Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Apart from that scarring on his back his health is reasonable,’ Tarcho said now. ‘Nothing a bit of sunshine and some decent food wouldn’t cure.’ He said more cautiously, ‘He has some bruising around the thighs, however. His mouth and throat are damaged, and—’

  ‘Enough,’ Thalius snapped.

  Tarcho said to the overseer, ‘I know what goes on in these places. A pretty boy like this will be traded for a morsel of food.’

  Volisios said, ‘What did you expect? But things are more complicated than you probably understand, soldier. The men, trapped in the dark and the damp, turn to each other for comfort, for there is nothing else. Why, some of our longer-lasting workers have “marriages” that have fared better than my own! This boy may have been hurt, but he’s just as likely to have been treated with kindness.’ But he didn’t look at the boy as he said this, or ask him to confirm or deny it.

  Thalius asked carefully, ‘And the marks on his back?’

  Tarcho nodded to the boy. Audax turned around and lifted up his tunic, exposing skinny legs, flat buttocks, and a back covered with livid scars. But now the dirt was off Thalius could clearly see the shapes of the letters, sixteen of them, in their square grid:

  PEEO

  NERR

  OSRI

  ACTA

  Tarcho scratched his head. ‘And is this what you came looking for?’

  ‘It must be.’

  ‘The boy has no memory of having received this tattoo.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Thalius said. ‘See how the letters are stretched, distorted? He must have received these markings when he was very small, an infant perhaps. As he has grown the marks have grown with him. Perhaps the marks were copied from his own father at his birth, and his father before him…’ Thalius imagined it: a slave painfully pricking out letters into the raw skin of his child, perhaps with a bit of quartz from the gold seams, and rubbing in dirt or vegetable dye.

  It had been the curse of Severa’s sentence to slavery that her grandchildren would not even be literate. So with the Prophecy burned, its words would be lost after a generation, two, three. But evidently, Thalius thought, excited, somebody had come up with a way of preserving at least some of the text, inscribed into the very bodies of children. Thalius had read something of Severa, his remote grandmother of so many generations ago; perhaps it was that hard woman herself who had come up with this way of saving the Prophecy in blood and pain.

  Volisios had become a lot less respectful since Thalius had admitted he was no government inspector. ‘So you have what you wanted. What will you do with the boy? Throw him back down into the pit? Or would you like him to warm your own bed first?’

  ‘You disgust me,’ Thalius snapped.

  But Tarcho said, ‘Actually he has a point, Thalius. Slaves are expensive, you know.’

  ‘He is blood,’ Thalius said. ‘Distant blood, but blood. I won’t leave him here to be raped to death. Name your price, overseer.’

  Volisios nodded and, businesslike, reached for a wooden note block and a pen.

  The boy watched all this, wide-eyed; surely he hadn’t understood a word.

  Tarcho studied the tattoo again. ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet. It’s clearly some kind of acrostic.’

  ‘A what? Never mind. And where will this quest of yours lead us next?’

  ‘To Rutupiae.’

  ‘The east coast? What for? Who will be there?’

  Thalius said simply, ‘Constantine.’

  V

  It would take many days for Thalius, Tarcho and Audax to travel from Dolaucothi in the west of Britain all the way to Rutupiae in the extreme east, where Thalius intended to gain an audience with the Emperor. With the boy in Tarcho’s care they set off, the three of them in Thalius’s cart.

  Once they had crossed the Sabrina river they passed out of what Tarcho called ‘soldier country’, where wild men of the hills chased flocks of ragged sheep between the walls of Roman forts, to the more settled lands of the south and east. The cart rolled along busy, well-maintained roads through farmland–rather a lot of it abandoned.

