Empire's End

by Leila Rasheed

  “Ah, a gift from some old boyfriend. I see now. But you worship the gods too, I see by this amulet.”

  I hastily assured her that my devotion to the gods and ancestors of Rome was total. She did not seem overly concerned by the ring, however. Having the amulet – something normal – on me as well as the ring, seemed to reassure her that I was no Christian. If Publius had been asked before the courts if he was a Christian he would not have been able to deny it, and then he would have been executed.

  “Have you heard of Apollonius of Tyana?” she said, handing the ring back to me. “Now he is the one you should be following, not Jesus. He is a true mystic, not a charlatan. He did everything that Jesus claimed to have done, but there are better witnesses to his miracles.”

  “I would be happy to read more of him,” I said, eager to please her.

  “Good, then I will find some writings for you. There is nothing wrong with seeking for truth in many different places. Only don’t forget: gods are important not because they tell us what to do, but because they tell us who we are.” She handed the ring back to me. “And this?” She pointed to the amulet.

  “My old nurse gave it to me. She was from the tribe of the Garamantes.”

  “The desert people,” Julia Domna said. “Did she come with you to Rome?”

  “I think she died of grief rather than leave her home,” I said quietly.

  It was the first time I had ever admitted my thoughts, even to myself. You hide things from yourself because they are too painful to see. Nurse had been the only mother I had really known, closer than my own mother. But she was enslaved. She had become my wet nurse because she had breasts full of milk, for a baby who was not me. Who did she secretly think of when she fed me? Was there a small grave that she did not want to leave behind her? Every so often, in Leptis Magna as well as in other cities, the bodies of those too old and weak and poor to live were pulled from the sea. An old woman, penniless and hunted by the law, could only disappear into death.

  Julia Domna looked at me, her head on one side. I wondered what she hid from herself. I thought of Caracalla and Geta, twitching their tails and muttering curses like rival tomcats.

  “A brave woman then,” she said. “Who died with honour despite being a slave.”

  She must have made up her mind on that carriage ride, because when we stepped out at the palace, she announced it as a fact.

  “Your daughter is too young to marry,” she said to my mother. “She can come to Britain with us, and when we return to Rome I will arrange a husband for her. She can do better than Publius.”

  My mother opened her mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing she could say. It was not a question, it was a statement by the most powerful woman in the world.

  “You are favoured,” she said to me when we were alone. “The Empress herself takes an interest in you.”

  Yes, I thought, as the eagle takes an interest in the chicken!

  I told my father the truth about what had happened.

  “You did the right thing,” he said with a frown. “I am disappointed in Publius.”

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” I begged him. “They would kill him – and Christians don’t eat human flesh. He said they don’t, and I believe him!”

  He smiled sadly. “No, they don’t eat human flesh. But they are required to believe through faith, not through the arguments of philosophy. And that is a dangerous path, which leads far from Rome.”

  That night, I went to my apartments and removed my rich clothes and my jewels. I undid my tight, uncomfortable hairstyle. Outside my window, I could see one of the many pools filled with fish, flicking their tails, swimming back and forth, without ever being able to find a way out of their prison. Water and light rippled on white marble.

  When I had changed into simpler clothes, I sat down at the window. In the light of the setting sun, I took off Nurse’s amulet. I had only ever taken it off to change the string before. The prayer itself was contained inside a hollow reed, sealed with red wax.

  I dug my nail into the wax. The reed cracked open. There was no going back now, although my chest felt tight and painful. I broke open the reed and a thin scrap of papyrus came curling out. There was faded writing on it. I hadn’t been sure I would understand it, for the priests of Isis used strange symbols sometimes, but I was lucky: this prayer was written in Greek. I read it carefully.

  It was what Nurse had said it was – a prayer to keep a baby safe from harm. But it was not a prayer for me.

  It was not my name written on the papyrus. It was a stranger’s.

