Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. Look at the numbers!’ Tullio threw his notebook at the architect. ‘Oh, it’s always possible to shave off a bit. Use only local stone. Push the legionaries that bit harder. Maybe make some use of local labour or slaves, but if they’re untrained they won’t be useful for much. But none of that will make any real difference. No, I’m saying you simply can’t do it, friend.’

  Old Xander seemed about to burst into tears.

  Severa glared at Tullio. ‘I don’t know why we’re even having this debate. The command for this Wall comes from the Emperor Hadrian himself.’

  Tullio sat back and folded his massive arms. ‘I don’t care whether he’s the Emperor of the Romans or the King of the Bog People. You can’t build a six-year Wall in three years, love.’

  Severa’s fury was cold. ‘Don’t you call me “love”, you fur-backed—’

  ‘Severa!’ Karus snapped.

  Annius was studying the model. ‘Tell you what. Why not build it in turf? Just as good at keeping out the hairy lads from the north, and be done in less than half the time.’

  ‘Turf? Turf?’ Severa said menacingly. ‘Why, you insolent fool, if I had a clod of turf in my hand right now, I would gladly shove it down your throat—’

  Brigonius touched her arm. ‘Wait,’ he whispered. ‘I’m a quarryman. I deal with fellows like this all the time. It’s all a game. Just give us some time.’

  Karus stood hastily. ‘Quite right. Let’s sleep on it, shall we?’ He stood massively over Severa until she allowed herself to be escorted from the room. Then he sat down, blowing out his jowled cheeks with relief.

  ‘Feisty piece, isn’t she?’ Tullio said.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Karus said dryly.

  Brigonius faced Tullio. ‘Let’s get down to business, shall we? You heard her, prefect. This is the Emperor we’re dealing with. And the Emperor wants a stone wall.’

  Tullio said heavily, ‘Listen, black-beard, the Emperor can want to build his Wall on the moon, but that doesn’t mean it can be done.’

  ‘Then what can you do?’

  Annius was pulling his lip. In his dull way he seemed the more creative of the two, Brigonius thought, and was at least trying to come up with solutions. ‘Tell you what,’ he said slowly. ‘How about half in turf and half stone? You could probably manage that in the time. Then you get the best of all worlds, a complete defensive barrier in three years and a nice bit of stonework to impress the boss.’

  Brigonius was about to reject this out of hand, but Xander said wearily, ‘Four-tenths.’

  Brigonius turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘Not half. Four-tenths in turf, the rest stone according to the plan.’ He tapped Tullio’s notebook. ‘That is feasible from the figures, if you are honest in your calculations, prefect. Besides I worked it out for myself earlier.’

  Tullio took back the notebook and revised his figures quickly. ‘All right. Yes, four-tenths turf, six-tenths stone. Yes, you could do that.’

  Xander turned to Brigonius. ‘This is the best we can do in the time.’

  Karus said darkly, ‘And you knew this before we came in here? Why didn’t you say something when we put the plan before the Emperor?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know we would only have three years,’ Xander said. He sounded exhausted. ‘Severa didn’t let slip that little detail until the audience. What could I do, argue with her before Hadrian himself?’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ Annius said cheerfully. ‘Everybody goes away happy. And you could always replace your turf with stone later.’

  Karus growled, but subsided.

  Brigonius glanced around. ‘All right,’ he said cautiously, not wishing to overstretch the consensus. ‘Then the question is, which half will be turf?’

  After another hour’s discussion, and after a tankard or two of Tullio’s coarse German beer, they came a conclusion. From Segedunum at its eastern extremity, the Wall would run west as stone for forty-five miles, and then turf the rest of the way to the western coast. The eastern half of the Wall was closer to local sources of good stone–not least Brigonius’s own quarry–and the two soldiers regarded the security situation along this part of the border as more critical, so stone was appropriate for this stretch.

  ‘And besides,’ as Tullio pointed out, ‘the eastern half is where the Emperor is. He’s going to want to lay a foundation stone, not dig a lump of sod.’

  The four of them stood up and shook hands. ‘Then we have a plan,’ Brigonius said, weary but relieved. ‘Now all we’ve got to do is sell it to the Emperor.’

