Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  Karus said, ‘Ah, but if I understand your mythology right, Jesus’s own life was time-bound, unlike the gods of the past, and it marked a great disjunction in history. He was the God made man, and in His life and His murder He redeemed mankind.’

  Xander raised his eyebrows. ‘So Jesus is an intervening god, like the gods of Olympus of old. I thought we were done with them! And He was murdered? How?’

  ‘By the Romans,’ Lepidina said. ‘The governor of Judea had Him put down as a rebel.’

  Tullio said gruffly, ‘I knew a man, who knew a man, who knew your Christ.’

  Lepidina’s eyes widened. ‘You did?’

  ‘This fellow I’m talking about was a veteran, retired, when I was starting out myself. I was eighteen or so. I met him in Pannonia. And he told me about a veteran he had met when he was young, in Africa. This chap had been a centurion, and he was on duty that day in Judea, when your Christ was crucified. The lads showed Him mercy, he said. As He was dying on the cross, one of them gave Him soldiers’ wine.’ He raised his cup. ‘Just like this.’

  They sat gravely, reflecting on this.

  Karus murmured, ‘ “Whilst God-as-babe has birth…” ’

  ‘From the Prophecy,’ Brigonius said.

  ‘Yes. Lepidina, I’ve often wondered about the meaning of that phrase. Even if you accept that Severa is right that the text of those lines is about Hadrian and the Wall, that phrase doesn’t fit. You have always said the Prophecy is bound up with your young faith because of the coincidence of the birth dates of your ancestor and your Christ. I wonder if that line is telling us something of a great conflict to come, between your young god and the old. But if so, what is the Prophecy guiding us to do? What does the Weaver want?—’

  There was a crash, and a smell of smoke. Tullio dropped his cup of wine and ran out of the tent.

  XV

  The camp was plunged into chaos. Soldiers were running everywhere, fumbling with weapons and armour, some of them only half-dressed. And from one corner of the camp a plume of smoke was rising.

  Xander stared about, bewildered. ‘What has happened? What should we do?’

  ‘Stand still,’ Brigonius said firmly. He took Lepidina’s arm. Her face was closed up and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking or feeling. This wasn’t the place for her, he told himself angrily. ‘Stay with me,’ he said. ‘The camp is obviously under attack. We’re in the safest place, right here. Just let the soldiers do their jobs.’

  Karus shook his head, clearly reeling from the wine. ‘I’d like to know how they managed to torch the camp. What did they use, a catapult?’

  Tullio approached them and glared at Brigonius. ‘You. You’re a Brigantian. Are you going to give me any trouble?’

  ‘No.’

  Tullio pressed him: ‘What are you then? On this night when many of your countrymen will have their bellies slit open by Roman stabbing swords, are you a traitor to your kind?’

  The question struck at Brigonius’s heart. But he said, ‘No. But I am no fool either. This isn’t the way to deal with the Romans; this can’t work.’

  ‘And what is the right way to “deal” with Rome?’

  ‘On your own terms. By skinning you of every sesterce.’

  Tullio inspected him closely. ‘Very well. Stay close to me or Annius; it’s likely to be a long night. And keep these people under control.’ Then he turned away, dismissing Brigonius and his party.

  A junior officer ran up. ‘Sir, we’re under attack!’

  ‘Well, I can see that,’ Tullio snapped. He drew his stabbing sword and turned to face the north. ‘Perhaps those northerners are taking their chance before the Wall is built. Get me a signaller and tell him—’

  ‘Sir.’ The officer, no older than twenty-five, was distressed, out of his depth. ‘They aren’t coming from the north.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘From the south, sir. The south!’

  Tullio gaped. ‘The south? Which side of this cursed Wall are the barbarians supposed to be on? And how did they set fire to my camp?’

  ‘I can answer that, sir.’ A tough-looking centurion approached. His face was streaked with ash, and he carried something in his hand, something that dangled and dripped a dark fluid. ‘He was inside the camp. He had business here; he’d been here before. We’d no reason to suspect him. But he was carrying a bottle of oil which he lit and—’

  ‘Who, man? Who did this?’

