Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Here.’ She dug out a little of the white cream and raised her fingers to his face to rub the cream into his cheek. ‘How does that feel?’

  ‘It’s pleasant.’ So it was. The cream was smooth, and cold at first, but soon warmed on his skin, and as she rubbed it in further he felt a powdery, gritty texture. ‘What’s it made of?’

  She shrugged. ‘Animal fat, I think. Starch. And some complicated compound of tin.’

  ‘Tin? I thought Roman ladies used lead on their faces.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very old-fashioned. Lead’s poisonous – didn’t you know?’

  She continued to rub cream into his cheek, and he relished the warmth of her touch, the close sweetness of her breath on his face. But he pulled back. ‘Perhaps that’s enough.’

  ‘Oh, but this is just the start. This is a foundation cream which will make my skin glow like a marble statue. Then I’ll apply rouge and mascara – this is burned rose petals, see? – to highlight my cheeks and eyes. I will whiten my teeth with powdered pumice, and sprinkle my neck with perfume – this one is my favourite, myrrh mixed with spices.’

  He took her hand in his, silencing her. The bones of her fingers felt fragile, like a baby bird’s, and her skin was pale against his. Compared to his earthy darkness she was like a ghost, he thought.

  She leaned a little closer to him; her face, a perfect oval, filled his vision, and her lips brushed his. ‘I bet you don’t even shave your chest, do you, Brigantius-Brigonius?’

  He hesitated for one heartbeat. If she was toying with him, tormenting a clumsy barbarian, he was about to be humiliated. But it was worth the risk. He slid his hand around her waist. ‘Why don’t you find out?’

  She came at him like a wave breaking, and their mouths locked.

  VIII

  The formal meal was to be held in the afternoon, from the ninth hour onwards, in Verecundus’s largest reception room. This was a very grand, sprawling room that occupied almost the full length of one side of the atrium – ‘a veritable basilica’, Karus said. Brigonius got there late, but not as late as the Emperor himself, who was out hunting boar.

  Brigonius found the room crowded. People lay on couches or strolled with a certain false casualness. The men were as carefully groomed as the women, their faces shaved and their eyebrows plucked. The women wore clothes in an explosion of rich colours, and the men’s togas were crisp and shone white. Music played, slaves circulated with trays of food and drink, musicians played lutes and Catuvellaunian pipes, and the conversation bubbled prettily. Oddly, much of the talk seemed to be in Greek. But there was tension under the politeness, and people watched each other with sharp eyes. They were like a flock of hungry birds, Brigonius thought.

  And one or two guests were already the worse for wear. One fat, sweating man was rather obviously sliding his hand up the thigh of any slave who passed him, male or female. Brigonius wondered if the Emperor’s lateness was a deliberate ploy, so that drink or gluttony could weed out the less worthy of his petitioners.

  When Brigonius joined the party Severa’s companions were already all here, Severa herself and her daughter, lawyer Karus and the architect Xander, with his model set out on a low table and covered with a sheet. Lepidina seemed cool, composed.

  Brigonius sat down, trying to avoid everybody’s eyes. He had washed and changed since his tryst with Lepidina, but he was sure the smell of their love must still linger on him.

  Sure enough, Karus leaned over. ‘Congratulations,’ he whispered, slightly drunk.

  Brigonius cursed. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Your sheer animal joy is, yes. I congratulate you; she is truly lovely. But have no fear, I won’t take her from you, though of course I could. I told you, I only have eyes for the mother…’

  Severa’s gaze glittered, and she seemed secretly amused. Severa knew, of course; if Karus had detected it she would have. And Lepidina knew that she knew.

  As for Brigonius, all he knew was that he was far out of his depth with these complicated women and their games. But Lepidina was worth it.

  And beneath all this there was something oceanic in his mood. What he felt for Lepidina was not mere lust, had not been since the moment he met her. There was tenderness too. And now, after their hour together in the morning, was that tenderness becoming love? How vulnerable would he become then to Severa’s machinations?

  The service began, to Brigonius’s relief, and they all had something else to occupy their attention. There was a starter of salad, eggs and oysters from the coast – and snails, big salty beasts brought in from Gaul. Karus, Xander and Severa tucked in. Lepidina ate more sparingly but with every expression of relish.

