had preceded the arrival of the Romans — so old they didn’t even have the skills to make iron. Now that the legions were gone, and the land was emptying, they were, perhaps, slowly creeping back.

If they seemed to Regina’s folk as furtive, creeping, uncanny spirits, she wondered how her folk must seem to them. And after all, she thought wistfully, nowadays we can’t make iron, either.

The children all wore simple shifts of colorless wool. Some of them wore daisy chains around their heads or necks, and one small boy had a broad black stripe of birch-bark oil on his cheek, a lotion applied by Marina to a deep graze. Sitting there they looked like creatures of the forest, Regina thought suddenly, quite alien from the little girl she had once been.

At length Brica’s fable was done. The children scattered through the woods in twos and threes, to find mushrooms and other fruits of the forest for that evening’s meal, and then to make their way home.

Brica approached her mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Regina tried to be stern. But she cupped her daughter’s cheek and smiled. “Let’s just get on.”

Brica briskly stamped out the little fire, and the two of them walked out of the belt of forest and into the sunshine. They looked down the broad breast of hillside at the farmstead’s three roundhouses, and beyond that to the valley where the silver-gray thread of the river glistened like a dropped necklace. But they turned away and began to walk along the crest of the hill, making for the ruined villa. Brica was always busy, always alert. She would run away to inspect a trap, or pick a handful of berries from a cane, or dig mushroom flesh from a fallen tree trunk. She was like fire, Regina thought, filled with a blazing energy Regina herself couldn’t even envy anymore.

“So,” she said carefully, “have you seen Bran again?”

“Not for a few days.” But Brica turned away, her smoky eyes dancing. Bran was a boy, a little younger than Brica herself, from a farmstead a couple of hills away. He was the grandson of old Exsuperius, in fact, their first grumpy, grudging neighbor, now long dead. Brica said, “He isn’t a bad sort, you know,

Mother.”

“Not a bad sort behind a plow, no, but he can read no better than you could at the age of five. And as for his Latin—”

Brica sighed. “Oh, Mother — nobody reads. What use is it? A papyrus scroll won’t plow a field, or tend the birth of a calf—”

“Maybe not now. But when things—”

“ — get back to normal, yes, yes. You know, there are girls five years younger than me who have husbands and children.”

“You aren’t those girls,” Regina snapped.

“You don’t think Bran is good enough for me.”

“I never said that.”

Brica slipped her hand into her mother’s. “The only reason he’s learning to read at all is to please you.”

Regina was surprised. “It is?”

“Doesn’t that show how he cares about me — even about you?”

“Perhaps.” Regina shook her head. “You must make your own decisions, I suppose. I made many foolish choices — but if I had not, I wouldn’t have you. I just want you to be sure what you want. And in the meantime be careful.”

Brica snorted. “Mother, I go to Marina every month.”

Regina knew that Brica was talking about the herbal teas Marina made up as a contraceptive treatment. Marina had, over the years, become something of an expert on remedies gathered from the forests and fields; in the absence of a doctor such wisdom was the best anybody could do.

“Well, you know what I think of potions like that,” Regina snapped. “If Bran really did care about you he would use a condom. There’s no tea that’s as effective as a pig’s bladder.”

Brica flushed red, but she was suppressing a laugh. “Mother, please !”

“And another thing …”

Bickering, laughing, gossiping, they made their way along the broken ridge.

There were more than twenty people at the farm now, a community grown from the seed of that panicky flight from Verulamium. Around the old core of Regina and her daughter, Marina and Carausias, others had gathered: refugees from an old town to the south, the second eldest son of an overcrowded farmstead to the west and his family.

In the beginning, in this dismal ruin on its breast of green hillside, Regina had felt utterly lost. The sense of isolation was the worst. The richer parts of the countryside were inhabited and cultivated as they had always been, but scattered farmsteads like this one on more marginal land, farmed only when it had been necessary to pay Roman taxes, now lay abandoned. Their neighbors were few and far between — there were few lights to be seen on the hills at night. The crown of forest at the top of the hill became a source of almost superstitious dread for Regina, a thick green-black tangle within which lurked boar, wolves, and even a bear, a shambling, massive form she had glimpsed once. She suspected that as the years went by the forest was gradually creeping down the hillside, and wild animals of all kinds were becoming more numerous, as if nature were seeking to reclaim the land it had once ruled.

The endless labor had been hard on them all. Regina counted herself lucky that she hadn’t been afflicted by the chronic back problems many had suffered, or the worms and other parasites. But it broke her heart that a third of all the children born here had died before their first birthdays.

Still, she and the others had persisted. They would not be driven from this place — after all, they had nowhere else to go. And slowly, they had managed to improve things.

After a time, as their numbers had grown, they had plucked up the courage to try to build another roundhouse — but its roof had blown off in the winter’s first storm. There was a trick to the angle of the thatch, it turned out; a perfect one-in-one slope would wash away the rain and resist the wind, and if you didn’t allow the lip to dangle too close to the ground it remained safe from the mice.

And now, by Jupiter’s beard, there were three roundhouses. It was a little village, a busy place. They had dug pits in the ground for surplus grain, and every day you could hear the steady grinding of quern stones.

In the spring and autumn there was the plowing to be done — twice a year, for in the autumn they would seed the fields with winter wheat and other seasonal crops. They cultivated emmer wheat, spelt wheat, hulled six-row barley, kale, and beans. Wild garlic and parsnips could often be found, and in summer blackberries, elderberries, and crab apples. They kept a few chickens, sheep for their wool and milk, and pigs, useful creatures that could be turned out into the fields to root in the stubble, or driven into the forest for forage in the winter. Only old animals were butchered. Most of their meat came from hunted deer and occasionally boar, and they still used the simple traps for hares they had made from their very earliest days.

