Tarcho waved a hand. ‘Forget that garbage. Here in the north, we haven’t forgotten who we are. Our grandfather Audax grew up a slave, yet he remembered he was a Brigantian. And now the Romans have gone we’re in a position to restore Brigantia to her old power. Think of that. Why not an empire of the Brigantians this time - and with us at the top? Why, we could take on the Caesars themselves.’ His eyes gleamed.

Isolde wondered what the Duke of the Britains and the Eburacum government would have to say about such an ambition. And Nennius looked confused. Isolde knew that exiled Britons in Rome boasted that they were descended from Trojans who had fled the Greek siege, and that such groupings as ‘Brigantians’ were just artificial labels, imposed by the Romans for their administrative usefulness.

Was the future to resemble the past, then? Would Rome return, as Maria seemed to hope? Or, if they ever existed, could Tarcho’s old erased nations really be reborn? And what of all the Saxons milling around in the south? They weren’t going to disappear. She had a feeling that the future would be much more complicated than either Maria or Tarcho imagined, or hoped for - complicated, and bloodier—

That was when she felt the first contraction. She bit her lip and bent forward, clutching her belly.

Maria leaned forward. ‘Isolde! Are you all right?’

Typically, Nennius didn’t even notice his daughter’s difficulty, and nor did Tarcho. ‘We must talk of my purpose here,’ Nennius said. ‘My grandfather told me about the Prophecy. He had decided our family must remember the truth about itself. But the Prophecy, of course, was lost. Or was it?

‘I simply couldn’t believe no copy exists! Claudius hints of a copy placed among the ancient Sibylline oracles. I looked there - but Stilicho, Honorius’s Vandal general, had the oracles destroyed decades ago.’

‘And so,’ Tarcho said, ‘you wrote to me.’

Nennius sat up on his couch, intent. ‘I know what meticulous record-keepers you army types have always been, Tarcho. It was here that the Prophecy’s original was, supposedly, destroyed. But, I wondered, couldn’t a copy of it have survived here, deep in some old vault? Wouldn’t the tidy, indeed superstitious, mind of a soldier have ensured that much? And so I wrote to you, and asked you to search in advance of my visit - and, well, here I am. Come now, cousin, stop teasing me! Tell me if you found what I asked you to look for.’

Another contraction. Through her pain, Isolde clung to Maria at her side. Maria murmured comforting words.