Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  Nectovelin rested his hand lightly on the hilt of a dagger. The tension in the house was extraordinary.

  Agrippina could bear it no more. She pushed her way out of the house into the dusty air of Camulodunum. She could see the logic of Nectovelin’s argument, that patient resistance was the way to wear down the Romans. But she was not the person she had been a few days before. Her deep, angry core responded to Caratacus’s bold cries of total war; she longed to see Roman blood spilled.

  IX

  Narcissus came to a ridge of high ground. He broke away from his companions and urged his horse to climb the rise. From here, he looked back at the column.

  He would not have admitted it to any of the officers, not even to his ally Vespasian. But the fact was that a Roman army on the march was a stunning sight. The legionaries flowed past, an endless river, their metal armour shining under the watery British sun, the standard bearers identifying each unit. The army was noisy too. The sound of thousands of feet was a low thunder that shook the very landscape, overlaid with the amphitheatre-like murmur of a crowd of male voices, and the clatter of metal on metal, and the brittle peals of signal horns.

  The men were heavily laden. As well as his weapons and armour each man carried a complicated kit containing a saw, a basket, a pickaxe, a water bottle, a sickle, a chain, a turf-cutter, a dish and pan, and enough rations for three days. Narcissus had heard the men grumble about this load; they called themselves ‘Marius’s mules’, after Gaius Marius, the great general who had helped define the Roman way of waging war. But this meant that each unit was ready at a command to fight – or to dig out a fort or build a bridge – and the army as a whole was unburdened by a long baggage train.

  Away from the main column of the legionaries the auxiliaries walked or rode. The specialist foot soldiers marched like the legionaries, the slingers and javelin-throwers and spearmen, the archers with their chain mail and bows, while cavalry units rode out to the flanks, providing cover for the infantry. Most of the auxiliaries were recruited from the provinces or even the barbarian lands beyond, and in the drab British landscape they made splashes of colour with their exotic helmets and cloaks and tunics. Indeed, many of the legionaries were provincials now too, a major change since Caesar’s day, and when the cohorts came close enough Narcissus could hear the jabber of alien tongues. This Roman army was a vast mixing-up of races drawn from Gaul to Asia, from Germany to Africa, and yet they all worked in harmony under the command of a good Roman.

  And the marching men threw up dust that caught the sun, so that a band of light stretched dead straight across the undulating British landscape.

  Vespasian came trotting up. ‘You shouldn’t break away like that, secretary. This is hostile country, remember.’

  ‘Oh, I like to test your vigilance, legate. And what a sight!’

  ‘Quite. The poor little British.’ Brittunculi. ‘The legions will crush them like peppercorns in a grinder.’

  ‘Well, it’s a marvel of organisation,’ Narcissus said. ‘It’s like a city on the march.’

  ‘Aulus Plautius is nothing if not meticulous.’

  Narcissus said softly, ‘His enemies say he is nothing but meticulous.’

  Vespasian raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you testing my loyalty, secretary? I suppose that is your job. I’d rather follow a man like Plautius than a Caesar. What we need is planning and control, not brilliance – dedication to the cause, not to oneself.’

  Narcissus mulled that over. He actually knew Aulus Plautius a little better than Vespasian probably suspected. The Plautii had a somewhat tangled relationship with the imperial family. A daughter of Plautius’s father’s cousin had been the Emperor Claudius’s first wife – and her mother had been a close friend of Livia, the manipulative and dangerous wife of Augustus. So Aulus Plautius was a good choice personally for this crucial project, and as it happened, with his experience as governor of Pannonia, he was well suited militarily and politically as well. Claudius was wily enough to choose a man whom he could trust – but that hadn’t stopped him sending Narcissus along to keep an eye on things.

  Meanwhile, as Claudius trusted Aulus Plautius, so Narcissus knew he could trust Vespasian. It had been Narcissus’s influence that had secured Vespasian this posting in Britain, his first legionary command. From humble origins, Vespasian had used the influence of his better-connected mother to climb up the social ladder. He had acquitted himself well in his first military post, as an equestrian tribune in Thrace. Narcissus watched constantly for young men like Vespasian, clearly able, eager for advancement yet blocked by their social origin. They were the hungry sort who needed a favour – and, once given it, were forever in your debt.

