Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Tell them to paint their faces,’ Narcissus snapped.

  Vespasian pursed his lips. ‘We didn’t see any painted faces in the field, secretary.’

  ‘Caesar reported painted faces, so painted faces we will have. Blue, if possible.’ Narcissus, immersed now in the theatre of the Emperor’s victorious arrival, was dissatisfied by the array of specimens before him. ‘There were women in the field, weren’t there?’ He boldly walked to a knot of people, a girl with strawberry-blonde hair who might have been attractive if cleaned up, a dark, defiant-looking boy with a straggling beard – and a burly farmer’s wife of a woman, aged perhaps forty, whose cheek bore a scar from what might have been a blade. ‘This one, for instance. You. What’s your name?’

  Allius translated hurriedly. The woman replied, ‘Braint.’

  Narcissus flinched from the raw hostility of her expression, but stood his ground. ‘She looks savage enough to me. Decurion, explain what’s wanted of her. And find a few more, will you?’ He looked the woman up and down. ‘Oh, and tell her to bare her tits during the action. It will be a nice detail for the chroniclers.’

  He walked away from the woman. But with every step the space between his shoulder blades tingled, as if Braint’s gaze were a dagger being plunged there.

  XVIII

  Sheltered from view behind Braint’s broad back, with everybody watching the Romans as they strutted through Camulodunum, Agrippina examined the leather document wallet.

  After a lifetime pressed against Nectovelin’s chest, it was scuffed, battered, and stank of Nectovelin’s sweat and blood. The document within, carefully folded, was only a single page of cheap-looking parchment, yellowed with age. It was stamped with a broken seal. And just sixteen lines of Latin, she counted quickly, had been transcribed in a neat hand. Could this really be the hand of her grandfather Cunovic, was this his seal?

  She read the first lines feverishly:

  Ah child! Bound in time’s tapestry, and yet you are born free

  Come, let me sing to you of what there is and what will be,

  Of all men and all gods, and of the mighty emperors three.

  Named with a German name, a man will come with eyes of glass

  Straddling horses large as houses bearing teeth like scimitars…

  If these were the words of a god, it was a literate god. The phrasing was elegant, the meter at least functional. She wondered if the transcript contained more information than apparent to a first reading; the Romans were famously fond of wordplay – compression, acrostics.

  But the lines were terse. After the salutation and that mention of ‘emperors three’, there followed a reference to an emperor who called himself a German, but who had, mysteriously, ‘eyes of glass’. The single other detail, about some kind of exotic beast, merely confused her further. Could these opaque hints have something to do with the invasion? After all, what use was a prophecy if it didn’t refer to such a calamity as this? But if so, what did it mean?

  She scanned on quickly. The further lines hinted at a ‘noose of stone’ – some kind of huge building project? – and the elevation of an emperor in Brigantia. How could that ever be possible? The last few lines seemed to be given over to poetry, clumsy stuff that might have been translated from another language altogether, about freedom and happiness: unarguable, but not much use. That, though, was clearly the passage that had touched Nectovelin’s heart—

  ‘They took Braint.’ Cunedda was tense beside her, his right hand seeking a sword that he no longer carried.

  Hastily Agrippina tucked the document inside her tunic, hoping Cunedda wouldn’t notice she had it. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘They seem to be recruiting warriors. Some kind of display for the Emperor. Must they humiliate us? And I think I heard them talking about Cunobelin’s House.’ He pointed. ‘During his first night here the Emperor is to stay in the granary.’

  Agrippina understood. Of course a Roman would seek a square floor plan, rejecting the native roundhouses as barbaric.

  It was hard to concentrate on mere events, when the Prophecy, the future itself, burned in her hand. She longed for time to think about it, to decipher its enigmas.

  ‘Just imagine,’ Cunedda said, ‘the Emperor himself, the very head of the empire, is to stay here, just paces from where we are standing. And we can’t do a thing about it!’

  ‘Maybe we can,’ Agrippina said, suddenly thinking fast. Perhaps it was the Prophecy that fired her mind. ‘Cunedda. I have an idea. The granary must have underground storage pits.’

  He frowned. ‘So?’