  The centurion glared at Brigonius. ‘This is yours, I believe.’ He raised his arm. The thing in his hand was a human head, severed at the neck, from which blood still oozed. The face was obscured by a thick black beard. The centurion dumped the wet thing on the floor.

  Brigonius flinched but stood his ground, while Lepidina cowered behind him. ‘Matto,’ Brigonius breathed. ‘Oh, you fool.’

  Tullio glared. ‘Recriminations later. For now let’s get control of the situation. You,’ he told the centurion. ‘Take charge of what’s going on inside the camp. Put that fire out before it does any more damage.’ The centurion ran off. ‘Annius, you come with me. What are those signallers doing up in that tower, sucking each other off? I need to find out what’s happening in the country…’ He stalked off, bristling, angry, competent.

  Karus was staring at the severed head. ‘I knew this man.’

  ‘He was my cousin,’ Brigonius said grimly. ‘He worked for me, at the quarry.’

  ‘What was in his mind, Brigonius? He must have known he could not survive a lone attack on a Roman camp.’

  ‘But death didn’t matter to him,’ Xander said quietly. ‘The Romans have encountered such suicide killers before–and know they are hard to deal with. As Tacitus has written, “The man who is prepared to die will always be your master.” ’

  The commands flowing from Tullio soon had their effect. Soldiers swarmed around the camp, preparing weapons and armour. Meanwhile others gathered around the fire. They hauled a cart laden with a heavy tank of water. Two beefy infantrymen began to work a two-handed lever, and water was forced out of a nozzle. The cart was hastily swivelled so that the fire engine’s spouting water was aimed at the burning tents.

  XVI

  The light faded, the long day dwindling into night. Brigonius and his party huddled with Tullio’s staff in the prefect’s tent.

  Beyond the camp the country was wild. Brigonius heard shouts, screams, and there was a prevailing stink of smoke. The soldiers prowled around their watch posts, peering out into the dangerous dark.

  To Brigonius’s surprise, Tullio didn’t send his forces out immediately to meet the enemy. During the night the sentries passed only despatch riders. On the old signal tower flags were raised and beacons lit, and across the turbulent countryside more pinpricks of fire lit up in response, as the mass mind of the army channelled and absorbed information about what was happening.

  It soon became clear that the uprising had been coordinated. There had been strikes all along the line of the Wall, most of them rash suicide raids. And at the same time there had been a general rising in the countryside, with tax officials and councillors, many of them Brigantian themselves, abused, attacked, their homes ransacked. The most serious rising was to the west of Banna, where a pack of young men had torched the still-incomplete turf wall, kicked in the defensive ditch, and generally made a mess of the Romans’ new frontier.

  Through the night Tullio sat in his improvised command post, poring over maps and lists of detachment names and numbers on hastily setout tables. Records, charts, lists, information, information: even as the countryside boiled like a disturbed ant hill, communication, patience, thinking was the key to the Roman response. Sitting here Brigonius saw how very wrong Matto had been to resist the Romans’ literacy, for it was the army’s key weapon. Through words and numbers on paper Roman commanders were able to transmit their commands unambiguously across hundreds of miles, and the bloody lessons of the past were stored without error or distortion, for ever.

  While Tullio an
d his staff worked, the Brigantian slave boy brought them food and more soldiers’ wine. Brigonius wondered what was going on in the head of the boy, what he understood of the uprising. Where was his family–north of here, south? But families, even names, were irrelevant, once you were a slave; you had no past, no future, no purpose but that which your master assigned you. Even your children were slaves, and given litter names by your master: ‘First-born’ (Primigenius) perhaps, or ‘Similar’, or ‘Runt’. But on a night like this, Brigonius thought, even the most docile slave must feel something stirring in his heart.

  The long night wore on. Karus drank himself to sleep on a soldier’s blanket. Xander, a nervous man surprisingly stoical in the face of a real crisis, wrapped himself in his cloak and sat quietly, eyes wide. Lepidina curled up against Brigonius, and Brigonius welcomed this echo of their brief love, though he knew she wanted no more than comfort. As for himself he could not sleep.