  ‘Well, it’s a marvel, however this adventure turns out,’ Narcissus said. ‘Look at that band of dust we throw up, right across the country, like a dream of the road that will one day be laid here.’

  Vespasian grunted. ‘Not “one day”, secretary – today.’ He pointed to the rear of the column.

  In the back of the short baggage train, behind bulky shapes that were the components of prefabricated siege engines, Narcissus made out slower-moving units; he saw the flutter of flags, the flash of surveyors’ mirrors. ‘They are laying the road already?’

  ‘Why not? We aren’t coming this way by chance; for decades to come this route is likely to be a key artery inland from Rutupiae. May as well get it right from the start. Anyhow it keeps the troops busy, and there’s no harm in that.’

  ‘And show the natives we intend to stay.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Ah, but where is it we have come to stay?’

  Narcissus tugged at his rein, turned his horse away and gazed out on the landscape of southern Britain. He saw a gently rolling land. Forest clumped on hilltops and spilled into the valleys – he thought he saw pigs snuffling at one forest fringe – but most of the land was cleared, and covered by a patchwork of fields. Round houses sat everywhere, squat, dark cones. The place was clearly densely populated – though empty today; evidently when they saw a Roman army approaching the people had sensibly run or hidden.

  There were strikingly many circular structures: the houses, ditches and banks, rings of standing stones which for all he knew they might have been forts, or temples, or simply places to keep the sheep. It struck him that as seen from the air, by a curious crow perhaps, Britain would be covered by circles, like a muddy field splashed by rain.

  But Romans built in straight lines, and the new military road would cut through this landscape of circles, rude as a sword slash. Roman roads ran straight for long stretches because they were designed to support army marches, and as long as they had a good surface and sound drainage and weren’t too steep for a soldier loaded with his kit, the roads could be laid across almost any landscape.

  Narcissus knew that such stupendous rectilinearity was itself an oppressive marker of Roman dominance. This was a land beyond the Ocean, a land at the very edge of the Roman mind, beyond which lay madness. But here was the army to impose order on chaos.

  That was the theory. But, he reflected, this ‘chaos’ was a place of neat little fields and farmhouses. He murmured, ‘We are here to civilise the moon. But there is a civilisation here already!’

  ‘Peaceful, too,’ Vespasian murmured. ‘Those low walls are for keeping out sheep, not men.’

  ‘Caesar wrote of waves of invaders from the continent. It’s true you see pots from Germany and brooches from Gaul. That doesn’t mean the potters and jewellers came over in force! Julius wanted to make Britain seem the wilder place, I suppose, and his own deeds the greater by association. Yet I should have anticipated this,’ he said. ‘After all it is deliberate policy to cultivate our neighbours.’

  In return for high-quality goods from the empire, raw materials were imported from Britain: minerals, wheat, leather, hunting dogs – and, increasingly in the last few decades, slaves, though as Narcissus could testify from his personal experience Britons made for testy servants. The
empire made a fat profit on such trade, trinkets exchanged for huge volumes of raw materials. Narcissus, a thoughtful man, considered this pattern probably inevitable when an advanced culture dealt with a more primitive one. And all of this served the longer term goals of the empire. Roman material culture was an invaluable tool for manipulating local elites, and friendly native rulers provided an inexpensive buffer against more remote barbarians.

  ‘So we have tamed these southern Britons. I just didn’t expect to see it had gone this far.’ Narcissus felt somehow irritated by the landscape’s lack of strangeness.

  ‘Perhaps it has gone further than you think,’ Vespasian said. He produced a coin, roughly cut and stamped. ‘This was part of a hoard, a tribute for Aulus Plautius from the ruler of a local mud-heap. The coin was issued by the king of the Atrebates, in fact – our friend Verica. Yes, the British strike their own coins! Or at least some of them do.’

