Empire's End

by Leila Rasheed

  Contents

  Cover

  235 AD

  1. Burying the Past

  208 AD

  2. The Heart of the Storm

  207 AD

  3. A City of Gold

  4. Going Home

  5. Childhood’s End

  208 AD

  6. Cold Marble

  7. The Greatest City in the World

  8. Eagles

  9. The Ghost of a Marriage

  10. Godless

  11. Figs in Winter

  12. Among the Barbarians

  209 AD

  13. Eboracum

  14. Avitoria

  15. The Hairdressers on the Top Floor

  211 AD

  16. Bad News

  17. Snow

  18. A Dream from the Gods

  19. The Return

  20. A Pot of Poison

  21. Emperor’s End

  22. Springs of Sulis

  Epilogue

  Timeline

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  235 AD

  1 .

  Burying the Past

  On a clear day, you can see to the end of the Empire from here.

  It has taken us all morning to ride from our farm up to the top of the cliffs that look out over the harsh northern sea. I’m glad of the two little Silurian ponies we bought last year. Without them, it would be an even longer journey. Even so, I’m tired by the time we get to the cliffs. The wind whips my pony’s rough mane against my skin. It draws stinging tears to my eyes.

  Ahead of me on the other pony, you don’t seem to notice the wind. Perhaps you’re too young to feel pain. Yet you’re sprouting up so fast! I’m used to the speed of growing apple trees and wheat, but the speed a human grows at – that’s a surprise to me. Every year takes you further out of danger; not that we’d ever say that aloud and tempt the gods. The little burial ground near our farm holds too many babies who never breathed and too many little ones their parents had only just dared to name. Nothing is more dangerous out here, near the end of the Empire, than being a child.

  At the edge of the cliff, I rein in my pony and look out to sea. The sea is hardly ever blue here. Sometimes it glints as brightly as the silver box I have strapped to my saddle. But not today. Today the sea is dark as thunderclouds.

  The silver box, too, will turn dark without my careful hands to polish it every day. It was a gift from an empress – the most powerful woman in the world. Even so, I have outlived her and all her heirs. The box already looks as if it comes from a vanished world.

  Your shouts mingle with seagulls’ cries as you canter back and forth, pretending to be a chariot-warrior. You urge your pony down the steep slope, halt it, turn it back again. You have no fear. You don’t know what there is to be afraid of. I itch to tell you to be careful, but I hold my tongue. You need to be fearless. It is a hard life in Britain. No place for cowards.

  “Hail Caesar!” you yell, and wave your spear above your head. I smile; you see nothing strange in moving from playing at British charioteers to saluting the Roman Emperor. That’s your life: one minute you’re a Roman centurion, primus pilus even, the very best soldier of all, and the next you’re Vercingetorix leading the rebels against the Empire. Your blue eyes come from your Brigante grandmother, but your warm smile is just like your Libyan grandfather’s. I wonder who your children, my grandchildren, will look like. I wonder where they will play, and if I will live to see them. At least I will do my best to leave them something to remember me by: this silver box of memories.

  “We should go down to the ruins now,” I tell you. Obedient, you follow me as I ride down the slope. The fallen stone walls have been here so long that the grass has grown over them. We wouldn’t know they were here, if years ago I hadn’t cut a slice of turf and found that the things I thought were rocks were actually the remains of walls.

  The path down is steep. I dismount and lead the pony after me. Once we are in the hollow, no one can see us. We are hidden from the sea. I think, perhaps, if we had been seafaring folk, things might be different. But we are not. We are farmers. We can’t sail away when things get hard.

  The turf has already been cleared. Arcturus did that a few days ago, last time he came to look. He said the ruins were not built by the Brigantes, his mother’s tribe. He said they were much older than that. He said to keep them a secret, because they could come in useful one day.

  One day. We have been thinking of that day, planning for it, since before you were born. But, on the night of the last full moon, I was sure. Now is the time to bury our treasures – in case we have to leave home, fast.

