Every day and every night Scipio wrote urgent letters in black ink on wafer-thin slices of white birchwood. He wrote to the Dux Britanniarum in Eboracum, and the Comes Britanniarum, and the Count of the Saxon Shore. He wrote to Londinium and Camulodunum and Rome itself, to any number of governors and quartermasters and treasury officials, demanding and haranguing and pleading for food and arms and armor, and more men, and more money to pay his men. He barely slept.

  It was hard to tell, because the outside world was silent, but it seemed the great imperial apparatus was not functioning as it should. It was starting to feel like Rome itself was the myth, and Britannia the reality. The only letters he got were from his wife, silver-haired, almond-eyed Galla, who spared him the news of the wider world and just told him about their little world. She wrote him about the mosaic he’d left half done in the atrium. The tiny colored cubes still lay all around the room in heaps—blues and greens, ceramic blacks and whites and reds and browns, and marble for the in-between colors, the pinks and peaches and oranges. There were even a few silver and gold ones, the precious metals pounded thin and sealed under glass. The kids liked to trade them back and forth, she said, and build roads and cities with them.

  She was too clever to tell him what he already knew, which was that it wasn’t the mosaic, and it wasn’t the empire, it was his family that needed completing.

  In a desperate attempt to make payroll he raised the tolls for the traders who passed north and south through the wall. In a show of benevolence he picked a local chief at random and declared him governor of all Caledonia. In a show of confidence he had the camp’s granaries expanded, to accommodate future bumper harvests. In a show of strength he took a couple of centuries and marched on Dogtown—he’d make Servius the mayor there, see how they liked that.

  But Dogtown was deserted, with human skulls set up on posts in a circle around it. He put it to the torch. Then Servius disappeared into thin air along with an entire squad of limitanei. He searched everywhere for the woman in the mound, the queen or witch or witch-queen or whatever she was, but in vain.

  One morning in November, with the temperature dropping and the weather closing in, Scipio woke up to a letter from the governor, the Dux Britanniarum himself. Finally! It was the first official communication of any kind that he’d gotten in months.

  It was orders. He and his officers were to return to Rome immediately, to assist in the campaign against the Visigoths. There would be no more coin coming, no more food or equipment. The limitanei could do whatever they liked. From now on Britain would look to its own defense, and good luck to it. The First Cohort, XX Valeria Victrix, was disbanded.

  He stared at the little slip of wood for a long time. Then he threw it into the fire.

  Those fools. Those piss-guzzling idiots. Scipio got dressed. He put on his armor and belted on his sword, threw his great officer’s cape round his shoulders and donned his helmet with its white ruff a foot tall, and walked down the camp’s muddy main street.

  How dare they. How dare they give up. Had they forgotten that Rome had stood for a thousand years? Did they think this was the toughest scrape it had been in? Rome did not give ground. Rome would thrive and grow forever.

  In something like a fugue state Scipio walked out through the East Gate and began stumping north. He knew what he was looking for. He walked for an hour, forded the North Tyne, two hours more to the advance fort where he commandeered a horse. From there he galloped even deeper into Caledonia, across roadless hills and moorlands, always north, into open country, humped and billowy meadows flocked with clumps of dark trees. A Pictish archer could’ve picked him off at any moment, a warband could have ridden him down, but somehow he knew they wouldn’t. In his own way he’d let Britannia get to him after all. Well, he wouldn’t stop until he’d gotten to it too.

  That night he blundered into three Picts sitting around a fire, hunters. He threw himself on them out of the darkness with just a knife in his hand, stabbed one man in the guts, folded him over where he was, then beat another’s sword strike up and over his head and bulled into him. Their momentum took them over the edge of a gulley, down a slide of wet leaves and into a rushing stream below, where he cut the man’s throat, hot blood in the cold water.

  The third Pict was covered in eczema or something that made his skin blotchy, and when he saw Scipio rise from the stream he ran, but Scipio threw a rock and hit him in the back of the head. Knocked him down for long enough that he could run up and stab him in the back. Dominus nobiscum. Roma invicta. He wasn’t even frightened. Death would not touch Scipio Hostus, not today, not till his work was done. It was not permitted. It was contrary to regulations. That night he drank from cold pools thick with floating leaves and slept rough and shivering on the ground.

  When he found the mound again he wept with relief.

  Was it the same one? It looked the same, but this one had no door. He walked all the way round it three times but it was smooth and featureless. The heart of Britannia was closed to him.

  Despair cut his knees out from under him and he fell to the grass. A cold drizzle began, sweeping in slack white lines across the flat, misty country. He stayed there he didn’t know how long, head bowed, water running off his nose. Let me in. He almost prayed to it. Please. Let me in. Please. I need you. I’ve been looking for you for so long. He knelt for hours, till his knees ached, clenching his jaw to keep it from chattering.

  When he looked up again the woman was there.