  Narcissus took the coin. ‘It’s gold.’

  ‘Yes. Used for tribute, it seems, not for commerce, for it has too high a value. Even these half-civilised Britons don’t get the point of a currency, it seems.

  ‘But we still know little of what lies beyond this south-east corner. We believe there are more than twenty tribes out there, of which we have made serious contact with only a handful. No doubt there are plenty of hairy-arsed fellows out there in the hills who have never even heard of a Roman.’

  Still Narcissus felt faintly uneasy. ‘But this is a land with its own story. You can see that, just by looking from here. And now here we are to wipe it all away. You know, when you occupy a country you take on the responsibility for its people, perhaps millions of them, for all their hopes and dreams. I sometimes wonder if Rome knows the gravity of what it is doing.’

  Vespasian looked at Narcissus curiously. ‘You aren’t feeling a prick of conscience, are you, secretary?’

  ‘Every thoughtful man has a conscience.’

  ‘The Britons are farmers, but nothing more. You can buy a woman with a handful of glass beads, and her husband with a mirror so he can comb his scraggly beard – but he will be frightened by the barbarian looking back out at him! We must be like parents with these childlike people. Firm but fair.’

  ‘Oh, I understand that.’ Narcissus shook off his mood, reminding himself it was always a mistake to show the merest chink of weakness – always. He took one last glance back at the landscape. ‘By Apollo’s eyes I couldn’t bear to live in one of those wooden huts. They sit there like huge brown turds. No wonder the Britons are dazzled by a goblet of wine or two!’

  Vespasian laughed, and led the way down the slope.

  X

  Agrippina lay on her belly in the low brush. She had been here since first light. She was stiff, her neck was sore, and she was out of food and low on water. But here she lay, silent and motionless, her face blackened by dirt, for she was spying on the Roman army.

  Even she, educated in Gaul, had been stunned to see a Roman army on the march close up. The tens of thousands of men in close order had taken no less than three hours, she estimated, to stream past her position. All that time the noise had been deafening. The Romans awed her, even as she clung to her shard of hatred over Mandubracius, and her longing for revenge.

  But she kept her mind clear. She had tried to count the troops and units, baggage carts and animals. She had already sent preliminary information by a runner to the camp Caratacus had established to the west of here, on the bank of the River of the Cantiaci. Despite the princes’ warlike bluster, for now they had followed Nectovelin’s advice, to watch, to gather information on the Romans, and to strike at them in small corrosive ways. Thus Agrippina was just one of a network of spies across the country.

  After the main body of the force passed she kept her station, to see what might follow. She was given a lesson in Roman road engineering.

  It had begun even before the first soldiers had come this way. Surveyors, protected by a detachment of cavalry, took up positions on ridges and hills. They had mysterious contraptions of wood and string and lead weights that they held up before their faces. Agrippina imagined this must have something to do with making sure the road ran straight. After that the route was marked out with canes thrust into the ground every few paces, and the surveyors hurried on to their next station.

  After the main force of the army had passed along the marked-out route a construction gang followed. The gang themselves seemed to be soldiers; a cart followed with armour and weaponry piled high, though every man kept a knife at his belt.

  They worked their way along a track already churned up by forty thousand pairs of boots, tens of thousands of hooves. First they cleared the central track of undergrowth, and then dug out ditches to either side, heaping up the dirt along the spine of the road. They piled large, heavy rocks on top of the ridge of dirt, and then a layer of smaller rocks, and finally gravel was shovelled out and spread crudely. The smaller rocks and gravel were hauled along in carts, but the heavy rocks were scavenged locally – mostly from the dry stone walls of local farms, but there were no farmers around to complain. At last the soldier-engineers walked up and down along the newly laid stretch of the road, ramming down the gravel with heavy posts.

  As the soldiers worked, under the pleasantly warm British sun, they sang. Many of their work-songs were in Latin, but Agrippina recognised some Gallic, and even a little Germanic. Rome’s soldiers did not only come from Rome these days.

