The meeting was held in the fort’s office of sign-bearers. The little room, cluttered with records of soldiers’ pay and savings and other military incidentals, was cramped, awkward. Oil lamps had been set out on the low tables to dispel the gloom of the poky room, and their sooty smoke flavoured the air. Small statues of Antinous, beautiful boy and lover of Hadrian, filled alcoves on the walls.

Brigonius found himself a place on a couch next to the prefect’s aides. Severa wasn’t here; she was late.

The prefect of Banna, Tullio’s successor, was here with some of his aides, as was Primigenius, the shadow-thin freedman. Sabinus was the only man in a toga. He looked as if he never appeared in public without one these days.

Lepidina attended, apparently as reluctantly as Brigonius. She was dressed in what he thought of as her Roman ‘uniform’ of fine clothes, cosmetics and sculpted hair. The sturdy Brigantian woman he had glimpsed during that morning ride along the Wall might never have existed. She was at Sabinus’s side, of course; she belonged there. But she smiled at Brigonius.

As they waited for the accused to show up Brigonius listened to the soldiers gossiping about dice games. The principals in the case, himself and Sabinus, Primigenius and Lepidina, were no more talkative than the many statues of Antinous.

Brigonius understood the game to be played out today. He knew from his own dealings with Roman law that all emperors were suspicious of rival centres of power. That included private enterprises such as his own partnership, the quarry business, whose operations were tightly controlled by contract law, and watched over by the provincial procurator. And this emperor in particular had an obsession with foretelling. In the harshness of his latter reign, consulting prophecies had become a sign of unhealthy ambition; it was said that Hadrian had had one of his own young relatives put to death for such a transgression.

You could see all this as a symptom of the Emperor’s own decay, he thought. Just like all these statues of Antinous.

After two decades Hadrian would leave behind much to be admired. He had rebuilt his empire. Brigonius knew farmers who spoke admiringly of another of Hadrian’s projects, lesser known than the Wall if no less mighty in scale: after his visit to Britain he had had drained much of the fenland in the east of the island, in the old homeland of the Iceni, opening up hundreds of miles of wholly new land for cultivation.