  ‘That’s the easy part,’ Karus muttered. ‘It’s Severa I’m frightened of…’

  XII

  The climax of Hadrian’s visit to Eburacum was the twenty-fourth of June, a day of religious celebration for soldiers wherever they were posted across the empire. After this Hadrian would ride north and ceremonially install the first foundation stone of the great Wall which would soon divide the island of Britain in two.

  Brigonius had been forced to learn a lot about the habits of his sole customer, the Roman army. A soldier’s religious life was complicated. To begin with he brought along his own gods. A German here in Britain, for instance, celebrated his feast of Matronalia on the first of March. He would also be expected to pay respect to any local deities. The soldiers seemed to like Brigantia’s own Coventina, and thanks to the army’s mobility she was gaining adherents even overseas, in Gaul and Germany. But the soldiers’ statues of her, crudely made, were alien in the eyes of the Brigantians, who found Coventina in the hills and the streams and in the wind, and did not recognise these busty Romanised cartoons.

  The centre of a soldier’s religious life, however, was a calendar based on feasts of the traditional Roman deities, principal city days, the anniversaries of the emperors, and dates associated with his unit itself. And of all the feasts on the calendar none was more significant than today, the twenty-fourth of June, the feast of Fors Fortuna, a popular goddess among the troops.

  Brigonius had hoped to spend the day in the company of Lepidina. He wasn’t sure what Severa’s plans would be now, and how much more time he and Lepidina would have together. But as the day’s festivities began Lepidina was nowhere to be found.

  Then Severa herself peremptorily requisitioned him as an escort. Beside Severa, her face set as hard as Roman concrete, Brigonius found himself trailing the Emperor as he toured the troops.

  Accompanied by his courtiers, Hadrian walked slowly from barracks block to training field, and inspected displays of infantry field manoeuvres and formation riding by cavalry units. It was a festival day, and the imperial party grew raucous on wine and British beer. Brigonius had a policy of staying sober around Romans, but Severa seemed determined to ply him with drink, and he saw no point in defying her. As the ale filled him even her company seemed less than icy.

  Hadrian drank his share, but he remained focused on the part he was playing. He was good at detail; Brigonius heard him sympathise with one unit of mixed cavalry and infantry that it was harder for them to put on a spectacular display than for a dedicated cavalry unit with their larger numbers of horse. Each man seemed to grow in his presence, and Brigonius could see why he was so loved by his troops.

  It wasn’t a bad life, Brigonius was coming to think, to be a soldier of Rome. You received regular pay and reasonable food. You had camaraderie in the barracks, and there was always the civilian town outside your fort, with its shops and inns and brothels and temples, where you might find a little relief, or a companion who could one day become a wife. The barracks could be rife with lice, and the town with diseases. But you could get rid of the lice in the bath house, and if you got sick you could go to the hospital–the army ran the only professional hospitals in the world. You might go through your whole twenty-five-year career with only two or three campaigning seasons, and perhaps without seeing any fighting at all. You were almost certainly better off than the Brittunculi o
r other half-civilised provincials beyond the walls of your fort…And every so often an emperor came to visit.

  Many of the troops had grown beards, in defiance of the usual Roman custom, imitating Hadrian’s coin images. This amused Severa. ‘Look at them. The Emperor’s beard is more famous than he is!’

  At noon the Emperor and his retinue, with Brigonius and Severa in tow, retired to the fortress’s headquarters. Today the largest reception room in the block had been decked out as a shrine to many gods, and the party settled down to a long afternoon of eating, drinking and fortune-telling. At the inception of his mighty project Hadrian was seeking good auguries. Since dawn his philosophers had been inspecting the sky, looking for unusual clouds and the flight of birds with auspicious patterns. Now animals were put to death on charcoal braziers, entrails were prodded, statues venerated and libations poured, as scholars worked their way through scrolls of prophecies and interpretations.

  Only the sinister freedman Primigenius sat aloof from it all, as always watching, watching.

