And Galba’s move into the dunon had made Brica more than happy, too, to Regina’s chagrin. Galba was cheerful, sturdy, competent, and obviously attractive — but, to Regina, crushingly dull. In that way he was astonishingly like Bran, Brica’s farmboy first love, a relationship Regina had crushed long ago.
Now Galba came out of the workshop, softly calling Brica. Somehow he had managed to scorch a lank of soot-filled red hair at the side of his head. Brica took a knife and carefully began to saw at the blackened ends. Galba crouched a little so she could reach, and as she worked her body moved closer to his, her cheek resting on the side of his head.
They belonged together. It was a sudden, unwelcome truth, and yet it could not be denied. But Regina found jealousy gathering inside her. I can’t allow this, she thought suddenly.
Not for the first time, she found she had come to a decision intuitively, and had to unravel it retrospectively. She felt as hostile to Galba as she had once to Bran. Why?
Galba was now a larger part of Brica’s life than Regina was. So he should be. There were women younger than Brica who were already grandmothers. It was the way of things. A daughter matters more to a mother than a mother can ever matter to the daughter, for the daughter represents the future, and the future must predominate over the past. Regina should simply — let go.
And yet the past contained everything Regina valued in her life: the villa, her own mother, the towns, the fine things. Peace and order, richness and beauty. If she were to let Brica go into the arms of this cloddish boy, this apprentice smith who thought better with his muscles than with his head, then Brica’s future would count for everything, and Regina’s past for nothing. It was a tension between past and future — and it was a tension that resolved in her head, as suddenly as clouds might clear from the face of the sun, and a warm determination filled her.
I will stop this liaison, she thought, just as I got rid of Bran. I don’t know how yet, but I will find a way. I have to, for the sake of the past, which is more precious than the future, and which must therefore be preserved.
A braying of trumpets drifted from the west: it was a peal that announced the return of the riothamus and his army. All over the dunon work was abandoned, and everybody ran to the gate.
In the six years since Regina and Brica had been brought here, the predations of the rebellious Saxons from their fastnesses on the east coast had become a severe problem across southern Britain.
In her long conversations with Artorius about his diffuse foe, she had learned much about the Saxons. For a start they weren’t really “Saxons,” even though that was what everybody called them. After they had erupted from their homeland in the north of Germany, the Saxons had become sea pirates, traversing the Mare Germanicus, which facilitated links among Jutland, Frisia, and Francia. Now nobody could precisely say who or what they were — they were all kinds of Germanics — not that that mattered if you were on the receiving end of a Saxon blade.
The Saxons were not savages. Some of the booty Artorius had brought home from his wars, particularly the fine metalwork, was as beautiful and complex as anything she had ever seen. But they were not remotely civilized in the Roman sense. They were not even like the Vandals and Goths and Franks who were moving through Gaul. Those barbarians often tried to ape the rulers they displaced, and even tried to maintain the forms of society that had prevailed there, with more or less degrees of incompetence.
But the Saxons were adventurers, wanderers, marauders, pirates. They were certainly not capable of running anything like the old imperial administration — and besides, Regina thought ruefully, in Britain there really wasn’t much left of the old system to run anyhow, for it had all collapsed even before the Saxons got here. The Saxons actually seemed to hate the towns and other relics of the Empire. They were intent not just on plunder but also on massacre, conquest, and destruction.
The only choices for the natives were to serve the new rulers, to flee — or to die. Many people had indeed fled, it was said, either to the west and north, the harsher mountainous lands beyond the effective reach of the old diocese, or else they had gone overseas to the growing British colonies in Armorica. Great stretches of the countryside were depopulated altogether.
But Artorius and his growing armies had formed one of the few foci of resistance to the marauding Saxons.
With a mixture of Roman discipline and Celtae ferocity, even before the present campaigning season Artorius had scored nine significant victories. People had come flocking to his hill fort capital, and the petty warlords and rulers who had emerged from the collapse of the old diocese had been keen to vow their allegiance to him — Vortimer, for instance, son of Vortigern, who had tried to avenge his father’s destruction by Hengest. As Artorius’s power, influence, and reputation grew, he was slowly earning his self-anointed title of riothamus, king of kings. Not that Regina trusted many of the bandits he dealt with, many of whom she suspected of making equally vivid declarations of loyalty to the Saxon warlords.
Despite such doubts, she had no choice but to cling to Artorius, for he was a beacon of hope in a terrible time. And despite all his efforts the Saxon advance was a wall of slow-burning fire that left nothing but a cleansed emptiness behind it: Roman Britain was suffering a slow, terminal catastrophe.
The army came in a great column of thousands of men and as many horses. The foot soldiers yelled and struck their shields, the cavalry raised their slashing swords so they glinted in the low autumn sun, and the trumpeters blew their great carynx trumpets, slender tubes as tall as a man and adorned with dragons’ mouths.
As the first of the booty wagons was hauled up the steep path toward the gate, Regina saw that it was piled high with heads — the severed heads of Saxons, complete with long tied-back hair and heavy mustaches, heads piled up like cabbages on a stall, their rolled-up eyes white and their skin yellow-white or even green. Behind the cart a prisoner walked, attached by a length of rope wrapped around his hands. He was a big man with a golden torc around his neck. The skin of his face was broken and caked with blood and dust. He had evidently been dragged all the way from the site of his defeat, for he was staggering.
Women and children ran down the slope from the dunon, anxious for news of their husbands, brothers, fathers. Regina held her place, just outside the gate. It was like something out of the past, she thought wonderingly, an army from four or five or six centuries ago, the kind of force that must once have met the Caesars.
And yet Artorius had made great changes. To those old Celtae forces, fighting had been ritualistic. Armies would draw up to face each other, would make a racket and an elaborate display, and only small teams of champions would be sent to do battle together. And they couldn’t sustain a long campaign: Celtae armies, recruited from local farmers, had been forced to disperse when the crops needed harvesting. All that had had to change when the Romans had come with their propensity for pitched battles with decisive outcomes: The Celtae had quickly learned the techniques of long campaigns and massed slaughter.
Now the Romans were gone, but their lessons lingered. Artorius had been assiduous. He had even picked Regina’s brains over what she could remember of Aetius’s reminiscences of the comitatenses. Now Artorius’s warriors were an effective and mobile fighting force, just as capable as the Romans’ of waging a pitched battle — and of mounting a summer-long campaign.