A hand was clamped over her mouth. Agrippina struggled, but she was pinned to the ground. Her mind flooded with awful memories of that night on the beach. But then the weight shifted off her back, and she was able to twist and see the broad, dirt-streaked face of Braint, the farmer.

'Sorry,' Braint hissed. 'Didn't want you yelling out.'

Agrippina tried to control her anger. 'You shouldn't have done that.'

'Well, you should be watching your back,' Braint said. She crawled deeper into the undergrowth, and winced.

For the first time Agrippina noticed that Braint's leg was bleeding. 'What happened? Were you found?'

'Nearly. I gashed my leg on a rock, and lost my knife, but I got away. Dodgy work, this spying. No wonder they gave it to us women.'

'You need to tie up that cut. Do you want to borrow my knife?'

'No need.' Braint cast around on the ground, and turned up a lump of flint. She slammed it down against a rock and cracked it in two, exposing an interior as smooth as cream. She tapped half the rock with a pebble to crack off long thin flakes, selected one shard, and began to saw a strip of cloth from her tunic. All this took only heartbeats. 'So,' she said as she worked, 'you counted the legionaries as they went by? How many?'

'You don't want to know. I even stayed to see the road builders pass.'

'Oh, yes. Those blond young Germans, stripped to the waist. I bet you enjoyed the sight.' She leered and grabbed her own crotch.

Agrippina, still shaken up, couldn't help smiling, for she had had some earthy thoughts as she watched the soldiers work.

Braint said, 'I saw them smashing up a holy place. They pulled down a ring of standing stones and crushed them for rubble, to make their road. They have no respect.'

'But it's a mighty force they've brought, Braint. Even Caratacus is going to be discouraged.'

'I wouldn't count on it,' Braint said gloomily. 'He's too fond of himself for that. Yesterday he led another assault on the Roman line. He burned a cart full of legionaries' socks, and lost three warriors in the process.' She snorted her contempt. 'Perhaps a thousand such flea bites will cause the Romans to falter. But it's beneath Caratacus's dignity, and I can't blame him for that. What's worse, all day the Roman commander has been receiving embassies. One local rich man or petty boss after another, coming to pledge allegiance to the Emperor.'

'We expected that,' Agrippina said.

'Yes, but one of them was the princes' own brother, Cogidubnus.' One of the sons Cunobelin had sent off for education to Rome. 'The word is that Cogidubnus is going to travel the country under Roman guard, negotiating treaties for the Emperor.'

'He would betray his own brothers?'

Braint shrugged. 'I think Cogidubnus would say that with their antics in recent years, Caratacus and Togodumnus have brought this storm down on all our heads. But there's rarely a right or a wrong in family matters, Agrippina, as you know.'

'So what now?'

'Caratacus is impatient. He's giving up the plan-the skirmishing, the ambushes. Soon the Romans will have to ford the Cantiaci River. Caratacus says that is where he will make his stand.'

'He's going for a pitched battle after all?' Agrippina felt a thrill of conflicting emotions. 'I suppose the whole course of Caratacus's life has led him to this point-him and Togodumnus.'

Braint harrumphed. 'If you use the word "honour" about them I'll smack you. The princes are two spoilt little boys who won't quit until they have it their own way. And they have the druidh whispering in their ear. Anyhow we have no choice but to support them. And, who knows, they might even win.' She cut free her strip of cloth and began to bind up her leg.

Idly, Agrippina picked through the flakes of flint.

After all her travelling she had a sense of the broad patterns of life across the island of Britain. Yes, in the south you had coins and pottery, farms and markets. But further away, where the Romans and their traders and their culture had yet to penetrate, older traditions prevailed. In her own nation of Brigantia you counted your wealth not in coin but by the numbers of cattle you owned. You ate off wooden bowls, not pots. You lived amid immense cairns, relics of the past. And you listened to fireside stories of kings of stone, and emperors of copper and tin, distant ancestors who had once ruled the land, their wealth and their domains utterly vanished with the coming of iron.

When Agrippina had learned to read she had come to doubt the truth of the family tales she had grown up hearing. How could such ancient histories have any truth if they had never been written down? But the stories were told and retold to audiences who knew them as well as the teller, and in their very telling the truth of these stories was preserved, from generation to generation. Thus she had grown up with the true deep history of her nation. Britain was an ancient place, soaked by deep culture. And when Braint had without conscious thought picked up a stone and shaped it into a tool, she was echoing a tradition that was far older than Rome.

But now the Romans were here, their army like an iron axe cutting through the trunk of an ancient tree. Whatever the outcome of the next few days, nothing would be the same, ever again-and Agrippina was here to see it. This wider perspective awed her, even as her lust for revenge still burned.

The sun was going down, the air cooling, and there had been no activity on the gleaming new road for some time.

'Come on, let's get back to the camp.' Braint stretched, and winced as the pain of her wound cut in once more. Agrippina helped her to her feet.

In the gathering twilight the two of them made their way through deserted farms towards Caratacus's camp.

With Vespasian, Narcissus rode away from the dusty chaos of the soldiers' camp-building near the river bank. On the afternoon of this hot day, Narcissus was sweating as heavily as the horse beneath him. But as always it was a relief to get away from the army for a while; after another day on the march tens of thousands of men and their animals produced a tremendous stink.

They headed up to a scrap of higher ground, a ridge. Narcissus's horse picked its way cautiously over chalky earth littered with flints, which Narcissus inspected curiously. He had seen almost identical terrain throughout northern Gaul. It was as if, he mused, Gaul and Britain were in reality a single landscape, severed by a strip of Ocean as a surgeon's blade amputates a limb. It was an intriguing notion, but he had no idea how such huge changes in the structure of the earth could have come about. Perhaps Britain was a relic of Atlantis, he mused, or a bit of builder's debris left over from primordial days when giants constructed the earth.

From the ridge they looked west, to the river, and the soldiers who swarmed near its bank. An overnight fortress had been set out above the ford, constructed in a few hours despite the men's usual grumbling after a day of laden marching-but soldiers always complained, Vespasian said. The fort's rectangular formation was marked out by a ditch and a low bank topped by a palisade of wooden stakes, hastily lopped from a scrap of woodland nearby. In the interior the legionaries' leather tents were being set up in their usual rows. Already cooking smells curled up from a dozen fires, and the digging of latrines was itself a minor industry.

And when Narcissus looked further west, across the shining body of the river, he could see another force massed on the opposite bank. They were the Britons, here to oppose the Roman advance. The Britons, lacking any of the obvious discipline of the Roman troops, looked more like an urban mob, Narcissus thought idly, transplanted from Milan or Rome. Some of them seemed to be enacting some kind of ritual at the edge of the water. Narcissus could swear that they were breaking cups and plates, even weapons, and dumping the remains in the water. Was the barbarian mind really so bewildered that it imagined it was a good idea to smash your weapons and dump them in the river on the eve of battle?