In the middle of the night it wasn’t hard for Agrippina, Nectovelin and Cunedda to sneak into the old granary. As Agrippina had expected there was indeed a storage pit dug into the ground. The three of them clambered down into the pit and fixed planks an arm’s length under the floor surface. Once they were safely interred, they had friends of Braint fill in the rest of the hole with dirt, tamp it down, and cover the floor with straw.

It was a ruse that would have been obvious to a Catuvellaunian. But the Romans had not yet inspected the interior of the building and probably knew nothing of Catuvellaunian granaries, and it was a gamble worth taking that when they looked inside and saw an unbroken floor they wouldn’t be suspicious.

After that, all Agrippina and her companions had to do was to endure the rest of the night, and the whole of another long late-summer day, stuck in a hole in the ground. It wasn’t deep enough for them to sit up properly, and the three of them lay curled around each other, ‘like three puppies in a litter’, as Nectovelin said. After a few hours even Cunedda’s closeness became uncomfortable for Agrippina.

They had brought plenty of water, and as the stifling heat built up in the airless hole they drank much of it. Nectovelin had brought pots to piss in. He had even brought some food - dried bread, stuff that he said wouldn’t create a smell that might make some dull-witted Roman soldier suspicious. Agrippina didn’t know how he could eat in such a situation, but Nectovelin said he didn’t want the rumbling of their stomachs to wake the Romans from their slumber. Nectovelin’s gut, however, even while not rumbling, was a bottle of noxious gases, which did nothing to add to their comfort.

So they had nothing to do but lie there and wait, in the increasingly fetid dark. Wait and think.

Agrippina couldn’t get the Prophecy out of her head. She longed to discuss it with Cunedda, and with Nectovelin, though she knew it was impossible. But the more she brooded on the meaning of its enigmatic lines, the more she began to wonder what it might be telling her of their chances of victory today - and the more she thought it through, the more dread gathered in her heart. Emperors three.