Agrippina tried to follow the conversation. She had learned her Latin in Gaul, itself a backward province; the Emperor and his entourage were sophisticated Romans, and their speech was complex. ‘Difficult to tell,’ she admitted. ‘The invasion. Gaul and Britain. But that’s the surface. The Romans like to be clever. They like word games—’

Nectovelin snorted. ‘A man should say what he thinks.’

‘That’s not the Roman way.’

‘Then I’m glad I’m no Roman.’

The volume of conversation started to die down. Couches were scraped, drunken words of farewell exchanged. Evidently the dinner was over. At last Agrippina identified the Emperor’s own voice. It was thin, and broken by an occasional stutter. Responses came curtly, perhaps from slaves, and from a more cultured voice, strongly accented - the Greek in the toga, perhaps, who had walked so arrogantly through Camulodunum yesterday.

Finally the Emperor ordered everybody out.

Nectovelin listened. Now there were no voices at all, no pacing, only a soft scraping that might have been a pen on parchment, a stylus on a wax tablet. Nectovelin whispered, ‘Here’s our chance. We’ll have to move fast.’

Agrippina’s heart pounded, and she grasped the hilt of her dagger.

‘On my count,’ Nectovelin hissed. ‘One, two, three—’

XX

XX

Agrippina rolled, got her legs underneath her body, and pushed up with the others. The wooden planks covering their temporary tomb splintered and fell away, and dirt tumbled in around her. Then she found her shoulders pressing against a dense mass of carpet. They had expected this. Nectovelin drove his sword up into the weave and dragged it backwards to make a broad cut.

They thrust upwards into a soft light of torches and oil lamps. Agrippina blinked; it was the first light she had seen all day.

She took in the scene in a heartbeat. The granary had become a palace, the walls hastily whitewashed, a thick carpet with a richly woven pattern laid over the floor. Oil lamps splashed pools of light. Low couches and tables lay littered around the floor, the remains of the dinner party. Amid these bits of luxury Agrippina, standing in a hole in the floor, felt filthy, stinking, a beast in the world of humans.

And at one end of the granary a desk had been set up, heaped with scrolls and parchments. A man, unassuming, dressed in a plain-looking woollen tunic, was sitting at the desk. He was looking over his shoulder at the intruders. Slowly he got to his feet. He was perhaps thirty feet from Agrippina.

Nectovelin roared, ‘Claudius!’ And he threw his stabbing sword.

Claudius flinched, but shuffled aside. The sword slammed into the desk top, skewering scrolls. The attack had already gone wrong, Agrippina saw. It was chance that their hole in the ground was at one end of the long granary, Claudius’s desk at the other, giving him time to step aside.