Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  Severa turned away from Primigenius, as if in disgust, and addressed Sabinus. ‘Son-in-law, you are a senator now. Can you not think for yourself? Can’t you see what is happening here? All this business of secrets and lies, of jealousy and theft–it is the paranoia of the Emperor writ large, as if we were all living inside his head!’

  Lepidina had her eyes downcast. She had never reminded Brigonius more of the subdued girl of the days of her visit to the north. ‘Mother, I don’t imagine that insulting the Emperor is going to help your case.’

  ‘What case?’ Severa shouted. ‘I ask you again, Sabinus–am I on trial here?’

  ‘Enough,’ Primigenius said sharply. ‘I take it you don’t deny the charge I have made against you.’ Without giving her a chance to answer he turned to Sabinus. ‘Senator, I suggest we cut this short and proceed to the matter of her repentance.’

  Severa snapped, ‘And what is this repentance? More euphemisms?’

  Sabinus said heavily, ‘Madam, it is this or a full trial. This or the penalty of the state. This or the Emperor’s wrath.’

  She glared at him, but fell silent. Sabinus nodded to Primigenius.

  The freedman produced a wax tablet. ‘I have had your finances investigated, Claudia Severa. Thanks to this Prophecy of yours you have made yourself wealthy. I am not vindictive; none of us is. I propose that it will be a sufficient act of redemption for you to pledge all you have earned to the Emperor.’

  ‘All I have earned?’

  Primigenius read out a quick summary of his estimation, and then gave a total: ‘In excess of one million sesterces.’

  There was a startled silence. It was a total, Brigonius knew, equivalent to the property requirement of a senator in Rome.

  ‘Your estimate is excessive,’ Severa said.

  ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Primigenius tapped his wax tablet with a manicured forefinger. ‘But it’s all here.’

  ‘Whatever is true,’ Sabinus said, ‘if you can pay this sum to the imperial treasury, mother-in-law, then no more will be said.’

  ‘I cannot,’ she said. ‘Even if I had earned all that I could not, for much of it is spent.’

  ‘On luxuries?’ Primigenius scoffed.

  ‘On my children,’ Severa said.

  At that word Lepidina looked up, shocked. Brigonius had thought she was an only child; evidently Lepidina had thought so too. What was this mention of children?…

  Primigenius was closing in for the kill, and his words, delivered steadily, were relentless. ‘Then from this moment on you are a debtor, madam. And you can’t cover your debts, can you? You know the law. You will have to sell everything you own. But even that will not be enough, will it? You will have to sell yourself. You will end your days a slave. For that is the law.’

  Lepidina shuddered, and Brigonius knew that if not for her own marriage she would have shared her mother’s fate.

  But Severa was not defeated yet. ‘This has nothing to do with the Emperor, does it? This is all because I out-manoeuvred you over the building of the Wall all those years ago, Primigenius. Have you waited this long for revenge? Do you have a list of victims you score off one by one as the years go by?’

  ‘ “Children”,’ Lepidina said slowly. ‘You said “children” ’.’ She looked up at her mother with grave eyes.

  Severa took a breath. ‘All right. I have a son. A marriage before your father, Lepidina. He was a fool, a drunkard, he got himself killed in a brawl. The son he left me isn’t much better. But he is your half-brother, and he has children of his own. My grandchildren. I support them, Lepidina. And if I can’t do that any more—’

  Primigenius eyed Lepidina. ‘Are these grandchildren pretty? They may fetch a better price than a leathery old boot like you.’

  Lepidina said coldly, ‘You have always manipulated me. You have used me to further your own ends. Now I learn you have lied to me, all my life.’

  Severa said, ‘Lepidina, regardless of the past, help me now.’

  Lepidina turned away.

  Primigenius tutted softly. ‘More enemies, Severa. Even among your own blood?’

  Severa turned to Brigonius. ‘You are a decent man. Help me.’

  Brigonius recoiled. But he reminded himself that beneath her hard skin there beat a human heart–and she was Lepidina’s mother. He said to the freedman, ‘She may hold assets your list does not cover, Primigenius. She has invested in my own partnership, for instance.’

