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“When?” She seemed relieved, but still anxious.

He shrugged. “Who knows? Soon.”

“He must not know about it.”

“When I give orders, they have to be obeyed.”

“Yes.” She nodded but stood there uncertainly. She’s like an animal from the wild, he thought. Only half tame. He indicated that the interview was over. A few moments later he was riding away.

Cartimandua turned back to her innocent children, who knew nothing of her terrible secret. But soon they would know. And an even more terrible thought crossed her mind. Would they still love her then?

The druid’s eyes scanned the water as the dugout moved upstream. Had the shield been received by the river yet, or was it still hovering in the stream? He glanced also at the modest man rowing him. He could remember this fellow’s father, with webbed hands like the little boy’s. And his father before that. The druid sighed. Not for nothing did the people of that region call him the father of the river.

He was very old, almost seventy, yet still powerful, still an imposing figure. He stood nearly six feet tall – a giant compared with most men. His full white beard reached down to his waist, whilst his head of silver hair was bare except for a simple gold band round his forehead. His eyes were grey and watchful. It was he who performed the sacrifice of the oxen once a year on the western of the twin hills of Londinos; he who prayed in sacred groves in the oak forests of the region.

No one knew when the druid priesthood of north-west Europe had first begun, but there were more in Britain than ever, since in recent years a number had come across the sea to take sanctuary in the mist-shrouded island. It was said that the druids of Britain safeguarded the purist tradition of the ancient lore. In the interior of the island there were strange circles of stone, temples so old that no one could say even if human hands had built them, and in these, long ago, the druids were said to have met. But along the river they usually worshipped in small wooden shrines, or in sacred groves of trees.

Yet this ancient druid, it was said, had a special gift denied to other priests. For the gods, years ago, had given him second sight.

He had been in his thirty-third year when this strange gift had come to him. He himself could not say whether its possession was a gift or a curse. It was not complete. Sometimes he had shadowy premonitions, sometimes he saw future events with terrifying clarity. And sometimes, he knew, he was as blind as other men. As the years passed, he had come to accept this condition as neither good nor bad, but merely part of the order of nature.

His home was not far away. At the western, upstream end of the great two-and-a-half-mile stretch of water lay one of the river’s many majestic curves, this one making a full right angle to the south before veering eastward again. Just around this corner, a bifurcated stream had created a low rectangular island off the river’s northern bank. It was a quiet place where oak, ash and thorn trees grew. Here, in a single, modest hut, the druid had chosen, for the last thirty years, to live alone.

Often he travelled around the hamlets along the river where he was always reverently welcomed and fed. Sometimes he would abruptly summon a villager, like Segovax’s father, to row him many miles upriver to some sacred site. But usually a little column of wood smoke would announce that he was on his island, a silent presence, so that the folk in the area considered him a guardian of the place, like some sacred stone that despite the lichen growing upon it remains unchanged by the seasons.

It was just as they were entering the curve, with the island now in view, that the old man caught sight of the shield. As before, it was still glinting softly just below the surface, inching its way upstream towards the river’s distant heart. He gazed at it. The river had not exactly rejected the offering. But it had not accepted it either. The old man shook his head. The sign seemed to match the premonition which had come to him a month ago.

His second sight had told the druid other things that morning. He had not realized what young Segovax was going to do, but he had perceived Cartimandua’s terrible dilemma. Now he also foresaw what fate had in store for the quiet fisherman before him. But it was a much greater and more terrible event that his premonition had been concerned with. Something he still did not fully understand. As they neared his home, he remained deep in thought. Could it really be that the gods of the ancient island of Britain were going to be destroyed? Or was something else, something he could not comprehend, to happen? It was very strange.

All that spring Segovax waited. Each day the boy expected messengers on foaming horses to appear, and each night he gazed at the stars and wondered, Are they crossing the sea now? But no one came. From time to time, rumours of preparation had reached the hamlet, yet there was no sign of invasion. It seemed as if the island had relapsed into quietness.

The little hamlet where the family lived was a delightful spot. Half a dozen circular huts with thatched roofs and earthen floors were surrounded by a wattle stockade that also included two pens for livestock and several storage huts raised on stilts. It stood not at the tip of the spit where the druids had waited, but about fifty yards back. At high tide, when the spit became an island, the hamlet was cut off, but no one minded. Indeed, when the place had first been settled a score of generations ago, this watery protection had been one of its attractions. The ground itself, however, being gravel-based like the twin hills opposite, was firm underfoot and dry. With the warmer spring weather, some of the marshy ground along the southern bank dried; horses and cattle grazed there; and together with the other children, Segovax and his little sister would play in these meadows strewn with buttercups, cowslips and primroses. But the best feature of the little promontory was the fishing.

The river was broad, shallow and clear. Many kinds of fish teemed in its waters. Trout and especially salmon abounded. The spit was a wonderful place from which to run nets out into the sparkling waters. Or the boys would venture along the marshy banks by the base of the spit to certain places where it was always easy to trap eels.

“Those who live here,” his father had told him, “will never go hungry. The river always provides.” Sometimes, when they had set their nets, he would sit on the shore with his father, gazing across at the twin hills on the far bank. And, seeing the ever-changing ebb and flow of the tide as once every day the current flowed upstream from the estuary, paused at high water, and then ebbed back towards the sea again, his father would contentedly remark: “You see. The river is breathing.”

Segovax loved to be with his father. He was so anxious to learn, and his father so happy to teach. By the age of five he had known all about setting snares in the nearby woods. By seven he could thatch a hut with reeds from the marshes nearby. As well as setting nets, he could stand stock-still in the shallows and expertly spear a fish with a sharpened stick. He knew many of the stories of the innumerable Celtic gods and could recite the ancestry not only of his own family but of the island’s great chiefs for many generations. Recently he had begun to master the more important of the huge web of marriages, descents and oaths of loyalty that bound tribe and tribe, chief and chief, village and family in friendship or enmity all over the Celtic island. “For these,” his father explained, “are things a man must know.”

