His father, blind but still a soldier at heart, is pleased but also not pleased it isn’t so good to have a deserter in the family, even if it means deserting to protect one’s native country.

As a farewell, he lights the great beacon at the fort to shine out while the Roman Empire leaves Britain for good.Īfter that, he goes home. He becomes a wilful deserter, and allows the last ship to leave without him. He goes back to barracks at Rutupiae, or Richborough, as it is now called, on the south-easternmost tip of England, and gets his men ready for boarding ship. He receives word unexpectedly that his legion is being pulled out of Britain, along with the rest of the army, and realises that if he goes, he may never see his family again.

(Readers of earlier novels in the sequence will know who bought the farm, and who lived there before.) He’s one of the native British officers: after over 300 years of Roman occupation, the island of Britain has contributed generations of soldiers to the Roman army. In The Lantern-Bearers Aquila is a Roman centurion, visiting his family on their farm in what we now call Sussex, which has been in the family for generations.

It begins as one of her Romans in Britain novels, the books for which she is best known, a sequence that traces different periods of Roman rule in Britain, linked by the transmitted family heirloom of a glass ring engraved with a dolphin. This novel of King Arthur from the Really Like This Books podcast scripts catch-up is Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern-Bearers.

The lantern bearers