PART 1 

A Gathering Storm AD 304 


 

The rain had fallen for so many days that the river Ver no longer whispered but snarled, ripping branches and drowned leaves downstream to the marshes beyond the walls. Its swollen banks lapped at the foot of the stone bridges, and the reeds in the marsh quivered like the tails of frightened dogs. For weeks, the sky had been a vast iron sheet, its heaviness pressing down upon roofs and spirits too, and even the sturdiest citizens of Verulamium had begun to complain that the gods were displeased. It was blamed by some on Neptune’s wrath over a fisherman’s bad manners; others blamed Jupiter for having lost patience with the local weather. Actually, the citizens of Verulamium would have blamed anybody but themselves, a skill they had developed to civic perfection. They knew every aspect of their daily lives was governed by gods & spirits.   

Now, as if some weary deity had at last relenting, the clouds parted and the first dawn in weeks broke over the chalk hills. It came like a coin tossed high by an idle hand: a molten disc shedding gold over the wet roofs and soaked fields. Shafts of light lit up the puddled ruts of Watling Street, turning mud to mirrors and sending long bars of fire across the city walls. 

To the bakers, it meant the dough would finally rise again; to the washerwomen, it meant their laundry could, for once, actually dry before the next rain. Even the town dogs barked with the relief of animals who had started to believe they might never smell dry ground again. 

Alban saw it all from above his family villa. He breathed in the damp, earthy scent of pine, fresh and sharp after rain, and felt the slight give of rain-wet grass beneath his feet. Below was the Roman city in its sturdy defences—compact and secure, like the mind of the engineer who originally planned it out, as the clear shout of a bronze Cornu blowing from the soldier’s garrison. 

The walls, which were fronted with dressed flint and crowned with red Roman tiles, glowed like a serpent’s back.  

Watling Street cut straight through the city’s heart, a white slash of laboriously fitted stone glinting like a freshly drawn sword. Already, smoke curled from the bakeries—blue and tenuous against the light morning air—though merchants in the forum were only just unrolling their awnings, cracking them into place with swift, practised gestures. They shouted in crisp Latin that mingled with the older, lyrical syllables of the native Britons who still clung to their old tongue. Alban closed his eyes for a moment, letting the morning sounds break over him: the hollow clap of hooves on wet cobble; the clink of amphorae of wine and oil as carts rattled off towards the market; the blacksmith’s hammer striking on iron with a rhythm older than the empire. The smells of the city drifted to him on the rising breeze, the warm richness of new bread, the acrid tang of the forge, the sour reek of dung from the stables by the north gate, the faint bitterness of charcoal smoke carried up from the tannery. 

The tanner, old Rufus, maintained the smell was “the very scent of civilisation.” Most didn’t, least of all anyone downwind. Verulamium doesn’t have as many temples as Rome, but more scandal and better bread,” he mused. “And if the gods had any sense, they’d relocate here straightaway—for Jupiter himself couldn’t resist Tullia the baker’s honey loaves.” These sounds and smells he had known since boyhood. He could have walked the streets blindfold and shouted out each turning: the columned basilica where magistrates dispensed Roman justice; the narrow alleys behind the baths where tanners’ vats stank of lye and boys gambled playing knucklebones; the moss-covered steps of the theatre which bulked like a modern giant, a 2000-seat theatre with arches and colonnades where travelling troupes acted Greek comedies. 

The theatre was not only a building but a declaration that Britannia’s third city had found its voice, one that was meant to be heard. 

The last troupe had been memorable, though not for the drama. A local goat had eaten half the chorus’s costumes midway through the play, which—depending on taste—had added immensely to the play. And for all its ordered tumult, he knew also the quieter undertow: the troubled sleep of a conquered nation. Three centuries of Roman rule had laid a hard, disciplined grasp on the isle. The villas glittered with mosaic floors, the temples rang with hymns to Jupiter and Mercury, and the eagle standards of the legions cast long shadows across every field. 

Outside the walls, however, the country was the older gods’ own. The oak groves still murmured with the names of the ancient gods. 

In the hush of evening, when the wind sighed through the leaves, the folk still addressed those shadowy spirits whose title predated Rome by a thousand years. Alban was the child of both worlds. His father, a veteran of the Twentieth Legion, had served beneath the Eagle in Gaul and Hispania before receiving a share of British land. His mother’s blood was even more ancient: she was the daughter of a king of a tribe whose ancestors had ruled these hills many years before Caesar’s initial ships darkened the southern horizon. He had learned from her the island’s subdued gravity, the pulse of rivers and stones. He had acquired from his father the soldier’s self-control, the Roman regard for law and order. 