To these, in the last two years, his father had begun to add another skill. He had made the boy a spear. Not just a sharpened stick for fishing, but a proper spear, with a light shaft and a metal tip. “If you want to be a hunter and a warrior one day,” he told the boy with a smile, “you must first master this. Though be careful when you use it,” he had added cautiously.

Hardly a day passed when the boy did not go out and hurl the little spear at a mark. Soon he could hit any tree within range. Before long he was searching out more difficult targets. He would aim at hares, usually without success. Once he had been caught with little Branwen dutifully holding a target on the end of a stick at which he was throwing the spear. Even his kindly father was furious with him for that.

His father was so wise. And yet, as he had grown a little older, Segovax had begun to sense something else. Though he was wiry, his father, with his thin face, his rather straggly brown beard and his curved back, was not as physically strong as some of the other men. Yet in any communal work, he always insisted on doing as much as any of them. Often, after he had toiled for long hours, he would look pale and strained, and Segovax would be aware that his mother was glancing at him anxiously. At other times, when folk sat round the fire on summer evenings, drowsy with ale and mead, it was his father, in a voice that was quiet but surprisingly deep from so slight a body, who would sing to them all in the poetic voice of their people, strumming sometimes on a simple Celtic harp. At such moments the strain would dissolve and his face would take on a look of magical serenity.

And so it was that at the age of only nine, Segovax, like his mother, not only loved and admired his father, but knew in his heart that he must also protect him.

There was only one thing in which, in the boy’s view, his father had failed him.

“When will you take me downriver, to the estuary?” he would ask every few months. Always his father replied: “One day. When I’m not so busy.”

For Segovax had never seen the sea.

“You always say you will, but you never do,” he complained, and sometimes sulked a little.

The only shadows that fell across these sunlit days were the occasional dark moods of their mother. She had always been mercurial and so neither Segovax nor his sister was much troubled. But it seemed to the boy that recently her moods had been harder to account for than usual. Sometimes she would scold him or Branwen for no reason, then suddenly seize the little girl and clasp her tightly, before just as quickly sending her away. Once, having slapped them both for some offence, she burst into tears. And whenever his father was there, the boy would see his mother’s pale face watching him, almost angrily following his every move.

As spring turned into summer, no further news came of Caesar’s movements. If the legions were still massing across the sea, no one came to the hamlet by the river to tell them. And yet, when the boy asked his father, “If the Romans come, do you think they will come here?”, his father always quietly answered: “Yes.” And then, with a sigh: “I think they must.” For a very simple reason.

The ford. It lay by the island where the druid dwelt. At low tide, a man could walk from there to the southern bank with the water only reaching up to his chest.

“Of course,” his father would add, “there are other fords, further upstream.” But, coming up from the estuary, this was the first place where the river could safely be crossed. Descending from the ancient tracks along the great chalk ridges that strode across the island, travellers since time out of mind had made for this pleasant spot. If this Roman Caesar landed in the south and wished to strike up into the wide lands of Cassivelaunus beyond the estuary, then the simplest course would bring him to this ford.

“Soon,” the boy told himself, “he must come here.” And so he waited as a month passed. And then another.

It was in early summer that the incident occurred after which, it seemed to Segovax, his mother’s behaviour became stranger.

It had started quite innocently one afternoon with a childish quarrel. He had gone for a walk with little Branwen. Hand in hand they had crossed the meadows on the southern bank and started up the slopes behind, to the edge of the woods. For a while they had played together; then, as usual, Segovax had practised throwing his spear. And then she had asked.

It was a small enough thing. He had promised her that she could throw his spear. Nothing more than that. But now he refused, though whether because he thought she was too small after all, or because he felt like teasing her, he could not afterwards remember.

“You promised,” she protested.

“Perhaps. But I’ve changed my mind.”

“You can’t.”

“Yes I can.”

Little Branwen, with her tiny, athletic body, her bright blue eyes; Branwen who would try to climb trees even he hesitated to tackle; Branwen with her temper that not even his parents could control.

“No!” She stamped her foot. Her face began to go red. “That’s not fair. You promised. Give it to me!” And she made a grab at the spear. But he cleverly switched hands.

“No, Branwen. You’re my little sister and you have to do what I say.”

“No I don’t!” She shouted the words with all the force of her lungs, her face now puce, tears welling from her eyes. She made another grab, then swung her little fist, hitting him on the leg with all her might. “I hate you!” She was almost choking with rage.

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do!” she screamed. She tried to kick him but he held her off. She bit his hand and then, before he could catch her, she ran up the slope into the trees and vanished.

For some time he had waited. He knew his little sister. She was up there, sitting on a log probably, knowing he would have to come looking for her. And when he finally found her, she would refuse to move so that finally he would be reduced to pleading with her. At last, however, he had made his way up into the woods.

“Branwen,” he had called. “I love you.” But there had been no reply. For a long time he had wandered about. She could not be lost because wherever she was, she had only to walk downhill until she came to the meadows and marshes above the river. She must, therefore, be hiding deliberately. Again and again he called. No answer. There was only one conclusion. He guessed now what she had done. She had given him the slip, trotted home to their parents and told them he had gone off and left her alone, so that he would get into trouble. She had played that trick on him once before. “Branwen,” he called once more. “I love you.” And then, under his breath: “I’ll get even with you for this, you little snake.” Then he had gone home. To find to his surprise that she was not there.