  ‘Do you think the Romans know about them? They might not realise the building is a granary at all. If we could sneak in there—’

  He started to see. ‘And then hide in the pits. Let the Emperor come. And then—’

  And then, Agrippina thought, they might strike a blow that would send shudders across the whole world. Suddenly hope sparked in her breast.

  Cunedda too looked fully alive, for the first time since the battle. ‘Agrippina, Braint was right. Maybe it will take a woman to fight the Romans!’

  She pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Hush. We mustn’t chance somebody overhearing. Let’s go find Nectovelin. We’ll need his help.’ And she must sneak the Prophecy back in Nectovelin’s pile of clothes before he finished plucking those wretched chickens.

  Excited, burning with their secret plan, the two of them rushed hand in hand back to Braint’s house.

  XIX

  In the middle of the night it wasn’t hard for Agrippina, Nectovelin and Cunedda to sneak into the old granary. As Agrippina had expected there was indeed a storage pit dug into the ground. The three of them clambered down into the pit and fixed planks an arm’s length under the floor surface. Once they were safely interred, they had friends of Braint fill in the rest of the hole with dirt, tamp it down, and cover the floor with straw.

  It was a ruse that would have been obvious to a Catuvellaunian. But the Romans had not yet inspected the interior of the building and probably knew nothing of Catuvellaunian granaries, and it was a gamble worth taking that when they looked inside and saw an unbroken floor they wouldn’t be suspicious.

  After that, all Agrippina and her companions had to do was to endure the rest of the night, and the whole of another long late-summer day, stuck in a hole in the ground. It wasn’t deep enough for them to sit up properly, and the three of them lay curled around each other, ‘like three puppies in a litter’, as Nectovelin said. After a few hours even Cunedda’s closeness became uncomfortable for Agrippina.

  They had brought plenty of water, and as the stifling heat built up in the airless hole they drank much of it. Nectovelin had brought pots to piss in. He had even brought some food – dried bread, stuff that he said wouldn’t create a smell that might make some dull-witted Roman soldier suspicious. Agrippina didn’t know how he could eat in such a situation, but Nectovelin said he didn’t want the rumbling of their stomachs to wake the Romans from their slumber. Nectovelin’s gut, however, even while not rumbling, was a bottle of noxious gases, which did nothing to add to their comfort.

  So they had nothing to do but lie there and wait, in the increasingly fetid dark. Wait and think.

  Agrippina couldn’t get the Prophecy out of her head. She longed to discuss it with Cunedda, and with Nectovelin, though she knew it was impossible. But the more she brooded on the meaning of its enigmatic lines, the more she began to wonder what it might be telling her of their chances of victory today – and the more she thought it through, the more dread gathered in her heart. Emperors three.

  In what must have been the middle of the morning there was a bout of crashes, bangs, hammering and splintering, laced by whistles and cheerful curses in Latin, Germanic and Gallic. The legionaries were fitting out the granary to make it ready for an emperor. Agrippina lay rigid, scared that a cough or sneeze might give her away, and fretted that some fat soldier might come crashing down into their hole. After that came a pause that
must have stretched through noon. Agrippina heard only softer talk, the rattles of dice, laughter, the clatter of crockery. Guards stationed in the granary were passing the time.

  Then, in the afternoon, there was a more general commotion, people running, the ominous scraping of stabbing swords being drawn from scabbards. Agrippina heard soldiers yelling, and was able to make out Latin words: ‘The Emperor! He is coming!’

  At last, Claudius had completed his procession from Rome all the way here to Camulodunum. Agrippina heard marching feet and cheers – and then thunderous footsteps, as if some monstrous man were walking into the town, to gasps and muttering in Catuvellaunian. She had no idea what this could be, but she thought uneasily of the strange Prophecy line about ‘horses large as houses’.

  Then there was a roar, half-hearted, and running footsteps. That must be the ‘resistance’, a few dozen British rounded up and pressed into putting on a show of defiance. Agrippina heard the smash of sword against shield, thuds that might have been javelins landing – and, ominously, screams of pain. Why should the Roman commander keep his promise that few Britons would be hurt in this shameful game? She imagined Braint out there, angry, defiant, perhaps stripped to the waist as that toga-clad Greek snake had ordered. Braint at least would give the Romans as good as she got.

