The blade appeared to be done. Galba quenched it once more and set it aside. Then he noticed Regina. “Madam — good day — would you like me to call your daughter?”
“If you please,” she said stiffly.
He went into the back of the workshop, calling Brica’s name. Regina sat on a low wooden bench and waited.
As Artorius’s kingdom had grown, so it had become necessary to find efficient ways to shape it, and to run it.
Despite Regina’s own inclinations the order that was emerging had little to do with imperial forms, but was based on older Celtae structures. The center of it all was the dunon itself. The hill fort provided facilities for trade and exchange, a religious center, a resident population of craftsmen with growing expertise — and, most importantly, administrative control.
Artorius’s nation was divided into three classes. The nobles included the soldiers, but also jurists, doctors, carpenters, bards and priests, and metalworkers like Myrddin. Artorius’s rule was moderated by a meeting on every feast day of the oenach, an assembly of the nobles. Below the nobles were the free commoners, the lesser craftsmen and the farmers, who were actually the productive level of society. It was their rents, taxes, and tithes that sustained Artorius’s nascent government, and paid for his army and their campaigns. Finally, the lowest level were the unfree: former criminals, slaves, and late-arriving refugees who found no free land to farm. Their fate was simply to serve, and they provided the bulk of the labor.
The basis of society was the family. According to the old tradition the property and other rights of a man extended to his derbfine, his descendants as far as his great-grandchildren, through four generations. Basic rights were assured by each person having an “honor price,” a level of compensation to be paid in case of injury, insult, or death. But the system extended only to the free; the unfree had no rights, and no views that were listened to at higher levels.
It was a crude system, of course, a barbaric structure to regulate the relationships of a warrior people, with nothing like the sophistication of Roman law. But any attempts Regina made to reform the ancient code were resisted, especially by Myrddin, who seemed to have appointed himself a kind of keeper of the truth here in Artorius’s kingdom. Perhaps more civilized forms would emerge with time.
Still, in this great project, Regina had found a place.
She had never forgotten the lessons Aetius had taught her. Aetius would say that it was information as much as sword blades that had enabled the emperors to take and hold such a vast territory: not just military knowledge, but records of wealth and taxes, payments and savings, gathered by the officials in the towns and transmitted by the cursus publicus along the great network of roads, which had been built as much to carry facts as soldiers’ feet.
It had not been hard for her to convince Artorius of the truth of this. Her very first attempts at record keeping rapidly bore fruit in exposing unpaid tithes and unjust levies. He had since granted her all the time and resources she needed.
She had pupils in her work — she, at least, was not jealous of her knowledge. She taught her pupils to read and write, and to argue and analyze in the forensic tradition of the Roman system. Literacy was very important to her. It was a peculiar horror to her that most Saxons couldn’t read. Records and literature were the memory of humanity: if the Saxons were ever to overrun this place her past would truly be lost, lost forever.
Aside from her moments of solitude with the calendar, this brief tour of inventory compiling was the most pleasurable part of her daily routine. She never forgot that all the dunon’s busywork was primitive compared to what had been available in the poorest of the towns in the old days, when the old continentwide trading routes had still worked, and there was little here that hadn’t been made on the spot. But they had come a long way since the time, only a few years ago, when she had scoured the rubble of abandoned villas in search of iron nails for her shoes. She felt she was in an island, a haven where civilization was slowly recovering, in the midst of the country’s devastation and collapse.
Brica came running out to her mother and kissed her on the cheek. They sat together on the bench.
“I heard you talk to Myrddin,” Brica said. “That old monster gives you a roasting every day.”
Regina shrugged. “I can’t take him seriously, not with a beard like that.”
Brica snorted laughter. “But he does know his craft. I think he just resents being watched over.”
To Regina, Brica showed an alarming lack of interest in the subtleties of human interaction. “It isn’t that,” Regina said slowly, massaging her daughter’s hands. “Not really. Myrddin is no fool, whatever else he is. He knows the value of record keeping as well as I do. His problem is not the record keeping but who’s keeping the records.”
“You?”
“Myrddin sees me as a rival for Artorius’s attention. He whispers in one ear about the glory of the Celtae and the magic of the old ways; I whisper in the other about record keeping and tax revenues. We are like two poles, like past and future.”
Brica grinned. “But you are the one who sleeps with the riothamus.”
“Yes. Though I think that if Myrddin thought he could lure Artorius to his bed he would cut himself a new hole—”
Brica’s mouth gaped. “Mother!”
Regina patted her hand. “Reassuring to know I can still shock you, dear. Anyhow, I think the riothamus likes having us both around, even having us fight, so he can take in contrasting opinions. The mark of a wise leader …”
Artorius still called her his queen, his Morrigan. But their relationship nowadays had little to do with the fierce love of gods — little to do with passion, in fact, for he rarely visited her bed, even in the rare intervals he broke off from his campaigning and alliance building to return to the fort by the Caml.
Artorius’s bold early notions of stepping down and submitting himself to election had long been quietly dropped. But he and Regina had privately spoken of his own eventual succession, and the need for him to find male descendants. It was unspoken between them, but it was obvious that she would not be the source of his children and the derbfine that would follow. She suspected he was also talking to other advisers, such as Myrddin — and perhaps he was already taking other women to his bed. But she cared nothing for that; her liaison with Artorius, in ensuring her own survival and Brica’s, was serving her purposes.
As Regina mused, Brica’s attention was drifting. Galba was moving about at the back of the manufactory, wiping his hands on a rag and joking with another worker.
Galba was short, stocky, with broad heavyset features; he had a pale complexion and thick red hair, which betrayed his people’s probable origin among the Picts north of the Wall. He was young — younger than Brica, who was now a venerable twenty-eight. He had come down from the north with his family, en route to Armorica. They had fallen afoul of Saxons, but a chance encounter with a party of Artorius’s soldiers had saved their lives. Galba’s family had taken over an abandoned farm only half a day’s a ride from here, and had become commoners in the new kingdom. Brica had met Galba at a feast on one of the farmsteads. She had prevailed upon Regina to bring the man into the dunon for a trial at the forge. Galba had acquitted himself so well that Myrddin had taken him on at the manufactory permanently.