These two legacies had never lain easily together. He wore the short tunic of the citizen and bore the faded military tattoo of the legions on his arm, but he had been sung to sleep as a boy by his mother’s tales of spirits who haunted the brooks and watched the stars. The empire called him Albanus Varian, but his mother, in the old tongue, had called him by another name: Alban, son of the hills.  

Now thirty-seven years old, he bore the bearing of the soldier he once was: tall, broad-shouldered, movements spare, the scars of old campaigns marked like faint lines down his forearms. Yet there was a stillness about him, the stillness of a man who had seen war but never celebrated it. He had learned that heroism was more often cheered by those who remained far enough away to stay dry.  

He had witnessed villages ablaze in the damp forests of Gaul, heard the screams of children and women as legionaries did their work. He had fought in the sleet and the dark and come to understand that the gods of Rome, with their infinite appetite for sacrifice, were stilled by such atrocities.  

The household brazier to Mars in his atrium had not been lit in years. A cohort of centurions appeared now out of the mist along the bridge over the swollen Ver. Their helmets caught the sunlight in splinters of fire. Behind them, a line of prisoners trudged, mud-stained and pale. Even at this distance, Alban sensed their terror: the bowed heads, the darting eyes like trapped birds. The edicts of Emperor Diocletian against the adherents of the new sect—Christians, they called themselves—had arrived in Britannia months ago. At first, there were only rumours: of secret gatherings in cellars, of a single god who demanded no sacrifice but the heart, of hymns sung in derision of the old gods.  

But the magistrates had begun to hunt with sudden zeal. There were already stories of executions in Londinium, of men and women thrown to the beasts or burned alive before the crowds. Alban felt the ancient tension wind like a snake in dry grass. 

His father’s instruction ordered loyalty to the emperor and the law; his mother’s blood whispered that there were truths older than sword or edict. 

He had walked both paths—land and law—but neither brought him to certainty now. He felt the weight of the empire on the quiet earth beneath his feet, and the river whispered that no statute could ever unite the loyalty of the heart. He turned his back upon the city and walked through his own garden, where rain had bejewelled every leaf. The villa behind him was modest by Roman standards: a small atrium with an open roof to gather the rain for the house pool, some mosaics polished bare by decades of sandals, walls painted in the soft ochres his mother had once loved. Here, he had chosen solitude as his preferred guest: ordered days of tending his garden, of mending walls and listening for the blackbird’s song at dusk. 

The blackbird, for its part, had no inclinations towards empire, religion, or philosophy—just worms, which it pursued with commendable single-mindedness.  

He had never married. He had once thought it was freedom, the freedom to live his life as he wanted. But lately, it had felt like a question unanswered, an echo in an empty hall. He would stand at the edge of the garden some nights long after the last light had gone, waiting for a sign or a voice that never came. A sound at the far end of the garden broke his daydream. He stiffened, the soldier in him instantly on guard.  

His first thought was that one of his neighbours had stopped over to borrow something again—salt, oil, or perhaps just sympathy. But this caller did not appear to be in any state to borrow anything except trouble. From the edge of beech trees, a figure stumbled into view: cloaked and limping, robes torn and stained with mud. He stopped, scanning the open ground as if in flight, then stumbled forward. Alban’s hand wandered to the dagger at his belt. Bandits were not uncommon on the roads beyond the town, and deserters from the northern garrisons. He moved forward, calculating the distance to the gate. 

The man stumbled to the low wicket and collapsed against it. Alban moved quickly across the wet grass, knocking rain-drenched blades against his sandals. The man’s face was pale beneath a tangle of dark hair; his beard was matted with sweat. His eyes opened, deep-set, alarmingly calm. Not the desperate eyes of a bandit, but something more solid, as if he had already measured the worst thing that could befall him. 

“Please,” the man whispered, his voice rough with exhaustion but with the tone of authority. “Hide me.”  

Far off, beyond the trees, the clatter of hooves sounded. Alban heard it clearly: the disciplined ring of Roman patrols. The magistrate’s guards, perhaps, are combing the countryside for fugitives. 

To hide such a man, wanted for his faith, was treason. The penalty was certain: death. 

Alban hesitated. Duty and instinct wrestled within him like two silent adversaries. He recalled his father’s voice, as unyielding as the centurion’s whip: A Roman’s loyalty is first to the law. He recalled the stories of his mother, of gods who weighed the hearts of men not in obeisance but in mercy. 

The man’s eyes did not blink. There was a silent defiance, a stillness like that before a storm breaks. Something in the eyes, something he could not name, pierced the armour of his wariness. 

The hoofbeats grew louder. 

Alban breathed slowly, the chill air biting at his lungs. Then, with the deliberation of a man stepping across an unseen threshold, he unbarred the gate. 

As he lifted the latch, he thought wryly that if this was a mistake, at least it would be an interesting mistake—something which most mistakes in Verulamium could not claim.