She slept as much as she could, though her dozing was interrupted by the jolting of the cart. At night she lay on straw-stuffed pallets, or sometimes just on blankets and cloaks scattered on dirt floors, listening to Severus’s drunken fumblings at Cartumandua. Sometimes she stayed awake all through the night, until the dawn came. At least she was alone in the dark. And if she stayed awake she had a better chance of escaping into the oblivion of sleep during the misery of the day.

But when she did sleep, each time she woke she was disappointed to be back in this uncomfortable reality, the endless, meaningless, arrow-straight road surface, and to the fact that she was alone now, alone save for the matres—and perhaps her mother, who had abandoned her to go to Rome.

At last they approached a walled town. The town was set beside a river, on a plain studded with farmsteads. Beyond the town a hillside rose steeply, with a scattering of buildings on its flanks and at its summit.

The town’s wall was at least twice Regina’s height. It was faced with square tiles of gray slate, but in places the slates had decayed away or had been stripped off, exposing a core of big rubble blocks set in concrete, interspersed with layers of flat red bricks. It would have been dwarfed, of course, by the great northern Wall.

They came to a gate, a massive structure with two cylindrical towers topped with battlements. There were two large entrances through which the road passed, and two smaller side passages, evidently meant for people. But the side passages were blocked with rubble, and one of the big archways had collapsed.

A man stood before the gate, blocking their way. He wore the remnants of a soldier’s armor, strips of tarnished metal held in place over his chest by much-patched leather bands. He was armed—but only, comically, with what looked like a farmer’s iron scythe. Severus negotiated. As a former soldier he had a basis of contact with the gatekeeper, and they shared dull, incomprehensible details of assignments and ranks and duties.

From the walls other men watched, men armed with swords and bows. They peered down speculatively at Regina and Carta. Regina stayed hunched inside her cloak, trying to make herself shapeless and insignificant.

Old soldier or not, Severus had to pay a toll to be allowed into the town, at which he grumbled loudly. The cart rattled through the gateway, jolting over debris. The wall was thick enough that the gateway was a kind of tunnel, and the clatter of the horses’ hooves echoed briefly.