  Now I knew the truth. It had never been meant for me at all. I was second-best. All my life, I had been wearing a good-luck charm that Nurse had bought not for me but for her own baby, who had died just before I was born. The dead child had left me an inheritance of her mother’s milk – and this amulet.

  We must treat bad news and good news exactly the same, I said to myself silently. I looked up and out of the window at the sun setting over the Palatine Hill. Tears pricked behind my eyes, but I thought of all the Stoic philosophers I had ever read. What would Marcus Aurelius say? After all, we are all going to die soon, so what is the sense of weeping? It helped, in that it made everything seem so miserable that I couldn’t decide what to cry about first, so in the end I didn’t cry at all. Instead, I watched blankly through the window as a slave came out of the shadows, carrying a long net, which he dipped unhurriedly into the gilded water to snare a fish for the Emperor’s dinner.

  11.

  Figs in Winter

  The wind rustles the long grass and a distant lonely bird calls. It’s cold and quiet and so, so far from Rome.

  I’ve talked myself into the past, and it seems strange to me to think that Britain has been my home for twenty years and more now. People I love have been born here; people I love have died here. Is that what makes a place a home? Or will home always be the place I grew up in, the city I will never go back to – Leptis Magna?

  I could do it. If I really wanted to, I could go back. Just a few weeks and I would be standing on the quay at Leptis Magna, the sun warming my body through to the bone. I would be looking up at the lighthouse’s trail of smoke, listening to the old familiar accents of the sailors and traders working the harbour, mingling with the snarl of caged beasts on their way to Rome. And the smells! Bread doesn’t smell the same here as it does at home, and fish sauce doesn’t taste the same.

  “Well?” you say behind me. “What happened next, Ma?”

  And I know I can’t leave. Because I know that as I stood looking up at the lighthouse, I would be missing, to the very bone, everything about Britain. I would miss the cool rain in the air, the soft change of the light. I would miss your laughter as you play outside, and your father grumbling to himself as he struggles with some leaky window frame or warped wheel rim he’s trying to fix. He’s always trying to make this place better, for me and for you. When I came here, it was built of wood. He turned it into stone for me. He even laid a mosaic floor, so I could close my eyes and pretend I was barefoot at home. Not that it worked. Mosaics here are always cold and damp.

  “Next,” I say, swallowing down my sadness. “Next, we set out for Britain. We travelled over the sea to Spain, then up through Gaul. It was a long way. The Emperor was in such pain that he could not travel in a carriage; he had to be carried in a litter the whole way. It was a long, dusty journey and when we got to the coast, and we could tell ourselves we saw the shores of Britain ahead of us, we were so happy because we thought that it was nearly the end of our journey. The Classis Britannica was there, the fleet that ferried soldiers over the short gap of sea to Britain, and we thought we couldn’t be safer.”

  “But then there was the storm,” you say.

  “Yes, then there was the storm.” Even now it is hard to think of it without feeling sick.

  “When my grandmother drowned.”

  “Yes. When we got to Britain, we were not a family any more – we we
re like an arch when one stone falls down and the rest tumble after it.”

  “Was there no grave for my grandmother?” you ask. You look serious – you know how important it is to be remembered.

  “We put up a memorial. For all I know it is still there – in the port, at Londinium.”

  London was larger than I expected, more Roman than I expected. We stood on the deck and watched as the long stone walls slid into view. The eagle standards, symbol of the Empire, flew above everything. The sludgy river carried us past banks where wooden houses and fishing boats huddled. Children with strange, reddened skins ran and played on the bank, shouting to each other in the odd, bird-like languages of British tribes. But as we docked we heard the sound of Latin, mixed with Punic and Gaulish and other, stranger languages. It was not so different from Leptis Magna, after all. It was a Roman city, with all the things a Roman city should have. There was a lighthouse and a temple to Jupiter, and further in we could see the forum and the basilica. Of course, it was not Rome. It was more built of wood than of stone, but you felt you were in the Empire. It was only the heavy grey cloud above and the sense that there was damp everywhere, unseen, in the air, that troubled me. My woollen cloak already felt water-logged. The cloud pressed down on my spirits. Where was the sun?

