Now the soldiers were catcalling. “I’ve waited all these years for you to blossom, little flower!” “Come sit on me, your old friend Septimius!” “No, me! Me first!” One of them had lifted his tunic to pull out his penis, like a floppy piece of rope that he shook at her.

Regina grabbed Magnus’s heavy, musty-smelling woolen cloak and wrapped it around her. Then she clambered down the ladder to the ground and ran over the vallum toward the settlement, hiding her face.

For all Aetius raged at them, the soldiers kept up the baffling, terrifying barrage.

In their five years together at the Wall, Aetius had tried to tell Regina something of the world beyond the Wall. “There’s been an awful lot of trouble for everybody. It all started the night the Rhine froze over, and the barbarians just walked into Gaul. But for Britain that wretch Constantius was the one who nailed down the coffin lid . . .”

The problems went Empire-wide, said Aetius. When the Empire had been expanding, new wealth had always been generated, from booty and taxation. But those days were long gone. And with the new, better-equipped, more powerful barbarian enemies, just as economic pressure increased, so did pressure on the borders, and more money had had to be found to pay for the defense of the realm. For a generation there had been problems and instability throughout the western provinces. Sometimes Aetius talked nostalgically about the great Stilicho, military commander in the western provinces, who had protected Britain. Aetius seemed to worship this Stilicho, even though, it turned out, he was a barbarian, Vandal-born. Barbarian or not, he had been the effective ruler of the west, under the ineffectual Emperor Honorius. But even the greatest generals grow feeble—and make lethal enemies at court.

And in Britain, since Constantius’s adventure, the problems had been particularly acute.

After Constantius’s subjects had thrown out his hierarchy of officials and tax collectors and inspectors, the cycle of taxation and state spending had broken down. Not only that, there was no mint in Britain, and after the expulsion of the moneymen there was no way to import coins from the rest of the Empire. Suddenly there weren’t even any coins to circulate.

As everybody hoarded what they had left, people returned to barter. But with its lifeblood of coinage cut off, the economy was rapidly withering.

“There’s just no money to pay the troops. You know, I heard that before I was posted here the soldiers even sent a deputation across the ocean to try to get the back pay they were owed. They never returned.”

“They must have found some other place to live.”