  On the way to Durovernum Cantiacorum and Rutupiae they stopped in towns, including a night in Londinium. All the towns looked the same, with their basilicas and their forums, their baths and their townhouses: all miniature models of faraway Rome itself. But many of the public buildings had seen better days. Shabby old basilicas had been turned into granaries or stock sheds or arms dumps, and sometimes you could see fire damage nobody had bothered to fix. Even in Londinium there was a monumental basilica only half finished and apparently abandoned; entwined by vines and carpeted by grass and weeds it seemed to be turning into a ruin before it had even been completed. And a new wall ran along the north side of the river, cutting through the wharves and dock facilities that had once served the grand cross-provincial trade routes. People, over-taxed, just didn’t put their money into civic developments the way they once had. Most wouldn’t even pay to keep the public sewers working, or to clear away rubbish. As a result, the towns stank.

  And all the towns had walls: massive thick barricades with cores of rubble and concrete and imposing facing stones. Thalius knew all about fortifications like this; even at Camulodunum, always a walled town, the cost of the renovations of the town’s defences had fallen heavily on the curia.

  Times had changed since the days when the towns had been planned. The country was a lot more dangerous now, as organised bands of barbarian raiders came breaking through the northern Wall, or sailing across the Ocean. There were plenty of home-grown brigands too. From top to bottom, with everyone tied to their jobs from birth, society was static. But when your farm failed, when the taxes and levies got so tough your land wasn’t economical to cultivate any more, you had nowhere to go. Many farmers had just slunk off into the night, to become part of a growing underclass of poachers and bandits living beyond the law.

  The towns were like hedgehogs, Thalius thought, their old, shabby buildings huddling behind massive walls that had taken generations to pay for and build, bristling nervously in a dangerous, depopulating countryside. Thalius knew enough history to see how strange this would have seemed to a citizen of Hadrian’s time. The towns were no longer centres of commerce and culture; they were like fortified prisons for a trapped population.

  But in all the towns there were a few grand new houses, rising up out of the rubble of older developments. In an age when the tax system was squeezing everybody tight, it was still possible to get rich, if you were a landowner buying up the failed properties of the marginalised, or a government stooge on the make.

  As they rode, Thalius watched the boy.

  He wondered how much Audax understood of what was happening to him. The boy spoke only when asked a direct question, and even then in a guttural, vocabulary-poor British tongue that even Tarcho had difficulty understanding. Surely it had sunk in that Thalius had saved him from the mine, that Thalius was his distant relative. But the boy seemed distrustful, perhaps because Thalius had been so obviously interested in the message he carried, not in him.

  The boy’s head seemed to be a jumble. Certainly Audax had no idea who the Emperor was. Why should he? The brutes with whips who had run his life in the mine had had far more power over him than Constantine, even the power of life and death. He hadn’t even seen the cycles of daylight for much of his young life, and in open spaces, crossing abandoned fields or moorland, he would cower, as if longing for the safe enclosure of the grimy walls that had confined him.

  Audax stuck to Tarcho, though. The big soldier in turn was careful never to raise his voice to the boy. Thalius thought that with Tarcho’s support there might be hope for the boy yet; he was still young, and had time. And as for Tarcho he seemed to be developing a duty of care towards this helpless, half-formed child. What did that say about Tarcho? That he should have had children, Thalius thought.

  And it was this fragile boy Thalius was going to present to an
emperor, he thought, his nervousness growing the closer they got to Rutupiae.

  He had a way in, of sorts. When he had heard Constantine was returning to Britain he had written to a friend of a friend of a friend in the imperial court, one Ulpius Cornelius, pulling in favours in the Roman way, to request an audience during the Emperor’s stay. Constantine had begun his career as a soldier, and as a consequence many of his advisors were soldiers. Cornelius was no exception; he had once been a senior army officer, and now served as a prefect under Constantine, one of the inner circle who ran the empire.

  Somewhat to Thalius’s surprise, this Ulpius Cornelius had responded to Thalius’s letter with a note inviting him to come to the court at Rutupiae, soon after Constantine’s landing. And so here was Thalius travelling to confront an emperor–not for himself, not even for the good of the empire, but for Christ.

  But what was he going to say to Constantine? Distracted by his own deep thinking, and by a gathering dread of his meeting with the Emperor, Thalius failed to puzzle out the Prophecy-acrostic on poor Audax’s hide, its dense pattern of letters mocking his ageing mind.