And then there were all the other essentials of life. It still startled Regina sometimes that you really couldn’t buy anything anymore. Anything you couldn’t barter for, from shoes to clothes to tools to new roofing for your house, you had to make.

Take clothing, for instance. As their few garments had quickly worn out, Regina had had to find out how to pluck wool off their sheep with combs of wood or bone, and to spin it into yarn, and even to weave it with simple looms. The clothes they made were simple — just tubes of cloth, made into tunics and undershirts and braecci, trousers for the men, and a peplum, a sleeveless dress for the women — but they did the job.

Shoes were more of a challenge. When their old town-bought shoes had worn out, their first attempts at making leather replacements had been disasters, ill-fitting lash-ups that had rubbed and burned and caused blisters. Even now they were only beginning to learn the knack of cobbling a good serviceable boot. It amazed her how much time she spent thinking about her feet.

They had even tried their hand at pottery, to replace their cups and bowls of carved wood. They experimented with pit clamps. You would line a shallow pit with hot embers overlaid with green wood. The pots would be carefully placed on top, and the whole thing covered with dry wood, damp straw, and soil to make an airtight mound. If you left it for a full day, making sure the covering of soil was intact, you might be lucky to have a quarter or a third of your pots come out whole — blackened, coarse, but intact.

Carausias and Marina seemed to find great satisfaction in making such things, while Brica and the children were used to nothing better. But Regina remembered her mother’s precious Samian ware, and she wondered how long it would be before the trade routes were restored and the markets opened again, and she would once again be able to buy such treasures as easily as breathing.

But all that was lazy thinking, she told herself sternly, pointless longing, a distraction from the business of simply staying alive that occupied nearly all their time, from dawn to dusk. After all she had an example to set.

As the years had gone by, somebody had to lead. It would never be Marina, who, despite her own two children and three grandchildren, had never thrown off her self-denigrating cast of mind as a servant. As he aged, poor Carausias, who after all had led them all here in the first place, became less and less effectual, often sinking into the state of unhappy confusion from which he had never really recovered since his betrayal by Arcadius.

And so it had become Regina who led, more or less by default. It was Regina who welcomed newcomers or turned them away, Regina who took the floor at their regular meetings, Regina who sat in judgment like a Verulamium magistrate to resolve disputes over share-outs of chickens’ eggs, Regina who traveled the area to keep up their tentative contacts with their neighbors — Regina who had discovered in herself the leadership without which, all seemed to agree, the farmstead would long since have failed and they would all have become bacaudae, if they had survived at all.

It wasn’t a situation she liked. She always promised herself that the whole thing was just temporary. But in the meantime there was nobody better to do it.

To her frustration they were out of touch with the great events of the world here. There was still no news of the Emperor’s return. The old road still bore some traffic, and the travelers or refugees sometimes brought news of kings: there was one Cunedda in Wales, for instance, and a Coel in the north, rumored to be the last of the Roman commanders there, now styling himself the Old King. From the east came rumors of one Vitalinus, who called himself Vortigern — a name that meant “high king” — who, it was said, had taken on the job of uniting the old province and keeping it safe from the marauding Saxons and Picts and Irish. The farmsteaders heard nothing from these grand men. “We’ll know they mean business,” Carausias would say, “when the taxman comes to call.”

Nobody ever did call. And, almost unnoticed, while Regina built her farmstead into a place of prosperity and safety, more than twenty years passed by.

When they reached the villa Regina and Brica separated and began a systematic search through the ruined buildings.

The villa had been sited in a natural bowl of green landscape, with a fine view of the western hills. Once it must have been grand indeed, Regina thought — grander even than her parents’ villa — a complex of seven or eight stone buildings set around a courtyard, with barns and other smaller wooden buildings nearby.

But it had been abandoned long before she had first discovered it. Its tile-stripped roofs had already decayed, and weeds had choked the courtyard and had started pushing their way up through the floors. Since then things had only gotten worse, as nature had followed its inexorable cycle. The floor of what must once have been the bathhouse had been broken open from below by the spreading roots of an ash, and the rooms were strewn with dead leaves. Since her last visit, last autumn, fire had burned out one of the stone buildings, removing the last vestiges of the roof and leaving its interior a shattered and smoky mess.

Despite all the damage, though, she could still see the grand plan of the villa in the great rectangular pattern of its walls, and the stumps of the broken columns that had once formed a colonnade around the courtyard. But she wondered how long it would be before the mortar crumbled and the stones rotted, and nothing was left but hummocks in the green. It was as if the world itself were a constant foe, with its million fingers of plants and insects, frost, sunlight, and fire, a relentless destroyer of all human ambition.

Regina made for the largest building in the complex. Probably it had once been a reception room. The roof was long gone, save for a few stumps of rotting beams. The floor was covered by a litter of soil and leaves, and after years of exposure to the weather the painted plasterwork had crumbled off the wall in great sheets. The walls themselves were intact, and still the room impressed by its sheer size. But the room had long since been stripped of furniture, and even the little sockets on the walls were empty of the oil lanterns they had once held.

Regina got down on her hands and knees and started to comb through the dirt. After so long, anything large enough to be seen easily had long since been smashed or carried off, and the only hope of finding anything was a fingertip search, bit by bit. But in a time when even a shoe nail was precious, it was worth the effort. Last time she had been here, in fact, she had found a small perfume bottle. As she had raised it into the light she had been stunned by its symmetry and perfection compared to the crude bowls and wooden pots she was forced to use at home, as if it had leaked into this world from some better place. She kept the bottle in the little alcove she had built for the matres, and every so often she would hold it, and take it out into the light.

