Perhaps you have something of the Weaver's manipulative coldness in your heart…' But his words tailed away, and Severa's glare held only contempt for this man who had been her closest ally.
As for Brigonius, he had nothing to say to Severa. Somehow the company of this vicious, thrusting woman felt appropriate on this awful day.
There was a disturbance. Brigonius turned to see a detail of soldiers dragging a prisoner out of the camp. They towered over him; he was only a boy. Brigonius and his companions had to step back to allow the party through. For a moment the boy's glance met Brigonius's. It was Similis, Tullio's British slave. The boy seemed to recognise Brigonius, who had once thanked him for bringing him a drink. Then the moment was lost, the link between their souls broken.
The soldiers briskly pushed the boy to the ground. They strapped his arms to his cross. Then they laid one foot over the other, and to pin both feet to the cross upright, drove a long iron nail through them. The sound was extraordinary, like a skewer driven into a side of pork. The boy stayed silent; he panted hard, panicky. Brigonius had heard that there was comparatively little pain associated with the nailing, oddly. With a grunting effort the soldiers raised the cross, and pushed its base into a hole in the ground. As the cross was jolted into position, Brigonius thought he heard the flesh in the boy's feet tear. Now the screaming began.
'Oh, have mercy!' Karus said, but it was a whisper, too quiet for the soldiers to hear.
Severa said bleakly, 'Mercy? The suffering is necessary. Not for him and the crime he committed, but for us, so we will not transgress in future.'
'But he didn't commit a crime,' Karus blustered. 'That's what's so monstrously unfair about it!'
The boy's guilt or otherwise didn't matter, Brigonius knew. Severa was right about that. The rebellion had been broken up, its leaders punished. But for the soldiers at Banna one loose thread had remained. Nobody had been found who had supported Matto in his strike at the very heart of their camp, nobody who had ordered him to do it, nobody who had helped him. The soldiers couldn't bear the idea that one individual acting alone could have penetrated so far into a base they thought of as secure. So somebody had to be blamed, a conspiracy concocted. And there, conveniently, was a Brigantian boy serving the prefect himself. Some whispered he had been seen at the gate when Matto arrived, or at the headquarters building before it was torched, or-
'All lies,' Karus moaned. An empathetic man for a lawyer, Brigonius thought; he felt the boy's agony himself. 'All rumours, misunderstandings-a will to see blame where none exists!'
Brigonius put a hand on his shoulder. 'For once Severa is right. His suffering is necessary; it is closure. Let's just be grateful it isn't one of us.'
Karus spat on the ground, an uncharacteristically crude gesture. 'Sometimes you are too pragmatic, Brigonius. This may be necessary but it isn't for me.' He stalked off, and Severa, her face unreadable, followed.
Blood dripped steadily from Similis's feet. If he let himself hang from his arms, so sparing his torn feet, he couldn't breathe. But if he tried to raise himself on his feet so he could get some air, the tearing got worse. So he jerked and struggled, shifting his weight from one source of pain to another, his movements minute but agonised.
As the boy fought to stay alive, one by one the crowd drifted away. Brigonius felt he ought to stay, though he wasn't sure why.
When people called him 'pragmatic', he had learned, it was meant as an insult. He didn't think of himself as cowardly, or a traitor to his ancient nation. He could see very clearly how the Romans brought unhappiness to many-and misery or death to those who opposed them. It was just that he couldn't imagine any way of striking at the Romans that would do anybody any good. Surely Matto's futile gesture proved that. But that didn't make him feel any better as he stood here and watched an innocent child die on a cross.
The boy's whimpering quieted and he fell into unconsciousness. As darkness gathered, one of the soldiers who stood at the foot of the cross, taking pity, smashed the boy's legs with the hilt of his sword, and the boy's body slumped further. Unable to support himself, he would surely soon be dead of asphyxiation. But his body would hang there until the crows had his flesh.
Brigonius turned and walked back into the camp.
XIX
The letter from Lepidina was a slip of wood covered in her own rounded, still girlish handwriting. She had returned to Britain from Rome, she said, and would visit the Wall. She said that her mother was coming too-indeed, the purpose of her visit was somehow connected with Severa.
And so Brigonius was going to see Lepidina again. He was shocked to reflect that since the fateful day of the Decision, when before governor Nepos the Wall had been redesigned from end to end, fifteen years had already passed. And Lepidina was no girl now; she was to stay in the fort at Banna with a party led by her husband of fourteen years: Galba Iulius Sabinus, once a pushy young legionary tribune, now a senator.
Brigonius clutched the letter to his heart, wondering what to tell his wife.
On the appointed day he made his way to the fort at Banna. He was passed through the west gate. The double-arched gateway alone, he sometimes thought, was grander than anything seen in Brigantia before the Romans came.
Leaving his horse to be stabled by a slave, he walked along the main drag through the fort, called-as in every Roman fort of this type right across the empire-the via praetoria. Banna was no tent city now. Buildings clustered around him like huge bricks: the barracks to either side, and before him the squat blocks of the praetorium, Tullio's commander's residence, and the principia, the fort's formal headquarters. Beyond that he glimpsed the hospital, and more barracks, stables and workshops. An empty area was laid out with the foundations of two granaries, enough to store a year's supply of grain for a thousand men, which would have raised floors for protection from the elements. But these were yet to be constructed. Progress was always slow, hampered by a lack of local resources. One of the grandest buildings was a drill hall where the soldiers could be trained during the most inclement northern weather; it was a monument of stone big enough to allow javelins to be thrown indoors.
The streets were busy, not just with soldiers but with their slaves, and with local traders and workmen. Pay day had been only a couple of days ago, and the vendors prowled the streets and pushed their heads inside open doors, looking for likely buyers of their wares and services. Enclosed within its walls, self-contained, the fort shut out the untamed countryside around it; it was like an island of Romanness, Brigonius thought, independent of the world outside.
But of the Brigantian settlement that had once stood here not a trace remained. The old Roman watchtower had been demolished, the forest cleared and marshland drained. Even the ancient barrows that had lined the escarpment, the tombs of deep ancestors, had been levelled. This was the place where Brigonius had been born, and the ancestors of Severa and Lepidina; it was here that Nectovelin's birth had long ago been heralded by the strange Prophecy. These days the only Brigantians lived in a shanty-town that had grown around the walls of the fort, just as at Vindolanda. Coventina was banished now.
Brigonius reached the headquarters building. He crossed the broad cloistered courtyard with its well, heading for the central cross-hall, the basilica. These two areas were large enough to hold all the troops in the fort. To the rear of the basilica was a row of offices, at the centre of which was the shrine, the aedes, with its statue of Hadrian, the standards of the fort units, and other religious tokens. Two rooms to either side were the offices of the adjutant, the cornicularius, and of the signiferi, the standard-bearers. The shrine and offices had open fronts with low ironwork screens. This little area was the fort's heart. The signiferi were responsible for the crucial issues of the soldiers' pay and savings, and behind the shrine itself was a strongroom containing the fort's cash. Brigonius had watched this being built from the ground up, and indeed had sold the Romans much of the stone they had needed. It was all still so new he could smell the mustiness of fresh plaster.
And today, in the basilica, the fort commander was holding a reception for Sabinus's party. There was little left of the pretty-boy tribune about Sabinus; he had become a tough-looking man of his world, competent and corpulent.
Sabinus was leading this delegation from Rome, representing both the senate and the Emperor's household. It was here to make a regular inspection of the Wall and the situation in the north in general-and, so the rumours went, to deal with a spot of unpleasantness concerning the conduct of Claudia Severa. Brigonius was surprised that
