The little party rode their horses down narrow rutted trails made by deer and wild boar and aurochs as much as men and men's herds, beneath towering oaks and beeches, ash and chestnut and lime, tangled thorny underbrush to either side. Wind whipped through leaves turning sere and yellow with early autumn, scattering them downward with a steady drip and drizzle following behind. The air above was thick with wings, many on their way southward for the year, and their cries drifted down with the rain: redpolls and siskins chattered anger at the humans from the boughs. The trail veered down from a ridgeback, through a marsh-bordered stream edged with alders; water lapped her stirrup-irons and mud spattered on her boots and trouser legs with a cold yeasty smell. The storm mounted, moaning through the branches and ruffling the surface of the puddles. It was good to speak into the teeth of the whetted wind:

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

"Roman?" Swindapa asked.

In the decade they'd been together the young woman of the Fiernan Bohulugi had acquired a fair modern education to add to the lore of an astronomer-priestess of Moon Woman and hunter of the Spear Mark, but not much of it concerned the details of a history that would never happen.

"A people that invaded… would have invaded Alba a long time from now. About…" Let's see, this is year 10 A.E., which makes it 1240 B.C., Claudius invaded Britain in the 40s A.D., so… "Call it thirteen hundred years from now. They would have built a city thereabouts." She nodded off to the northwest, to where Wroxeter stood in her birth-century.