As they passed through the town some of the younger people in the party averted their eyes from the monumental ruins and muttered prayers to the god of the Christians and other deities. But Regina quietly mourned. These ivy-covered stones spoke to her about the depth of the generation-long holocaust that was assailing Britain more eloquently than any historian, even Tacitus, could ever have. And how strange it was, she thought, that none of this had been inflicted by the Picts or the Saxons—none of the raiders had yet come this far west, in numbers sufficient to do this kind of damage. The town had collapsed all by itself. It was all as Aetius and Carausias had once foreseen, that once people stopped paying their taxes, the towns had no purpose, and had fallen in on themselves. Or perhaps Amator had been right, that the town was simply a relic of a thousand-year-old dream, from which humankind was now coldly waking.

Their destination proved not to be the town itself but a graveyard that sprawled over a hillside nearby.

It was vast, so densely packed with tombs it was like a pavement of tile, sandstone, and marble; there must be thousands buried here. People were already working: they were prizing up gravestones, slabs of sandstone or marble, with picks of wood and iron. The work was under the direction of a couple of Artorius’s soldiers. They did not hang back from the labor but joined in themselves, stripped to the waist in the summer heat.

“So this is our ‘quarry,’ “ Regina said. “A graveyard, which we are desecrating for bits of stone.”

Brica shrugged. “What does it matter? The dead are dead. We need the stones.”

Regina felt a sense of shock. If at age seven, or even age seventeen, she could have seen herself now and learned what she must do to stay alive, she would have been horrified. And she felt a pang of sadness that Brica, still so young, saw nothing difficult about it. How we are fallen, she thought.

Strangely, a small farmstead had been established at the center of the graveyard, complete with a barn and a couple of granary pits. A woman was selling food to the workers in return for nails and other bits of iron. Perhaps the bones of the dead had made the ground rich for vegetables, Regina thought morbidly.

Neither Regina nor Brica had the muscle for digging up gravestones, so they were put to work fetching pails of water from a stream for the workers to drink and wash off their dust. They moved among the opened graves, stepping over smashed-up stones.