Severa turned to her daughter, who looked as startled as her mother. ‘Rome’s great son has come to earth ... A little Greek his name will be ... A little Greek! That’s what the prophecy says, mother. Oh, my eyes! It’s coming true, it really is ...’

The Emperor and his courtiers continued to chat with fascination over Xander’s model, all unaware of the metaphysical shock among those who had proposed it.

And when Brigonius looked up he met the cold eyes of Primigenius. The freedman did not seem happy at this turn of events, not one bit.

X

X

Once Hadrian had made his decision, things moved quickly.

Governor Nepos insisted that at least some ground be broken, a few stones laid, before Hadrian left the province. And besides, if the ambitious project was to have any chance of being completed within Nepos’s three-year governorship, then some progress surely had to be made this year. ‘I want to see those stones piling up faster than leaves in autumn,’ Nepos declared.

This decree sent Xander into a spin. Brigonius had the uneasy feeling that Xander’s toy architecture did not translate quite as coherently as he had given the impression into a real-world project to be built by fifteen thousand hulking legionaries. But an emperor’s will was not to be defied. And nor was Severa’s: cold as ice, her determination fuelled by the Prophecy, she allowed no room for doubt. Thus they were all committed.

Hadrian planned to advance to the northern legionary fortress of Eburacum to inspect his troops. Once again Severa and her party rode ahead of Hadrian’s caravan. Severa would use every hour she could steal to get the project up and running before the Emperor even arrived.

But for Severa’s party the journey north was tense and sour. Once they were out of the pacified south, Roman military control was overt. There were no towns here save military outposts. The land was studded with watchtowers and beacons, and churned up by the remains of marching camps. Brigonius had grown up here; it had been his family’s home for three generations. As a boy he had even played at the foot of a stern Roman watchtower, erected in Banna before he had been born. But for his companions it was a strange, uneasy landscape, and they barely looked out of the carriages. Xander and Karus kept themselves busy poring over plans of their Wall. Lepidina huddled over her poetry, and even Severa was subdued. In their minds this was the edge of the world, beyond which lay only a chaos that threatened to blow out the orderly lights of civilisation.

Once Brigonius tried to engage Severa and Lepidina in conversation about this. He talked of stories still told around Brigantian fires, of dynasties of bronze and stone, an oral history that went back thousands of years.