I assured him that I had not the slightest intention of touching the girl. The engineer said that the most sensible thing to do would be to give her wine to drink because the uncivilized Britons were not used to wine and she would soon be drunk. Then I could do what I liked with her as long as I made sure that I did not get too drunk myself. Otherwise the girl might cut my throat when she sobered up. That was what happened to one of the legion’s tanners who had made the mistake of drinking together with an untamed British woman.

I repeated impatiently that I did not want to touch the girl. But the engineer insisted that it would be wisest if I kept the girl bound. Other- wise she would run away at the first opportunity.

“Nothing could be better,” I said. “Tell her that tonight I’ll go with her past the guards and set her free.”

The engineer shook his head and said that he had thought I was mad before, voluntarily joining in the work with the men, but he had not thought I was that mad. He spoke to the girl and then turned back to me.

“The girl doesn’t trust you,” he said. “She thinks that you’re taking her into the forest to get your own way. Even if she did escape from you, Britons from other tribes would capture her and hold her as a hostage as she doesn’t belong here. Her name is Lugunda.”

Then the engineer’s eyes began to glisten and he licked his lips as he looked at the girl.

“Look,” he said. “I’ll give you two silver pieces for the girl and then you’ll be rid of her.”

The girl saw the look and rushed up to me, grasping my arm as if I were the only security she had in the world. But at the same time she uttered a stream of her sibilant language. The engineer laughed loudly.

“She says, if you touch her without permission you will be reborn as a frog. Before then her tribesmen will come and cut out your stomach, pull out your intestines and stick a red-hot spear up your backside. It’d be wiser, I should think, if you sold her at a reasonable price to a more exper-ienced man,”

For a moment I felt like giving the girl to the engineer for nothing, but then I again patiently assured her that I did not want to touch her. In fact I thought of treating her like a colt. They had their fringes combed and were given a blanket on their backs on cold nights. Old veterans used to relieve their boredom by keeping pets. The girl would be better than a dog because she could teach me the Britons’ language.

I do not know how the engineer interpreted my words, or if in fact he knew enough of the language to convey what I had said to the girl. I suspect that he told the girl that I was as unwilling to touch her

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as I would be to mate with a dog or a horse. Anyhow, she drew quickly away from me and began to splash her face with water from my wooden pail, to show she was neither a horse nor a dog.

I asked the engineer to leave and gave the girl some soap. She had never seen such a thing before, and to tell the truth, neither had I until I stayed the night in the Gallic town of Lutetia on the way to Britain and visited the wretched bathhouse there. It was on the anniversary of the day of my mother’s death and thus also my birthday. I was seventeen in Lutetia and no one congratulated me.

The thin slave in the bathhouse surprised me with the mild and cleansing soap he was using. It was quite a different feeling from being scoured with pumice. I remembered the money Tullia had given me and bought both the slave his freedom and his soap for three gold pieces. On the morning I left Lutetia, I gave him permission to call himself Minutius. The few pieces of soap I received in return, I kept well hidden when I realized that this new invention roused the contempt of the legionaries.

When I showed the girl how the soap should be used, she forgot her fear, washed herself and began to untangle her hair. I rubbed her swollen wrists with good ointment, and when I saw how badly her clothes had been torn by the thorns, I went to the trader for underclothes and a woolen cloak for her. After that she followed me everywhere like a faithful dog.

I soon noticed that it was easier for me to teach her Latin than for me to learn the barbarians’ language. During the long dark evenings by the fire, I also tried to teach her to read. But I did it just for my own amusement, by writing the letters in the sand and letting her copy them. The only books in the garrison were the centurion’s almanac and the trader’s Egyptian-Chaldaean book of dreams, so I very much regretted not bringing anything with me to read. Teaching Lugunda made up for some of this.

I endured with a laugh the stream of obscenities from the veterans regarding the girl in my hut, for they meant no harm. More likely they wondered what kind of witchcraft I had used to tame the girl so quickly. Of course, they thought I slept with her,” but in fact I did not touch the girl, although she was over thirteen years of age.

As the icy rain poured down and the even normally wretched roads were transformed into bottomless mud, and the puddles every morning were covered with a crisp layer of ice, life in the garrison became more and more static and monotonous. A couple of young Gauls who had

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