  Sabinus leaned forward. ‘Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the finer points of Roman law, Brigonius.’ He seemed pleased to be able to put this old lover of Lepidina’s in his place. ‘If one is in debt one cannot sell on shares. So her holding in your partnership, and any others, is worthless to her. Do you understand, Brigonius? Do you have anything else to say?’

  Even now Severa was unable to look Brigonius in the eye.

  And as Brigonius hesitated Primigenius leered at him. ‘Don’t let her sell you to me again, Brittunculus. Once was enough.’

  Brigonius stared at Primigenius and promised himself that he would, some day, somehow, take his own revenge on the freedman. He said, ‘You always did make unnecessary enemies, Claudia Severa. It is a character flaw.’

  Severa sneered and turned away. Even now she retained her composure. ‘Primigenius, you will not win, whatever you do to me. You are a slave, the son of a slave. I am more than that; my family is more. Our future is secured whatever you do to me, for we have the Prophecy.’

  The freedman grinned. ‘Oh, this old thing?’ He held the Prophecy casually, waving it in the air–and he wafted it over the naked flame of a lamp. ‘But your grandchildren will have no need of prophecies. As slaves they will never make a decision for themselves again. Besides, in a generation or two your descendants will be illiterate. Whatever is not written down cannot survive.’ He began to feed the Prophecy into the flame. ‘And the last vestige of this dreadful old curse will be gone for ever.’

  Brigonius saw how the burning Prophecy’s flame lit up the horrified eyes of Lepidina. And Severa’s face showed grief, guilt, and fear–fear of a future now forever unknown.

  III

  EMPEROR AD 314-337

  I

  The gold mine at Dolaucothi was a wilderness of quarries and shafts and crude shacks, its air thick with dust and acrid smoke. It was the sheer extent of the digging that was so overwhelming. The ripped-up ground covered square miles. There must have been thousands of toiling workers here, all of them filthy, bent and dressed in rags, and even more of them tunnelling like moles underground.

  Thalius was a man of letters, based in Camulodunum. He had had no idea such places as this existed; the mine, stranded in the untamed country of the west, struck him as a vision of the Christian Hell that not even the most inventive court theologian could have conjured up. And as the mine overseer, a plump little man called Volisios, escorted him through the workings, Thalius was very glad of the scented cloth he pressed over his nose, and of the massive presence of old soldier Tarcho at his side.

  But somewhere among the wretches here, Thalius believed, was the boy he had come to find: a slave and the son of slaves, yet a distant cousin of Thalius’s, and a boy who might hold the key to past and future.

  ‘This is the only gold mine in all the Britains,’ overseer Volisios boasted. ‘You can see we work open-cast and by tunnelling underground. That’s where the boy is, down in the deep shafts. I’ll take you down there in a moment.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ growled Tarcho.

  Thalius pointed to the wall of a fort, situated on a rise a way away from the churned-up ground of the mine itself. ‘You have the army close by, I see.’

  ‘To deter brigands and barbarians,’ Volisios said.

  ‘And perhaps to keep your own workers in order?’

  Volisios frowned. Aged perhaps forty, some ten years younger than Thalius and Tarcho, he was a small, rotund man with shaven head and plucked eyebrows–an oily man, Thalius thought, sli
ppery. He clearly didn’t know what to make of Thalius, and his story of looking for a particular slave boy. Why would one of the curia of one of the most significant towns in all four Britains come to a place like this, if not to spy, sniff around, look for evidence of tax avoidance and other evasions? And so he squirmed and wriggled as he sought to conceal the petty graft Thalius had no doubt existed. Volisios said, ‘You must understand that the workers wouldn’t be here at all if they weren’t scum, or the spawn of scum–and it’s the devil’s own job to keep them in order.’

  Tarcho grunted. ‘And it looks as if the devil has had his hands full.’ He pointed.

  On a ridge close to the fort Thalius saw a row of crosses, each eight or ten feet tall, stark shapes silhouetted in the afternoon light. Rags appeared to be dangling from their frames.

