Carta herself was still only twenty. Aetius had long made her a freedwoman, and allowed her to seek out her own destiny in this little below-the-Wall community, but she still had room in her life for Regina.

When Regina had calmed down enough to show her the blood, Carta clucked disapprovingly. “And nobody told you about this? Certainly not that old fool Aetius, I’ll bet.”

Regina gazed in renewed horror at the dried blood. “Carta — I’m afraid I’m dying. There must be something terribly wrong.”

“No. There’s nothing wrong — nothing save that you’re twelve years old.” And Carta patiently explained to her what had happened to her body, and helped her clean herself, and showed her how to pad herself with a loincloth tied with cords.

In the middle of this Severus came in, carrying a bundle of firewood. He was a soldier, a heavyset man, his stubble grimed with dirt. He glared at Regina. She had never seen him performing strictly military duties. He only ever worked around the little village, carrying food, repairing buildings, even working in the fields where oats were grown and cattle fed. In the shadow of the Wall the lines between the soldiers and the rest of the population had gotten very blurred, especially since marriage between the locals and the soldiers had been made legal.

Regina didn’t like Severus. She had always hoped that Carta would take up with Macco, the stolid, silent slave who had accompanied them from the villa. But one night Macco had slipped away, apparently gone to seek his freedom in the countryside beyond the Emperor’s laws. For Severus’s part he seemed somehow jealous of Regina’s relationship with Carta, which long predated his own attachment. Regina wasn’t even sure what Severus’s relationship with Carta was. They certainly weren’t married. Regina thought he gave her some measure of protection, in return for companionship. It wasn’t an uncommon arrangement.

But Carta was in control. Now she just waited until he dropped the wood and went away.

Carta made them both some nettle tea, and they sat on mats on the ground. Regina tried to describe how the soldiers had taunted her — now she was no longer afraid of dying, that seemed worst of all — and Carta comforted her, but told her such attention was something she was going to have to get used to. Slowly Regina calmed down.

Regina glanced around at the smoke-stained walls. The hut was wattle and daub, just mud and straw stuffed into the gaps in a wooden frame.

Carta said, “What are you thinking now?”

Regina smiled. “About my mother’s kitchen. It was so different. I think I remember a big oven with a dome on it.”

Carta nodded. “That’s right. You could put charcoal in it and seal it up. It made perfect bread — that wonderful dry heat. And then there was a raised hearth.”

“I could never see over the top of that. I wonder if it’s still there.”

“Yes,” Carta said firmly. “I’m sure of it. You know your grandfather put the villa in the hands of a steward.”

“But in these times you can’t be sure of anything,” said Regina.

Carta giggled girlishly. “Oh, my. You sound like an old woman! You can trust your grandfather to look after your family’s property. He’s a good man, and family is everything to him. You are everything … Won’t he be worried about you? Maybe I should send a message—”

Regina shrugged. “Let him worry. He should have told me about the bleeding.”

Carta snorted. “I think he’d rather face a thousand blue-faced Picts than that.”

“Anyway he saw which way I came. If he’s worried he’ll come after me.”

Carta sipped her tea. “He doesn’t often come here, to the shadow of the Wall.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t fit. For one thing he’s older than anybody here.”

“What? That can’t be true.”

“Think about it,” Carta said, eyeing her. “You know a good few people here. You’re popular here, as you are everywhere! How many men over forty do you know? How many women over thirty-five?”

None, Regina thought, shocked — even though, she was sure, much older people had been commonplace in her parents’ circle of friends, with wrinkles and white hair, the badges of age.

“Why is it like this?”

Carta laughed. “Because we don’t live in villas. We don’t have servants and slaves to clean our teeth. We have to work hard, all the time. It’s the way it is, little Regina. Only the rich grow old.”

Regina frowned. Even now, she resented being spoken to like that by a slave — even a former slave — even Carta. “There was no shame in the way we lived,” she said hotly. “Our family was civilized, in the Roman way.”

To her surprise Cartumandua gazed at Regina coldly. She said, “ ‘The allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naпvetй the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.’ “

“What’s that?”

“Tacitus. You’re not the only one who’s learning to read, Regina.” She got up and walked to her cauldron, and poked at the haunch of meat with a long iron skewer.

It was evening, a few days after Regina’s humiliation on the Wall. By flickering candlelight, she was reading, in halting Latin, from the historian Tacitus. “ ‘Good fortune and discipline have gone hand in hand over the last eight hundred years to build the Roman state, which destroyed will bring down all together …’ “ She had asked for Tacitus after Carta’s mild reprimand. This was a speech said to have been given three centuries earlier to rebelling tribes in Gaul by Petillius Cerialis, soon to be governor of Britain.

She was in Aetius’s chalet, one of a row in this little community in the lee of the Wall. It wasn’t grand, just a hut of four rooms built of wattle and daub to the rectangular Roman plan. But it had a tiled floor and a deep hearth, and was cozy and warm. It had been erected when long-stay soldiers had first been allowed to marry and raise families. It was here, during an earlier tour of duty with the border troops, that Aetius had brought his bride Brica, and here that Julia, Regina’s mother, had been born.

Its centerpiece was the lararium, the family shrine that Aetius and Regina had built together after their flight from the villa. The three crudely carved matres in their hooded cloaks sat at the center of a little circle of gifts of wine and food. But this was a soldier’s shrine, and there were also tokens to such abstract entities as Roma, Victoria, and Disciplina, as well as a coin bearing the head of the latest Emperor anybody had heard of, Honorius.

And it was in his chalet that, at Aetius’s insistence, Regina had continued her education. He expected her to become fluent in both her native language and in Latin — and to know the difference; Aetius despised what he called the “muddle,” the patois of Latin-flavored British much favored by the ordinary people of the behind-the-Wall community. He had her read Tacitus and Caesar, historians and emperors and playwrights, from his store of fragile, ancient papyrus scrolls. She learned to write with styli on tablets of wax on wood, and with ink made of soot and a pen of metal. Later, he promised, he would train her in the art of rhetoric. But he believed in combining the best of the British and Roman traditions, and he also had her memorize long sagas of heroes and monsters in the old British style.

“ ‘At present, victor and vanquished enjoy peace and the imperial civilization under the same law on an equal footing. Let your experience of the alternatives prevent you from preferring the ruin that will follow on revolt to the safety that is conferred by obedience …’ “

There was some disturbance outside. Shouting, what sounded like singing. No doubt the soldiers were getting drunk again. But Aetius didn’t react, and Regina knew she was safe with him.