Through the ruined walls she could see Brica. She had settled to a heap of dirt in one corner of what might once have been a kitchen and was exploring it carefully. It was a disconcerting juxtaposition of images, her daughter in her grubby shift rooting under a wall that still bore the marks of shelving, and even a hint of flower-design fresco work. She knew Brica felt uncomfortable in such places as these ruins, as if she believed they were ghost-haunted relics built by giants of the past, as the children’s tittle- tattle had it. Sometimes Regina worried about what would happen if this unsatisfactory situation went on so long that the last of those who remembered died off, leaving only ruins, secondhand memories, and legends.

She thought about Bran. He was a little dull, but he really wasn’t a bad young man, Regina thought. And it wasn’t as if Brica had much choice.

There was no civic structure here; there was no nearby town or functioning villas. But as time had passed Regina and her people had settled into a loose community of neighboring farmsteads. They were somewhat wary — some of these hillfolk were very long established and were suspicious of newcomers — but they would help each other out with harvests or medical emergencies. And they would trade, vegetables for meat, a wooden bowl for a blanket of woven wool. If not for such contacts, Regina mused, it was probable none of them would have survived.

But the population was sparse. The land had drained as people fled south, dreaming of Armorica, abandoning even farms on the best land, driven away by the rumored advances of the Saxon raiders in the east and the Picts and Irish in the west and north. And in this empty landscape of ghost towns and abandoned farms, there was a paucity of suitable mates for Brica, that was for sure.

Regina’s opposition to Bran didn’t make much sense, then. But she was opposed even so. It seemed there was some deep instinct inside her about the destiny of her daughter. Yet when she thought hard about this her mind seemed to skitter away, like a pebble over a frozen pond. No doubt she would eventually figure it out.

Absently Regina brushed at the debris, she exposed a bit of floor, revealing scarlet, a patch of color picked out in tesserae. It was part of a mosaic.

With sudden eagerness she brushed aside the dirt with her forearm, exposing more of the mosaic. It showed a man’s face, large-eyed, bearded. The head was surrounded by colors, gold, yellow, orange, bright red, in a sunburst pattern. It might have been Apollo, or perhaps it was some Christian symbol. Though some of the gold-leaf tiles had been prized out by hopeful robbers, most of the colors still shone as bright as the day they had been laid down. With obsessive motions she began to clear more of the floor. It seemed wrong that such beauty should be wasted under dead leaves and crawling worms, as if the young man in the picture had been buried alive. Suddenly it struck her how the farmstead, much as she was proud of it, was a place of drab gray-green and brown, as if everything had been molded from mud. How she missed color! She had forgotten how bright the world used to be. She was carried back to another time, impossibly warm, bright, and safe, when she had crept into the ruined rooms of her parents’ villa and discovered another mosaic …

A single scream pierced the air. It was cut off suddenly.

Brica.

Regina’s thoughts evaporated, replaced by hard, cold fear. She got to her feet and ran out of the room.

Brica was standing in the kitchen. Her gray eyes were wide with terror.

The man behind her was taller than Brica by a head. He held Brica easily with one hand clamped over her face, and in the other he held a short iron sword with an elaborately cast handle. He wore a cloak of dyed wool. His blond hair was long and tied back from his head, and his drooping mustache was clogged with bits of food. When he saw Regina he smiled, showing yellowed teeth. He said something in a language she did not understand.

He reached down, dug the heft of his sword into the neck of Brica’s tunic, and let the corner of the blade cut through the soft wool. When he had exposed her chest he massaged her breast with the fingers of his sword hand. He seemed to enjoy the way she flinched when his cold metal touched her bare flesh. Again he spoke softly to Regina, as if inviting.

He was a Saxon, of course. She had seen his like before — scattered parties of them, riding west along the old Roman road. They had always kept on past the poor farms of this hillside. But now this Saxon had her daughter; now he cupped her whole life in his hands. It was as if the room expanded around her, as if time itself stretched, so that past and future were banished. There was nothing in the universe, no time or space, nothing but this moment and the three of them, locked in fear and calculation.

She forced herself to smile. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

Looking at the Saxon, not at Brica, she walked up to him. He eyed her expectantly, as if trying to see her figure through her shapeless, leaf-strewn shift. She pulled at the fabric over her thigh, and parted her lips. She reached out to her daughter, and touched Brica’s breast as coarsely as had the Saxon.

He laughed out loud. She could smell barley ale in his breath. His huge hand still clamped over Brica’s mouth, he dragged the girl sideways, so his body was exposed; he was wearing a torc of tarnished silver around his neck. Regina stepped closer to him, touched his chest, then ran her hand down over his crotch. She could feel the bulge there. She smelled urine, semen, the stink of horseshit and the road. He grinned and spoke again, and she pressed her body against his.

The knife slid easily out of her sleeve. Using all her strength she rammed it through layers of coarse cloth into his crotch, above the root of his stiff penis.

His eyes bulged. The Saxon brought down his sword arm. But Regina was standing inside the arc of the stroke and he could do her no harm, not in that first crucial heartbeat. She got both hands on the hilt of the knife and dragged it upward, cutting into flesh and gristle.

And now Brica was at his back, her cut-open tunic flapping. She thrust her own knife into his back and twisted it, seeking his heart. Still the Saxon stood, flailing with his sword arm, as the women ripped and tore with their knives. It was like a dance, Regina thought, a gruesome dance of the three of them, in wordless silence.

