Nectovelin hawked and spat. ‘You talk like that bowel-creasing druidh. But words are as dust. Look at what you are! You wear a woollen tunic like your brother’s, but your face is smooth, your hair brushed - even your nostrils and ears plucked, if I’m not mistaken. The house of your body shows what you aspire to be.’

Cunovic took a step closer to the old man, a deliberate challenge, and Nectovelin stiffened subtly. ‘And you’re a hypocrite,’ Cunovic said softly. ‘I don’t recall you turning down my silver brooches and my amphorae of wine, with which only yesterday you bought five head of cattle from Macha, that other old curmudgeon from the valley. You may not like it, grandfather. It may not be like the old days. But this is the way the world works now.’

Nectovelin glared back, as still as a wolf, his face a mask pooled with shadows.

Ban came to their rescue. He stood between brother and grandfather. ‘Not tonight, lads. I’ve got enough to deal with.’

Nectovelin kept up his unblinking stare a heartbeat more, and Cunovic was willing to be the one to look away first. The three of them moved apart, and the tension eased.

In awkward silence the three of them turned to face the house. One of a dozen surrounded by a straggling ditch, in the dark its conical profile was low, almost shapeless. But you had to understand the detail. Its big support posts came from trees marked out for their purpose since they were saplings, so securely fixed and well balanced that no central prop was needed. That big open inner space was set out, according to ancient custom, to reflect the cycles of days and seasons. The single doorway faced south-east, towards the rising sun at the equinox. As you walked around the house, following the track of the sunlight through the day, you passed from the morning side of the house to the left, where children played, cloth was woven and grain was ground, to the night side, where food was prepared and people slept. Even now Brica lay on her hide pallet just to the left of the doorway, for this was the place of birth, while the oldest of her grandmothers sat at the right of the door, ready to walk out into the deeper cold of death.

In Cunovic’s experience, stuck-up southern types trying to ape the Romans imagined that such houses were nothing but great middens, heaped up by men with minds like children. They were quite wrong. Brigantians could build any shape they liked. Most of their barns and grain stores were rectangular, for convenience, and sometimes they built of stone, just like the Romans. But they preferred to build their homes round and of living wood, to reflect their minds, the cycles of their lives, and their embedded goddess.