  VI

  As Thalius and his companions neared Rutupiae they crawled along a road crowded with carts, horses and pedestrians, with officials and civilians, rich and poor, here on business or for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see an emperor in the flesh.

  Thalius’s heart lifted as it always did when they first glimpsed the Ocean, glimmering in the east. There was something magnificently primal about the Ocean, something you couldn’t tame, even to the extent that you could tame the land by slicing it up into farms and studding it with cities. It was odd for a town-dweller like Thalius to feel that way, perhaps, a man whose whole life depended absolutely on the continuance of order, but there it was.

  Of course even the Ocean had changed. Once the Ocean had been thought of fondly by the British as a great moat, mightier than any of Hadrian’s works, which excluded the barbarians who caused such havoc in Gaul and Roman Germany. But now the Ocean was less a barrier to brigands than a highway for them to travel over.

  Thalius had read that there were reasons for these ‘Saxons’ from north Germany to make the hazardous journey to Britain. Their narrow coastal homelands had been squeezed between vast movements of peoples from further east in the mysterious heart of Asia, and the Ocean itself which, year on year, rose inexorably higher. Thus the world was changing, reshaped by vast forces of population movements and even shifts in the tides that not even an emperor could command.

  In response to this threat Rutupiae, once an open town, had become a fortress.

  The fort itself was surrounded by an immense system of double ditches, and the streaming crowd had to cram itself onto a narrow causeway that approached the east gate. Ahead, thick walls with angular towers glowered down. The walls were built in the solid Roman fashion, with slave-worked concrete so strong it was said it would withstand the sea-coast weather for ever. But embedded in the walls Thalius identified fragments of broken columns, bits of statuary, even what looked like soldiers’ tombstones, all smashed and reused. Thalius wondered how many people here today knew that Claudius’s invasion force had once landed here, or mused on the irony that a triumphal arch commemorating that epochal landing had been demolished to build a fortress intended to repel new invaders. This was a grim age, an age of closure and huddling, not a time for grand gestures.

  Still, regardless of its complicated history, today the fort was hosting Constantine himself, the Emperor of all the western provinces, ruler of half the known world. And on the Ocean beyond the shoulder of the fort walls Thalius glimpsed the purple sails of the ships that must have brought the Emperor and his retinue here. Thalius felt excitement grow inside him, a thrill he had barely known since he had been a child younger than Audax, waiting for the chariot races to begin in the circus outside Camulodunum.

  As they passed through the fort’s west gate, Thalius and his party found themselves working through an access system mediated by officials from the local towns, the provincial government, the diocese of Britannia, even the prefecture of Gaul, and from the imperial court itself. All these officials, taking the chance to make a profit out of the Emperor’s visit, seemed to expect to have a coin or two stuffed in their hands for the favour of passing you through. The process was watched over by hard-faced members of the Emperor’s own German bodyguard–not the Praetorians, Constantine had run down those overpaid emperor-makers–who were not averse to a few hand-outs themselves. Tarcho grumbled as he handed over yet more coins from the heavy purse he carried.

  But Thalius found it impossible to be sour, despite the queuing and the petty corruption. You couldn’t ignore the eagerness and anxiety, the hopes and dreams of the supplicants, for today Rome was here, on this windy British shore.

  At last, thanks to his note from Ulpius Cornelius, Thalius found himself part of a crowd of petitioners drawn up before a stage, hastily erected just off the road inside the fort’s western gate–a stage on which Constantine himself sat, advisers and guards at his shoulders, patiently listening to complaints and pleas.

  If Thalius had expected to see a soldier on that wooden throne, he was disappointed. Constantine was a big-boned, strong-looking man in his early forties, but he wore his hair down to his shoulders, so luxuriantly blond Thalius was sure it had to be false. He was dressed in a long, flowing robe of what looked like silk, embroidered with flowery designs done in gold. Even his shoes were studded with gems. And though Thalius thought he detected a soldier’s bluff amiability in Constantine’s not unhandsome face, to approach him you had to go down on your knees and press your head to the floor.