Then the Saxon clutched Regina against his torso, and blood dark as birch-bark oil spilled from his mouth into her face. He shuddered and toppled like a felled tree, pulling both women down with him.

With disgust, Regina slithered backward across the dirt-strewn floor. She wiped the blood off her face with her hands. Brica fell on her mother, burying her face in Regina’s chest. Regina tried to comfort her daughter, to stroke her hair and soothe her.

Their return to the farmstead created panic. Marina insisted on treating the bloody scrapes on Brica’s chest with her poultices.

Regina longed to get the Saxon’s blood off her. But first she instructed the younger men to round up the children and animals, while others checked over their simple weapons — a few iron swords and knives, mostly spears and arrows tipped with wood or stone. Meanwhile, led by limping, ancient Carausias himself, now more than sixty years old, others were to go back to the villa, take what they could from the Saxon’s body, and dispose of it. The rest of his raiding party might yet ignore the farmstead, as had others in the past — but they surely would not ignore the murder of one of their own.

When everything was in hand, all Regina wanted was to get to her pallet. In the gloom of her house she curled over on herself, as if trying to escape the world.

She had done many things over the years in order to survive. But she had never killed a human being before. She remembered the little girl who had once run to her mother as she dressed for her birthday party. That child is long dead, she thought, the last vestige of her now gone; and I am like her ghost, or her corpse, kept alive but steadily decaying.

Not without purpose, though. Poor or not, she knew that what they had built here — what she had built — was something to be proud of, something worth saving.

But now the Saxons were here. And Regina must decide what to do.

With the dawn she was awake.

After a brief toilet she pulled on an old tunic and cloak. She slipped out of the compound and walked down the hillside to the marshy land at the side of the river.

On some level she had always known this day would come. She had put it out of her mind, hoping, she supposed, that things would return to normal before she had to face it. But now the day of trial was here, and she had woken with shame that in her denial she had left her people, her own daughter, woefully undefended. They hadn’t even built a palisade around the compound.

She waded out into the water and began to rummage in the black, reed-choked mud. The weather had been dry since spring and the water level was low. She had not forgotten the rusted iron dagger she had once found here, and she had always wondered if any more of that long-dead warrior’s hoard might have survived. If so, it might provide better weaponry than their own poor wooden sticks and stone-tipped arrows. It was a poor idea, but she could think of none better.

She had found nothing but a shield, so corroded it was no more protection than a papyrus toy, when Brica came running down the hillside.

“Regina! Oh, Regina! Mother, why are you here? You must come!”

Regina straightened up, startled. There was smoke in the air. It came from the west. “Exsuperius’s farm,” she said grimly. “The Saxons—”

Brica reached her and grabbed her arm. “We have visitors,” she said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know — you’ll see — you have to come—” She grabbed her mother’s hand and dragged her from the marsh. Together they hurried up the hillside to the farmstead.

A group of soldiers stood before the largest roundhouse, their hands resting casually on the hilts of their swords. They wore leather body armor, short tunics, and woolen trousers. The people of the farmstead stood in a sullen row before the soldiers. With them was the boy Bran, grandson of Exsuperius. His face was blackened by soot, perhaps from the burning of his home, and he stood in subdued silence, a mute testament to the power of these new arrivals.

“There are more of them down on the road,” Brica whispered. “A few carts, too, and a sort of trail of people behind them. Their leader came up and demanded to be let in — we didn’t know what to do — you weren’t here—”

“It’s all right,” Regina said.

“Are they Saxons?”

“I don’t think so.”

One of the soldiers was taller than the rest, obviously the commander. He wore a red cloak and an elaborate leather cuirass, inset with metal buckles. He was perhaps thirty, but his face was lined with the dirt of the road. Regina’s first impression was of strength, competence, but fatigue. And his short brown hair was brushed forward, in the Roman style — even his garb was almost Roman. For a brief moment her heart beat a little faster. Was it possible that the comitatensis had returned?

She stood between her people and the interlopers. She drew herself to her full height, disregarding the dirt on her face and legs, her disheveled clothes, the people in their mud-colored clothes behind her.

The leader hadn’t even noticed her. “Riothamus — “ One of the soldiers tapped his shoulder, indicating Regina. He seemed surprised to find himself facing a woman. He asked, “Are you the leader here?”

“If you wish it. And what rank are you, riothamus ?” She pronounced the word mockingly, masking disappointment. It was Latin, but a version of a British word — ’high king.’ This was no soldier, no officer of the imperial army, but a mere warlord.

He nodded. “That is the only rank I have, and not one I wished for.”

“Oh, really?”

He spread his hands. “I am not here to harm you.”

“Oh,” she said. “And you did not harm this boy, Bran, by burning down his home.”

“I did him the least harm that way.”

“Your definition of harm is interesting.”

He grinned, his eyebrows raised. “Defiance! We have found a new Boudicca, boys.” He won a ripple of laughter from his troops.

She drew herself up. “You will not mock us. We are living poorly here; I can’t deny that. But if you think we are illiterate Saxons—”

“Oh, I can see you are no Saxons.” He waved a hand. “Your grain pit, for instance … I have seen some Saxon farmers. There are many in this country already, you know, off to the east. The way they do things is sometimes better, sometimes worse than what you have worked out here. But they do not do things quite like this. And it is the threat of the Saxons that has brought me here. Listen to me,” he said, raising his voice to address the rest of the people. “Things have changed. The Saxons are coming. ”

“We know that,” Regina said.