  ‘You can see from the state of those corpses that it’s a while since we had any trouble, and just as well for my purse.’ Volisios began to talk of the cost of the last petty uprising. Those who ran this mine did so under licence, for Dolaucothi was an imperial estate, and from their profits its managers had to contribute to the upkeep of the fort and its soldiers. ‘We even pay for the wood on which the miscreants are crucified,’ he grumbled. ‘But we get by. I’ve run this mine for twenty years, as did my father, and his father before him…’

  It was a typical story. Many professions had long been made hereditary, as had Thalius’s own position on Camulodunum’s curia. People joked that everybody took his father’s job nowadays–everybody but the emperors, who killed other people’s fathers to take their job.

  ‘My father worked this place in the time of the Emperor Carausias,’ Volisios went on. ‘He kept working right through the time of the Roman Invasion too. That didn’t bother him, but he never got over the way the taxes were hiked up afterwards!’

  ‘Carausias was no emperor but a usurper,’ Thalius felt compelled to remind him. ‘The purpose of the Invasion was to remove him. And of course taxes are higher now. Things have changed since the days of Hadrian, you know.’

  Volisios looked confused. ‘Who?’

  ‘An emperor from ancient history,’ Tarcho said. ‘From a hundred years ago!’

  ‘More like two hundred,’ Thalius corrected him mildly. He pointed. ‘You’ll have to take those crosses down. The Emperor has banned crucifixion.’

  ‘He has? Why?’

  Tarcho said heavily, ‘Why do you think? Because the Christ was executed on a cross.’

  Volisios raised barely visible eyebrows at Thalius. ‘Everybody is a theologian now, isn’t that true?’

  ‘No doubt,’ Thalius said, ‘those in your charge will be glad to hear the news.’

  ‘Perhaps I won’t tell them until I have to,’ Volisios said, and he winked. ‘Keep the bastards guessing–eh?’

  Thalius looked again at the ugly crosses, and thought how strange it was that his own quest to do service to the man who had once died on such a cross had, in such a complicated fashion, brought him to this dismal place.

  Volisios glanced up at the sky, where heavy clouds were clustering. ‘Now, gentlemen, I think we’d better go underground. Believe me you don’t want to be down there when it rains…Come, come this way. Watch your step, mind.’

  He led them across broken ground to the mouth of a tunnel which gaped, black.

  II

  Thalius descended into the dark, climbing down ladders and staircases roughly cut into bare rock. He was over fifty years old and he felt stiff, awkward; he was unused to physical exertion. Again he was grateful for the presence of Tarcho, who went on below him.

  ‘You’d think they would have some better way of getting important people down here,’ Tarcho said. ‘A nice wide staircase perhaps. Or a bucket on a rope!’

  Volisios called up, ‘It’s rare anybody comes down if they don’t have to.’

  Tarcho said, ‘If I was younger I’d sling you over my shoulder, Thalius.’

  ‘I’ll manage, Tarcho. Just be there to catch me if I fall.’

  ‘I’ll throw down the overseer so you’ll have a soft landing!’

  At last they reached the base of the chain of staircases. As Thalius and Tarcho caught their breaths, Volisios summoned a worker and whispered to him. The man ran off into the dark.

  Thalius found himself standing on the rough-cut floor of a cave dug into the ground by the hands of men. There was a sound of running water, a stink of damp, and an unrelenting grind of wood on metal. The only light came from smoky oil lamps fixed to the walls. The place was hot, the smell of smoke strong; he had heard that the miners set fires to break up the rocks.

  More shabby workers toiled here. Some of them hauled wooden carts laden with rock fragments; others watched the rest, holding whips and clubs, but the foremen were as grimy as those they controlled. Thalius saw passageways cut into the rock, leading off into a greater darkness. The passages were narrow, some not even tall enough for a man to stand upright, yet workers laboured there too.

  That grinding, mechanical noise sharpened. Thalius peered up. In the shadows above his head vast wheels turned.

  Volisios spoke with some pride of his family business. ‘You can tell we’ve lots of water to play with here. We’re served by two reservoirs. Up on the surface we use it for “hushing”, washing off dirt and soil from ore outcrops, and down here to rinse away the bits of broken rock. Of course the deep galleries tend to flood, but we actually use running water to pump them out. See the waterwheels over your head? Their power hauls water from the sump up to the surface.’

