‘Quite so.’

‘Ah, but where is it we have come to stay?’

Narcissus tugged at his rein, turned his horse away and gazed out on the landscape of southern Britain. He saw a gently rolling land. Forest clumped on hilltops and spilled into the valleys - he thought he saw pigs snuffling at one forest fringe - but most of the land was cleared, and covered by a patchwork of fields. Round houses sat everywhere, squat, dark cones. The place was clearly densely populated - though empty today; evidently when they saw a Roman army approaching the people had sensibly run or hidden.

There were strikingly many circular structures: the houses, ditches and banks, rings of standing stones which for all he knew they might have been forts, or temples, or simply places to keep the sheep. It struck him that as seen from the air, by a curious crow perhaps, Britain would be covered by circles, like a muddy field splashed by rain.

But Romans built in straight lines, and the new military road would cut through this landscape of circles, rude as a sword slash. Roman roads ran straight for long stretches because they were designed to support army marches, and as long as they had a good surface and sound drainage and weren’t too steep for a soldier loaded with his kit, the roads could be laid across almost any landscape.

Narcissus knew that such stupendous rectilinearity was itself an oppressive marker of Roman dominance. This was a land beyond the Ocean, a land at the very edge of the Roman mind, beyond which lay madness. But here was the army to impose order on chaos.

That was the theory. But, he reflected, this ‘chaos’ was a place of neat little fields and farmhouses. He murmured, ‘We are here to civilise the moon. But there is a civilisation here already!’

‘Peaceful, too,’ Vespasian murmured. ‘Those low walls are for keeping out sheep, not men.’

‘Caesar wrote of waves of invaders from the continent. It’s true you see pots from Germany and brooches from Gaul. That doesn’t mean the potters and jewellers came over in force! Julius wanted to make Britain seem the wilder place, I suppose, and his own deeds the greater by association. Yet I should have anticipated this,’ he said. ‘After all it is deliberate policy to cultivate our neighbours.’