  With the ‘resistance’ vanquished, there was an interval of clattering wheels, marching, speeches and orderly cheering. This must be the entrance of the Emperor himself into the capital. Some of the triumphal pronouncements were in the Catuvellaunian tongue; the Romans, methodical as always, would ensure that the locals knew exactly what was happening here, why the Romans had come, and what the future would hold for the people of Camulodunum.

  After that there was more activity in the granary. She heard booming laughter, the clatter of plates, the splash of what might be wine into goblets, and running footsteps that must be serving slaves working. The Emperor and his entourage were evidently having dinner. The smells of cooked food penetrated the hole in the ground, and as Nectovelin had warned, Agrippina felt her empty stomach growl in response.

  Nectovelin pressed a bit of dried meat into her hand. He whispered, ‘What are they saying?’

  Agrippina tried to follow the conversation. She had learned her Latin in Gaul, itself a backward province; the Emperor and his entourage were sophisticated Romans, and their speech was complex. ‘Difficult to tell,’ she admitted. ‘The invasion. Gaul and Britain. But that’s the surface. The Romans like to be clever. They like word games—’

  Nectovelin snorted. ‘A man should say what he thinks.’

  ‘That’s not the Roman way.’

  ‘Then I’m glad I’m no Roman.’

  The volume of conversation started to die down. Couches were scraped, drunken words of farewell exchanged. Evidently the dinner was over. At last Agrippina identified the Emperor’s own voice. It was thin, and broken by an occasional stutter. Responses came curtly, perhaps from slaves, and from a more cultured voice, strongly accented – the Greek in the toga, perhaps, who had walked so arrogantly through Camulodunum yesterday.

  Finally the Emperor ordered everybody out.

  Nectovelin listened. Now there were no voices at all, no pacing, only a soft scraping that might have been a pen on parchment, a stylus on a wax tablet. Nectovelin whispered, ‘Here’s our chance. We’ll have to move fast.’

  Agrippina’s heart pounded, and she grasped the hilt of her dagger.

  ‘On my count,’ Nectovelin hissed. ‘One, two, three—’

  XX

  Agrippina rolled, got her legs underneath her body, and pushed up with the others. The wooden planks covering their temporary tomb splintered and fell away, and dirt tumbled in around her. Then she found her shoulders pressing against a dense mass of carpet. They had expected this. Nectovelin drove his sword up into the weave and dragged it backwards to make a broad cut.

  They thrust upwards into a soft light of torches and oil lamps. Agrippina blinked; it was the first light she had seen all day.

  She took in the scene in a heartbeat. The granary had become a palace, the walls hastily whitewashed, a thick carpet with a richly woven pattern laid over the floor. Oil lamps splashed pools of light. Low couches and tables lay littered around the floor, the remains of the dinner party. Amid these bits of luxury Agrippina, standing in a hole in the floor, felt filthy, stinking, a beast in the world of humans.

  And at one end of the granary a desk had been set up, heaped with scrolls and parchments. A man, unassuming, dressed in a plain-looking woollen tunic, was sitting at the desk. He was looking over his shoulder at the intruders. Slowly he got to his feet. He was perhaps thirty feet from Agrippina.

  Nectovelin roared, ‘Claudius!’ And he threw his stabbing sword.

  Claudius flinched, but shuffled aside. The sword slammed into the desktop, skewering scrolls. The attack had already gone wrong, Agrippina saw. It was chance that their hole in the ground was at one end of the long granary, Claudius’s desk at the other, giving him time to step aside.

  Nectovelin bellowed his frustration, drew a dagger and began to run at Claudius. But the Emperor, recovering from his shock, called for his guards: ‘Custodiae!’

  The first to respond were the two senior Romans of the day before in Camulodunum, the impressive commander and the Greek – though the commander’s armour was half undone, and the Greek wore a nightshirt. The commander, unarmed, unhesitating, hurled himself at Nectovelin’s legs and brought him crashing to the ground. Nectovelin struggled but the Roman, younger, just as heavy, was on his back, and in an instant he had taken Nectovelin’s own dagger and pressed it to his throat.

  More soldiers burst into the room. Agrippina didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the Greek, easily twisting an arm behind his back, and cut his cheek with a savage swipe of her knife. The Greek screamed, his voice high, like a distressed sheep’s.

