Empire's End

by Leila Rasheed

  I went. Aisopos was an elderly lame Ethiop who looked after the Empress’s petty cash. I had treated him for fever before, on several occasions. He was clearly as doubtful as I was of the wisdom of sending me to find a hairdresser, but there was no going against the Empress’s orders. I put on my heavy shoes and cloak for the streets and, with Aisopos following close behind me, set out into Eboracum in search of someone who could do hair the way they did it in Rome.

  Where should I look for a hairdresser? I wondered. I turned away from the smelly, noisy streets where the potters and the smiths and the leatherworkers lived, and instead headed towards the forum. I led the way hesitantly, occasionally glancing at Aisopos in hopes of a hint. I didn’t want to ask him – after all he was the slave, I was supposed to be in charge – but he caught my eye. I raised my eyebrows hopefully, and he widened his and looked completely blank. Clearly he too had no idea where to find a high-class hairdresser in a city full of soldiers.

  I prayed under my breath to Fortune to guide my footsteps, and she must have listened, for as I passed the marketplace, I ran full-tilt into a blonde girl, who cried out and dropped the basket she was carrying. Out clattered hairpins, polished mirrors, combs, ribbons, false hair, and all kinds of other things.

  “Fool of a child!” she burst out, and then spotted the richness of my dress and the fact I was followed by a slave. Her eyes widened and she ducked down as if to avoid a blow, and hastily collected her things back into her basket.

  “You’re a hairdresser!” I exclaimed.

  “One of the best,” she replied cautiously. “I belong to Theodora.”

  I had no idea who Theodora was, though I did think it was an unusual name – Greek. I did not care, however. I grabbed all her fallen goods and returned them to the basket as fast as I could. Baffled, she stared at me.

  “Come with me,” I told her. “If you’re really as good as you say, the Empress will make you and your mistress rich, and I hope I will live another day!”

  We hurried back through the streets to the palace. She had seemed a little doubtful at first, but a coin from Aisopos had convinced her that whoever we were, we could pay. The girl was older than me, I guessed, but not by many years. I noticed she was pretty, and she was polite and obedient, but there was a sadness in her face that nothing I said to reassure her seemed to cut through – there was a dullness in her eyes, which were the blue of a spring sky. Her name was Avitoria.

  We burst triumphantly – well, Aisopos and I were triumphant – into the portico of the palace, and the doors opened for us. We crossed the courtyard and I went into the Empress’s apartments. I heard Geta’s voice from outside and hesitated.

  “But, Mother, I have no idea how to answer this peasant,” he was saying, petulantly. “Does an emperor worry about who owns some miserable strip of land not even fit for farming? Why should I waste my time on this?”

  “Because, my son, this is the business of governing the Empire,” the Empress said patiently. “One day, you and your brother will do this together.”

  Geta’s snort was audible through the panels of the door, and I stepped back hastily. “Together! I will do nothing together with that man. I know that he has been taken off to the North because the soldiers prefer me – to try and make him look like a soldier when we all know he’s nothing but a murderer who cannot control his passions.”

  “Geta!” The Empress’s voice was sharp. Halfway through her next sentence Geta yanked the door open and strode out. I was glad I had moved aside. He stormed off and I dared to lead Avitoria inside.

  Luckily, she was as good as she had promised. Her fingers flew through the Empress’s hair as skilfully as a woman weaving a patterned cloth, and the frown on the Empress’s face softened, line by line erasing as the waves were smoothed out and plumped up and curled. When the glittering crown of hairpins was finally perfect, she stood up with a smile.

  “You may tell your mistress you will serve me from now on,” she told the slave girl. “Every day, be here before daybreak.”

  Avitoria bowed in acknowledgement. Our eyes met and I smiled at her, thrilled to have succeeded in the task for the Empress, but she just looked back at me without returning the smile, her eyes flat, as if long ago a veil had dropped over them that she had decided never to raise again.

  “Why did you smile at her? She was just a slave,” you say.

  It shocks me a little. We have two slaves on the farm, Caledonians born into slavery. I think we treat our slaves well – we feed them the same food we eat, we free them when we can and they are never beaten. They can live together, have possessions, have children. Almost every slave we have freed has chosen to stay here, to farm the pieces of land we have given them. My father always taught me that to free a slave without giving them a means of feeding themselves is just a slow way of murdering them.

  But enslaved is still enslaved.

  “I suppose I was lonely,” I say. “There was no one else of my age around, and. . .” I tail off.

  “It doesn’t matter,” you say, bored already. “What happened next?”

  I look down the hill. Avitoria was a Caledonian. But she had not been born into slavery. She knew what it was like to live free.

  I take a deep breath and go on with the story.

  15.

  The Hairdressers on the Top Floor

  Yes, it was stupid, but I tried to be friends with Avitoria.

