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Chapters (76)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. I
  4. II
  5. III
  6. I - INVADER AD 43-70
  7. I
  8. II
  9. III
  10. IV
  11. V
  12. VI
  13. VII
  14. VIII
  15. IX
  16. X
  17. XI
  18. XII
  19. XIII
  20. XIV
  21. XV
  22. XVI
  23. XVII
  24. XVIII
  25. XIX
  26. XX
  27. XXI
  28. XXII
  29. XXIII
  30. XXIV
  31. XXV
  32. XXVI
  33. II - BUILDER AD 122-138
  34. I
  35. II
  36. III
  37. IV
  38. V
  39. VI
  40. VII
  41. VIII
  42. IX
  43. X
  44. XI
  45. XII
  46. XIII
  47. XIV
  48. XV
  49. XVI
  50. XVII
  51. XVIII
  52. XIX
  53. XX
  54. XXI
  55. III - EMPEROR AD 314—337
  56. I
  57. II
  58. III
  59. IV
  60. V
  61. VI
  62. VII
  63. VIII
  64. IX
  65. X
  66. XI
  67. XII
  68. XIII
  69. XIV
  70. XV
  71. EPILOGUE
  72. I
  73. II
  74. III
  75. IV
  76. Afterword

As well as his staff officers, Vespasian was accompanied by a younger man, obviously one of the Durotriges serving as an interpreter. He was clean, his tunic unmarked, and he showed no shame in this burning fortress of his people. The young man asked a question in the tongue of the Durotriges.

Nectovelin answered, ‘I am of the Brigantians.’ The young man switched easily to that tongue.

‘I know you,’ Vespasian said again through his interpreter. ‘That night in Camulodunum. You were the buffoon who tried to kill the Emperor.’

‘And but for bad fortune I would have succeeded.’

Vespasian smiled. ‘Bad fortune? But you boasted of your Prophecy. I remember digging into your sweating armpit to find it. Where is your Prophecy now? Did it foresee this?’

Nectovelin thought of the ancient fort, now being kicked apart by Roman legionaries. He thought of the Catuvellaunian farmers who had pulled on their grandfathers’ chain mail and had gone into battle expecting a clash of champions, only to be met by a Roman meat-grinder.

‘No, it didn’t tell of this,’ he said. ‘But the Prophecy tells of freedom for every human being, long after you are dead, Roman.’

‘But not for you.’

‘No, not for me. I die for that freedom, and for Coventina’s rocky heart.’

And with that Nectovelin thrust his arms through the net. He ripped the skin off one hand, and felt a finger break on the other, but he got his hands through the mesh and around Vespasian’s throat, before a staff officer stepped forward with his stabbing sword and skewered his belly.

XXV

XXV

On her release from the Emperor Claudius’s household, Agrippina, aged twenty-four, found employment as a bookkeeper. She worked for a moneylender, a fat, pleasant man called Marcus Crassus Cerealis, whom she eventually married.

Despite her education in Gaul, Agrippina found life in Rome very strange. It wasn’t just the scale and clamouring bustle of this world capital, but the small things. In Eburacum she had grown up amid big extended families, where marriages were fluid and children were the responsibility of everybody in the roundhouse, and women had much the same power as men. Now she was stuck in a set of tiny partitioned-off rooms, with Cerealis who, despite his mild nature, clearly expected her to raise him a family alone.

But this was the life she had chosen, and she stuck to it. In time she bore Cerealis two healthy girls, whom she raised in the Roman manner.

She never left Rome again, but always followed events in her native Britain.