  I lift the box down from the pony’s back. It is wrapped in an old cloth, to shield it from prying eyes. The things inside are my treasures, not your father’s. I know them off by heart.

  A prayer for a child’s safety, written on papyrus grown at the other side of the Empire.

  A gold ring inscribed with two Greek letters: chi and rho.

  A scrap of blue silk stained by seawater.

  A bracelet of black jet from British shores.

  A small golden pot with a lid made to look like a coiled snake: red glass eyes and shining scales, a diamond on its head.

  They have all come so far with me. I refuse to lose them now. Instead, I’ll bury them here. Maybe one day we’ll feel safe enough to dig them up again, and I can tell the stories properly, around the fire as stories should be told.

  I unwrap the silver box for a last look at it. On the lid, there are snakes curling around a staff. It is the staff of Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing. My family have always worshipped him. On the sides, Hercules and Dionysus: gods of the distant east. Dionysus rides a panther. I saw one once, in a cage. I will never forget how its eyes burned like suns. Even on this cold, shivery day I can still feel the ghost of heat from that memory.

  “Can we go now?” you say, fidgeting.

  I place the box into the earth and pack the turf down around it. “We will come back,” I whisper, and I say a short prayer to the spirits of this place, whoever they are. “I promise we will come back.”

  It is as we ride up out of the small valley that you spot them. Your eyes are sharper than mine.

  “Sails!” you yell, and point to the water.

  My heart skips like a stone skimmed across water – then sinks. They are not Roman sails; just the fishing boats. We know these men. I raise a hand in greeting.

  But you have already seen my expression.

  “Mother,” you say, “why do you fear the sea?”

  I fear the sea because enemies come from the sea, I think. But I don’t want to scare you.

  “Oh, just because a long time ago, I was caught in a storm,” I say.

  “Like when Jupiter’s Oak got hit by lightning?” you say, meaning a year ago when a great tree we’ve always used as a landmark was struck. You had nightmares about the blaze for a long time afterwards.

  “Yes, but worse, because this time the storm was at sea.”

  “Storms at sea are not scary,” you say. “You don’t have to go out and bring the animals to shelter. There’s nothing to get burned out there.”

  I remember that you have only ever seen a storm at sea as something far off; spears of light jabbing the shield of the water. You have only ever felt grateful that it stays out there and does not come on to land.

  “Unless you’re on board a ship,” I say.

  “You were on board a ship?” you say. “In a storm? What was that like?”

  I never meant to start telling the story like this, here and now. But as we ride on, I realise that some stories are so big, that, like the ocean, if you think too hard about it you’ll never start swimming. You just have to take a deep breath and jump
in. In medias res, my father would say: right in the middle of the thing. Jump in, and hope you can swim your way out again.

  So as we ride homewards, the huge sea at our back, I take a deep breath and dive into the story.

  208 AD

  2 .

  The Heart of the Storm

  I wanted to die.

  The captain had sent all the passengers below decks when the waves got so high that even the strongest of us could not keep our footing. We had been stuck in our cabin for so long I had lost count of the time. I could hear my father and mother coughing and retching near me. For a long time we had lain in our bunks, sick and shivering with terror, listening to the shouts of the sailors on deck and the ship creaking and groaning all around us.

  “I feel like a British Druid,” my father had moaned, once the ship started pitching as well as rolling, “wrapped up in a bull’s hide for thirty days and thirty nights until I start to sweat poetry.”

  That was the last thing any of us said for a while. We were too ill and frightened to talk, and the ship was being tossed around so much that we could not stand up. It was pitch black except for the flicker of lightning. There was no chance of a lamp in this storm; the flame would only have set light to the ship. Outside the thunder crashed and the wind howled so loud we could no longer hear the captain and the sailors. Every time we rose up on the crest of a wave, I clung to the edge of my bunk, and every time we crashed down again, I thought the ship would break apart around me.

