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can get on with making their statues or their songs as they like.’
    Vedrix set another little cube in place, settling it down with his round-nosed mallet. ‘We of the Tribes,’ he said, ‘we don’t divide people up, as you Romans do, into neat bundles – soldiers or tent-makers or wine merchants or poets. I’d have been out with the fighting men in the Troubles three years since, but for this short leg of mine.– I can handle a spear as well as most, but I’m slow on the hills, and that makes a man dangerous to his comrades.’

    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said awkwardly.
    He turned a cube of blue shale over in his fingers, and bent to settle it in place. ‘You have no need to be,’ he said, very carefully.
    ‘No,’ I stumbled, ‘not about that. – I’m sorry I got it wrong about tent-makers and poets.’ I felt the whole conversation getting away from me, and certainly getting further every moment from what I had come to talk to him about. I took a deep breath, and swallowed, ‘Vedrix,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to you seriously about something, and you’re making it all more and more difficult.’
    ‘So? I am listening. Speak then, as seriously as you please.’
    Somehow, almost without knowing it, I slipped into the British tongue, the Celtic tongue. I had grown used to speaking it, after a fashion, with Cordaella, for the Celtic is better than the Latin, for making love-talk to a British girl, and easier for explaining to her brother in, too.
    I said, ‘The love is upon me, for Cordaella.’
    He abandoned the pavement and looked upat me, and answered in his own tongue also. ‘And is the love upon Cordaella for you?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘You sound very sure, my fine young Roman Standard-bearer.’
    ‘I am,’ I said. ‘She told me.’
    ‘And did she tell you that I have already found for her a man of her own people before we left Lindum?’
    ‘Yes, with thirty head of cattle.’
    ‘You, I am thinking, do not have thirty head of cattle. And yet you would be marrying with the girl in his stead.’
    ‘I would!’ I said. ‘But I cannot – not yet anyway.’
    ‘And why would that be?’ said he, with his red brows quirking up towards the roots of his hair.
    ‘In the Legions, no one below the rank of Centurion—’
    ‘Is allowed to take a wife, ah yes. And so you will be needing promotion before she grows weary of waiting. Well – good luck to you, noble Standard-bearer.’
    Suddenly I began to feel a flicker of hope.
    ‘You mean – you’ll not force her to go to this other man?’
    ‘Force Cordaella?’ he said. ‘In all the yearssince our father died, I have never found the way to make Cordaella do anything she was set against. If ever you do marry her, it may be that you will find the way, but I very much doubt it. Far more likely it will be the other way round!’
    ‘I’ll risk it,’ I said; and all at once it was as though the sun came out.
    And then the trumpet sounded from the fort, and I knew that I must be getting back.

CHAPTER THREE
    Campaign in the North
    Later the same day I was standing before the piled writing-table in the Headquarters Office, where Dexius Valens the Senior Centurion had sent for me, waiting for him to notice that I was there. After a while he looked up from the scatter of tablets and papyrus rolls before him, and said, ‘Ah, Standard-bearer. – Yes, the General Agricola is at Corstopitum overseeing the arrangements for this summer’s Caledonian Campaign. The order has just come through. – We march to join him in three days.’
    So that was that. All town leave was stopped, of course, and I never even got to see Cordaella to say farewell to her. Couldn’t write her a note, either, because of course she couldn’t read anyway. The best I could do was to scratch a few lines to Vedrix and ask him to read them to her – I thought I could trust him – and get one of the mule-drivers to take the letter down into the town the next day.

    And three days