  He was suddenly aware of how filthy he was. He was wet through and covered in dirt and blood and snot. He’d lost his helmet and he had leaves in his hair. She was as beautiful and composed as ever, with beads of mist in her red-gold hair like seed pearls and those strange eyes and that heavy silver rope around her neck. He was the one who looked like a damn barbarian. He dragged a forearm across his face and stared up at her with angry, bloodshot shame-eyes.

  “Poor baby.” She sounded amused. “Well, come on then.”

  He huddled by her fire, shuddering and rocking as he warmed up. When he had some strength back, he gathered himself and got to his feet, but before he could speak she slapped him across the face so hard he tasted blood. He raised a disbelieving hand to his face and she slapped him again, then knocked him down with her small, sharp fist.

  Satisfied, she turned and strode out the door. She was gone for hours, but for all that time Scipio didn’t move. He understood that he wasn’t allowed to, and that she would know if he did, and punish him further.

  When she returned she pointed to the broom, and he got up and swept the floor. Then he washed her dishes and built up the fire and brought her wine. Just like last time he did whatever she told him, though it didn’t seem as funny now. He served her day after day, he lost track of how long. He worked the bellows as she forged and shaped things. If he was slow to obey her she hit him, sometimes with her hand, sometimes with a stick. Sometimes she had guests, strange ones, fairies and animals, emperors and corpses and stones and trees, and he waited on them, too, in the most servile manner possible, and ate the scraps they dropped on the floor.

  All he could think was that if he served her well enough perhaps she would come with him like he wanted, back to Rome. He would parade her through the streets to remind everyone that there is nothing Rome cannot take, nothing it cannot control. Why not? How could she not want what Rome had to offer? Writing and money and glass and fish sauce? Rome was the whole world. How could she not want to be part of it?

  * * *

  • • •

  And then one day he came to himself as if from a deep sleep. He remembered who he was. She was absorbed in her metalwork. Smoothly he snatched a sharp tool from her table and stabbed her in the back, aiming for a kidney.

  The blade broke against her pale skin. She laughed.

  “What are you?!” He threw the broken blade into the fire. “Witch? Fairy? God?”

  “There is no word for what I am.” She kept working, twisting wire with her nimble fingers. “I was here long before you Romans came. Before the Picts, before even the fairies. I was here when the lush plains of Doggerland stretched all the way across the North Sea. And I will be here when the seas run dry.”

  “You will come with me now.” He swallowed. “Now. To Rome.” Scipio grabbed her wrist and pulled with all his strength, but she barely seemed to notice.

  “Ten thousand horses couldn’t move me from this place,” she said, “because I am this place.”

  “Then one man will do it. I will drag you through the streets of Rome.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to go there.” Now she rose, picked up a stick of firewood and smacked him across the face with it. She broke it over his head and he fell down with stars dancing across his vision. “Rome is burning. Even as we speak Visigoths are sacking the Eternal City and putting whole families to the sword.”

  Lies. Sick lies. Whole families…how dare she. She reached into the fire and took out the broken knife—the heat didn’t touch her—and did something to make it whole again. Then she crouched over him and began to draw searing lines of pain on his body and on his face with the hot blade. He couldn’t move.

  “For all the days you’ve stood on your wall, you still don’t understand what it means. The wall is death. An empire that builds its walls in stone has stopped growing. And an empire that is not growing is dying.”

  She spoke over his screams.

  “One day you will see that it is a mistake to love an empire, or a throne, or a crown, because those things cannot love. They can only die.”

  She took his chin in her hand and turned his burning face one way, then the other. Satisfied with her work, she beat him with the stick till he passed out.

  He woke up outside on the grass. He sat up, rubbing his mouth and slapping the leaves out of his hair. It was November when he went into the mound, but now it was warm out. Could he really have slept the whole year round, from winter to summer?

  He set off south for the Wall at a jog. He felt strangely light. Whatever else the woman from the mound had done to him, she’d broken the spell Britannia put on him. He was done. He could go now. He’d lingered too long on this enchanted isle, he saw that clearly now. He was a good soldier, and if Rome needed him to go home then home he would go. Back to Aesica, and from there to Eboracum, Londinium, and Dubris, where he would take ship for Rome. Where his wife and his children were waiting. He could still make up for lost time. It wasn’t too late.

  It wasn’t till he reached the Wall that he understood what had happened. The great double doors of the East Gate stood open, and someone would get a good lashing for that. But no, they weren’t open, the doors were gone. The roofs of Aesica’s long barracks were sagging, and it looked like one of the granaries—so recently expanded—had fallen in. Grass swamped the base of the walls like drifted snow, and the well was overgrown with lilac and honeysuckle. The Wall curved away into the distance in both directions, broken and uneven, like the spine of a dragon long dead and turned to stone.

  He’d been gone for a hundred years. Rome had fallen, and everyone he’d ever loved was dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later scipio would make his way south, and he would find a new ruler to serve, new laws to enforce, and new order to spread. He could never quite bring himself to join the Round Table, because once you’ve seen an empire fall you can never look at another one quite the same way again. All you can see is ruin. But his old Roman manners and military bearing marked him out as a man of importance, one of the right sort, and his bravery was famed all over Britain, for truly it was said of Sir Scipio that he fought as if he cared not whether he lived or died.

