Emperor

Tullio sat back and folded his massive arms. 'I don't care whether he's the Emperor of the Romans or the King of the Bog People. You can't build a six-year Wall in three years, love.'

Severa's fury was cold. 'Don't you call me 'love', you fur-backed-'

'Severa!' Karus snapped.

Annius was studying the model. 'Tell you what. Why not build it in turf? Just as good at keeping out the hairy lads from the north, and be done in less than half the time.'

'Turf? Turf?' Severa said menacingly. 'Why, you insolent fool, if I had a clod of turf in my hand right now, I would gladly shove it down your throat-'

Brigonius touched her arm. 'Wait,' he whispered. 'I'm a quarryman. I deal with fellows like this all the time. It's all a game. Just give us some time.'

Karus stood hastily. 'Quite right. Let's sleep on it, shall we?' He stood massively over Severa until she allowed herself to be escorted from the room. Then he sat down, blowing out his jowled cheeks with relief.

'Feisty piece, isn't she?' Tullio said.

'You don't know the half of it,' Karus said dryly.

Brigonius faced Tullio. 'Let's get down to business, shall we? You heard her, prefect. This is the Emperor we're dealing with. And the Emperor wants a stone wall.'

Tullio said heavily, 'Listen, black-beard, the Emperor can want to build his Wall on the moon, but that doesn't mean it can be done.'

'Then what can you do?'

Annius was pulling his lip. In his dull way he seemed the more creative of the two, Brigonius thought, and was at least trying to come up with solutions. 'Tell you what,' he said slowly. 'How about half in turf and half stone? You could probably manage that in the time. Then you get the best of all worlds, a complete defensive barrier in three years and a nice bit of stonework to impress the boss.'

Brigonius was about to reject this out of hand, but Xander said wearily, 'Four-tenths.'

Brigonius turned to him. 'What?'

'Not half. Four-tenths in turf, the rest stone according to the plan.' He tapped Tullio's notebook. 'That is feasible from the figures, if you are honest in your calculations, prefect. Besides I worked it out for myself earlier.'

Tullio took back the notebook and revised his figures quickly. 'All right. Yes, four-tenths turf, six-tenths stone. Yes, you could do that.'

Xander turned to Brigonius. 'This is the best we can do in the time.'

Karus said darkly, 'And you knew this before we came in here? Why didn't you say something when we put the plan before the Emperor?'

'Because I didn't know we would only have three years,' Xander said. He sounded exhausted. 'Severa didn't let slip that little detail until the audience. What could I do, argue with her before Hadrian himself?'

'It's not so bad,' Annius said cheerfully. 'Everybody goes away happy. And you could always replace your turf with stone later.'

Karus growled, but subsided.

Brigonius glanced around. 'All right,' he said cautiously, not wishing to overstretch the consensus. 'Then the question is, which half will be turf?'

After another hour's discussion, and after a tankard or two of Tullio's coarse German beer, they came a conclusion. From Segedunum at its eastern extremity, the Wall would run west as stone for forty-five miles, and then turf the rest of the way to the western coast. The eastern half of the Wall was closer to local sources of good stone-not least Brigonius's own quarry-and the two soldiers regarded the security situation along this part of the border as more critical, so stone was appropriate for this stretch.

'And besides,' as Tullio pointed out, 'the eastern half is where the Emperor is. He's going to want to lay a foundation stone, not dig a lump of sod.'

The four of them stood up and shook hands. 'Then we have a plan,' Brigonius said, weary but relieved. 'Now all we've got to do is sell it to the Emperor.'

'That's the easy part,' Karus muttered. 'It's Severa I'm frightened of…'

XII

The climax of Hadrian's visit to Eburacum was the twenty-fourth of June, a day of religious celebration for soldiers wherever they were posted across the empire. After this Hadrian would ride north and ceremonially install the first foundation stone of the great Wall which would soon divide the island of Britain in two.

Brigonius had been forced to learn a lot about the habits of his sole customer, the Roman army. A soldier's religious life was complicated. To begin with he brought along his own gods. A German here in Britain, for instance, celebrated his feast of Matronalia on the first of March. He would also be expected to pay respect to any local deities. The soldiers seemed to like Brigantia's own Coventina, and thanks to the army's mobility she was gaining adherents even overseas, in Gaul and Germany. But the soldiers' statues of her, crudely made, were alien in the eyes of the Brigantians, who found Coventina in the hills and the streams and in the wind, and did not recognise these busty Romanised cartoons.

The centre of a soldier's religious life, however, was a calendar based on feasts of the traditional Roman deities, principal city days, the anniversaries of the emperors, and dates associated with his unit itself. And of all the feasts on the calendar none was more significant than today, the twenty-fourth of June, the feast of Fors Fortuna, a popular goddess among the troops.

Brigonius had hoped to spend the day in the company of Lepidina. He wasn't sure what Severa's plans would be now, and how much more time he and Lepidina would have together. But as the day's festivities began Lepidina was nowhere to be found.

Then Severa herself peremptorily requisitioned him as an escort. Beside Severa, her face set as hard as Roman concrete, Brigonius found himself trailing the Emperor as he toured the troops.

Accompanied by his courtiers, Hadrian walked slowly from barracks block to training field, and inspected displays of infantry field manoeuvres and formation riding by cavalry units. It was a festival day, and the imperial party grew raucous on wine and British beer. Brigonius had a policy of staying sober around Romans, but Severa seemed determined to ply him with drink, and he saw no point in defying her. As the ale filled him even her company seemed less than icy.

Hadrian drank his share, but he remained focused on the part he was playing. He was good at detail; Brigonius heard him sympathise with one unit of mixed cavalry and infantry that it was harder for them to put on a spectacular display than for a dedicated cavalry unit with their larger numbers of horse. Each man seemed to grow in his presence, and Brigonius could see why he was so loved by his troops.

It wasn't a bad life, Brigonius was coming to think, to be a soldier of Rome. You received regular pay and reasonable food. You had camaraderie in the barracks, and there was always the civilian town outside your fort, with its shops and inns and brothels and temples, where you might find a little relief, or a companion who could one day become a wife. The barracks could be rife with lice, and the town with diseases. But you could get rid of the lice in the bath house, and if you got sick you could go to the hospital-the army ran the only professional hospitals in the world. You might go through your whole twenty-five-year career with only two or three campaigning seasons, and perhaps without seeing any fighting at all. You were almost certainly better off than the Brittunculi or other half-civilised provincials beyond the walls of your fort…And every so often an emperor came to visit.

Many of the troops had grown beards, in defiance of the usual Roman custom, imitating Hadrian's coin images. This amused Severa. 'Look at them. The Emperor's beard is more famous than he is!'

At noon the Emperor and his retinue, with Brigonius and Severa in tow, retired to the fortress's headquarters. Today the largest reception room in the block had been decked out as a shrine to many gods, and the party settled down to a long afternoon of eating, drinking and fortune-telling. At the inception of his mighty project Hadrian was seeking good auguries. Since dawn his philosophers had been inspecting the sky, looking for unusual clouds and the flight of birds with auspicious patterns. Now animals were put to death on charcoal braziers, entrails were prodded, statues venerated and libations poured, as scholars worked their way through scrolls of prophecies and