  With Severa at his side like a gaoler, Brigonius had nothing to do but drink. The chanting of the philosophers and the thickness of the air, cloudy with incense, made him feel as if he were floating out of his body. He tried to strike up conversation with Severa. ‘Romans are always superstitious, aren’t they?’

  ‘None more than Hadrian,’ she said. ‘But it’s not surprising. He is a soldier who has to come to terms with the prospect of becoming a god after he dies–indeed in Egypt they worship him already. How would that feel, Brigonius? Can you even imagine it? Wouldn’t you be fascinated by past and future, if you felt you might some day transcend time itself?’

  This kind of philosophising baffled Brigonius at the best of times; now the words flew around in his head. ‘Superstitious or not, he’s still a soldier. And you can see he still has the touch with his men.’ He spotted Prefect Tullio sitting close to Governor Nepos. Tullio was silent, his face like thunder. ‘But there’s one soldier whose life doesn’t seem to have been improved by the Emperor’s visit.’

  ‘Oh, things have gone slightly awry for our friend the prefect,’ Severa said with silky satisfaction. ‘He’s still in his post. But he’s lost a few of his privileges. His wife and kids have been kicked out of the fortress for a start.’

  ‘Why?’

  She inspected her fingers, long, perfectly manicured. ‘Because of this solution you cooked up between you and your drinking pals. A Wall that is half stone, half turf.’

  Brigonius knew how unhappy she had been with the deal, not least because it violated the terms of her Prophecy. ‘Not quite half—’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said without emotion. ‘I had no choice but to accept it. But it took me some effort to sell it to the Emperor–or, more specifically, the freedman Primigenius. I had to promise some favours.’

  He asked uneasily, ‘What favours?’

  ‘And even then I found it necessary to shift some of the responsibility. I’m happy to say that it is our oafish Germanic friend Tullio who is taking the blame for fouling up the estimates for the Wall, not me, not Xander.’

  Brigonius, his head full of beer fumes and smoke, felt as if he was about to pass out. ‘That’s unfair on Tullio. He’s only trying to do his duty. And you have made an unnecessary enemy. That’s a bad habit, Severa.’

  ‘Of course it is unfair, which makes it all the sweeter. That’ll teach him to call me “love”.’

  Something in her tone alarmed Brigonius, but he seemed unable to sit up. ‘These favours you promised—’

  Her face loomed before his eyes. ‘You aren’t completely incapable yet, are you, little Briton? The poison I’ve had dropped in your ale will soon grip you completely, though.’

  ‘Poison?’

  ‘Oh, it won’t harm you. It will just be that for a sunset and a sunrise you won’t be able to impose your will on your own body.’ She ran a fingertip down his chest. ‘How awful for you. But never mind, there is somebody else who will be able to make good use of your fine body while you’re gone. You’ve guessed, have you? You’re the favour, you see, to sweeten the deal you forced me to make. It’s not my choice at all, oh no, it’s simply a consequence of your own actions. You see that, don’t you?’

  Suddenly Brigonius remembered the way Hadrian had looked at him. Anger and fear flooded him, but still he couldn’t move; he lolled on his couch, a helpless doll, his limbs heavy as logs. ‘What have you done–have you promised me to Hadrian?’

  Another face loomed over him now: pale skin, black eyes, lips like a wound.

  Severa was whispering in his ear. ‘Oh, not the Emperor–you aren’t pretty or young enough for him–but Primigenius, who wields the power I needed. He has issues with our proposal, you know, for he has his own pet architect he hoped to promote. And then there is simple jealousy, of one bed-warmer for another. Primigenius lusts for you, yet hates you at the same time, for he knows you caught the Emperor’s eye, if only briefly. Isn’t that a paradox? Won’t it add spice to the night you’re about to spend together?’ She came closer still; he could feel her breath on his ear, smell the spices on her tongue. ‘And after he’s split you open, o Brittunculus, my daughter will never touch you again.’

  That red mouth descended towards him, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t struggle, couldn’t even cry out.

  XIII

  Brigonius rode west towards Banna, along the line of the Wall.