  Agrippina had seen Gaul; she knew what the future would hold. From this beginning the roads would spread out across the country like ivy over a wall, bifurcating and firing off their straight-line segments, until every corner of the land was reached. Messages would flash along the roads fast as thought, and the next time the soldiers needed to march this way they would be able to make much faster progress than today, through the mud and dirt. And in the future the young fighters of Britain, who today were preparing raids against the advancing Romans, would be marched away along these roads to go fight in Germany and Thrace and Asia, far from the misty cool of their homeland. Thus the empire absorbed its enemies and used them for its own further expansion—

  A hand was clamped over her mouth. Agrippina struggled, but she was pinned to the ground. Her mind flooded with awful memories of that night on the beach. But then the weight shifted off her back, and she was able to twist and see the broad, dirt-streaked face of Braint, the farmer.

  ‘Sorry,’ Braint hissed. ‘Didn’t want you yelling out.’

  Agrippina tried to control her anger. ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Well, you should be watching your back,’ Braint said. She crawled deeper into the undergrowth, and winced.

  For the first time Agrippina noticed that Braint’s leg was bleeding. ‘What happened? Were you found?’

  ‘Nearly. I gashed my leg on a rock, and lost my knife, but I got away. Dodgy work, this spying. No wonder they gave it to us women.’

  ‘You need to tie up that cut. Do you want to borrow my knife?’

  ‘No need.’ Braint cast around on the ground, and turned up a lump of flint. She slammed it down against a rock and cracked it in two, exposing an interior as smooth as cream. She tapped half the rock with a pebble to crack off long thin flakes, selected one shard, and began to saw a strip of cloth from her tunic. All this took only heartbeats. ‘So,’ she said as she worked, ‘you counted the legionaries as they went by? How many?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. I even stayed to see the road builders pass.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Those blond young Germans, stripped to the waist. I bet you enjoyed the sight.’ She leered and grabbed her own crotch.

  Agrippina, still shaken up, couldn’t help smiling, for she had had some earthy thoughts as she watched the soldiers work.

  Braint said, ‘I saw them smashing up a holy place. They pulled down a ring of standing stones and crushed them for rubble, to make their road. They have no respect.’

  ‘But it’s a mighty force they’ve b
rought, Braint. Even Caratacus is going to be discouraged.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ Braint said gloomily. ‘He’s too fond of himself for that. Yesterday he led another assault on the Roman line. He burned a cart full of legionaries’ socks, and lost three warriors in the process.’ She snorted her contempt. ‘Perhaps a thousand such flea bites will cause the Romans to falter. But it’s beneath Caratacus’s dignity, and I can’t blame him for that. What’s worse, all day the Roman commander has been receiving embassies. One local rich man or petty boss after another, coming to pledge allegiance to the Emperor.’

  ‘We expected that,’ Agrippina said.

  ‘Yes, but one of them was the princes’ own brother, Cogidubnus.’ One of the sons Cunobelin had sent off for education to Rome. ‘The word is that Cogidubnus is going to travel the country under Roman guard, negotiating treaties for the Emperor.’

  ‘He would betray his own brothers?’

  Braint shrugged. ‘I think Cogidubnus would say that with their antics in recent years, Caratacus and Togodumnus have brought this storm down on all our heads. But there’s rarely a right or a wrong in family matters, Agrippina, as you know.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘Caratacus is impatient. He’s giving up the plan – the skirmishing, the ambushes. Soon the Romans will have to ford the Cantiaci River. Caratacus says that is where he will make his stand.’

  ‘He’s going for a pitched battle after all?’ Agrippina felt a thrill of conflicting emotions. ‘I suppose the whole course of Caratacus’s life has led him to this point – him and Togodumnus.’

  Braint harrumphed. ‘If you use the word “honour” about them I’ll smack you. The princes are two spoilt little boys who won’t quit until they have it their own way. And they have the druidh whispering in their ear. Anyhow we have no choice but to support them. And, who knows, they might even win.’ She cut free her strip of cloth and began to bind up her leg.