  Brigonius did his best. By the time the first plates were cleared he already felt full, but more plates, more food, quickly followed. There were to be several main courses, he learned, including boar, venison, pork, hare and dormouse; chicken, geese, thrushes and peacocks; more fish and seafood – and finally, in the far future, a dessert of fruit and cakes laden with honey. Even the vegetables were unfamiliar. Lepidina, gently mocking, named such Roman imports as cabbage, broad beans, parsnips, peas and celery. All this was served on fine plates of pottery or silver, and though you ate with your fingers there was a bewildering variety of cutlery: special little forks for pulling oysters out of their shells, knives for scraping meat from bone. Brigonius was continually bewildered at what a wide variety of things were available to a well-off Roman.

  He kept trying. He sampled what he recognised, but was constantly put off by the peculiar flavours of the sauces. Everything seemed to taste both sour and sweet at the same time, and the Romans doused the lot with a disgusting fish sauce.

  Severa glared at him. ‘Leave it if you want, but don’t pick. You eat like a child.’

  ‘But it’s all so appetising,’ Brigonius said dryly. He lifted up a dormouse by its tail, poached whole and stuffed with nuts and herbs.

  That made Lepidina laugh, but Severa turned away contemptuously.

  ‘And anyhow,’ Karus said around a mouthful of minced pork, ‘the food isn’t the point.’ He sighed. ‘Though it should be. Food should always be the point. While the Emperor is still away we should review our strategy.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Severa said. ‘Xander! Come here. Let’s go over it one more time…’

  Xander, reluctant to interrupt the meal himself, joined Severa, and they began to discuss empires, borders and walls.

  Hadrian had to consider fixing his borders because his empire had reached its natural limits of expansion. In Britain, from Claudius’s first foothold at Rutupiae in the far south-east of the island, a wave of military advance had washed over the countryside, leaving behind a network of forts, roads and signalling towers. Brigantia had been the most northern political unit the Romans had been able to deal with diplomatically. But under the Emperor Domitian, Governor Agricola had gone further, mounting a strong assault on the furthest north, and his ships had sailed all the way around the northern coast. But in a land of mountains, mist and bogs, inhabited by an elusive, fleeting people who never seemed to understand when they were defeated, it had not been a comfortable campaign for the Romans, and Agricola’s forces, scattered in garrison forts, were overstretched. When troops were withdrawn from Britain to deal with problems on the Danube the Romans had been forced to fall back to Brigantia.

  Elsewhere in the empire similar limits were reached. Domitian’s successor Trajan was another expansion-minded soldier-emperor, and he had won swathes of territories in the east of the empire. But towards the end of his life his energies had been consumed by troubles along the empire’s long, vulnerable borders, in Mesopotamia, Africa, even in northern Britain once more. And in the east, while he was distracted, the Jews had risen in a savage revolt, that had been put down equally savagely.

  This was the complex, unstable situation bequeathed to Hadrian, Trajan’s successor in turn, who had served with his mentor in the field.

  ‘You must understand th
e way these Romans think,’ said architect Xander. ‘Once the Romans saw no limit to their conquest. Why should they? Especially once their generals started getting rich from it. Expansion pays for more expansion, and on it goes. Why shouldn’t it proceed to the ends of the world? But the truth is the Romans can venture no further than the plough…’

  As the Romans had expanded out of their Mediterranean heartland, north and south, east and west, they had taken lands that were already farmed, and which could provide the wealth to make their city rich, and to fuel their further expansion. But Rome could not conquer wastelands. So the empire was like a sea, said Xander, rising to flood the agricultural heart of Europe. But it was dammed in the east by the Parthians, and in the north, west and south its waves broke on shores of forests, deserts and mountains.

  Xander was about fifty, with a round, red face and a shock of greying hair. In his ill-fitting toga and with his fingers coated in sawdust from his toy forts, he seemed remarkably unworldly. But Severa listened to him, and Brigonius began to see that the point of view of a Greek, of a race seen as a cultural ancestor of the Romans, was quite different from that of a subjugated people like his own.

