“You do not know Britain, do you?” Licinius had said. That had been the night his posting came through.
The young man standing on the fore-deck of the galley watched the fortress drawing nearer with a sense of expectancy his thoughts reaching alternately forward to the future that waited for him there, and back to a certain interview that he had had with Licinius, his Cohort Commander, three months ago, at the other end of the Empire. And out of the waste of sandbank and sour salting, higher and nearer as the time went by, rose Rutupiae: the long, whale-backed hump of the island and the grey ramparts of the fortress, with the sheds of the dockyard massed below it. The tide was low, and the mud-banks at either hand that would be covered at high tide were alive with curlew and sandpiper. On a blustery autumn day a galley was nosing up the wide loop of a British river that widened into the harbour of Rutupiae.
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