  The sun was rising when at last the bugles sang. Brigonius left his companions sleeping, letting Lepidina slide off onto a blanket, and went out to see.

  Units of soldiers were forming up, preparing to march out to meet the enemy. Brigonius overheard Tullio and his aides reviewing their information and giving commands to the junior officers. The Romans had delayed their response until they could assemble a sufficient countering force with detachments of the auxiliary units from Banna, other nearby camps, and the forts behind the Wall line. The legionary detachments assigned to Wall construction work were also gathering their weapons, but they were falling back, while other detachments from the legionary fortress at Eburacum, better prepared, were moving forward. The auxiliaries would do the brunt of the fighting while the legions would be kept in reserve, for no large-scale pitched battle was expected…

  And so on. This was how the system was supposed to work. Thanks to its fast communications, detailed record keeping and flexible deployment the army, never numerically strong, was able to deploy rapidly and efficiently, focusing its energies exactly where they were needed most. The army itself was a high technology, Brigonius saw, honed and perfected over centuries of conquest.

  Meanwhile the soldiers were individually preparing. Brigonius had worked with Roman soldiers for years. While they could sneer at the Brittunculi they had been posted to govern, they had come to seem disarmingly ordinary to him: ordinary fellows doing a job of work, wanting nothing but food, sleep and an occasional shag. But now he saw these men for what they were. In armour that fit like a second skin, wielding weapons with the casual intimacy of a lover’s touch, they were barely human at all, he thought; they were slabs of muscles intent only on killing. And as they formed up in their tight disciplined units they seemed more formidable yet. Brigonius’s heart felt heavy as he thought of the force that would face them, a rabble of disaffected Brigantian farm-boys stirred up by hotheads like Matto, armed with rusty weapons their grandfathers had been hiding in grain pits since the days of Cartimandua.

  XVII

  A month after the insurrection had been put down, governor Nepos travelled from Londinium to assess the damage for himself.

  Nepos toured the forts and rode the length of the Wall, and spoke to his senior commanders, including Tullio. He returned to Eburacum for a few days to preside over the trials of the suspected ringleaders of the rising. And he announced, in the even-handed way of wiser Romans, that he would consider compensation for farmers who had lost significant chunks of land–always providing they could prove they hadn’t taken part in the uprising themselves.

  Then he came to Banna, where he ordered a review. Tullio, Annius and their staff were called in, as were senior officers from the forts, a couple of tribunes from each of the three legions, and the architect, Xander, with his sponsor Severa, and Brigonius and other local suppliers.

  The meeting was fractious from the start. Nepos demanded of Tullio, ‘How could this happen, prefect?’

  ‘We had some failures of intelligence,’ Tullio admitted, ‘which have been put right. A failure of security too which has been tightened.’ Brigonius could testify to that; he had the bruises inflicted by gatekeeping soldiers to prove it. ‘But,’ Tullio went on, ‘we just didn’t anticipate the way the attack unfolded. The Wall is designed to deal with attacks from the north, not the south!’

  Nepos shook his head. ‘I still find it hard to believe. This has implications for everything we are doing here. If this were to happen again—’

  ‘It won’t,’ Severa said quickly. ‘Governor, this was a bit of restlessness by unhappy Brigantian farmers. Once your more lenient policies are accepted—’

  Nepos glared at her until she was silent. ‘Madam, to my mind we are building for centuries. Perhaps Brigantia will be quiet for a season or two. But in time a new generation of young bulls will rise up who will imagine their grandfathers didn’t go far enough–I’ve seen it all before. We must plan for all contingencies.’

  A young man in brightly polished dress uniform stood and took the floor. ‘And that isn’t all we have to think about.’ He bowed to the governor. ‘Sir, my name is Galba Iulius Sabinus. I am a tribune of the sixth; my legate at Eburacum sent you his report on the new military dispositions.’

  Tullio growled, ‘The damn legions didn’t deploy.’

  ‘But they might have had to,’ Sabinus said with effortless command.

  Nepos nodded to the tribune. ‘I’ve seen the report. You may summarise its findings, Iulius Sabinus.’