  At home, you see, I had grown up alongside the children of trusted slaves who knew they would be freed in due course. But now I was living at the court of the most powerful and sophisticated and cruel people in the Empire. I had lost my home, my mother, given my childhood doll to the gods. My father might never come back. I was a toy for Julia Domna – I amused her by reading to her, by holding her wool while she wove, by taking dictation of her less important notes, by listening for hours on end to her telling me about the life of mystics of the East. She believed in magic and ate up stories of miracles hungrily. Every day she worshipped Heliogabalus, the sun god of the mountains, whose priestess she was. Geta too joined in these rites. Myself, I longed for our own household gods. I did my devotions to the household gods of the Emperor, but it was not the same.

  Over the months that passed, letters came often from my father, written on sheets of wood. That was strange to me; I had expected them on wax tablets. The Empress’s censors read them first, as usual, but then passed them on to me. They would not have found them disturbing. My father wrote kindly, with lots of Stoic morals and recommended reading, and I wrote back reassuringly, and nothing was said or asked about how the campaign in the North was progressing. In the Empress’s household, I was supposed to be safe and looked after – and I was in a way; I lacked for nothing, not food or drink or clothes. But I was often forgotten completely, like a pet that does not really belong to anyone. One day, it was my birthday, and no one noticed.

  “Avitoria!” I called her as she came out of the Empress’s room. She looked at me, startled.

  “Today is my birthday,” I told her. “Will you share some honey cakes with me after you finish dressing the Empress’s hair? It will be fun!” I hesitated as I saw she did not seem pleased or excited. If anything, she looked frightened and worried.

  “Do you fear your mistress?” I asked kindly. “I will come back with you if you like, if the Empress allows it, and speak to her.”

  She did smile then, finally.

  “You are kind to me,” she said slowly, in her strange Caledonian accent.

  I shrugged, feeling awkward. To be told I was kind reminded me that she was not Livia. It made me uncomfortable.

  Taking a household slave with me, I went with Avitoria through the streets of Eboracum. Until now, I had not given a thought to where Avitoria lived. She led me away from the forum, down narrow, dirty streets, where rainwater pooled in front of rooms that backed onto the shops and taverns. People watched curiously and I began to feel uncomfortable.

  Avitoria stopped by a smal
l door and knocked. A stray cat slipped by my ankles, and I jumped. I heard footsteps from inside. Avitoria called out in a language I did not understand.

  The door was opened hesitantly by another woman, who looked to be from the same tribe as her. They exchanged whispers and glanced at me uncertainly. I blushed. I had begun to realise I had done something foolish. The imperial household slave stood primly by the door, clearly thinking I was as foolish as I thought myself.

  After a few moments, a tall, elegant woman, about the age my mother had been when she died, came to the door. She wore a worried frown, but I was astonished when she greeted me in the language of my own city, Punic. On her wrist she wore two bangles: one white ivory, one black jet.

  I fumbled the words at first, it having been so long since I had spoken it, and she switched easily to Greek. Her name was Theodora and Avitoria was her slave.

  “Do you have no mother, child?” she said, looking at me with sympathy as she led me into the house.

  The words made tears well up and I had to swallow. It had been a long time since I had been asked about my mother.

  I quickly saw that the two rooms Avitoria and the other slaves shared with their mistress were smaller than my own apartments. Theodora offered me food and drink, and out of good manners I had to accept, although I could see she had something on her mind and would have preferred me to go. She kept glancing towards the back room, as if there was something there that troubled her.

  She told me she was a Greek freedwoman from Apollonia, who had married a Gaulish soldier. After he had died she had had to support herself and had a knack for copying hairstyles easily. Now she owned several slaves, like Avitoria, whom she had taught to dress hair with the same skill she had.

  “I have been busy since the Empress arrived here,” she said with a smile. “Everyone wants their hair to be just like hers!”

  From the back room came a moan of pain.

  “Is someone ill?” I asked.

  “One of my girls dropped a glass jar and has hurt her foot badly,” she explained. “We have bound up the wound, but she is in a lot of pain. Forgive her, miss.”

  “May I see?” I asked.

  Theodora looked startled. “If you wish.”

  I went to the bedroom and greeted the girl who was lying on the bed. The bandage was already coming undone, and as soon as I saw it I knew I would have to do something. I had never treated a wound like this before, but I had seen my father do it often enough.

  “Can you bring me old wine and clean linen cloths?” I said to Theodora. I began unwrapping the bandage. Theodora looked as if she was going to object, but Avitoria quickly whispered in her ear, and she nodded.

  I undid the bandage, talking calmly and reassuringly to the girl as I did so. Her name was Vitia and she was an Ethiop, like Aisopos. We were able to talk about the port of Leptis Magna, where she had been bought by the Gaulish captain of a ship. I saw at once that the wound was cut across the muscle, and not downwards. My heart sank. It would never heal like this.

  “It needs stitching,” I told Theodora as soon as she came back. “Do you have clean cat gut and a needle?”

  Vitia flinched back, her eyes wide with fear. As soon as she understood that the muscles would not join up properly without the stitches, however, she bravely prepared herself. I gave her as much of the wine to drink as she needed to dull her pain, and used the rest to clean the wound. Then, forcing my fingers not to shake, I quickly put in four stitches to seal the wound up.

