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

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 . . .”