  Now Xander smiled. ‘Like Alexander, the emperors have looked beyond the edge of the world and recoiled, their minds fogged.’

  Hadrian, a new emperor forty years old, had formulated a new policy. He was intent on abandoning Trajan’s expensively won territories and drawing the empire back into a shell bounded where possible by ‘natural frontiers’: deserts, rivers. And where necessary such frontiers would be fortified.

  As Brigonius thought this over the more it seemed a remarkable ambition, for to succeed Hadrian was going to have to reshape the Roman spirit. No longer expansive conquerors, the Romans would have to turn their empire into a community. Even the army would have to be redesigned, turned from a mobile fighting force to one able to defend fixed frontiers.

  ‘Of course he has his opponents,’ Xander muttered. ‘There are plenty of generals who would like their turn at the booty-gathering of the past. Critics in the Senate say that to sit behind a wall and jab at your unconquered enemies with a spear isn’t the Roman way – but half of them are fools who still dream of the Republic, and scarcely matter. There are some who wonder if, by halting the expansion that has always fuelled Rome’s economy, Hadrian isn’t committing some drastic, long-term error – although no doubt we’ll all be dead before anybody can answer that.’

  Karus said, ‘Admirably summarised, architect. But as far as we’re concerned, Hadrian’s dilemma boils down to this. If you’re not going to expand then you have to stabilise the frontiers.’

  With typical Roman magnificence, Hadrian intended to consolidate his northern provinces’ frontiers into a single defensive boundary, a system of forts, walls, banks and ditches that would span Europe, heading west from Asia Minor, following the great continent-draining rivers to pass north of Dacia, Noricum and Lower Germany – and then it would leap across the Ocean to Britain.

  ‘I think it’s clear enough where the British boundary is to be,’ Karus said. ‘To the north of here, in the place where the neck of the country narrows, between the estuaries of the rivers Tinea and Ituna.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Severa. ‘The question is what will he build there? We can show him all the models and plans we like. But what will convince this man that he must build in stone rather than turf as he did in Germany?’

  Karus said, ‘The emperors have been building linear defences of one sort or another since the time of Domitian.’

  ‘Oh, we mustn’t mention that,’ Xander said. ‘Every emperor likes to believe he has built the whole world single-handed.’

  Brigonius popped a harmless-looking bit of meat into his mouth. ‘Well, don’t ask me. I doubt if I’ll understand anything anyhow. Haven’t you noticed – aside from us, everybody here is speaking Greek!’

  Karus grunted. ‘And an archaic form at that. How pretentious!’

  ‘It’s to please the Emperor,’ Xander said. ‘His own family are from the provinces, you know. Like all those born most humbly he has the highest aspirations, and so has decided he is a devoted admirer of all things Greek.’ Brigonius thought this pompous little man spoke of an emperor as if he was an irritating schoolboy.

  ‘Well,’ Brigonius said, ‘in that case it’s a shame the Greeks didn’t build walls of stone, for surely Hadrian would copy them.’

  Karus slapped his forehead. ‘May Jupiter bugger me but they did! Didn’t they, Xander? You should know, man!’

  Xander, wide-eyed now, nodded. ‘Of course, of course.’

  Karus grinned and gripped Brigonius’s arm. ‘My friend, I think you may have just won us the contest.’

  Severa’s gaze flickered suspiciously between lawyer and architect. ‘You two had better be sure you know what you’re doing.’

  Xander was flustered, but Karus grinned, a lawyer’s smile. ‘Trust me.’

  And now time ran out, whether Severa trusted Karus or not. Trumpets sounded, a clear peal above the babble. All heads turned to see the former slave Primigenius standing at the door, beside a beaming Marcus Claudius Verecundus, the host. Primigenius called, ‘Stand for Publius Aelius Hadrianus.’

  And the Emperor walked into the room.

  Hadrian gave a brief, gracious speech of welcome, then bade everybody sit and continue with the meal. After a decent interval little groups of citizens approached him with their requests, petitions, disputes to be resolved, or paeans of praise. Severa’s party waited their turn.