He growled, “Perhaps you have heard of Vortigern. That foolish kinglet was much troubled by Pict raiders from the north. So he invited in the Saxons, to help keep the Picts at bay.” It had been an old trick of the Romans, Regina knew, to allow in one set of enemies as allies to oppose another lot. “I will not deny that the Saxons did a good job. They are sea pirates after all, and fared well against the Picts in their clumsy coracles.

“But,” said the riothamus, “the Saxons, under their brute of a leader Hengest, who is already notorious on the continent, betrayed Vortigern. They brought in more and more of their cousins, and demanded more and more in tribute from Vortigern. But the more they took from him, the less he could pay them, and the weaker he became.

“Now Vortigern is dead, his council slain. And now that they have a foothold in the east, the Saxons are becoming greedy.

“You may have heard of their cruelty. They are not the Romans! They hate towns and villas and roads, all things of the Empire. And they hate the British. They are spreading across the countryside like a plague. They will burn these flimsy huts, they will drive you out of here, and if you resist they will kill you.”

“The Emperor will help us,” somebody called.

The riothamus laughed, but it was a grim sound. “There have been pleas. No help comes. We must help ourselves. I will help you,” he said boldly. “I am building a new kingdom in the west — I have a capital there. It is a place the Romans themselves struggled to defeat, and it will see off a few hairy Saxons.” There was a little laughter at that, and Regina saw the skill in his mixture of fear and humor. “But I need you with me. The land is emptying. Everybody flees, fearing the raiders. And if you come with me—” He drew his sword, and flashed its polished surfaces in the air above his head. “ — I swear before the gods that I and Chalybs will protect you to my own death!” Chalybs, which he pronounced Calib, was the Latin for “steel.”

He was met by uncertain silence.

Regina stepped forward to face him. “We don’t need you, or your shining Chalybs. For all your posturing and speeches you are just another thug, another warlord, as bad as the Saxons or the Picts.”

The riothamus eyed her. “You have done well to survive here, Boudicca. Few have prospered so well. I can see you are a strong woman.”

She glared. “Strong enough not to be patronized by a popinjay like you.”

He seemed to want to convince her. “I am earnest in what I say. I am not a Saxon or a Pict. I am like you. I am your kind. I grew up in Eburacum, where my father was one of the landowners …”

“Earnest or not — son of a citizen or not — you are still a warlord. And if I submit to you it will only be because I have no choice, because of your force, not because of your rhetoric.”

He laughed. “Are you bargaining with me? I offer you survival, with me, in my compound. But you want more than survival, don’t you?”

She glared at him. “I am old now—”

“Not so old.”

“ — and I may not live to see the day when the emperors return. When we don’t have to scratch at the land like animals, and live in fear of barbarians. I may not see it. But my daughter will, and her daughters. And that is what I want for my family. For them to be ready …” She fell silent, suddenly aware of how wistful she sounded, before this silent tower of muscle in his scuffed cuirass.

“I have met Romans,” he said softly. “I have dealt with them in southern Gaul and elsewhere. You know what the Romans call us? Celtae. It means ‘barbarians.’ Their Empire is a thousand years old. We were barbarians before our assimilation, and we are barbarians now. That is how they think of us.”

She shook her head tightly. “My daughter is no barbarian. And when things get back to normal—”

He held up his hand. “You are determined that the light of civilization will not go out. Very well. But until that day of blessed recovery comes, until the Emperor rides in to tell us what to do, we must fend for ourselves. Do you see that? Well, of course you do, for I can see what you have built here. You must come with me — you and your family, and the others who depend on you. I can protect you in the dangerous times to come … You can’t do it all yourself, Boudicca,” he said more gently.

“And if we refuse?”

He shrugged. “I can’t let you stay here, for what you have built will give succor to the Saxons.”

“What will you do — burn us out, as the Saxons have our neighbors?”

“I hope not,” he said. But he was still and silent as a statue, and she could see his determination.

Once again she faced an upheaval in her life — the abandonment of all she had built, the security she had made. But it could not be helped.

“Do you make iron?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes,” he said. “Not well. But we have begun.” He seemed amused. “Are you assessing me?”

“I would not throw my lot in with a fool,” she snapped. “I have lived too long, and seen too many fools die. If we come with you, it will not be as captives, or slaves, or even servants. We will live with you as equals. And we will live inside your fort — we will not grub in the fields beyond, exposed to the blades of the Saxons.”

The moment stretched, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. And she was aware, too, of the crusted mud that clung to her legs and stiffened her hair. But she held her nerve, and returned his startled gaze.

At last he laughed out loud. “I would not dare challenge you, my Boudicca. Very well. As equals.”

She nodded, her heart pounding. “Tell me one more thing, riothamus. What is your name?”

“My name is Artorius.” It was a Roman name, but his t was soft, and he spoke in the Welsh style: ar-

thur-ius. He smiled at her, and turned away to issue crisp commands to his soldiers.

Chapter 16

When I got back to my hotel room after my visit with Lou, I used the room’s clunky pay-for-use plug-in keyboard to check my email. There were two significant notes.

The first was a long missive from Peter McLachlan.

“Most of the universe is dark,” Peter wrote. “ Dark matter. An invisible, mysterious substance that makes up some ninety percent of all the mass of the universe. You can tell it’s there from gravitational effects — the whole Galaxy is embedded in a big pond of it, and turns like a lily leaf in a pail of scummy water. But otherwise it passes through our planet like a vast ghost. How marvelous, how scary, that so much of the universe — most of it, in fact — is quite invisible to us. Who knows what lurks out there in the glassy dark? … I’m inspired, George. Something about my contact with you, this little mystery in your life, has sparked me off. That and Kuiper. I’ve been in touch with the Slan(t)ers again …” He was an unusual email correspondent. There was no BTW or abt or lol, no smiley faces for Peter. His mails were clearly thought through, composed, even spellchecked, like old-fashioned letters: they were genuine correspondence. “… Of course we do have a handful of human-built space probes that have reached almost as far as the Kuiper Belt. They aren’t capable of studying the Anomaly, sadly. But they are running into strangeness …”

My finger hovered over the DELETE button. Part of me responded to all this stuff. But the adult part of me was beginning to regret letting this strange obsessive into my life.