  We were supposed to have been in Britain already. It was supposed to be a short trip across the Mare Britannicum, the strip of sea that separated Gaul and Britain. The fleet had set sail on a fine spring day, with a good wind. It should have taken barely two days to get there. Instead, a few hours into the journey, the first clouds started forming in the sky. I could not believe how fast they moved, like an iron-clad legion closing in on us.

  Rolled about in my bunk, like dice in a hand, I no longer believed in Britain. I was so ill and so delirious that I actually thought it was a lie as so many had said in the beginning; a legendary place of monsters; a dream island that vanished into Hell as soon as you seemed likely to set foot on it. I certainly didn’t believe I would get there. I didn’t believe I’d get anywhere except to the bottom of the sea, where there was no wind and no waves and I was just bones which couldn’t vomit any more.

  Thoughts chased each other madly around my head like charioteers around the Circus Maximus. I knew Neptune was angry when there was a storm, but I couldn’t understand why he was so angry with me. I was just a fourteen-year-old girl. What could I possibly have done? Perhaps, I thought, it’s not me the gods are angry with but some hero whose ship’s path has crossed mine. Maybe I am caught up in the flailing tail of someone else’s story. Perhaps, I thought, I had better try to get up and pray – ask the gods for mercy.

  My father’s hand grasped mine just as I thought that. I realised he was saying my name, over and over again: “Camilla! Camilla!” And then: “Have to get out!”

  My mother grasped my other hand, and they pulled me from my bunk. I was in water, first up to my ankles, then my knees. My father led us towards the steps leading up to the deck – not that easy when the floor did not stay still. By the time we had fumbled our way in darkness to the door, my skirts were swimming around me.

  My father forced the door open. A gust of wind took it and slammed it off its hinges, and a wave crashed down the steps and into the cabin. As I stepped out of the cabin, something heavy slammed into my wrist, and my mother’s hand suddenly slipped from mine. I was left clinging to my father on the flooded deck.

  “Ma!” I screamed. I turned back, but I could not see her anywhere. There was just broken wood, tossed on the water, and lightning-lit waves crashing down on us. I realised our ship was not just sinking – it had already sunk, the deck was below the water, and the waves were tearing it apart like a wild beast tearing at a hunk of meat.

  “Ma!” I tried to scream again, but this time I choked on a mouthful of water. Then I was in the sea, and my feet were kicking water, not wooden boards. In the lightning flashes, I could see other ships, rearing up like monsters around us.

  I knew how to swim. My father had insisted that I learn, that my mother take me to the baths in the morning and let me work out how to paddle myself along. But a warm bath in Leptis Magna was not a freezing cold storm in the Mare Britannicum. I kicked out towards the ships and sank straight down, my dress tangled around my legs like hateful seaweed.

  Stay alive, I told myself as I sank into cold, roaring green water with no bottom to it. Stay alive. Alive. Alive.

  That is all I remember.

  Later, my father told me that we were picked up by a ship from the Classis Britannica, the troop-carriers that ferry soldiers across from Gaul. Those of us who escaped the wreck huddled shivering, caked with salt, on the deck of the ship that had rescued us. The Emperor’s ship had survived the storm and sailed on to Londinium ahead of us. We were ordered to follow.

  After the storm, pieces of our lives were laid out across the calm sea. They floated gently, bobbing up and down, silent survivors. It was as if the gods had fought like squabbling toddlers, snatched what they wanted, then tossed the unwanted toys away. We rescued a crate of drowned chickens, a barrel of fresh water. We pulled shoes and sailcloth from the sea. We pulled bodies from the sea too, bodies who had been people: Callirhoe, the freedwoman whose sharp tongue everyone on board had feared; the twin slave boys who used to bicker all the time and would now be silent forever; Fortuna, a jolly old woman, who had been making her first sea journey, to join her daughter’s family in Londinium. And those were just the ones I recognised.

