to live in one of those wooden huts. They sit there like huge brown turds. No wonder the Britons are dazzled by a goblet of wine or two!'
Vespasian laughed, and led the way down the slope.
X
Agrippina lay on her belly in the low brush. She had been here since first light. She was stiff, her neck was sore, and she was out of food and low on water. But here she lay, silent and motionless, her face blackened by dirt, for she was spying on the Roman army.
Even she, educated in Gaul, had been stunned to see a Roman army on the march close up. The tens of thousands of men in close order had taken no less than three hours, she estimated, to stream past her position. All that time the noise had been deafening. The Romans awed her, even as she clung to her shard of hatred over Mandubracius, and her longing for revenge.
But she kept her mind clear. She had tried to count the troops and units, baggage carts and animals. She had already sent preliminary information by a runner to the camp Caratacus had established to the west of here, on the bank of the River of the Cantiaci. Despite the princes' warlike bluster, for now they had followed Nectovelin's advice, to watch, to gather information on the Romans, and to strike at them in small corrosive ways. Thus Agrippina was just one of a network of spies across the country.
After the main body of the force passed she kept her station, to see what might follow. She was given a lesson in Roman road engineering.
It had begun even before the first soldiers had come this way. Surveyors, protected by a detachment of cavalry, took up positions on ridges and hills. They had mysterious contraptions of wood and string and lead weights that they held up before their faces. Agrippina imagined this must have something to do with making sure the road ran straight. After that the route was marked out with canes thrust into the ground every few paces, and the surveyors hurried on to their next station.
After the main force of the army had passed along the marked-out route a construction gang followed. The gang themselves seemed to be soldiers; a cart followed with armour and weaponry piled high, though every man kept a knife at his belt.
They worked their way along a track already churned up by forty thousand pairs of boots, tens of thousands of hooves. First they cleared the central track of undergrowth, and then dug out ditches to either side, heaping up the dirt along the spine of the road. They piled large, heavy rocks on top of the ridge of dirt, and then a layer of smaller rocks, and finally gravel was shovelled out and spread crudely. The smaller rocks and gravel were hauled along in carts, but the heavy rocks were scavenged locally-mostly from the dry stone walls of local farms, but there were no farmers around to complain. At last the soldier-engineers walked up and down along the newly laid stretch of the road, ramming down the gravel with heavy posts.
As the soldiers worked, under the pleasantly warm British sun, they sang. Many of their work-songs were in Latin, but Agrippina recognised some Gallic, and even a little Germanic. Rome's soldiers did not only come from Rome these days.
Agrippina had seen Gaul; she knew what the future would hold. From this beginning the roads would spread out across the country like ivy over a wall, bifurcating and firing off their straight-line segments, until every corner of the land was reached. Messages would flash along the roads fast as thought, and the next time the soldiers needed to march this way they would be able to make much faster progress than today, through the mud and dirt. And in the future the young fighters of Britain, who today were preparing raids against the advancing Romans, would be marched away along these roads to go fight in Germany and Thrace and Asia, far from the misty cool of their homeland. Thus the empire absorbed its enemies and used them for its own further expansion-
A hand was clamped over her mouth. Agrippina struggled, but she was pinned to the ground. Her mind flooded with awful memories of that night on the beach. But then the weight shifted off her back, and she was able to twist and see the broad, dirt-streaked face of Braint, the farmer.
'Sorry,' Braint hissed. 'Didn't want you yelling out.'
Agrippina tried to control her anger. 'You shouldn't have done that.'
'Well, you should be watching your back,' Braint said. She crawled deeper into the undergrowth, and winced.
For the first time Agrippina noticed that Braint's leg was bleeding. 'What happened? Were you found?'
'Nearly. I gashed my leg on a rock, and lost my knife, but I got away. Dodgy work, this spying. No wonder they gave it to us women.'
'You need to tie up that cut. Do you want to borrow my knife?'
'No need.' Braint cast around on the ground, and turned up a lump of flint. She slammed it down against a rock and cracked it in two, exposing an interior as smooth as cream. She tapped half the rock with a pebble to crack off long thin flakes, selected one shard, and began to saw a strip of cloth from her tunic. All this took only heartbeats. 'So,' she said as she worked, 'you counted the legionaries as they went by? How many?'
'You don't want to know. I even stayed to see the road builders pass.'
'Oh, yes. Those blond young Germans, stripped to the waist. I bet you enjoyed the sight.' She leered and grabbed her own crotch.
Agrippina, still shaken up, couldn't help smiling, for she had had some earthy thoughts as she watched the soldiers work.
Braint said, 'I saw them smashing up a holy place. They pulled down a ring of standing stones and crushed them for rubble, to make their road. They have no respect.'
'But it's a mighty force they've brought, Braint. Even Caratacus is going to be discouraged.'
'I wouldn't count on it,' Braint said gloomily. 'He's too fond of himself for that. Yesterday he led another assault on the Roman line. He burned a cart full of legionaries' socks, and lost three warriors in the process.' She snorted her contempt. 'Perhaps a thousand such flea bites will cause the Romans to falter. But it's beneath Caratacus's dignity, and I can't blame him for that. What's worse, all day the Roman commander has been receiving embassies. One local rich man or petty boss after another, coming to pledge allegiance to the Emperor.'
'We expected that,' Agrippina said.
'Yes, but one of them was the princes' own brother, Cogidubnus.' One of the sons Cunobelin had sent off for education to Rome. 'The word is that Cogidubnus is going to travel the country under Roman guard, negotiating treaties for the Emperor.'
'He would betray his own brothers?'
Braint shrugged. 'I think Cogidubnus would say that with their antics in recent years, Caratacus and Togodumnus have brought this storm down on all our heads. But there's rarely a right or a wrong in family matters, Agrippina, as you know.'
'So what now?'
'Caratacus is impatient. He's giving up the plan-the skirmishing, the ambushes. Soon the Romans will have to ford the Cantiaci River. Caratacus says that is where he will make his stand.'
'He's going for a pitched battle after all?' Agrippina felt a thrill of conflicting emotions. 'I suppose the whole course of Caratacus's life has led him to this point-him and Togodumnus.'
Braint harrumphed. 'If you use the word 'honour' about them I'll smack you. The princes are two spoilt little boys who won't quit until they have it their own way. And they have the druidh whispering in their ear. Anyhow we have no choice but to support them. And, who knows, they might even win.' She cut free her strip of cloth and began to bind up her leg.
Idly, Agrippina picked through the flakes of flint.
After all her travelling she had a sense of the broad patterns of life across the island of Britain. Yes, in the south you had coins and pottery, farms and markets. But further away, where the Romans and their traders and their culture had yet to penetrate, older traditions prevailed. In her own nation of Brigantia you counted your wealth not in coin but by the numbers of cattle you owned. You ate off wooden bowls, not pots. You lived amid immense cairns, relics of the past. And you listened to fireside stories of kings of stone, and emperors of copper and tin, distant ancestors who had once ruled the land, their wealth and their domains utterly vanished with the coming of
