The young man’s eyes shone. ‘I do miss you, Thalius. You always did fill me with a sense of wonder.’
Thalius, moved, took his arm. ‘Then we must write. That way perhaps my fancy will enrich your life as your strength and courage have always enriched mine.’
They reached, at last, a small church. One of several in Camulodunum, it was modest, a boxy building on a rectangular plan. But it was neatly built of stone reused from some expensive ruin, and a wooden cross rose up above its tiled roof.
‘Towards the end of his life, this is where Tarcho came to worship,’ Thalius said. ‘In fact this church grew out of a soldiers’ chapel–there was once a mithraeum here, I think.’
Audax seemed briefly unable to speak. Then he said gruffly, ‘And he is buried here?’
‘Inside the church. His grave isn’t marked.’
‘It’s a fitting place for a soldier.’
‘Yes. The time was right for him to go, perhaps. He was always an admirer of Constantine, you know. A “good lad”, he would say. He enjoyed reports of the preparations for a campaign against Persia. The dream of Alexander revived again, Tarcho said! I think it pleased Tarcho, in a way, to die in the same year as such a man.’ He prompted gently, ‘But Tarcho gone, and Constantine too–what next, do you think, Audax?’
‘Things may be a little difficult,’ Audax said with grim understatement. ‘The campaign against Persia was controversial even in the Emperor’s court. The east has always defeated the Romans if they push too far. And then there is the succession. Constantine’s three sons have spent their youth fighting like puppies in a sack. I fear blood will be spilled before one of them emerges as top dog.’
Thalius sighed. ‘And more strength bled from the body of the empire, while our enemies watch and wait. Audax, you must be careful.’
‘I will be,’ Audax said. ‘I’m thinking of a change of posting, away from the court.’
‘Then you’re wise. You know, sometimes I am glad I am no longer young–sometimes it seems a comfort I won’t see much more of the drama. But perhaps every old man thinks the world is decaying as fast as his body.’
‘You mustn’t think like that.’
‘One must be realistic,’ Thalius admonished him. ‘But, Audax…’ He asked cautiously, ‘What of the Prophecy?’
Audax’s face hardened. ‘I suppose I have to thank it for saving my life. I’d have surely died in that hole in the ground if you hadn’t come to find me, and it. But when I joined the army I had the tattoo burned off my back.’
Thalius winced. ‘But the scarring—’
‘I’d rather wear that than the hateful thing which preceded it. Thalius, do you still believe the true purpose of the Prophecy was to change the destiny of the Church?’
That took Thalius aback. He had spoken with nobody about such matters since the day of the attempted assassination. ‘So you have been thinking this through.’
‘Look, I’m no philosopher,’ Audax said. ‘But I had that thing tattooed to my back since birth, and, on long campaigns, there was plenty of time to puzzle about its meaning. The way I see it is this: the Prophecy was a message, and somebody sent it. Now, whether it was God or demon, or even a wizard—’
‘The Weaver,’ Thalius said softly. ‘And if Constantine had been killed, Christianity might not have been incorporated into the empire, and the capital might not have been moved east. History would have been changed–the history of the whole world, for all time.’
‘Yes. Well, whoever sent back the Prophecy had a purpose. The question is, what could that purpose be? Christian symbols were written into that acrostic, the A and the O. Could it really be that the sender was trying to deflect Constantine’s adoption of Christianity?’
Thalius said, ‘It is what I believed at the time, I think–though others made their own interpretations of the Prophecy, and its lost promises of “freedom”. Perhaps the Weaver wanted what I always wanted–strange thought! Certainly Constantine has remade the Church, and the results have been just as I feared. The bishops have taken to chastising those who won’t follow the official line. The persecuted turned persecutor! Oh, I believe that thanks to Constantine the Church will live for ever. It is just that it is not my Church.’
Audax grunted. ‘So if the intention of the author of the Prophecy was to “save” the Church, he or she failed.’
