By contrast Tarcho, descended from a long line of soldiers of German origin, was a pillar of a man, calm, solid and stolid, with a ferocious crimson beard now laced with grey. He had served most of his twenty-five years in a garrison on Britain’s eastern shore - though some of those years had been accumulated under the reign of Carausias, the notorious usurper. It had been a pragmatic gesture by Constantius Chlorus, leader of the great Roman Invasion of Britain nearly twenty years ago, to have decreed that if soldiers like Tarcho were prepared to switch sides, their service under Carausias would count towards their retirement privileges.

But what was a retired Tarcho to do? He was unmarried. He was too restless to farm, and too scrupulous to serve as some tax collector’s hired thug. So he had come to Camulodunum looking for more suitable work, and through friends of friends had run into Thalius, who had been on the look-out for a dependable bodyguard. Thalius had certainly been glad of his company as he had ventured out of the safety of Camulodunum’s walls and made this journey to the far west, travelling through one of the four British provinces and into another.

A contrasting pair they might have been, but Tarcho had become a right-hand man to Thalius, a sounding board as much as protective muscle. Both childless bachelors, their company was congenial. And they were united, and divided, by a shared religion: Christianity. On their travels the two of them had had long and interesting debates on the nature of the faith. But then, as Volisios had remarked, everybody was a theologian nowadays.

Tarcho’s expressions of his tough creed had actually crystallised for Thalius his own doubts about the new Emperor, and the direction he was taking the faith. It was these doubts, in fact, which had brought Thalius to this mine - and what he hoped to achieve here was but a step towards his own ultimate goal, a confrontation over the direction of Christianity with the Emperor himself.

Christianity was a long-standing passion within Thalius’s family, said to go back centuries to Lepidina daughter of Severa, who had lived not long after the death of Christ Himself. Thalius’s faith was of an old-fashioned sort, a faith of love and hope, his community united in charitable associations of mutual aid - a faith derived from the teachings of Christ Himself, Thalius liked to believe. Tarcho, though, was a Christian of the new type. Like his Emperor’s, Tarcho’s was a robust soldier’s faith, his god a warrior who had proved His mettle by beating off other deities in battle. It was this metamorphosis of Christianity into a military creed he could no longer recognise that Thalius, gravely concerned, had been forced to reject. But the new direction came from the Emperor himself. What was a man of conscience to do?