Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  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 Thalius 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.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d put it like that—’

  ‘You’ll find you’re not alone. There are many of us who have reservations about the Emperor, reservations which have nothing to do with Christ but with the traditions of Rome – and their survival, and the survival of city and empire, into the future. Do you see?’

  ‘I think so. But I—’

  ‘And,’ Cornelius said almost wistfully, ‘is it true that your Prophecy speaks of freedom? Was that truly the subject of the enigmatic final lines of which Claudius wrote? Was the unknown seer writing of a return to the freedoms of the Republic, the lifting of the heavy hand of the Caesars?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Thalius said.

  ‘Well, now I’ve met you I can see you aren’t ready to meet the Emperor today. I will arrange another audience. In the meantime perhaps we will find time to talk. Now go.’ He turned away.

  Thalius, dismissed, felt crushingly disappointed he would not after all confront Constantine today; but already the processes of the court were moving on.

  Tarcho snorted. ‘These Romans and their foretelling – always have been a superstitious bunch!’

  ‘But I didn’t come here to conspire against Constantine.’

  ‘Didn’t you? Perhaps that stuck-up Roman saw your soul better than you see it yourself.’ He pulled Thalius’s sleeve. ‘Let’s get out of here. We’ve already lost our place in the line, and it doesn’t do to hang around an emperor’s court.’

  Thalius let himself be led away. Tarcho held Audax firmly by the hand. The boy, wide-eyed, hadn’t spoken through the entire exchange.

  VII

  Thalius, with Tarcho and Audax, joined the imperial procession from Rutupiae. The Emperor rode in a gaudily adorned litter, with his bishops flocking like exotic birds. Thalius grumbled, ‘The Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass. How He would have been appalled by the sight of those strutting fools!’ Tarcho, who seemed to think of Christ and God the Father as something like a centurion and his commander, was only confused by this remark.

  Constantine would visit the four provincial capitals, including the overarching diocesan capital at Londinium, and he would call at all the principal military bases, including Eburacum and the Wall forts in the north. The Emperor had many objectives. He wanted to firm up the new provincial government arrangements his father had left him, and to bed in army reforms begun by Diocletian and continued by his father. Constantine also intended that his visit would spark off a wider programme of refurbishment and renewal of the four provinces’ shabby
public facilities and military infrastructure.

  But everybody knew that Constantine’s main purpose was to detach units of British troops for his coming conflict with Licinius, Emperor of the east: he was here to take from the island, not to give. Constantine was popular in Britain, but there would be much resistance to his stripping troops from the diocese in a time of uncertainty. Constantine was wily enough to understand this. So he had come here in person, to dazzle and reassure even while he bled the island’s garrisons.

  After Londinium Constantine proceeded towards Camulodunum. But his route took a long detour to the north, so he could visit the fen country, an enormous quilt of farmland in the east conjured out of the sea by a vast system of dykes, canals, drainage ditches and roads – all paid for by the local people and maintained by labour levies and slaves. In older countryside the farms and settlements had grown out of communities and cultivation patterns that had been here for centuries before a Roman ever visited Britain, and so they were more disorderly, ancient, stubbornly chaotic. Here, though, the new land had been a blank canvas for the Roman planners to set down the orderly patterns they preferred, and in this utterly flat, wholly manufactured landscape the roads and dykes ran arrow-straight for mile after mile. Thalius thought that this geometric fenland was the quintessence of the obsessively disciplined Roman mind.

  The reclamation wasn’t perfect, however. In places Thalius saw farmers dismally scraping at soggy ground, and some farms had been abandoned to flooding altogether. If is was true that in Germany the Ocean was rising perhaps it was true here too.

  During this progression one member of the imperial court deigned to join Thalius and his companions: Ulpius Cornelius. His preliminary excuse was to show Thalius a letter he had been carrying, on a folded-over slip of wood.

  Thalius scanned it quickly. It was from one Claudia Brigonia Aurelia, a widow of Eburacum – and it concerned prophecies about Constantine. Thalius handed it back hastily, chilled.

  Cornelius seemed to enjoy his discomfiture. ‘Aurelia’s family, it seems, has its own legends about prophecies and emperors. Was some ancestor of hers tangled up in the complicated stories you have told me?’

  ‘How does she know about me?’

  ‘Through me,’ Cornelius said smugly. ‘I’m a thorough man, Thalius. I told you I confirmed the existence of your Prophecy through hints in the archives. But in following it up I drew extensively on contacts in Britain. And it happened that I caught the attention of this lady Aurelia, and sparked her interest.’

  ‘“Sparked her interest”? What does that mean, Cornelius? What does she want?’

  ‘Why, I’ve no idea, not specifically. But, like you – and me – it seems she has concerns about the direction in which the Emperor is taking us all.’ He grinned coldly. ‘I don’t think she had ever heard of you, Thalius. And yet it seems you have another member of your conspiratorial cabal.’

  As from the beginning of his dealings with Cornelius, Thalius had the feeling that events were spinning out of his control. ‘I don’t have a conspiracy, and I don’t want a cabal!’

  ‘Then the Emperor has nothing to fear,’ Cornelius said smoothly. ‘And nor do you.’