  The Emperor seemed more concerned for the Greek’s fate than his own. He took a step forward. ‘Narcissus!’

  ‘Stay back,’ Agrippina snapped in Latin. ‘Let Nectovelin live. Or this one dies before your eyes.’

  The crowded granary had become a tableau – the Emperor, Agrippina with Narcissus, Nectovelin with his own blade cutting into his flesh, and the guards staring wildly, their swords drawn. One of them had Cunedda in a bear hug.

  The Roman on the ground looked up. ‘Emperor,’ he hissed. ‘Let me finish off this fat pig.’

  Claudius was a small, middle-aged man. The single step he had taken was uneven, a limp, and his mouth opened and closed, gulping like a fish, as he took in the situation. The rumours in Gaul were that Claudius was a weakling, perhaps even deformed, the runt of the imperial litter. He wore thick socks, comically; perhaps he had poor circulation too. But he was an emperor, and after that first moment of shock he stood straight, and his voice was firm. ‘Let him up, Vespasian.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘Let him up! I am in no danger now.’ He glanced at one of the soldiers. ‘We will deal with the issue of my personal security later, Rufrius Pollio.’ The man, perhaps the commander of the guard, cowered. ‘But I would not lose my secretary to these grubby thugs. Let him up, I say.’

  The Roman commander, Vespasian, clambered reluctantly off Nectovelin. He hauled the Brigantian to his feet with a massive hand at the scruff of his neck, and he kept a grip on Nectovelin’s arm. ‘One move out of you, you ugly bastard, and I’ll slit your throat no matter what the Emperor says.’

  Nectovelin had not taken his eyes off the Emperor. Agrippina kept her knife blade at the throat of the Greek, Narcissus.

  Claudius walked forward, his gait uneven but his command now obvious. ‘Another warrior woman. You were right about their temperament, Narcissus. But this one seems rather more presentable, under all that dirt, than the muscular hags you paraded before me today. That rather attractive strawberry hair…’

  Narcissus, breathing hard, a knife at his neck, seemed to be trying to regain command of himself. ‘I ap
ologise for my poor taste, Emperor.’

  Vespasian growled, ‘Sir, we must end this.’

  ‘Now, legate, have patience. I would rather enjoy seeing how this little drama plays out. Quite a cast – a hairy savage, a beautiful girl, and a weakling boy who, from the moon-eyed glances he throws, is more in love than fearful.’

  Agrippina hissed, her anger overcoming her fear, ‘I understand every word you say, Roman.’

  ‘Yes, you spoke Latin, didn’t you?’ Claudius peered at her, his small face creased with curiosity. ‘But accented. Are you Gallic?’

  ‘I am Brigantian.’

  ‘I don’t know what a Brigantian is.’

  ‘An as yet undomesticated strain of British,’ Narcissus said tightly.

  ‘I was educated in Gaul,’ Agrippina said.

  ‘Then you must know who I am.’

  ‘You are Claudius.’

  He smiled. ‘Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, to be precise.’

  Germanicus. Named with a German name…The recognition shocked her, and her blade at Narcissus’s throat faltered. Vespasian saw this; his eyes were hard, waiting for an opportunity to move against her. She summoned her concentration. ‘My name is Agrippina.’

  Claudius clapped his hands. ‘A good Roman name! Your parents had sound instincts, even if you don’t share them. How ironic, then, that the logic of your life should lead you to this point.’ He turned to Cunedda. ‘And you?’

  ‘I am Cunedda.’ Despite his uncertain Latin he spoke firmly, and Agrippina was proud of him.

  Nectovelin growled in his native Brigantian, ‘What are they saying, ’Pina?’

  With interest Claudius turned to him. ‘Ah, your attack dog speaks too! But this hairy fellow has no Latin, I should imagine. Not very friendly, is he?’

  Vespasian growled, ‘Emperor—’

  ‘Oh, don’t fuss, Vespasian. You,’ he snapped at Cunedda. ‘Speak to your comrade in his own guttural tongue, if you know it, and relate his words to me.’ Claudius turned back to Agrippina. ‘So you are here to kill an emperor.’