  A year after Hadrian’s decision, this part of Brigantia had been transformed into a vast construction yard. On this bright late spring morning, from the higher ground Brigonius could see how from horizon to horizon a corridor of broken ground cut across the crags and green-clad hills, mapped out by surveyors’ flags and poles, and scarred brown by the ruts of wheels and the prints of feet and hooves. It was a slash through the countryside’s green flesh. And all along its length legionaries toiled, hauling and laying stone, maggots in the wound.

  In what had been left of last summer, governor Nepos had set his workforce the target of completing three miles of Wall, which had been achieved easily. This year, in the first full season, the three legions working on the Wall were each to complete five more miles.

  The mile-forts and turrets came first. The forts were built to a simple rectangular plan, fifty feet wide and sixty deep, with gateways in the north wall and the south. Inside there were small buildings and an oven, and a staircase leading to a viewing platform. The turrets were even simpler, just thatched towers set on bases twenty feet square, each with a hearth and a shelter for the soldiers. The turrets and forts were intended to be part of the fabric of the Wall itself, so they were built with ‘wings’, stubby extensions on their east and west faces where the curtain wall would be attached.

  Such was the speed of construction that in some places the curtain wall was already being built. On a foundation of slabs set in puddled clay, two courses of dressed stone were laid, rows of neat square blocks. Then a core of rubble bonded with clay or mortar was poured in to fill the space between the skin of cut stone. Drains were built under the Wall, and more significant streams were culverted. The completed stone sections were already being plastered and painted white with lime-wash render, and red stripes ran along the line of the wall, picking out the curtain’s courses of stonework.

  Brigonius, a stone man himself, marvelled at the pace of the work. It wasn’t just the hugely efficient transport of stone that impressed him but the Romans’ use of concrete. Without a core of concrete the Wall could never have been built so rapidly, or so robustly. Concrete even set hard under water, allowing the construction of firmly founded bridges. If the facing stones were robbed or decayed in the future, the concrete core would stand; the Romans were building for centuries.

  The Wall was not meant to be a defensive barrier, in the way that the wall of a fortress was designed to withstand a siege. Its purpose was control. The regularly placed fortified gates would allow the army to control the flow of population through the area�
�and, indeed, levy tolls from it. The Wall was imposing enough to deter any small-scale raids, but if there were any larger-scale disturbance the legionaries would mass from their bases in the south and ride out through the Wall gates to meet the enemy in set-piece battles in open country. In fact, Brigonius was coming to understand, the Wall was a mere component in a system of deep control, defence and communication that stretched south of here through roads and forts back into the Roman province, and even to the north, where manned outpost forts would be maintained beyond the Wall itself.

  But, watching the Wall rise grandly over the crags, Brigonius wondered how much this military theorising mattered compared to the brute physical reality of the Wall. It was a monument to the power of the Roman mind like nothing ever seen before in Britain–or, according to Tullio, in the whole world–and even if it were not manned by a single soldier such a structure would surely deter all but the most fanatical enemies of Rome.

  But then, Brigonius reminded himself, despite certain harm done to him, he was not a fanatical enemy of Rome.

  Brigonius arrived at his own limestone quarry. This was a great scoop out of the south side of a hillside, not far from the line of the Wall, some miles to the east of Banna. He rode up from the north, so he could stand at the lip of the artificial cliff that had been cut into the crag and view the activities in the pit. Long lines of men snaked from the quarry face to massing points by the carts, lugging stone. They were the men of the sixth legion, mostly drawn from Gaul and Germany but some from further afield. Day after day they hacked into British limestone, roughly cutting the stone blocks and dragging them to the carts to be hauled off to the construction sites.

  The speed of the work was remarkable here too. In less than a full season’s working the quarry had already been hugely extended, following the seam of rich creamy rock, from the small bite into the turf-covered crag that Brigonius had inherited. The legionaries had a variety of specialist tools that Brigonius coveted, such as heavy hammers, steel-tipped wedges and crowbars, and cranes for lifting heavy blocks. In one part of the quarry a watermill worked a trip-hammer, flailing arms which battered at intransigent rock. He had heard a rumour that in another quarry further along the Wall stone was being cut by a water-driven saw.