  We wrapped them all in sailcloth and said prayers over them and tried to comfort their families. Those of us who had survived swapped stories of the horror and the miracles: the Emperor’s chef, from Gaul, with a waistline fattened on wild boar, had survived by clinging to a barrel of his favourite Falernian wine.

  We never found my mother. That blow that separated her hand from mine was the last we ever knew of her.

  “It was the will of the gods,” my father said to me as the mouth of the river drew into sight. In just a few days he had grown a grizzled beard, and his face was all shadows and hollows. “If Aeneas can bear it, so can we.”

  He fell silent. Aeneas, the founder of Rome, escaped from the destruction of Troy but lost his wife, Creusa, on the way through the burning city. Every Roman child knew this story off by heart. I knew it as well as anyone. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, wakes to find that the Greeks have tricked their way into his city and are burning it down around him. He tries to get his family – his wife, Creusa, his old father and his baby son – to safety. But on the way out, he realises Creusa is no longer following him. He turns back to look for her. He desperately searches the city, and finds Creusa – but only her ghost, which slips through his arms when he tries to hug her.

  That story, too, starts with a storm at sea.

  I never told my father, but I used to imagine that Creusa had really escaped and lived on, hidden somewhere from the Greeks. There were hardly any girls or women in the story of Aeneas, after all. But there was no way my mother could have survived the shipwreck. I knew I had to be a brave Roman woman and accept the will of the gods, but within, I felt as hollow as a bronze statue.

  Just before we entered the mouth of the river to sail up to Londinium, a sailor spotted a chest floating on the water. When we hauled it up, it was dripping and already growing barnacles. It turned out to be ours. Inside was my mother’s best blue silk stola. She had bought it just before we went to Rome. We had never seen a dress made of cloth as thin and fine as this. It was like touching a dream. The saleswoman who brought it to our house was full of stories of how it had taken four years to bring it over land and sea from another empire at the far end of the world. When she finally mentioned the price, my mother dropped it as if it were hot, but my father said, “We are going to Rome now, yo
u must dress like a woman of quality,” and he bought it for her. I think she was more pleased than she liked to show.

  The stola was almost all ruined by seawater, but I tore off a piece that rippled like the sea itself. It still smelled of her. I buried my face in it and closed my eyes and tried to imagine that she was there. I felt like Aeneas, trying to hold onto a ghost.

  “You must be strong, daughter,” my father said to me gently. “Death comes when it is time for it to come. To everything its season. Let us not wish for figs in winter.”

  But I did wish for figs. As our ship sailed slowly upriver into Britain, the loneliest and bleakest province of the Empire, I longed – more than I longed for anything except to hear my mother’s voice again – for sweet, juicy fresh figs: a taste of my home that was so far away.

  I glance over at you as we ride down the hill. You’re only seven. Too young for this sad story, perhaps. Your face is serious.

  “I don’t understand. Why did you even come to Britain?” you say. “Why not stay in Rome, where you were born?”

  “I was not born in Rome!” I say. “Don’t you know that? I was born in Leptis Magna.”

  “Leptis Magna?” You shrug. “Where’s that?”

  That’s it, then. I have no choice but to tell you the whole story. Sad and scary as it may be, you have to know where you come from. So I go on. But I choose my words carefully, as if I’m hopping over rocks at the beach, avoiding the slippery dangerous bits.

  207 AD

  3 .

  A City of Gold

  I wasn’t born in Rome. I was born in the city of Leptis Magna, part of the province of Libya. My father’s family were from Rome, but my mother’s family had lived in Leptis Magna since long before the Romans ruled it. We spoke Punic at home, but we read Latin and Greek – and I dreamed in a mixture of all three.

  Leptis Magna perches on the north shore of Africa. It is one of a chain of merchant cities, like Berenice and Apollonia, that got rich on buying and selling. Its gods are Hercules and Dionysus. It’s a city of gold: golden sunlight, golden sandstone and golden coins changing hands in the marketplace.