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much serious fighting because the local tribes didn’t know how to combine and seemingly hadn’t found a leader strong enough to hammer them into one war-host.
    At summer’s end, when Agricola came back out of the wilds, he let it be known that there would be help from the Treasury for any town that liked to smarten itself up, with a new bathhouse, say, or a council chamber or a triumphal arch. Somehow he’d got it into the heads of the local chiefs that it was beneath their dignity to live in towns that looked like broken-down rookeries, while in the south of Britain the people had public buildings that Rome herself would not be ashamed of. So architects and craftsmen were got up from the south and back in the autumn Eburacum had started building a fine new Council Chamber.

    It had been a mild winter, and so the work had gone forward most of the time, and by winter’s end most of the work was done and the thick fluted roof tiles were in place, so that the floor could be begun. A real Roman picture-floor that was to be the chief glory of the place. In the early days the Elders had meant to bring in a Roman artist. But after a while, when the money began to run short, they had had to shorten their ideas to match.
    And so came Vedrix, up from Lindum, instead. I’ve always been interested in seeing how things are made; and so, as I say, I’d already got into the way of wandering along sometimes, when I was off-duty, to watch him at work with his hammer and chisel, cutting his little cubes of chalk and sandstone, and brick and blue shale, and fitting them together into his picture.
    A fiery little runt of a man, he was, with a white bony face that changed all the time, and hair like a bunch of carrots – and that’s an odd thing, too, because later, when I saw him and his sister together, their hair was the same colour; and yet hers never made me think of a bunch of carrots – and a lame leg that he told me once had mended short after he broke it when he was a boy. But he was the kind of artist-craftsman who could turn his hand to most things and make a good job of them. So later on, when that floor was finished, it was a pretty good floor on the whole, though I still think the leopard looked a bit odd. But I suppose when you remember that he had never seen a real one, and had only a painted leopard on a cracked wine jar to copy, the wonder is that it didn’t look odder still.

    But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The picture-floor was only just a few days begun when I first saw my red-haired girl at the Well of Sulis. I spent a good deal of my free time watching it grow in the next few days also, for I’d found Vedrix an interesting fellow to talk to before I knew he was brother to the bonniest girl in all Eburacum, I certainly didn’t find him less interesting afterwards.

CHAPTER TWO
    Marching Orders
    I didn’t ask him her name, though. Somehow I found I didn’t want to ask that of anyone but herself. So I waited, and for quite a while I was not off duty at the right time again. But at last the waiting was over, and we both chanced together once more at the Well of Sulis; and I carried her pail home for her again; and that time we got as far as telling each other our names on the door-sill.
    ‘Now that we’ve met again, we should know each other’s names,’ I said. ‘Mine is Quin tus, what is yours?’
    ‘Cordaella,’ she said, tucking in the ends of her hair that were being teased out by the wind.
    ‘That’s a beautiful name,’ said I. ‘It fits you.’
    And suddenly she laughed at me. ‘So I have been told.’ And she ran inside and shut the door on me again.
    Then the day came when I had the sneezing fever.
    ‘Do they not give you anything for that, up at the fort?’ she said.
    I had a sudden picture inside my head, of myself going up on Sick Parade, to bother Manlius the fort surgeon with my snufflings, and what he would say if I did. And that made me laugh so much despite my aching head, that