I read on.

He told me about the Pioneers: two deep-space probes launched in the seventies by NASA. They had been the first probes to fly past Jupiter and Saturn. And after that, they had just kept on going. By now, more than three decades after their launch, they had passed far beyond the orbit of Pluto — and there was nothing to stop them, it seemed, until they swam among the stars a few hundred thousand years from now.

But something was slowing them down. More anomalous information he and his pals the Slan(t)ers had dug up.

“The two Pioneers are decelerating. Not by much, a mere ten-billionth of an Earth gravity, but it’s real. Right now the first Pioneer is off-course by the distance between the Earth and the moon. And nobody knows what’s causing it.” But perhaps it was dark matter. “Maybe for something as isolated and fragile as a Pioneer, dark matter effects start to dominate. It’s interesting to speculate what will happen if we ever try to drive a starship out there—”

Or it might be a fuel leak, I thought. Or just paint, sublimating in the vacuum. Oddly, I felt reluctant to discourage him.

“I’m coming to think dark matter is the key to everything …”

I pressed a key to store the file.

The second notable mail was from my ex-wife.

Linda had heard about my dad’s death from our mutual friends, and wanted to see me. We had always gotten together regularly. I suppose we both accepted that after a decade of marriage, now buried in the irrevocable past, we had too much in common to ever cut the ties completely. Over an exchange of mails, we agreed to meet on neutral territory.

I flew back to London the next day. I left Florida without regrets.

It was my idea to meet Linda at the Museum of London. I was starting to become intrigued by what I’d heard of the Roman British girl Regina, who according to our dubious family legend was supposed to have traveled from the collapsed province of Britain, across Europe, all the way to the fading glory of Rome itself. Somehow she, or at least her legend, seemed to be central to what had happened to my family. And if any of it was true, perhaps she once traveled through London itself — Londinium, as the Romans had called it. But like most of London’s peripatetic population, even though I’d spent much of my working life in the City, I’d paid no attention whatsoever to its history. I’d never so much as been inside the Tower, though it had only been a quarter hour’s walk away from the offices where I once worked. Anyhow, now was a chance to put some of that right.

A check on the Internet showed me that the Roman city had been confined by a wall that contained much of the modern City of London — the financial center — excluding the West End, and points farther east than the Tower. The Museum of London was itself set on a corner of the old wall, or rather, on the line it had once traced out. It might give me a few clues about Regina.

And two thousand years of history might distract Linda and me sufficiently to keep us from bickering for a couple of hours.

The museum turned out to be just outside the Barbican, that concrete wilderness that seems to have been designed for cars, not humans. The museum itself is set on a traffic island cut off by a moat of roaring traffic. I seemed to walk a mile before I found a staircase that took me up to an elevated walkway that crossed the traffic stream and led into the museum complex itself. I was early — I’m always early rather than late, while Linda is the opposite — and I spent the spare time poking around the museum’s show-and- tell displays and scale models, showing Londinium’s rise and fall.

After Caesar’s first foray, the Emperor Claudius, equipped with war elephants, had begun the true conquest of Britain. By sixty years after the death of Christ, Londinium had grown into a city big enough to be worth being burned down by Boudicca. But in the fifth century, after Britain became detached from the Empire, Londinium collapsed. The Roman area would not be reoccupied for four hundred years, the time of Alfred the Great. I picked through the little models and maps, trying to figure out what date Regina must have come through here, if she ever did. I didn’t know enough to be able to tell.

I dug around in the gift shop. I felt like the only adult in there; the museum’s only other visitors were some Scandinavian tourists, all long legs, backpacks, and blond hair, and a batch of young-teenager schoolkids who seemed to swarm everywhere, their behavior scarcely modified by the yells and yips of their teachers. Eventually I found a slim guidebook to the “Wall Walk,” a tour around the line of the Roman wall. I queued up to pay behind a line of the schoolkids, each of them buying a sweet or a sparkly pencil sharpener or an AMO LONDINIUM mouse pad. An old fart in a duffel coat, I gritted my teeth and stayed patient, reminding myself that all this junk was helping keep the museums free to enter.

Linda found me in the coffee shop. She had come from work; she was an office manager in a solicitor’s office, based on the edge of Soho. She was a little shorter than me, with her hair cut sensibly short, a bit flyaway where it was going to gray. She wore a slightly rumpled blue-black suit. Her face was small, symmetrical, with neat features set off by a petite nose. She had always been beautiful in a gentle, easy- on-the-eye way. But I thought I saw more lines and shadows, and she looked a little stressed, her eyes hollow. She always programmed herself right up to the last minute, as no doubt she had today; she’d have had to make room for me in her schedule.

I bought her a coffee and explained my scheme to do the Wall Walk.

“In shoes like these?”

She was wearing plain-looking flat-soled black leather shoes, the kind I used to call “matron’s shoes,” when I dared. “They’ll do.”

“Not mine. Yours. ” I was wearing a pair of my old Hush Puppy slip-ons. “When the hell are you going to get yourself some trainers?”

“The day they go out of fashion.”

She grunted. “You always were perverse. But still — two hours of London roads on a muggy day like this. Why? … Oh. This is family stuff again, isn’t it?”