  “There is the Emperor’s ship,” my father said, pointing to the great mast that towered over all the other ships.

  The imperial family were nowhere in sight, but I could tell by the glint on gilded eagle standards where they must be. The soldiers were thickest there, like a moving forest of iron.

  The sailors threw down the gangplank. I tugged my woollen cloak tighter around me. I turned to look for my mother and just like the sun, she wasn’t there. Despite the lurch in my stomach, I walked down the gangplank with my father and, just like that, we were in Britain. I was not expecting to have to get used to being on land again. My legs wobbled and I almost fell. My father caught me. I could see in his face he was worried about me.

  “We will get a litter for you,” he told me, “and a maid.” He glanced around, trying like me, to make sense of where we were. Although the huge, busy, bustling port was reassuringly Roman, we saw a host of exotic tribesmen, with pale skins and long blond or reddish hair, striding here and there. Barbarians! I thought, fascinated. Some of them had blue eyes, which I found disturbing – no eye should be so pale.

  The captain of our ship was speaking to a centurion with a narrow, bronzed face and one eye missing, puckered into a scar. The centurion glanced towards us now and then as they spoke. Then he walked over to us, removed his helmet and nodded to my father.

  “Ave! I am Marcus Caecilius Naso, one of the Emperor’s personal guards. I have been sent by the Emperor to act as your escort. No doubt you will wish to rest after your long journey.”

  “Thanks to the Emperor,” my father replied gratefully. “Please show us somewhere my daughter can rest. I must replenish the stores of medicines I lost in the wreck – and I must also sacrifice to the gods in memory of my poor wife.”

  “Of course,” Marcus said, looking sympathetic. “Follow me.”

  As we walked, Marcus asked: “Do you have any questions?” It was directed at my father, but also at me, in a polite sort of way.

  I looked around us at the bustling port. I should have questions, I thought. I should have all kinds of intelligent, insightful questions. I should be interested in the barbarian ways, in the peoples of Britain and the campaign of the Emperor. My father was already asking about where he could get bitumen and foxgloves and other ingredients for his medicine chest. But I couldn’t think of any questions, except one, which I knew was probably going to make me sound stupid. I pulled my woollen cloak closer around my shoulders and asked it anyway, as soon as there was a space in their conversation.

  “When will it be summer?”

  My father and Marcus gaped at me.

  “This is summer,” said Marcus.

  Then they both burst out laughing. I was right. It had made me sound stupid, and my heart sank at the thought that the sun was never coming back. This might be summer for Britain, I thought, but it was winter for me. Without the sun it could never be anything but winter. But I laughed along with them anyway, because it was good to see my father smiling, even if it was only out of surprise, for the first time since we lost my mother.

  We went to a stonemason who worked in a street by the river. He sold tombstones that were already carved with the right portraits: for women, for men and for children. I found myself staring at one that was carved with a whole family group: mother, father and two children. The stonemason followed my gaze.

  “Cheaper than having one each,” he explained cheerfully. “You buy it for the first of you to go, and pop the others under the same stone when it’s their time.”

  The stone was local stuff and my father worried about it. Was British stone good enough for my mother? Would it last?

  “Don’t worry about it,” the stonemason told him. “Fifty years I’ve been doing this work. I’ve never had a memorial fall down yet. This limestone will outlast the Empire!” And he gave it a hefty blow with his dusty hand, as if to prove it.

  We took his word for it. We had to, after all. We bought a ready-made tombstone for a woman, and my father dictated a short inscription that the stonemason’s apprentice chiselled onto it.

  Dis Manibus: to the spirits of the departed.

  Marcia Numidia, who lived 39 years, seven

  months and six days. Neptune took her.