  It seemed to Thalius that what Cornelius really wanted of him was an ear in which to pour complaints about his own grievances. Not that those grievances weren’t extensive, for somebody of Cornelius’s patrician background. ‘Constantine’s butchery of authority and tradition has reached all the way to the heart of imperial government,’ Cornelius complained, ‘in fact, into his own court…’

  Constantine had created a whole new layer of aristocracy, called the ‘Order of Imperial Companions’. His council, the consistorium, was drawn from this group. Many of the Companions were the gaudy bishops who made Thalius so uncomfortable. And by establishing the Companions Constantine had excluded the old senatorial and equestrian classes. Cornelius’s family, senators since republican days, had been largely disenfranchised, and Cornelius’s own position in court was precarious.

  Cornelius fumed. ‘Not only has Constantine violated centuries of tradition, he has casually upturned checks and balances within an imperial system that has been evolving since the days of Augustus…’ But Thalius was sure that Cornelius’s concerns were not about the welfare of the empire but his own ambitions.

  And it struck Thalius that Cornelius, for all his sophistication and power, was so obsessed with court intrigues and his own ambitions that he simply could not see the deeper truths of his age. After all, within Thalius’s own lifetime the empire had nearly collapsed altogether. You could complain about Constantine’s reforms, as Thalius did himself, but was it possible that the Emperor actually had no real choice in how he acted, if he was to hold the empire together?

  VIII

  The caravan at last approached the bristling walls of Camulodunum. The lead carriages came to a gate in the west wall which had once, curiously, been a triumphal arch before being incorporated into the wall, and was now mostly blocked up. Here the caravan broke up.

  Thalius, happy to see the back of Ulpius Cornelius for a while, led his own companions to the townhouse he owned just a short walk from the forum. It had actually been some months since Thalius had been back to the city. Even though he had grown up here, and his affairs were closely bound up with the city, he much preferred his country estate half a day’s ride out of town. Now, as he walked through a grubby, decayed town crowded with hawkers, chancers, beggars and prostitutes all drawn to the tawdry gleam of a soldier-emperor’s court, Thalius was reminded why.

  The grand old Temple of Claudius still stood, however, rising out of a sea of vacant lots, rotting houses, tatty public buildings and filth-strewn streets. As they passed the colonnade Thalius peered inside to see the great statue of the wily old fox, lit up by candles and lamps, his arm still raised in victory as it had been for three hundred years. But a small Christian chapel had been set up within this temple to a long-dead emperor, whose exploits had been forgotten by almost everybody who passed by this way.

  Thalius was relieved to reach his own modest but well-maintained townhouse. He was too old for travelling, he thought, too old to be dealing with complicated and poisonous individuals like Ulpius Cornelius. At least within the walls of his house he could be in control of things for a while, and find some peace.

  So he was dismayed to find he had a visitor, waiting for him in the living room. Sitting beneath his most expensive tapestry, a scene of a colonnaded courtyard under a bright Mediterranean sun, she was sipping watered-down wine served to her by the elderly freedman Thalius employed as a housekeeper.

  She stood as Thalius approached. She was a woman of about sixty, Thalius judged, well-dressed and poised. Her cheekbones were high, her chin well-defined. Her complexion was dark, and she wore her grey-streaked black hair swept back from her face. She was unafraid of showing her age, then. She was immediately intimidating, with something of Ulpius Cornelius’s air of cold command.

  And she was remarkably attractive. Despite her age, there was something sensual about her, even animal, and she seemed to use the fumes of her scents as a weapon to confuse him.

  Thalius, still grimy from the road, felt inadequate in his own home. He was weakened by the helpless attraction he felt for her, which she must perceive, and had no doubt calculated to inspire. Suddenly his life had become even more complicated, he thought tiredly.

  ‘I think you know who I am, sir.’ Her voice was husky.

  ‘You must be Claudia Brigonia Aurelia. Your correspondence with Ulpius Cornelius—’

  ‘What a helpful man he is.’ She gazed at Audax, her eyes rheumy but bright. ‘And this must be the mysterious slave boy.’ She reached out a bony hand.

  Audax cowered behind the massive form of Tarcho.

  ‘You’re frightening him.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘Cornelius warned me about your sentimentality. You’re a Christian, aren’t you? A faith of soldiers and slaves, so they say.’

 
‘Madam, what is it you want here?’

  ‘Why, the same thing you do, I believe. To know the future.’ And she eyed the cringing boy as if wishing she could simply flay him and take his marked hide away with her.

  Thalius sent the boy off with Tarcho, and ordered the housekeeper to bring more wine and plates of light food. As social routines cut in, Aurelia calmed. But she watched Thalius constantly, as an owl watches a mouse.

  She told him something of herself. Born and raised in Eburacum, she had been widowed young. She had inherited her husband’s business interests, and had run them herself ever since, evidently not needing the shadow of a man to win herself a place in society. Her husband’s interests were an old family business of quarries in the north country, which supplied stone to army installations, including the Wall itself. And it was in the north country that the paths of their families had once crossed, she said.

  ‘It’s all family legend,’ she purred. ‘Tittle-tattle. But the legend is that my husband’s remote grandfather, one Brigonius, was the lover of your remote grandmother, Lepidina. But they never married, and had no offspring.’

  ‘And this was when?’

  ‘Two centuries ago. At the time of the famous visit of Emperor Hadrian,’ she said, sipping her wine. ‘And that is how the Prophecy of Nectovelin entered the mythology of my family. I grew up fascinated by the tale. A Prophecy all one’s own. Think of the power! So when I came across Ulpius Cornelius and his not-very-discreet inquiries I was fascinated.’ She glanced somewhat dismissively at his expensive tapestry. ‘It was a thread, I thought, a loose thread in time’s tapestry that I couldn’t resist tugging. And when I did it led me to you, and here we are.’