He wore a sleeveless tunic, and his bare arms were pocked with hot-metal scars, already a little like Myrddin’s. He was working a piece of iron—a short blade, perhaps for a knife—in the forge, while an unfree toiled at the bellows. Galba would thrust the blade into the furnace until it became red hot, beat it into shape while still heated, and then quench it quickly with water. It seemed that the fire didn’t just make the iron soft enough to work; something about the charcoal in the furnace made the iron stronger. And sometimes the iron, beaten flat, would be folded over and beaten again, the invisible layers adding strength. There were many subtleties to Myrddin’s art, which Galba and other apprentices were learning slowly.

The blade appeared to be done. Galba quenched it once more and set it aside. Then he noticed Regina. “Madam—good day—would you like me to call your daughter?”

“If you please,” she said stiffly.

He went into the back of the workshop, calling Brica’s name. Regina sat on a low wooden bench and waited.

As Artorius’s kingdom had grown, so it had become necessary to find efficient ways to shape it, and to run it.

Despite Regina’s own inclinations the order that was emerging had little to do with imperial forms, but was based on older Celtae structures. The center of it all was the dunon itself. The hill fort provided facilities for trade and exchange, a religious center, a resident population of craftsmen with growing expertise—and, most importantly, administrative control.

Artorius’s nation was divided into three classes. The nobles included the soldiers, but also jurists, doctors, carpenters, bards and priests, and metalworkers like Myrddin. Artorius’s rule was moderated by a meeting on every feast day of the oenach, an assembly of the nobles. Below the nobles were the free commoners, the lesser craftsmen and the farmers, who were actually the productive level of society. It was their rents, taxes, and tithes that sustained Artorius’s nascent government, and paid for his army and their campaigns. Finally, the lowest level were the unfree: former criminals, slaves, and late-arriving refugees who found no free land to farm. Their fate was simply to serve, and they provided the bulk of the labor.

The basis of society was the family. According to the old tradition the property and other rights of a man extended to his derbfine, his descendants as far as his great-grandchildren, through four generations. Basic rights were assured by each person having an “honor price,” a level of compensation to be paid in case of injury, insult, or death. But the system extended only to the free; the unfree had no rights, and no views that were listened to at higher levels.