Though even now there was much work to be done on it, she had to admit the hall’s magnificence. The centerpiece was a hearth, a great circle of scavenged Roman stone, on which a huge fire was blazing. The fire cast light and heat around the hall’s single vast room, and filled the noisy air with smoke. From an iron tripod twice the height of a man, a cauldron had been suspended, and she could smell the rich scents of stew—pork and mutton flavored with wild garlic, from the smell of it.

Already Artorius’s men were lining up to take their share of the meat. Artorius himself served it up, yanking joints out of the simmering broth with iron hooks. There was a constant jockeying for position among the subordinates, and there was nothing subtle about the way Artorius fished for the best cuts of meat to reward his favorites. He fumbled one serving, dropping the meat on the floor, and two of his soldiers began to fight over the honor of whom it had been intended for. The others didn’t try to separate them, but gathered around and roared them on.

Old Carausias was beside Regina.

She said, “What a display—grown men, squabbling over bits of meat.”

He shook his head. “But with such contests his lieutenants are working out their status—who is closer to the sun.”

“How savage.”

Carausias shrugged. “It’s a shame your grandfather isn’t here. I’m sure the legionaries in their barracks behaved much the same way. Anyway it’s their night, not ours.”

When the soldiers had had their share of the food, the other men and the women were allowed to approach the cauldron. Regina herself took only a little of the broth, and drank sparingly of her cup of wheat beer.

When Artorius took his place on the floor at the center of a circle of his men, the storytelling began. One soldier after another got to his feet, generally unsteadily, to boast how he—or perhaps a dead comrade—had bested two or three or five savage Saxons, each taller than a normal human being and equipped with three swords apiece. They all drank steadily, at first from a communal cup carried by a servant who moved to the right around the circle, and then, as the evening got rowdier, from their own vessels. It had been a heroic labor for the little community to produce the vast vats of wheat beer that would be consumed this night.

Then the iron maker Myrddin got to his feet and began a long and complex tale about giants who lived in magical islands across the ocean, far to the west of Britain: “There are thrice fifty distant isles / In the ocean to the west of us / Larger than Ireland twice / Is each of them, or thrice . . .”