  Thalius was fascinated by the wheels in the air. He had always been intrigued by technology. ‘Once I saw a water-organ playing in an amphitheatre in Gaul. Most remarkable thing I ever saw. Now I feel I’m trapped inside an even bigger machine.’

  Tarcho pointed at the galleries. ‘Those look awfully tight to me.’

  Volisios eyed the old soldier’s bulk with a touch of malice. ‘Oh, if you were sent to work under me I’d soon thin you down. You find gold in veins in the quartz, and we make the passages no wider than the veins themselves. It’s all to do with economy, you see.’ He talked about other details of mining processes, in which the extracted ore was crushed and then panned in rocking wooden cradles, leaving tiny particles of gold to be captured by filters made of sheep’s wool.

  ‘I hear that in Germany,’ Thalius cut in, ‘they dig shafts in the ground to bring air to the tunnels. Not here?’

  Volisios shrugged. ‘It would cost too much.’

  ‘But your miners must die in these holes in the ground.’

  ‘They die anyway,’ Volisios said, businesslike. ‘You have to balance the cost of cutting the shafts against the cost of the labour.’

  Tarcho said, ‘Slaves aren’t as cheap as they once were.’

  ‘That’s true. But convicts are always plentiful,’ Volisios said. ‘Always plenty more evaders for the tax inspectors to find and shove away down here.’

  Thalius turned away. ‘I can see why children are so useful to you in those rat runs–even if their little fingers have trouble picking apart the quartz, eh?’

  Volisios faced him, cunning and caution in his eyes. ‘You’re judging me, aren’t you? I’m only trying to make a living. This is a place of business, not an orphanage.’

  ‘Perhaps you should bring me the boy now.’

  Volisios glanced over his shoulder, and Thalius saw that the man the overseer had summoned earlier was standing in the shadows some way away, waiting. A smaller figure stood beside him, his thin arm held in the man’s grip. Volisios snapped his fingers, and the man approached, pulling the boy with him. The boy didn’t resist, but his limbs were loose, his head turned away; he was sullen, passive. ‘This is the one you’re looking for,’ Volisios said. ‘As far as we can tell, anyhow.’

  Thalius felt his heart hammer.

  The boy was brought into a pool of lamplight before him. Dressed in a rag, the boy was perhaps twelve, but he was so malnourished and skinny it was hard to te
ll. His joints were as lumpy as bags of walnuts, and his ribs under his ragged clothing were prominent enough to count. He was filthy, his face streaked with black. But despite that his oval face had a certain beauty, and the strawberry-blond colour of his hair showed through matted dirt.

  Tarcho asked Volisios, ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Audax,’ said the overseer bluntly. A common slave’s name. ‘He won’t know anything about his family,’ Volisios warned. ‘He’d have been taken from his mother as soon as he was weaned.’

  ‘If only I could see his face more clearly,’ Thalius said. He bent to the boy and cupped his chin, meaning to lift his head. But Audax flinched, and Thalius realised that some of the marks around his mouth were bruises, not dirt. Thalius stepped back, uncertain how to proceed.

  If Thalius was right about this boy’s lineage, he came from a branch of his own family that had been cast into slavery for nearly two centuries.

  When he had become interested in the ancestral legend of a lost Prophecy, he had traced the family history back to a bifurcation in the reign of Hadrian, when a brother of his own grandmother many-times-removed, Lepidina, had been sold with his mother (and Lepidina’s), a woman called Severa, into slavery. Thalius knew he was fortunate that Lepidina had been spared that fate or he too would have been born a slave–if he had been born at all. Then Thalius had worked forward once more, tracing the fate of slaves and the children of slaves. Romans always kept good records, and even the tallying of slave transactions was surprisingly complete–but then, once the empire’s expansion had been halted under Hadrian and the supply of new captives from conquered territories had dried up, slaves had become a commodity worth recording. At last he had followed the thread of lineage here, to this boy, Audax–who, if he was correct, was the very last of the line from that brother of Lepidina’s.

  If his research was accurate, then if any scrap of the old Prophecy had survived, it would be in the form of this hapless slave boy. But somehow Thalius had never quite worked out what he would do when faced with the boy himself.