‘Really? Perhaps you just don’t want to believe, Audax, that all of the future hung on your choices in those few terrible heartbeats when you held that knife–but it did, you know. And consider this.’ He shivered, an inchoate dread stealing over him. ‘If history has been changed around us, Audax, if we are now living in the wrong history–how would we know?’
Audax had no answer.
‘Will you tell your son about the Prophecy?’
‘No.’
‘You must,’ Thalius said firmly. ‘Ours is a remarkable family with a remarkable story. You would be depriving him of his past, his identity otherwise. Here,’ he said impulsively, and he handed Audax the scroll of Claudius’s memoir. ‘You take this. Keep it for when he’s older. Claudius was bound up with the Prophecy too, and perhaps it will help little Tarcho fill in the blanks in the story. If he’s as clever as you say, he may end up understanding far more of this strange business than I, than any of us, ever did. I never even saw the Prophecy itself,’ he recalled wistfully, ‘not even the few lines which might have described the great upheaval of our own lives…’
Audax hesitated, then took the book. ‘Very well, Thalius. I’ll make sure he understands it is from you.’ He looked around a cloudy sky, seeking the angle of the sun. ‘Thalius, I must go. My duties–I have people to see here on behalf of the imperial heirs.’
‘I understand,’ Thalius said.
Audax stepped away, returning to the crowded street. ‘I hope I’ll see you again before I leave.’
‘You know where I am–I never go far these days!’
But Audax was already lost in the crowd. Thalius, alone, empty-handed, felt his bruised belly twinge again. Moving cautiously he turned away and headed for home.
EPILOGUE AD 418
I
Isolde hated the idea of travelling to Britain with her father.
For one thing Isolde, nineteen years old, didn’t know anybody in Rome who had even been as far as Gaul, much of which was in the hands of foederati, German ‘allies’ of the empire. All Isolde’s friends knew about Britain was that giants had built a mighty Wall across the neck of the island to keep out capering monsters.
Nonsense, said Nennius, her father, predictably. You could tell when he got really angry because a pink flush spread all the way up his round cheeks to the shaven patch at the top of his head. Britain was just a place, its inhabitants just people, not monsters–and there was a Wall, but it had been built by Romans, not giants. Why, it was less than a decade since the British Revolution, when ‘ragged-arsed rebels’ had refused to pay their taxes. Britain had been detached from the empire many times before, and would no doubt be rejoined to the mother state when time and resources permitted.
‘And anyhow,’ he told her with a certain malicious glee, ‘we’re off to visit a cousin of mine, who lives on the famous Wall. We share a grandfather, cousin Tarcho and I, a slave who became a soldier called Audax, who was at the heart of the Prophecy story. And do you know how I happen to have a cousin there? Because you and I are British ourselves, daughter–a couple of generations removed, but British all the same…’
Nennius’s latest scheme was all to do with a Prophecy, he said, a Prophecy lost and now partially found again, a Prophecy made but never fulfilled–a Prophecy that might have shaped the world. The key to reconstructing this puzzle, he believed, and perhaps even to recovering the Prophecy itself, lay in Britain. And so because of this old man’s legend Isolde must travel beyond the empire itself.
Isolde had learned long ago that it did her no good to argue. Her whole life had been shaped by her father’s ambitions, and so i
t was now. But as they crossed a Gaul in which you heard nothing spoken but German, and as they took to the sea in the leather-sailed boat of a blond Saxon trader with bad teeth, she felt terribly vulnerable. She was a pregnant woman accompanied only by an absent-minded old man. Not only that, her stomach churned with every tip and rock of the boat. The trader offered her a remedy, a cold tea of German herbs, but Nennius forbade her even to try it.
She tried to tell herself she was safe with her father, but she had never believed that even as a small child. He simply didn’t pay enough attention to you to make you safe.
Isolde’s mother had died young, and even as a young girl she had seen how unworldly Nennius was. Respected thinker and monk he might be, famous for his friendship with the great theologian Pelagius, but there were mornings when he couldn’t put his own trousers on the right way round. In fact Isolde grew up thinking of herself as the adult in their relationship.