  Brigonius watched the Emperor, fascinated. Hadrian sat with his courtiers, talking animatedly, perhaps about the hunt they had just come from. Hadrian, a heavyset man, wore a toga, but his face was flushed, his thick hair damp from sweat, and his breathing was heavy.

  He immediately struck Brigonius as a mass of contradictions. It was clear that he wanted to seem accessible, but his entrance couldn’t have been more dramatic if he had rode in on his horse. He aspired to Greek culture, and yet he exuded the primordial thrill of the hunt. He was the richest man in the world, the very quintessence of Rome – and yet he wore a barbarian beard whose magnificence Brigonius envied. His skin was pocked by the scars of some disease: another contradiction, that the most powerful of all should be afflicted by a disease which could strike down the commonest of people.

  And though there was none more powerful than Hadrian there was a fearful look in his eyes, an almost hunted look.

  ‘Yes, a complicated man,’ Severa whispered, gazing at the Emperor. ‘Talking of the future, I think Hadrian fears it – and not just the assassin’s blade. He is a scholar who knows that history holds dire warnings for the Romans, for empires have come and gone in the past: even mighty Alexander’s realm barely outlived his own death. Take this business of the Jewish rebellion under Trajan – barely heard of in Britain, but a dreadful disaster in the east. The Jews won’t become Romans, as we Britons have; it is a clash of minds, a shuddering shock for the Romans. For all Xander sneers at Hadrian’s Greekness, I think it is necessary, a matter of policy as much as personality. He embodies the identity of the empire, which is Greek and Roman, and so in the face of the challenge of the Jews he must be more Greek than the Greeks.

  ‘No wonder Hadrian is obsessed by the future even more than by the past. Everywhere he goes he consults astrologers and mystics and soothsayers. And surely a thoughtful man like Hadrian wants to leave a mark on his empire, on history. What else can assure his own worth in the afterlife?’

  Karus’s eyes glittered as he listened. ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’ he whispered to Brigonius. ‘I told you, it’s as if she stands outside time itself.’

  Lepidina said, ‘Poor man.’

  Brigonius asked, ‘Who?’

  ‘The Emperor. If he really is so tortured. He might draw comfort if he followed the teaching of the Christ. Because then he would understand that cities and empires don’t matter. They all pass away, even Rome. But the city of God endures for
ever.’

  Severa glared at her. ‘That Judean renegade promised that all would be saved, not just emperors but slaves too. What use is that to anybody? Now shut up about your foolish fad, Lepidina.’

  ‘It’s not foolish,’ Lepidina shot back. ‘If it was, why is our Prophecy connected to it? Even the Emperor Claudius noticed that Nectovelin was born in the same year as the Judean!’

  ‘You never mind the Emperor Claudius. I’m your mother and I’m telling you that our family destiny has nothing to do with some ragged-arsed troublemaker from the east. And what’s more—’

  ‘Hush,’ Xander said. ‘We’re being called forward.’

  ‘About time,’ Karus muttered. ‘I’m bursting with piss.’

  The five of them advanced towards the imperial table, Severa, Lepidina, Karus and Brigonius, with a nervous Xander supervising two sweating slaves who carried his model on a slab of wood.

  IX

  Severa introduced herself and her party. Then she handed the floor to Xander. The little Greek stood fearlessly, Brigonius thought, fearless as only the representative of an older culture could be before a junior, regardless of such incidentals as global power.

  Xander spoke in Greek, and Brigonius picked up only a little of what he had to say. He began with a general discourse on the problems of imperial frontiers, with references to historical events all the way back to the wars between the successors of Alexander the Great. Meanwhile his precious model sat on the floor beside him, tantalisingly covered.

  Karus had warned Brigonius it would be like this. ‘The Romans love speeches,’ he said.

  Understanding barely one word in four, Brigonius found his attention wandering. Among the soldiers and learned men of the court of the soldier-emperor there were a few women. One of them, beautiful but sullen-looking, must be Hadrian’s wife, Sabina, said to have been trapped into a loveless marriage by her great-uncle Trajan to his favoured heir, Hadrian. One older woman was surely the famed Plotina, wife of the dead Trajan. Brigonius wondered what tensions lay beneath the rather cold façade of this imperial family.