  She was a good wife and a good mother.

  It didn’t seem enough to me, but what else was there to say? The stonemason charged for each letter. I didn’t like the fact that it could be any woman on the stone, but again, we had no choice. Our orders were to accompany the Emperor to Eboracum the very next day. There was no time to get the perfect memorial stone. Nothing was happening the way I had expected it to.

  The stone was set up just outside the city walls, and my father poured a libation in front of it and we said a prayer.

  I closed my eyes and prayed before the memorial in the cold wind of a strange land that still felt unsteady beneath my feet. Please, gods, be kind to her spirit.

  “Camilla! Camilla!”

  Mother was calling me, her voice high and urgent. She stood by a spring, which gushed water over bare, cold, grassy British hills. But the water was frozen and there was ice on the rocks.

  “Ma!”

  She stretched out her arms to me, and I ran towards her. But as soon as I threw my arms around her, she vanished like smoke or mist. I fell forwards – and woke with a start.

  The light was all wrong; dreary and damp. Was I still dreaming? I rolled upright from the bed, and the hollow, sick feeling in my stomach was there before I realised why it was there: it was a dream – my mother was dead. I was in a room in the mansio, the inn of the port where all the weary travellers first went to collapse when they landed from the river. My father had told me to rest while he went out to the market to get medicines.

  And yet I still ran downstairs in case somehow, somehow. . . because dreams come from the gods, after all.

  I came out into the courtyard, blinking and confused. By the looks of things it was late in the day, but although the sun was hidden behind thick veils of clouds the light still stayed around, like a guest that wouldn’t leave. I noticed I was not the only one who was slinking around, glancing at the heavy grey sky mistrustfully as if, like the Gauls, they feared it would one day fall on their heads. I was expecting everything to be different, but the voices and the houses and the shops around me were the same, like Rome. What was different were the things I wasn’t expecting to change. The light. And my mother. She was not there, though her voice had sounded so real.

  I still couldn’t quite believe she was really gone. Already the storm felt like a bad dream. I kept expecting her to come around the corner, just a little delayed, breathless, anxious and saying: “Now you are soon to be married. . .” But
she was not there.

  Instead, I spotted Marcus striding across the courtyard and ran after him.

  “Where is my father?” I said in a voice that was practically a panicked shriek.

  He looked at me startled. At once, I felt embarrassed for throwing myself in his path like this. He already had plenty of work to do, after all – how could he also be expected to look after a lost, confused girl?

  “With the Emperor, long may he live. We are setting out today for Eboracum.”

  I nodded, though I had no idea where or what Eboracum was. As long as I was with my father, I was sure everything would be all right.

  “What should I do?” I asked, hoping to sound more sensible.

  “I should gather your possessions together and make ready to leave, miss.” He was looking over my shoulder. A moment later, he was gone, striding away to handle another emergency or crisis.

  I rushed back to my room. My things were few and easily put in their box. Should I pack my father’s things? I wondered. Slaves had always done things like this for us. I had never expected to wash up in Britain like flotsam. I felt suddenly that I wanted to do it myself. At least then I would have some control over what happened.

  My father’s razor, his togas and books, all went into the box. I hesitated over his wax writing tablet: should I touch that? Was it private? I put it in, trying not to look at it in case there was some writing showing on the wax. Then I closed up his medicine box and sat on his trunk, my heart beating hard. He will come back for his things, I thought. He wouldn’t be able to leave me behind.

  A few moments later, my father raced in. He stopped and stared at me in confusion.

  “I am ready,” I told him.

  “So I see!” He shook his head. “Very well, go to the Empress. She has kindly said you may travel in her carriage.”

  I was not sure how I felt about that, but I did as I was told. The Empress had never been anything but kind to me, but she was also terrifying. The most powerful woman in the world could not avoid being terrifying, but Julia Domna was more than just the Emperor’s wife. She gave the impression that she could have run the Empire quite well on her own.