Isolde had briefly escaped when she married a young man called Coponius, of ancient Roman stock. But his good looks had belied a sickly nature. Only a month after Isolde found out she was pregnant he had been carried off by a nasty little plague, one of a series that had nibbled at the population of Rome in recent years. So Isolde had had no choice but to return home to her father, a widow at nineteen, and carrying a child. Nennius was not uncaring; Isolde knew her father loved her. But with his head forever filled with one dream or another–and now stuffed with his determination to make this extraordinary journey across the known world–there was no room for Isolde.
The boat landed at a place called Rutupiae, where a grim-looking fort loomed over a good natural harbour. The fort had seen better days. Its elaborate earthworks were clogged with rubbish, and the facing stones of its massive walls were crumbling away under the assault of the caustic sea breeze. In places they looked as if they had been robbed, quarried out.
Nennius was excited, for it was here, he claimed, that Roman invaders had, centuries ago, first set foot on the island. The only Roman from such incomprehensibly ancient history Isolde had ever heard of was Julius Caesar, and when it turned out not to have been him who had conquered Britain, she lost interest.
Anyhow there were no emperors here now, and the place swarmed with Saxons. Living in clusters of small wooden buildings outside the fort’s earthworks these Germans handled the sparse trade from the continent. They used this old fort, built to repel their own piratical ancestors, as a storage depot, and just as in Gaul the only tongues you heard were Germanic.
Isolde and her father found a small timber-built church set on the fort’s north-west corner. It had a pretty baptismal font, made of reused red Roman tile. They said prayers of thanks for their safe passage this far. Then they returned to the small wharf and stood together uncertainly while the trader unloaded his boat.
The Saxons looked extraordinary to Isolde. Many of them were blond and blue-eyed. The men shaved the front of their heads and let the hair grow at the back, an effect that made their faces look long, like a wolf’s. There were plenty of kids running around the wooden-hut settlement. Perhaps their fathers had been pirates, but these were clearly immigrants and had no plans to go anywhere. But every adult wore a knife at the waist; even some of the older children carried weapons.
Isolde was relieved when a young monk came pushing through the throng to greet them. He dressed as Nennius did, in a plain robe of heavy brown cloth, tied off with a belt of rope. He was young, perhaps not much older than Isolde. But his tonsure, severely cut, looked rather old-fashioned to Isolde, though she was no expert on monkish modes. His name was Damon, he said. ‘I bring greetings from the bishop of Camulodunum, and I come to escort you there.’
‘Oh, how kind, how thoughtful,’ Nennius burbled. ‘The exchange of letters I have already enjoyed with Bishop Ambrosius has been delightful, and I am sure the gift of his hospitality will be most welcome…’
Damon guided them to a carriage, crude but covered and serviceable. He had a man with him, a rough-looking servant too surly to be a slave; he hauled the visitors’ baggage from the wharf to the cart. Damon went on, ‘The bishop asked me to stress that the honour is all his. Any friend of Pelagius is welcome in his palace.’
Nennius nodded. ‘Britain has become something of a refuge for we Pelagians, I fear. But then Pelagius was born here; he is one of our own.’
Damon said cautiously, ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard the most recent news.’
‘About Pelagius’s excommunication by Pope Zosimus? Quite a victim for Augustine and his crew!’
‘Bishop Ambrosius comforts us that truth and goodness will prevail in the end,’ Damon said mellifluously.
They walked to the carriage as they talked. Isolde felt tired, bloodless, even a little giddy, but her father was oblivious to her, of course, and so was Damon, the young monk, and nobody helped her.
The Saxons, going about their own business, ignored them as they passed. The shoulder straps of the women’s gowns were fixed with brooches, they had sleeve-clasps around their cuffs, and around their waists they wore belts from which dangled odd metal good-luck charms like large keys. Isolde thought the style was rather attractive, and the quality of the metalwork looked good. She wondered if they would stop at any markets where she could do some shopping.
II
It would take two days’ travel to reach Camulodunum. The three of them set off in Damon’s carriage, with the servant walking silently, leading the horses.
