Regina shivered, and rubbed her arms to warm up. The Wall might be a safe place, but it was uncomfortable. The great masses of stone retained the cold all through the day. After five years here, though, she had gotten used to the brisk climate and needed nothing more to keep her warm but her thick woolen tunic. And she had learned never to complain about the rigors of life here, so stripped-down compared to life in the villa, which she still remembered brightly. She had no wish to be called a spoiled child again, even though she knew that as the granddaughter of the prefect she was given special privileges.

“. . . Ah,” Magnus said.

She walked back to him. “Don’t tell me you’ve moved at last, O Great General.”

“No. But your grandfather’s come out to play.” He pointed.

On the southern side of the Wall, Aetius had led his cohort out of the fortress and was drawing them up on parade. Aetius stood straight and tall, an example to his troops. But Regina understood how much effort that cost him, for at sixty-five years old he was plagued by arthritic pains.

The soldiers’ helmets and shields gleamed in the sun, and most of them wore the chill, expressionless bronze parade masks that had so terrified her when she first saw them. But their lines were ragged, with many gaps, and Aetius, waving his arms with exasperation, called out the names of the missing: “Marinus! Paternus! Andoc! Mavilodo! . . .”

Regina knew how infuriating Aetius found such ill discipline and lack of professionalism. Aetius had once served with the comitatensis forces, the highly mobile, well-equipped field army. Now he found himself the prefect of a cohort of the limitaneus, the static border army, and things were very different. These frontier troops had been on station here for generations. Indeed, nowadays most of them were drawn from the local people. According to Aetius, the limitaneus troops had become thoroughly indolent, even immoral. He raged at their habit of bringing actors, acrobats, and whores into the fortress itself, and their tendency to drink and even sleep when on watch.

All this was cause for concern, to say the least. Without a meaningful comitatensis in the country, these ragtag troops were all that stood between civilized Britain and the barbarians. And it was up to Aetius to hold them together.

Aetius consulted a clay tablet and called out a name. One unfortunate trooper stepped forward, a burly, harmless-looking man who didn’t look as if he could run a thousand paces, let alone fight off a barbarian horde.

“I was only drinking wine to wash down horehound to get rid of my cough, Prefect.”

“Do we not treat you well? Do you not enjoy medical attention even the citizens of Londinium would not be able to obtain? And is this how you repay us, by dereliction of duty?”