She had always been suspicious of my family, ever since it had become clear that my mother had never really approved of her. “Too dull for your personality,” Mum would say to me. I think Linda had been quietly pleased that I was always remote from them at the best of times, and had drifted even farther from my dad after Mother’s death. We had had enough fights over family issues even so, however. But then we had fights about everything.

“Yes,” I said. “Family stuff. Come on, Linda. Let’s be tourists for once.”

“I suppose we can always go to the pub when it doesn’t work out,” she said.

“There’s always that.”

She stood, briskly gathered up her belongings, checked her cell phone, and led the way out.

The London wall was a great semicircle arcing north from the river at Blackfriars, east along Moorgate and then back south to the river at the Tower. Not much of the wall itself has survived, but even after all this time the Romans’ layout is still preserved in the pattern of London’s streets.

The walk didn’t follow the whole line of the wall, just the section that cut east of the museum at the Barbican, passing north of the City and then down to the river by the Tower. There were supposed to be little numbered ceramic plaques you could follow, with the first few in the area of the museum itself, which had been built on the site of one of the Romans’ forts. Number one plaque was at the Tower and number twenty-one near the museum, so we were going to have to follow the line counting down, which bothered my sense of neatness, and earned me the day’s first bit of mockery from Linda.

The first few plaques were hard to find in the Barbican’s three-dimensional concrete maze of roads and highwalks — “Like an inside-out prison,” as Linda put it. The first plaque was glued to the wall of a modern bank building; it showed the site of a late Roman city gate, now long demolished. By the time we got there Linda was already sweating. “Is this going to be the story of the afternoon? Crappy little plaques showing where things used to be?”

“What did you expect, Gladiator ? …”

The next few plaques led us around the perimeter of the old Roman fort. Stretches of the wall were visible in scraps of garden below the level of the roadway. Much of the wall had been built over in medieval times, then uncovered by the archaeologists. The ground level had risen steadily over time; we walked on a great layer of debris centuries thick, a measure of the depth of time itself.

Plaques seventeen to fifteen caused us some arguments, because they were scattered around the ruins of a round medieval tower set in a garden in the shadow of the museum itself. We traipsed over the grass- covered ground, to the water and back, trying to figure out the peculiar little maps that supposedly showed us how to get from one plaque to the next in line.

Plaque fourteen was in a churchyard that turned out to be a little oasis of peace, set away from the steady roar of the traffic. We sat on a bench facing a rectangular pond, bordered by concrete. The wall, with its complex layers of medieval building and rebuilding, stretched its way along the bank opposite us, passing the remains of a round fort tower. I’d brought a couple of bottles of Evian, one of which I now passed to Linda. She had been right about the shoes. My arches were already aching.

“You know, I used to have a toy like this,” I said. “A castle, I mean. It was all plastic, a base with cylindrical towers and bits of walls you snapped into place, and a drawbridge for little knights to ride in and out …”

She leafed through the walk guidebook. “I can’t believe you’re actually ticking off the plaques as we find them. You’re so anal.”

“Oh, lay off, Linda,” I snapped back. “If you want to pack it in—”

“No, no. I know how you’ll fret if we do.” Which was code for her saying she was vaguely enjoying the little expedition. “Oh, come on.”

We walked on.

As we counted down the plaques, we passed the sites of vanished city gates and found more sunken gardens set away from the road, like islands of the past. But as we headed down Moorgate the plaques were less interesting, spaced farther apart and set on office walls. Moorgate itself was a bustling mixture of shops and offices, with, as ever, immense redevelopment projects going on. We had to squeeze our way on temporary walkways around blue-painted screens, scarily close to the unrelenting traffic, while intimidating cranes towered overhead.

One of the prettier sites was another little garden area close to the entrance of All Hallows Church: office workers sat around, jackets off, smoking, their cell phones glistening on the grass beside them like tame insects. But the plaque — number ten — was missing from its plinth, probably long ago vandalized and never replaced. Number nine was gone, too, and number eight seemed to have been swallowed up by redevelopment. My little book was acquiring frustratingly few ticks. The walk itself dated back to 1985, long enough for time and entropy to have started their patient work, even on the plaques.

I asked, “So why did you want to see me?”

Her eyes hidden by her Ray-Bans, she shrugged. “I just thought I should. Jack’s death … I wanted to see if you’re coping.”

“That’s good of you.” I meant it. “And what do you conclude?”

“I guess you’re healthy. You still have that damn duffel coat, and your sphincter is as tight as ever …”

She turned to me. I could see her eyes, flickering in the shadows of her glasses. “I’m worried about this quest to find your mythical sister.”

“Who told you about that?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose you think it’s anal again …”

As we approached Aldgate, we were entering the financial district of the City, the area where I had spent so much of my working life. At this time of day, late afternoon, the pavement was crowded with people, mostly young and bright, many with cell phones clamped to their ears or masking their faces. It felt genuinely odd to be tracing the wall, this layered relic of the past, through a place that was so bound up with my own prehistory.

She asked me, “So what will you do? Will you go to Rome?”

Lou had suggested that, but I still wasn’t sure. “I don’t know. It seems like a big commitment—”

“ — to a project that might be completely wacko. But it might be the only way you’re going to be able to clear this up, if you’re serious about it.”

“I’m serious. I think. I don’t know.”

“Same old same old. George, you’re a good man. But you’re so fucking indecisive. You blow with every breeze.”

“Then you were right to kick me out,” I said.

We walked in silence for a while.