To get out of the harbour area they had to pay a toll, in Roman coin, to a fat, hairy Saxon. Isolde wondered who the toll was being paid to, and the young monk explained that the governments of the four provinces of Britain still functioned, and still collected taxes–though nothing on the scale of ‘the old days’, as he called them, before the British Revolution and the expulsion of the diocesan tax collectors, a revolt that had occurred when he, Damon, had been about fifteen.
Beyond the harbour, it wasn’t an easy journey. The road they travelled was one of the first Roman roads ever built in Britain, her father proclaimed. That might be so, but that must make it very old, and it was so tatty! You could see where cobbles had been prised out, the holes never filled in, and so the road was full of potholes that shook Isolde painfully. Once the servant had to calm the shying horses. He said curtly that there was a body lying in the clogged drainage ditch; flies rising from the decaying corpse had spooked the animals. Isolde looked away and tried to breathe shallowly.
The country itself was quiet. It was a landscape of farms, of stone-walled fields and small wooden buildings. There were even some grand farmhouses, tile-roofed, enclosed by bristling walls. But many of these were evidently empty, shut up or even burned out, and many of the fields were clearly abandoned, their rain-eroded furrows strangled by weeds. It was rare that Isolde saw anybody working the land.
Nennius remarked on this to Damon.
‘It’s the Saxons,’ said the young monk. ‘Too many of them around here. So people are packing up and going off to the towns, or to live with relatives further west or north, or in Gaul. Even the rich have sold up, if they can, and cleared out.’ He murmured, ‘The Saxons are pagans, you know. They don’t mix with us.’
Isolde wondered what tensions were concealed behind those simple phrases.
They came upon Camulodunum in the evening. The city itself sat within massive walls; it looked more like a vast fortress than a town.
And in the rolling fields outside the town and beside the river there were more Saxons–many, many of them, warriors with their horses and wives and children, camped out in tents or in clusters of small wooden huts, some of them set up in the bowl of a disused circus. The travellers picked their way uneasily through this loose camp, along the old Roman road. It was almost as if the Saxons were besieging the city. Damon reassured them there was nothing to fear; the Saxons were mercenaries and had been hired by the townsfolk for their protection. Isolde had no doubt that these fierce-looking warriors would be useful to have on
your side. But she wondered what might happen if the money to pay them ever ran out.
They entered the city through the west gate. It was a big double archway that had been almost blocked up by chunks of stone, so that only one person could pass at a time. A soldier in very worn armour stood here collecting more tolls, this time on behalf of the curia, the town council.
Isolde was glad to enter the town, just to get away from the desolate and depopulated British landscape. But this was not Rome. The town within its walls was a bowl of rubble, a shattered townscape of derelict houses, weed-choked gardens and silted-up ditches. The baths were shut down, the theatre was a rubble-filled rubbish tip, and even the main road was ankle-deep in filth. There were none of the public buildings she would have expected in a town this size, or if they existed they were being used for something else. There were some grand houses here, but many of them were abandoned, and as they walked by Isolde saw cooking-fires set up on tessellated floors.
Damon said that in the darkest days of barbarian incursions and banditry, the army had moved its weapons workshops and depots and stock pens within the protection of the town walls. So the town had become a fortress once more, as it had been centuries ago at the beginning of its life. Now the Roman army had gone away, of course, but Saxons and other mercenaries still used the infrastructure it had left behind.
Amid the roofless shells, heaps of building rubble and lakes of sewage, there were functioning offices, however, where the town council or the provincial government still collected taxes, organised work levies and administered justice. And Camulodunum seemed to be full of churches, small but solidly built of reused stone and tile, rising out of the general rubbish like mushrooms from compost. ‘There are more churches than people,’ Nennius joked wistfully.
Damon picked his way along the rubbish-strewn road quite cheerfully. All this was normal to him. To Isolde and Nennius, though, the whole place stank like the vast garbage heap it was. And there were so few people that Isolde felt like a child creeping through a huge house abandoned by adults.
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