  Book IV

  The Saxon Shore

  Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say: here in this world he changed his life.

  —Le Morte d’Arthur, Thomas Malory

  Thirty-two

  Galahad

  It took them a week just to get down out of the mountains. The steel road was gone, and they had to pick their way through a steep, pathless, broken country of plunging cliffs, high windswept plateaux, and valleys choked with tumbled, ankle-breaking boulders. They would’ve died without Nimue, who made magical fires out of sodden bracken and diplomatically encouraged chilling squalls of rain and sleet to move on when it got too wet. Once or twice she ensorcelled a trembling deer to approach and stand still and be slaughtered.

  She regarded her handiwork with glum satisfaction.

  “At least I still have magic,” Nimue said. “Though I’ll be really disappointed if the great lesson of my life turns out to be that Morgan was right.”

  “I never cared about any of it,” Bedivere said. “All I ever cared about was getting Arthur back.”

  When you were inside them adventures happened slowly, but the aftermath of a failed adventure was even slower. On the journey out they’d walked in a dream, pulled on by the quest, driven by their divine purpose, but now they just trudged. It was not a path to glory, or to anywhere really, it was just a lot of cold gray mountains in northern Pictland.

  They didn’t talk much, though there were plenty of things they urgently needed to talk about. Collum wondered if Morgan would keep pressing her claim now that the spear was broken. He wondered whether Constantine had managed to pry Lancelot out of his monastery after all. It was time to pick a new side and make more plans. It wasn’t over, the millstone of history would keep turning till it had ground them all to fine dust that would blow away in the wind.

  God’s teeth, he thought a lot of crap when he was tired. They’d been walking for too long.

  At a dour Pictish settlement built up against the ruins of the Antonine Wall they bought four horses for five times what they were worth and rode south, through Strathclyde and the Royaume Sauvage. They crossed the southern Wall at Banna. After another week Collum began to notice familiar landmarks. They’d picked up the same path he’d followed on his first trip south from Mull.

  “Great,” Dinadan said. “You can give us a tour of the finer coastal haystacks.”

  They passed churches, and ruined Roman temples, and pagan shrines, and stone circles, but they didn’t stop. Let the gods play whatever games they wanted, or no games at all. Their playthings were tired out.

  One morning they crossed a matted brown meadow. A crooked ash tree stood there. From a branch hung a weather-beaten old shield. Bedivere stopped.

  “Look at that.”

  The meadow looked very different than it had in summer. The long grass was bent and brown and dead, the ash tree bare but for its velvety black winter buds. But Collum knew that shield because he was the one who’d hung it there. Most of the white paint had worn and peeled away.

  “Azure, three Scepters, a Chevron Or,” Bedivere said. “That was Sir Bleoberys of the Wilderness.”

  “It was?” Collum thought he was past surprise at this point.

  “Old Blueberries himself. I never thought to discover his end.”

  Collum nudged his horse forward, close enough that he could reach up and touch the weathered old leather that covered the shield. Could it be true? Was that the mystery of the uncouth knight? He’d come south looking for Sir Bleoberys, and he’d killed him instead.

  Scipio was right, Dame Fortune did have a peculiar sense of humor.

  “I wonder what happened,” Dinadan said.

  “I can tell you some of it,” Collum said. “Because I was there.”

  It was his last secret. Nobody looked especially shocked when he told them, but only because nothing shocked them anymore.

  “I’m impressed,” Dinadan said. “Bleoberys was a hard man to beat. Beautiful form.”

  “I don’t think I saw him on his best day,” Collum said.

  “Bleoberys wouldn’t have acted like that, though. He wouldn’t’ve said those things.” Bedivere dismounted and squatted over the grave that Collum had dug with such effort. You could still see it: the ground was sunken, the grass a different color. “He had a soft heart—sentimental, in the Frankish way. Used to cry at old songs. But you never met a more courtly knight.”

  “It could’ve been an impostor,” Dinadan said. “Someone fighting with his arms, in his harness. You never saw his face?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe the news of Arthur’s death drove him mad,” Nimue said.

  “Mad or not, he was carrying the medal of Saint Longinus.” Collum still had the thing, for all the good it did them, and now he fished it out from under his breastplate. “So in a way he died for a purpose. Though it didn’t matter much in the end.”

  “No, it didn’t.” Dinadan rubbed his chin. “But it’s strange, you meeting him like that. Must’ve meant something.”

  But no one knew what. Maybe not everything meant something; certainly the available evidence strongly supported that conclusion. They rode on, and at sunset they stopped at the Two Moons, the very same inn where Collum passed a sleepless night before he came to Camelot.

  He half expected to see Morgan le Fay tending bar, but there was only the innkeep with his thinning red hair. Collum would’ve welcomed a quiet dinner, lamb stewed with onions and a cup of sour wine to go with it, but the moment they walked in every eye was on the three road-spattered knights of the Table and their lady companion.