Penny sat down and glanced up at Marie. ‘Bring some water. Umm, and some hot milk.’

Marie hurried away.

Penny put her hand on Beth’s arm and leaned forward to see. The baby, at least, was sleeping peacefully, its face a crumple. ‘Oh, Beth. It’s beautiful.’

‘She. She’s a girl. She’s called Mardina.’

‘After your mother.’ Penny looked up at Ari, whose face showed nothing but hostility. ‘I don’t understand any of this. What’s wrong? Is she not healthy?’

‘The baby is fine,’ Ari said coldly. ‘But she was – unintended.’

‘They don’t hold with women my age having kids,’ Beth said. ‘The Brikanti. It’s a rough and ready rule. You can understand why; they fly warships in space but their medicine is medieval.’

‘But you got pregnant anyway.’

‘It was an accident. Yes, I got pregnant. I was told it would be all right, that the baby would be accepted.’

‘You probably misunderstood,’ Ari said. ‘You misheard the nuances. I told you there would have to be a trial—’

‘They exposed her,’ Beth said to Penny. ‘While I slept.’

Penny was bewildered. ‘They what?’

‘They took her, Ari’s family, the women. Took her from me. They stripped away her blankets, and put her on the roof of the house, naked. She would be allowed to live, you see, if she survived the exposure. And if he chose to bring her in. It was to be his choice, not mine.’

Penny turned on Ari. ‘That seems unnecessarily brutal.’

He managed to smile, self-deprecating. ‘It’s not the time for a history lesson. You may blame the Romans from whom we borrowed the custom. The rule is indeed – what did you say? – rough and ready. Better a few healthy children are lost, than that society is burdened with the weak—’

Beth snapped, ‘The father gets to choose to save her, or not. Not the mother. Supposedly the father’s a better judge. Most mothers will have families to back them up – sometimes they take the child, though the mother can’t see her again. But I had no one to help me. And he chose to abandon her.’

Ari shook his head. ‘Most men in my position would have done the same.’

‘But you found out, Beth,’ Penny prompted.

‘I busted out of that damn house where they were keeping me,’ Beth said. ‘I got up on the roof, and saved my baby, and I came straight here, where I knew you would be. I wonder how many laws I broke doing that. Will you prosecute me, scholar? Will I be thrown in jail, or mutilated, or executed, or whatever else you do to disobedient mothers?’

Ari shook his head again. ‘No, no. There are always exceptions. You will be welcome in my home, with my family – with the baby—’

‘Not after this.’ She turned to Penny with a look of pleading. ‘Let me stay here. With you.’

‘Of course you can stay,’ Penny said immediately.

Ari stood. ‘This changes nothing. This Academy is here at my discretion. In a sense you are still under my roof—’

‘They stay,’ Penny said firmly, ‘with us.’

‘And the future? As the child has needs, as she grows?’

Penny sighed. ‘We’ll deal with that when we come to it. I think it’s best if you go now, Ari Guthfrithson.’

He stood still for a moment, clenching one fist. Then he stalked away, almost colliding with Marie Golvin as she approached with a tray of drinks.

Stef watched him go. ‘I thought I understood him. I thought we communicated, as scholars. Druidh. But now—’

‘You don’t know him at all,’ Beth said. ‘I didn’t. These people aren’t like us, Stef. Not even Ari. Not even the man I thought I loved, who fathered my child. Especially not him.’

CHAPTER 18

AD 2227; AUC 2980

‘ColU, I thought Quintus Fabius was a pompous ass from the moment he came strutting down from that airship.’

‘He is a good commander, Yuri Eden. But as he hails from what is still regarded as an outer province of the Empire, he has to be more Roman than the Romans.’

‘So he’s got a chip on his shoulder. Boo hoo. Actually he reminded me of that other pompous ass Lex McGregor … I’m sorry. Kind of lost my way there.’

‘Relax, Yuri Eden. Breathe your oxygen.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Do you remember what we were talking about? I am here to witness your final testament.’

‘Always busy, eh, ColU? Look, just talk to me. I’ve had enough of my own miserable life for now. You’re the nearest thing I’ve got to a friend on this tub – you and Stef, but you were there first, right?’

‘Even if I was an instrument of the ISF, the organisation that stranded you against your will on an alien world.’

‘Well, there is that. No hard feelings, eh? And don’t tell me I need to rest. I’ll soon be enjoying the long sleep, drifting between the stars in a Roman sarcophagus. Fine way to go, actually.’

‘You are aware that I did quietly suggest to the optio that that would be the best course of action regarding the disposal of your body, and indeed Colonel Kalinski’s if it came to that. As opposed to depositing your corpses in the recycling tanks.’

‘Don’t spare my feelings, will you?’

‘After all, we hail from another timeline. Your bodies may contain pathogens exotic to this reality. And both of your bodies contain foreign elements, even dental work for example, which might be harmful in the ship’s food chain.’

‘Ha! Oh, don’t make me laugh, ColU. Now I have an image of my false teeth chewing their way out of some fat legionary’s gut.’

‘Well, you don’t wear false teeth, Yuri Eden. But the image is an amusing one.’

‘Don’t laugh too hard.’

‘Do you wish me to call the medicus again? Michael did say that if—’

‘Oh, don’t fuss, ColU. If I want the damn quack I’ll call him. It’s only been palliative care, and you know that as well as I do. He can treat the actual condition no better than you can. But with that suite of drugs he has, all those psychoactive substances from the South American jungles, he can play my level of pain like a fiddle … You know, I sometimes wonder if I haven’t carried these damn passengers all my life.’

‘That’s possible, actually, Yuri Eden. Your body has been exposed to a series of extraordinary environments. This is your second journey through interstellar space. You spent decades on Per Ardua, a planet of a flare star. Before that, you spent some time under a dome on Mars, a world lacking a thick atmosphere, an ozone layer. Even before that, a journey across interplanetary space from Earth to Mars.’

‘Also I passed through Hatches. Three times.’

‘Indeed. And before all that you spent a century in a casket, buried in a vault in Antarctica with a thousand others. The casualty rates from cancers of various sorts of survivors of that process—’

‘We called it “freezer burn”. So the parents who put me on ice and stuffed me in a hole—’

‘Surely they sought to send you to a better time, Yuri Eden.’

‘And now, it turns out, after all I’ve survived, it will be the damn cryo that kills me off in the end. Oh, the irony.’

‘I am only speculating, Yuri Eden.’

‘I know, buddy. I don’t take it personally.’

‘It is to be regretted that more advanced medicine is not available. I hope to help the ship’s navigators devise a medical scanner to emulate the functions of the slate I used to diagnose your condition.’

‘The navigators? Oh, your Arab buddies, in their observation blisters …’

‘This vessel navigates by the stars, by astronomical observations made by the Arab teams.’

‘These Arab buddies of yours sound like they are as advanced scientifically as anybody else in this timeline.’

‘It would seem so. Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilisation, the dar-al Islam, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of inter-faith conflict in Europe – no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.’