“I must still buy my clothes and my weapons, and bribe that old fool Percennius to give somebody else the latrine duty.” There was laughter at that. “And all for the privilege of waiting for a poke up the arse from some Pict’s wooden spear. Why do you think Paternus and the others have run off?”

Regina stared; she had never seen such defiance. She was uneasily reminded of how that farmer had stood up to her father.

But Aetius was not Marcus.

Aetius took a single step forward and slammed his gloved hand against the man’s temple. To the clang of bone on metal, the man fell sideways into the dirt. Grunting, he rolled on his back — and, Regina saw, he actually touched the hilt of the short sword at his waist. But Aetius stood over him, fists bunched, until he dropped his hand and looked away.

The rest of the troop stood utterly silent.

Aetius pointed at two of them. “You and you. Take him. A hundred strokes for drinking on guard, and a hundred more for what he has had to say today.”

The men didn’t move. Even from here Regina could feel the tension. If they were to disobey Aetius’s order now … She felt a hot flush in her belly, and wondered if that was fear.

The two troopers, with every show of insolent reluctance, moved to their fallen colleague. But move they did. Aetius stepped back to let the man stand. His arms held behind his back, he was walked toward the whipping post. The tension bled out of the scene. But Regina still felt that odd warmth at her center.

One of the troopers, glancing up, pointed at her. “Look! Septimius — look at that! The red rain has begun …” The other troopers looked up at Regina, and began to point and laugh. Aetius railed at them, but their discipline was gone now.

She felt heat burn in her cheeks. She had no idea what she had done.

Magnus was at her side. He put an arm around her and tried to pull her away. “Come now. Put my cloak around you. It’s all right.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. And then she felt warmth on her legs. She looked down and saw blood, dripping out from beneath her tunic. She looked up in horror. “Magnus! What’s happening to me? Am I dying?”

For all his strength he looked as uncertain and as weak as a child; he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Women’s matters,” he gasped.

Now the soldiers were catcalling. “I’ve waited all these years for you to blossom, little flower!” “Come sit on me, your old friend Septimius!” “No, me! Me first!” One of them had lifted his tunic to pull out his penis, like a floppy piece of rope that he shook at her.

Regina grabbed Magnus’s heavy, musty-smelling woolen cloak and wrapped it around her. Then she clambered down the ladder to the ground and ran over the vallum toward the settlement, hiding her face.

For all Aetius raged at them, the soldiers kept up the baffling, terrifying barrage.

In their five years together at the Wall, Aetius had tried to tell Regina something of the world beyond the Wall. “There’s been an awful lot of trouble for everybody. It all started the night the Rhine froze over, and the barbarians just walked into Gaul. But for Britain that wretch Constantius was the one who nailed down the coffin lid …”

The problems went Empire-wide, said Aetius. When the Empire had been expanding, new wealth had always been generated, from booty and taxation. But those days were long gone. And with the new, better-equipped, more powerful barbarian enemies, just as economic pressure increased, so did pressure on the borders, and more money had had to be found to pay for the defense of the realm. For a generation there had been problems and instability throughout the western provinces. Sometimes Aetius talked nostalgically about the great Stilicho, military commander in the western provinces, who had protected Britain. Aetius seemed to worship this Stilicho, even though, it turned out, he was a barbarian, Vandal-born. Barbarian or not, he had been the effective ruler of the west, under the ineffectual Emperor Honorius. But even the greatest generals grow feeble — and make lethal enemies at court.

And in Britain, since Constantius’s adventure, the problems had been particularly acute.

After Constantius’s subjects had thrown out his hierarchy of officials and tax collectors and inspectors, the cycle of taxation and state spending had broken down. Not only that, there was no mint in Britain,

and after the expulsion of the moneymen there was no way to import coins from the rest of the Empire. Suddenly there weren’t even any coins to circulate.

As everybody hoarded what they had left, people returned to barter. But with its lifeblood of coinage cut off, the economy was rapidly withering.

“There’s just no money to pay the troops. You know, I heard that before I was posted here the soldiers even sent a deputation across the ocean to try to get the back pay they were owed. They never returned.”

“They must have found some other place to live.”

“Or had their throats slit by barbarians. We’ll never know, will we? The people in the towns actually wrote to the Emperor himself and asked for help. This was only a few years ago. But by then, so it is said, Rome itself had been sacked by the barbarians. Honorius wrote back saying that the British must defend themselves as best they could …”

Aetius was worried about Regina’s future. That was why he lectured her about politics and history and wars. He thought it was important to equip her for the challenges of her life.

And Aetius was obviously worried about his own future, too. If you completed twenty years’ military service you could become one of the honestiores — the top folk in society. A career as a soldier was a way for a common man to retire to a nice house in the town or even a villa. But there was no obvious successor to Aetius, here in his station on the Wall, and he had no contact with the diocese’s central command. If he stepped down, the troops would fall apart; he knew that. And besides there was nowhere for him to retire to. He had to hang on.

“Look,” he would say, “this nonsense in Gaul has to stop. Rome is already back on its feet, and when he gets the chance the Emperor will reassert his authority here.”

“And things will get back to normal.”

“Britain has been lost to the Empire before — oh, yes, many times — and each time won back. So it will be this time, I’m sure.” And when that happened, at last, when the tax collectors returned and the coins started to circulate once more — when the soldiers were properly paid and equipped and there was a secure place for him to retire — Aetius could allow his own career to end.

As it turned out, however, for Aetius it was all going to end much sooner than that. And far from everything returning to normal, Regina would have to suffer another great disruption.

After her humiliation before the soldiers, Regina fled to Cartumandua.

Carta was cooking a haunch of pork wrapped in straw. She had hung a big iron cauldron from a tripod and was using tongs to load in fire-hot rocks from the hearth; they sizzled as they hit the water. Her house was a wooden shack, built in the rectangular Roman way. The “kitchen” was just a space around a hearth built in a stone-lined pit, around which you would squat on the ground.

When Regina came bursting in, weeping, Carta dropped the tongs and ran to meet her.

“Carta, oh Carta, it was awful!”

Carta held Regina’s face to her none-too-clean woolen smock, and let her weep. “Hush, hush, child.” She stroked Regina’s hair as she had when Regina was a pampered child of the villa, and Cartumandua a young girl slave.