“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 . . .”