But you had to understand the detail. Its big support posts came from trees marked out for their purpose since they were saplings, so securely fixed and well balanced that no central prop was needed. That big open inner space was set out, according to ancient custom, to reflect the cycles of days and seasons. The single doorway faced south-east, towards the rising sun at the equinox. As you walked around the house, following the track of the sunlight through the day, you passed from the morning side of the house to the left, where children played, cloth was woven and grain was ground, to the night side, where food was prepared and people slept. Even now Brica lay on her hide pallet just to the left of the doorway, for this was the place of birth, while the oldest of her grandmothers sat at the right of the door, ready to walk out into the deeper cold of death.

In Cunovic's experience, stuck-up southern types trying to ape the Romans imagined that such houses were nothing but great middens, heaped up by men with minds like children. They were quite wrong. Brigantians could build any shape they liked. Most of their barns and grain stores were rectangular, for convenience, and sometimes they built of stone, just like the Romans. But they preferred to build their homes round and of living wood, to reflect their minds, the cycles of their lives, and their embedded goddess.

All this swirled around in Cunovic's head. He was proud of his house and his contribution to it: a Brigantian house of the old style, partly paid for with new money. This place was where he came from; he would always be Brigantian.

But as a trader of dogs, horses and leather he had to deal not just with thuggish southern kings but with sophisticates from the Mediterranean, the very heart of the huge and mysterious Roman world. He'd had to learn to be a different way. Nectovelin's was a world of family and loyalty into which you were tied with bonds of iron, from birth to death. Cunovic moved in a much looser world, a world where he could do anything he liked, as long as he made money at it. He had learned to cope with this. But before proud old men like his grandfather, he sometimes felt as if he was being torn in two.