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I started coughing again, and leant against the doorpost choking and sneezing enough to put any girl off me for life. But she turned suddenly kind, and said, ‘Come you in to the fire, and I will give you something. I have some herb skill, even if your fat fort surgeon has none.’
    And she brought me in and sat me down by the fire on the central hearth of the warm smoky house-place; and she set the old slave-woman who came out of the shadows at her call, to heating water in a little bronze pot over the flames, while she herself fetched herbs and a lump of honeycomb from some inner place; and when they had boiled all together, she poured the brew off into a cup and gave it to me, saying, ‘Now, drink – as hot as you can.’
    So, more to please her than for any faith I had in it, I sipped and snuffled my way throughthe scalding brew. It was sweet with the honey and greasy with the melted comb-wax, and the smoke of all the nameless herbs that had gone into it seemed to go right to the back of my nose and drift around inside my skull, so that for a moment I thought the top was coming off my head. But in a little it began to ease the aching, and truly I think that I began to mend from that moment.

    Aye well, in one way and another, we contrived to see quite a bit of each other as that spring drew on. And after a while I kissed her, and she kissed me back as sweet as a hazel-nut. But it was after we had kissed each other, that we began to be unhappy. More and more unhappy. I daresay that sounds odd and the wrong way round, but we had our reasons, – seeing that the Legions don’t allow any marrying ‘below the vine staff’; below the rank of Centurion, that is.
    ‘Maybe you will get promotion,’ Cordaella said again and again.
    But I wasn’t very hopeful. It seemed to me that what I wanted was so tremendous that the Gods would surely never give it to me. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘and maybe not. Anyway it will not be for a long time, and your brother has other plans for you. You told me so yourself.’
    ‘There are two words as to my brother’s plans,’ said Cordaella, with a sniff. But there could be no sniffing at the Legion’s rule about marrying below the vine staff.
    I went round by the new Council Chamber on my way back to barracks, to have a word with Vedrix. I hadn’t much idea what I was going to say to him, but there might be something; and anyway it was better than not saying or doing anything at all.
    I heard the light tapping of his little hammer before I came in from the forecourt, and there he was squatting among his sticks of shale and sandstone, cutting them up into fine pavement cubes and setting them in place in the pattern. He was working on the ivy-leaf border, and I did not interrupt him; just stood looking, until he came to a good stopping place and sat back on his heels and grinned up at me like a fox.
    ‘Odd to think of our Elders sitting here solemnly in their Roman tunics and on carved Roman chairs, to settle the affairs of the city. Not so long ago, when there was any settling to be done, the chiefs gathered to the council fire, and sat on their spread bulls’-hides with their weapons left outside.’
    ‘Ever so civilised it’s getting in these parts,’ I said.
    He shrugged. ‘So the noble General Agricola would have us believe. If we are busy enough being Roman and civilised, we shall not notice that we are only strengthening our own bondage.’
    There was a sudden harsh silence, and then I heard my own voice saying, ‘You mind, don’t you? I did not think that you minded.’
    ‘Because I make a picture-pavement for the Romans and the British-Romans?’ he said; and then, carefully fitting another cube into its place, ‘How should I not mind that Rome rules me and my people, who have been free?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I floundered a bit. ‘I suppose I thought – well, artists and poets and such don’t seem to mind so much about who actually holds the rule, so long as they