He was maybe half a mile down the road from the town. He inspected the place curiously. Durovernum was an island of wood and stone, of roofs of bright red tiles. It looked very strange to Brigonius, not at all like his own community of roundhouses at Banna - and nor was it like the Roman military architecture he had grown up with in the north, the endless box-shaped forts and watchtowers, like the one in Banna.

He was used to Roman roads, though. The whole country was carpeted by them. This one ran straight as an arrow’s flight off to the east, its hard-packed gravel surface pressed flat. His quarryman’s eye noted how it had been resurfaced two or three times, so that it was raised proud of the surrounding farmland. Old or not the road was well kept, its drainage gullies swept clear, and with no sign of subsidence. The Roman soldiers who first built this did their job well, he grudgingly admitted.

But it wasn’t soldiers who used the road today. For perhaps an hour in the early morning Brigonius was at peace, just himself, his horse, the road and the songs of the birds. But as the day wore on the road filled up with traffic: people on foot and horseback, or riding carts and wagons and litters. The townsfolk were bright, clean, well-fed, their clothes were brilliantly coloured, and their skins shone with cosmetic oils. Slaves walked beside their masters’ carriages, or carried them on litters and chairs. Everybody was streaming east. It was as if somebody had tipped up the town and poured out its inhabitants like oil from a pot, spilling them towards Rutupiae, where the Emperor was due to land today.

Sitting on his stone beside this glittering crowd, Brigonius felt out of place, an ill-formed northern clod. But he had been summoned here, he reminded himself.

He took Severa’s letter from his satchel and read it over again. It was written in a blue dye on a small, scraped-thin rectangle of wood, scored down the middle and folded over. His own name was written on the outside, with an address: Vindolanda, the large fort planted square in the middle of Brigantia, with which Brigonius did a lot of business. Inside, the Latin text had been written out in two orderly columns by a neat, somewhat cramped hand. But it opened with a generous greeting - ‘From Claudia Severa to her friend Brigonius, greetings’ - and signed off with a flourish - ‘In the hope that this finds you in as good health and fortune as I and my daughter enjoy, C. Severa’ - both in a different hand from the main text, which had presumably been written out under dictation by a scribe.