  He muttered, ‘Why, he’s not like a Roman at all. He looks like something out of Egypt or Persia. Augustus would have been horrified.’

  Tarcho growled, ‘He looks like what he is–the Emperor. Do you expect him to dress like a latrine cleaner? He has to put on a show. And he’s a good lad, this one.’ He cupped his hands and called out, ‘Good on you, Constantine!’

  Thalius knew that Constantine had always been popular among the British troops. After all it was they who in Eburacum, on the death of his father Constantius Chlorus, had elevated thirty-five-year-old Flavius Valerius Constantinus as the new ‘Augustus’, one of the college of emperors, and then had fought under him when Constantine had achieved his greatest victory so far in dislodging a rival, Maxentius, to become sole ruler in the west.

  And he had won with the help of the Christian God, Constantine declared. On the night before the decisive battle outside Rome, he had a dream that the Christian God came to him. In the morning he had his troops chalk crosses on their shields. That victory had cemented God into his life, and his empire, for good.

  The fruits of Constantine’s conversion were visible before Thalius now. The Emperor’s mother Helena travelled with him; once a concubine, she was becoming a kind of pilgrim with a mission to travel across the empire to Judea in search of relics of Christ Himself. And there were bishops among the Emperor’s retinue, on the stage with him, almost as grandly dressed as he was, Thalius observed with disgust, men of wealth and power a world away from the vision of the carpenter’s Son. There were cynics who muttered that it only took a mote of dust in the eye to enable anybody to see a cross in the sky, and Constantine’s ‘conversion’ may have owed a lot to the manipulation of events by the wily bishops in his court.

  And some Christians of the old school, including Thalius himself, were deeply troubled that it was a warrior deity that was being cemented into the machinery of state, not the gentler God of Christ’s own teachings.

  At last Thalius, his heart thumping, was beckoned forward towards Constantine’s dais–but his way was blocked by the man whose response had brought him so far.

  Ulpius Cornelius, aged perhaps forty, wore a purple-edged toga. He was tall, angular, thin, his hair black and swept back, his mouth small and down-turned, his prominent nose ideal for looking down on people. Before him Thal
ius felt poor and shabby, a low-class provincial. If Constantine looked like an eastern potentate Cornelius was every bit the classic Roman–and therefore out of place in Constantine’s court.

  Cornelius, consulting a list, looked Thalius over keenly. ‘So you are the prophet,’ he began bluntly.

  ‘I wouldn’t call myself that,’ Thalius said, embarrassed and disconcerted. ‘It is a legend of my family that—’

  ‘But in your letter you did speak of a prophecy. Of specific warnings of an uncertain future, of momentous events unfolding in our lifetimes–events that might deflect the course of history forever. Yes?’ His Latin was so pure it sounded strangulated.

  ‘Sir, I am a Christian. I am here because of my concerns over the future of men’s souls, not—’

  ‘Yes, yes. But I am what is now referred to as a “pagan”, what I would call a defender of Roman tradition. I have precious little interest in your slaves’ cult. It is not your anguished proclamations of faith that caught my eye, citizen, but your claims about this Prophecy. I researched your family in the libraries in Rome and Alexandria. I even traced a mention in the biographies of the Emperor Claudius himself. Imagine that! And there is indeed something about a Prophecy there…But you say the Prophecy is lost.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Thalius said.

  Cornelius raised one plucked eyebrow. Thalius was urged to say more, but he felt Tarcho touch his arm, and he stayed silent. Cornelius seemed to notice this interplay, and looked at Tarcho with new interest. He stepped closer to Thalius and spoke more quietly. ‘Listen to me. Things are changing. The empire is not as our grandfathers would have recognised it, and soon it will change again, one way or another. The question is how it will change. If your Prophecy has any validity at all it may be a very powerful weapon in this time of great historical flux.’

  Thalius heard only one word. ‘ “Weapon”?’

  Cornelius studied him. ‘In your muddled way you want to deal with Constantine, don’t you? You want to alter the course he has set himself on.’