Brigonius grew impatient. He had to put up with this bluster every time he tried to do business with Matto. 'Like what? What will you do, throw stones at the governor?'

'You would say that,' Matto sneered. 'Some say you're more Roman than the Romans, now.'

Brigonius kept his face closed. 'Then there's no more to be said, is there?' He tapped the record. 'Thanks for this. I'll see you next week.' And he turned back to the spectacle of his quarry and the toiling legionaries. He heard Matto stomp off to his horse.

Brigonius knew he was an easy target for local resentment, because he was much more accessible than a council member. But what twisted him up about such encounters was his memory of what had been done to him a year ago at Eburacum. He had been conscious, helpless but conscious, as Primigenius had used him. When he had at last dared to approach Lepidina again she had recoiled, as if the stink of the freedman still polluted him. He was pretty sure that the harm he had suffered was more grievous than any petty land-grabbing suffered by Matto and his pals.

But the Romans were like the weather, or the passage of time; you couldn't do anything about them, you had to work with them, or slink away and die. That was what Matto couldn't see.

And as for what had befallen him that night it was not the Romans he blamed, not the Emperor, not even the bitter freedman Primigenius. It was the woman who had set the trap into which he had fallen: a Roman but by descent his own countrywoman, Claudia Severa.

In the meantime there was work to be done. He turned his horse's head and set off for Banna.

Brigonius's birthplace happened to be close to the site where the Wall's western turf construction met the stone eastern sections. Thus as he reached Banna that evening the turf Wall came into view.

If anything it was an even more spectacular sight than the stone Wall, for along its line the legionaries had stripped away the vegetation right down to the pink-white boulder clay beneath. The turfs they cut-and hauled here sometimes from miles away, for good turf was hard to find-were heaped up on a central strip of remnant greenery. The finished curtain wall was fourteen feet high and twenty feet wide at the base, punctuated by turrets of stone or timber, and a rampart of white clay was laid out before the Wall on the northern side. So as Brigonius looked down from the higher ground, the cleared strip of land stood out, a gash in the landscape brilliant white in the sun, with the green-brown line of the Wall itself running along its centre line.

At length he arrived at Banna. To the south of its escarpment the valley still cut deep, and far below the river washed as it always had. But the landscape bore the mark of the Romans. To the north a road set off straight as an arrow, heading for the northern outposts, and the hills where men had once seen the reclining form of a goddess now glimmered with the fires of watchtowers.

Banna itself was now the site of a Roman camp. As he approached Brigonius saw sentries silhouetted against a setting sun, their bare heads and spear tips clearly visible above wooden ramparts. The place bristled with activity, the roughly laid roads that led from east, west and south were full of traffic, and the turf all around had been churned to mud. The camp itself huddled against the escarpment, protected from any threat by a complex of ditches and a palisaded trench to the north, and the cliff to its back.

As he approached the camp's defences Brigonius was passed through a line of sentries. Within was a neat array of the Romans' leather tents. There were soldiers everywhere, of course, in their leather tunics and trousers, their woollen cloaks, their strapped-up military boots. Even more of them were sporting beards, such was the impression Hadrian had made during his visit last year. The camp was a sketch of the fort that would soon be built here, but it was already functioning, already an operational element in the system of the defence of the province.

Once there had been a Brigantian community here. A Roman watchtower had been built here long before Brigonius was born, a blocky stone pillar that had loomed over his boyhood. The watchtower still stood, but his home had gone, the roundhouses demolished, the defensive ditches filled in. Brigonius wouldn't have recognised the place, save for the essential shape of the landscape.

Brigonius found Tullio sitting in his own tent. Tullio had moved his household and his aides here for the building season; it was a place where he could watch over the progress of both the stone Wall to the east and the turf to the west. Some of his officers were here, including his close adviser the bucket-headed decurion Annius, and also his household slave. Karus and Xander were here, sitting with Lepidina, who looked bored. When Brigonius joined them they were winding down what sounded like a wide-ranging discussion of problems to do with the Wall, a conversation fuelled by wine served by the slave.

As usual Tullio was surrounded by heaps of paperwork. The army's system of assignments was quite complicated, Brigonius had learned, with detachments being sent all over the province, and perhaps only half or two-thirds of the nominal strength of a given unit actually being in its home base at any time. But as a soldier of Rome, in your unit's Acts your duties were recorded daily. It was the army's meticulous record-keeping that enabled the commanders to know exactly not just where each soldier was supposed to be but where he actually was. And to maintain this vast mountain of recording whole teams of clerks were required, an army within the army.

But today the discussion concerned the Wall.

'A fort every mile, two turrets every mile,' Xander said firmly. 'That's the design. That's what we are building.'

'And I'm telling you,' Tullio said, 'that it can't be done. You see, your design is all very well. I'm all for design. My cock would tumble out of my underpants without design. What I'm talking about now is fact, legionaries out there right now putting stones and turf blocks on the ground, one on top of the other. And if you try to follow your every-mile rule rigidly, Xander, you find yourself planting forts at the bottom of a gully where you can't open the gates, or at the top of a crest where if you did open the gates you would fall out.'

'Roman roads run straight,' Karus said, himself faintly mocking. 'Up hill and across valley; everybody knows that. Are you saying you can't build a simple Wall to the same standard?'

Tullio ignored him. 'And it's not just the position of the forts. I'm hearing grumbles from the legionary tribunes who've been up on inspection from Eburacum. If an assault were to come, how are they supposed to deploy through those toy-town gates?'

Xander said stiffly, 'I carefully computed the width and frequency of the gates to ensure-'

Annius said, 'Yes, but the local farmers have to use them too. What are we going to say to the legate of the sixth when he finds himself queuing up behind a flock of sheep?'

The image was so absurd it made Lepidina laugh prettily. Brigonius tried not to look at her.

Brigonius knew that the Wall-building project was actually running to schedule, somewhat to everybody's surprise. But Tullio was genuinely concerned about this issue of the useless mile-forts.

Tullio's slave, a boy aged maybe fourteen, approached Brigonius with a wine cup. Brigonius accepted it and said, 'Thanks.'

The boy looked surprised to be noticed at all. He said, 'Enjoy it, sir,' and resumed his station.

Brigonius watched him go and sipped his drink; it was soldiers' wine, strong, filthy stuff. The boy's tongue was British, Brigantian. His litter-name was Similis. Brigonius wondered what Matto would have thought if he could have seen his cousin now, being served wine by the British slave of a German officer in the pay of the Roman army, as he worked on a Wall which was meant to secure the servitude of the north of Britain for ever.