“Can we go now?” you say, fidgeting.
I place the box into the earth and pack the turf down around it. “We will come back,” I whisper, and I say a short prayer to the spirits of this place, whoever they are. “I promise we will come back.”
It is as we ride up out of the small valley that you spot them. Your eyes are sharper than mine.
“Sails!” you yell, and point to the water.
My heart skips like a stone skimmed across water – then sinks. They are not Roman sails; just the fishing boats. We know these men. I raise a hand in greeting.
But you have already seen my expression.
“Mother,” you say, “why do you fear the sea?”
I fear the sea because enemies come from the sea, I think. But I don’t want to scare you.
“Oh, just because a long time ago, I was caught in a storm,” I say.
“Like when Jupiter’s Oak got hit by lightning?” you say, meaning a year ago when a great tree we’ve always used as a landmark was struck. You had nightmares about the blaze for a long time afterwards.
“Yes, but worse, because this time the storm was at sea.”
“Storms at sea are not scary,” you say. “You don’t have to go out and bring the animals to shelter. There’s nothing to get burned out there.”
I remember that you have only ever seen a storm at sea as something far off; spears of light jabbing the shield of the water. You have only ever felt grateful that it stays out there and does not come on to land.
“Unless you’re on board a ship,” I say.
“You were on board a ship?” you say. “In a storm? What was that like?”
I never meant to start telling the story like this, here and now. But as we ride on, I realise that some stories are so big, that, like the ocean, if you think too hard about it you’ll never start swimming. You just have to take a deep breath and jump in. In medias res, my father would say: right in the middle of the thing. Jump in, and hope you can swim your way out again.
So as we ride homewards, the huge sea at our back, I take a deep breath and dive into the story.
208 AD
2.
The Heart of the Storm
I wanted to die.
The captain had sent all the passengers below decks when the waves got so high that even the strongest of us could not keep our footing. We had been stuck in our cabin for so long I had lost count of the time. I could hear my father and mother coughing and retching near me. For a long time we had lain in our bunks, sick and shivering with terror, listening to the shouts of the sailors on deck and the ship creaking and groaning all around us.
“I feel like a British Druid,” my father had moaned, once the ship started pitching as well as rolling, “wrapped up in a bull’s hide for thirty days and thirty nights until I start to sweat poetry.”
That was the last thing any of us said for a while. We were too ill and frightened to talk, and the ship was being tossed around so much that we could not stand up. It was pitch black except for the flicker of lightning. There was no chance of a lamp in this storm; the flame would only have set light to the ship. Outside the thunder crashed and the wind howled so loud we could no longer hear the captain and the sailors. Every time we rose up on the crest of a wave, I clung to the edge of my bunk, and every time we crashed down again, I thought the ship would break apart around me.
We were supposed to have been in Britain already. It was supposed to be a short trip across the Mare Britannicum, the strip of sea that separated Gaul and Britain. The fleet had set sail on a fine spring day, with a good wind. It should have taken barely two days to get there. Instead, a few hours into the journey, the first clouds started forming in the sky. I could not believe how fast they moved, like an iron-clad legion closing in on us.
Rolled about in my bunk, like dice in a hand, I no longer believed in Britain. I was so ill and so delirious that I actually thought it was a lie as so many had said in the beginning; a legendary place of monsters; a dream island that vanished into Hell as soon as you seemed likely to set foot on it. I certainly didn’t believe I would get there. I didn’t believe I’d get anywhere except to the bottom of the sea, where there was no wind and no waves and I was just bones which couldn’t vomit any more.
Thoughts chased each other madly around my head like charioteers around the Circus Maximus. I knew Neptune was angry when there was a storm, but I couldn’t understand why he was so angry with me. I was just a fourteen-year-old girl. What could I possibly have done? Perhaps, I thought, it’s not me the gods are angry with but some hero whose ship’s path has crossed mine. Maybe I am caught up in the flailing tail of someone else’s story. Perhaps, I thought, I had better try to get up and pray – ask the gods for mercy.
My father’s hand grasped mine just as I thought that. I realised he was saying my name, over and over again: “Camilla! Camilla!” And then: “Have to get out!”
My mother grasped my other hand, and they pulled me from my bunk. I was in water, first up to my ankles, then my knees. My father led us
