We filed through the city’s fine southern gate and I saw that though the town possessed neither the energy to preserve its ramparts nor the labour to keep the bridge from choking with flotsam, someone had found time to deface the beautiful mask of the Roman Goddess Minerva that had once graced the gate’s arch. Where her face had been there was now just a calloused mass of hammered stone on which a crude Christian cross had been cut. ‘It’s a Christian town?’ Ceinwyn asked me.

‘Nearly all towns are,’ Guinevere answered for me.

It was also a beautiful town. Or it had been beautiful once, though over the years the tiled roofs had fallen and been replaced by thick thatch and some houses had collapsed and were now nothing but piles of brick or stone, but still the streets were paved and the high pillars and lavishly carved pediment of Minerva’s magnificent temple still soared above the petty roofs. My vanguard forced a brutal way through the crowded streets to reach the temple, which stood on a stepped pediment in the sacred heart of the city. The Romans had built an inner wall about that central shrine, a wall that encompassed Minerva’s temple and the bath-house that had brought the city its fame and prosperity. The Romans had roofed in the bath, which was fed by a magical hot spring, but some of the roof tiles had fallen and wisps of steam now curled up from the holes like smoke. The temple itself, stripped of its lead gutters, was stained with rainwater and lichen, while the painted plaster inside the high portico had flaked and darkened; but despite the decay it was still possible to stand in the wide paved enclosure of the city’s inner shrine and imagine a world where men could build such places and live without fear of spears coming from the barbarian east.

The city magistrate, a flurried, nervous, middle-aged man named Cildydd who wore a Roman toga to mark his authority, hurried out of the temple to greet me. I knew him from the time of the rebellion when, despite being a Christian himself, he had fled from the crazed fanatics who had taken over the shrines of Aquae Sulis. He had been restored to the magistracy after the rebellion, but I guessed his authority was slight. He carried a scrap of slate on which he had made scores of marks, evidently the numbers of the levy that was assembled inside the shrine’s compound. ‘Repairs are in hand!’ Cildydd greeted me without any other courtesy. ‘I have men cutting timbers for the walls. Or I did. The flooding is a problem, indeed it is, but if the rain stops?’ He let the sentence trail away.

‘The flooding?’ I asked.

‘When the river rises, Lord,’ he explained, ‘the water backs up through the Roman sewers. It’s already in the lower part of the city. And not just water either, I fear. The smell, you see?’ He sniffed delicately.