Boudica chuckled. ‘Appearances aren’t everything.’ As she said this she turned her head to look at the sleeping centurion and Cato saw her smile. The tenderness of her expression jarred with the cool tension that had seemed to exist between her and Macro over recent days and Cato realised she still bore more affection towards Macro than she was willing to admit. Still, any relationship between his centurion and this woman was no business of his. Cato swallowed the shred of beef he had been chewing and stuffed the rest into his knapsack.

‘Looks can certainly deceive,’ Cato agreed. ‘When I first saw you back in Camulodunum, I would never have guessed you enjoyed this kind of cloak and dagger stuff.’

‘I might say the same about you.’

Cato blushed and then smiled at his reaction. ‘You’re not the only one. It’s taken me a while to gain any kind of acceptance in the legion. It’s not my fault, or theirs. It’s not easy to accept having a seventeen-year-old foisted on you with the rank of optio for no better reason than that his father happened to be a faithful slave in the imperial secretariat.’

Boudica stared at him. ‘Is that true?’

‘Yes. You don’t suppose I’m old enough to have earned such a promotion through years of exemplary soldiering, do you?’

‘Did you want to be a soldier?’

‘Not at first.’ Cato smiled sheepishly. ‘When I was a boy I was far more interested in books. I wanted to be a librarian, or maybe even a writer.’

‘A writer? What does a writer do?’

‘Writes histories, or poetry, or plays. Surely you have them here in Britain?’

Boudica shook her head. ‘No. We have some written words. Passed down to us by the ancient ones. Only a handful know their secrets.’

‘But how do you preserve stories? Your history?’

‘Up here.’ Boudica tapped her head. ‘Our stories are passed down through the generations by word of mouth.’

‘Seems a pretty unreliable method of keeping records. Isn’t there a temptation to try to improve the story with each telling?’

‘But that’s the point of it. The tale’s the thing. The better it becomes — the more it is embroidered, the more it grips the audience — the greater it is, and the more enriched we become as a people. Is it not so in Rome?’

Cato silently considered the matter for a moment. ‘Not really. Some of our writers are storytellers, but many are poets and historians and they pride themselves on telling the facts, plain and simple.’

‘How dull.’ Boudica grimaced. ‘There must be some people who are trained to tell stories like our bards do. Surely?’

‘Some,’ admitted Cato. ‘But they are not held in the same esteem as writers. They are mere performers.’