  Sabinus was good-looking, strong-featured, with thick dark hair. Brigonius imagined he might actually be a native Roman–and if he was a tribune he must be of the senatorial class, in the course of a career which might one day lead him to a post like Nepos’s own. Brigonius always reminded himself that to men such as Nepos and Sabinus, whatever happened in Britain was but an incident in a long career progression.

  ‘We of the sixth, concerned about the practicality of the Wall even before the uprising, have since mounted a major exercise to test its utility. All this is detailed in the report…’

  The idea of the Wall was that in the event of major disturbances to the north, the legions would deploy from their forts in the rear, march through the gates, and meet the enemy in open battle north of the Wall. When detachments of the sixth had actually tried this they hit problems. First you had to walk a few miles to the Wall itself. Then you had to break formation to make your way to one or other of the gates and file through, and just as Tullio himself had anticipated, legionaries in full battle armour found themselves queuing behind farmers’ wagons and herds of sheep. Even on the other side of the Wall you then had to form up again into marching order. During all this time you were terribly vulnerable to attack.

  ‘It just didn’t work,’ Sabinus said with bold bluntness.

  Tullio said, ‘In fact it’s worse. In some places you have to cross the river to get from the forts to the Wall! The Wall’s been my baby, and I hate to say it, but we should pull down the whole wretched thing. We did better under Trajan without a Wall at all.’

  Xander stood immediately, plump, anxious, shaking off Severa’s restraining hand. ‘We must finish what we have started,’ he insisted in his heavily accented Latin. ‘You can’t judge the performance of the Wall as a system when it is not completed, any more than you can expect a cart to run on only two wheels. When my design is fully realised—’

  ‘It’s still not going to work,’ Tullio said bluntly. ‘Because it will still have the flaws we have identified today. A vulnerability from the south. Inadequate crossing points.’

  Sabinus nodded. ‘My legate would agree. We have to think too of the longer term implications for the empire as a whole of such a static, frozen frontier. The economic consequences alone—’

  Nepos held up a hand to silence him. ‘Now your education is showing, Iulius Sabinus,’ he said dryly. ‘I have only a few years in this chair, and I have to think of the short term, not the long.’

  Severa said quickly, ‘In the countryside the Wall has alr
eady become a highly visible sign of Roman strength. To abandon it now would be a clear sign of weakness. A retreat.’ Brigonius saw she was trying to manipulate the soldiers’ sensibilities, trying to keep some control of the project.

  Nepos sighed. ‘Unfortunately I have to agree with you about that, madam. The Emperor would not accept an abandonment. It would harm him back in Rome. The Wall exists, for better or worse. We have to consider where we go from here, not where we would wish to have started from.’ He turned again to Xander. ‘We will not obliterate your precious monument, architect. But how would you modify it to correct its deficiencies?’

  Xander, unfortunately, had retreated into a shell of hurt pride. He all but shouted at the governor, ‘The design cannot be modified! It must be expressed!’

  Tullio raised an eyebrow, and a ripple of exasperation passed among the Romans in the room, Brigonius thought. Greeks will be Greeks.

  Sabinus, ambitious, saw his chance. ‘If I may, governor? I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a few modifications to Xander’s design that might accommodate the objections we’ve heard today.’ He held up a scroll. On Nepos’s nod of permission, he spread this on a low table before the governor. Brigonius saw it was a rough sketch done in charcoal of the Wall curtain, forts and ditches.

  ‘To begin with,’ Sabinus said, ‘the vulnerability at the rear. You can see that I’ve added a further earthwork on the south side.’ The cross-section he had sketched showed a ditch some twenty feet wide at the top and ten deep. There were mounds twenty feet across to either side, each set some thirty feet from the lip of the ditch. ‘This earthwork will be set back from the Wall to create a protected zone to the Wall’s south, an “annexe” if you will, where civilians will be excluded or controlled. There will of course be controlled crossing points and causeways at the forts.’

  Annius nodded, pulling at his lip. ‘That would work. I’ve seen such designs before.’ He squinted at the architect. ‘And how long will this earthwork be?’

  Sabinus said forcefully, ‘Why, it must shadow the Wall for its whole length. What use is it otherwise?’