Plaque four was at the back of an office building — we had to be bold enough to walk into private grounds — where we found a sloping glass frame, like a low greenhouse, set over a trench in the tarmac. A section of the wall was exposed, twenty feet deep under the glass, through which we peered. We couldn’t see the lower section, the Roman bit, because the office workers in their dungeon below had stacked boxes and files against it.

I was the first to say it. “Okay, I’m sorry. But I’m really not sure I need advice right now. My family may have been something of a screwup, but there’s nothing I can do to change the past. And now it’s gone — Gina’s fled about as far as she can go — and all I’m left with is …”

“This loose end. Which you can’t resist tugging. Well, I think you should go. Let’s face it, the death of a parent is as big a loss as either of us is ever likely to face. I think you should take some time to get through it. And if this sister thing is an excuse to do that, fine. Go to Rome. Spend some lira.”

“Euros.”

“Whatever.”

“I was sure you’d try to stop me.”

She sighed. “Listening is just one of the skills you never acquired, George.” She touched my hand; her skin was warm and comfortable. “Go. If you need anything just call.”

“Thanks.”

“Now let’s finish this stupid walk.” She marched on.

We passed out of the City area and came down Cooper’s Row, passing under the rail line into the tourist- oriented area close to the river, and the Tower. We passed through the Tower Hill underpass by the Tube station entrance, peered at the ruin of a robust-looking medieval gate, and then walked back through the subway to where a sunken garden at the northeast corner of the underpass contained the statue of an emperor — and, ironically, right at the end of the walk, the best-preserved section of wall we’d seen all day.

We sat on a bench and sipped our water.

“One more tick for your little book,” Linda said, not too unkindly.

“Yep.” It was all of thirty feet high, and the Roman section itself maybe ten feet. The Roman brickwork was neat rows interspersed with red tiles that might have come from my father’s house. The medieval structure above it was much rougher. “If I didn’t know better I’d have said that the Roman stuff was Victorian, or later,” I said. “It’s as if the whole wall has been turned upside down.”

Linda asked, “Civilization really did fall here, didn’t it?”

“It really did.”

“I wonder if she came here. That great-grandmother of yours. Regina.”

“… And I wonder if she knew that it would all disappear, as if a small nuclear bomb had been dropped on the city.”

The third voice made us both jump. I turned to see a bulky, somewhat shambling figure dressed in a coat that looked even heavier than my duffel. Linda flinched away from him, and I felt the tentative mood between us evaporate.

“Peter. What are you doing here?”

Peter McLachlan came around the bench and sat down, with me between him and Linda. “You mentioned doing the walk.” So I had, in an email. “I thought you’d end up here. I waited.”

“How long?”

He checked his watch. “Only about three hours.”

“Three hours?”

I could see Linda’s expression. “Listen, George, it’s been good, but I think—”

“No. Wait, I’m sorry.” I introduced them quickly. “Peter, why did you want to see me?”

“To thank you. And tell you I’m going to be away for a while. I’m off to the States.”

“Visiting the Slan(t)ers?” Linda caught my eye again; I pursed my lips. Don’t ask.

“I feel the need to catch up. Be refreshed.”

“Refreshed with what?”

He shrugged. “The energy. The belief. That’s why I want to thank you. Somehow you have shaken me out of my rut. Your bit of mystery with your sister. Layers upon layers … That and Kuiper, of course.” He leaned past me and thrust his face toward Linda. “Of course you know about the Kuiper Anomaly. Have you seen the latest developments?” He produced his handheld and started thumbing at its tiny controls, and Web pages flashed over its jewel-like screen.

Linda plucked my sleeve. “This guy is seriously weird,” she whispered.

“He’s an old school friend. He helped my dad. And—”

“Oh, come on. Your dad’s buried. He’s followed you to London. And all this spooky stuff — what does it have to do with you and your sister?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, George, I changed my mind. It’s as if the people around you are parts of your personality. Your family was the clingy, oppressive, Catholic part, and you need to get away from all that, not indulge it. And this guy, he’s like your—”

“My anus.”

That brought a stifled laugh. “George — go back to work. Or paint your house. Get away from memories, George. And get away from this guy, or you’ll end up on a park bench muttering about conspiracies, too …”

“Here.” Peter thrust his handheld before my face; data and diagrams chattered across it. “The Kuiper Belt is a relic of the formation of the solar system. We see similar belts around other stars, like Vega. The outer planets, like Uranus and Neptune, formed from collisions of Kuiper Belt objects. But according to the best theories there should have been many more objects out there — a hundred times the mass we can see now, enough to make another Neptune. And we know that such a swarm should coalesce quickly into a planet.”

“I don’t understand. Peter, I think—”

“ Something disturbed the Kuiper Belt. Something whipped up those ice balls, about the time of the formation of Pluto — so preventing the formation of another Neptune. Since then the Kuiper objects have been broken up by collisions, or have drifted out of the belt.”

“When was this disturbance?”

“It must have been around the time the planets were forming. Maybe four and a half billion years ago.” He peered at me, eyes bright. “You see? Layers of interference. The Anomaly, the Galaxy core explosions, now this tinkering with the very formation of the solar system. This is what we’re going to investigate.”

“We?”

“The Slan(t)ers, in the States. You read my emails.”

“Yes …” I turned. Linda had gone. I stood up, trying to see her, but as the rush hour approached the crowds pouring into the Tube station were already dense.

Peter was still in midflow, sitting on the bench, talking compulsively, bringing up page after page of data. He was hunched forward, his posture intense.

Standing there, I could either go after Linda, or stay with Peter. I felt that somehow I was making a choice that might shape the whole of the rest of my life.

I sat down. “Show me again,” I said.