  “There!” I said cheerfully, tying a knot. My father had told me how important it was to make the patient feel that all was well. “All done and it will soon heal as good as new now.”

  I was relieved when Vitia slipped into a deep, exhausted sleep, with no fever. But I had not expected Theodora’s gratitude. She kissed my hands, and I felt embarrassed. I had only done what my father had shown me.

  “The slaves are like my daughters,” she told me. “I was once like them. When I die, I want them to go free, but not to beg their bread – as skilled hairdressers they can earn their own living.”

  Theodora begged me to come to her house whenever I could, after that. I agreed – as long as the Empress did not need me. The girls caught fevers and other illnesses as regularly as anyone – but if they were ill, they could not work, she could not earn, and no one ate. They were so grateful to find someone who would treat them for free that they soon forgot how young I was. And I was not so young after all, any more. As the weeks turned into months, I worried more and more about what would become of me. What if my father never came back from the North?

  It was at Theodora’s house that I met Arcturus.

  I arrived one day with Ganymede, a young slave of Theodora’s. He and Avitoria had taken a liking to each other and spent their time whispering and giggling together. It irritated me, but I put up with it because I could not walk through the streets without an escort. I wanted Avitoria to notice me, not Ganymede, who made her blush and brought a little sparkle to her veiled blue eyes. I knew it was foolish of me and that made me even crosser – with myself and with Avitoria. She did not even seem to notice, and that was even more irritating. Still, my heart fluttered whenever I heard her voice as she came to open the door for us.

  This time, however, it was not Avitoria who opened the door, but a strange boy a few years older than me. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed, and to my surprise he was dressed like a farmer, not in an elegantly draped toga but in those odd, bulky trousers that Celts like, with a birrus Britannicus, a hooded cloak that was popular with the barbarians, worn over it. I have never been good at disguising my feelings – everything shows on my face. I must have smirked. He scowled and called: “Theodora!” He had the voice of a farmer too, made for yelling across fields at cows, and a strong British accent.

  “My brother-in-law’s son, Arcturus,” Theodora explained as she came to join us. “He has come into town to sell some heifers.”

  Cows – so I had been right.

  “I think the young lady can see I’m not usually to be found in the theatre or admiring the sound of my own voice in the basilica,” said Arcturus dryly.

  “I am certainly not used to seeing men without a toga,” I retorted, feeling a bit stung, as the theatre and the basilica described my father well.

  “A toga is a lovely garment, but a little impractical for ploughing a muddy field or tramping through undergrowth after a lost sheep,” he replied.

  “True, it’s meant for civilisation,” I said. His air of superiority was annoying. What did he have to swagger about? He still had mud on his boots, after all. And I could definitely smell the farmyard.

  “Ah yes, I always forget how you Romans love cities,” he answered. “Strange, for your wealth all comes from the countryside.”

  “You are Roman too,” Theodora put in, clearly concerned by the fact that we had just met and were instantly, it seemed, arguing.

  “British-Roman!” said Arcturus firmly. I did know what he meant. I felt like a provincial too, as foreign in Rome as I was in Britain. But I couldn’t understand why he was so obsessed with the countryside. There was nothing there – just bleak, wild, boring danger. Everything that mattered was in the cities.

  He left soon after that. Theodora looked weary and worried, and I asked her if it was something to do with Arcturus. She smiled and shook her head.

  “He really is a good boy,” she told me. “He comes every time he visits town to check that I am all right. He just dislikes cities so much – he is happiest on his farm.”

  “It must be a special place,” I said, trying to make up for my behaviour. I did feel I had been rude.

  “It is, but hard to make a living – it’s not like Italy, where crops grow so easily. There’s little sun and the wind cuts through you to the bone. It’s in Brigante country, north of here – his mother is from the Brigante tribe and his father is the brother of my dead husband. They have been there twenty years since Gaius received his pension and la
nd, and settled down there. His father is still working for the Empire in a sense – guarding his wife’s relatives in case they revolt.”

  That was all we said about Arcturus. But now and then I bumped into him, on market day, and though we rarely exchanged more than a few casual words we smiled more often, as if wanting to make up for the unpleasant way in which we had met.

  211 AD

  16.

  Bad News

  The Emperor had been in the North for more than a year. We heard regular news, which was reassuring in one way – the Caledonians and Maetae had been roundly driven back, and the Antonine Wall had been retaken. The defences were being rebuilt on Hadrian’s Wall. We were safe. But what I heard in the gossip at the market was another matter.

  I was with Avitoria, going to her mistress’s house to let the blood of a Gaulish slave who was anxious to have it done. I had only done blood-letting once before, and I was very nervous, knowing how easily it could go wrong. So, when Avitoria suddenly stopped still, eyes wide, I was cross with her.

  “What is it? Have you seen your love, Ganymede?” I said crossly.

  She threw me a glance of such bitterness that I was silent. “Listen,” she hissed at me.

  I listened, but all I heard was the babble of British words, as there often was on market day. The Ordovices, the Brigantes, the Catuvellauni – all had different accents and dialects, and it was exhausting to listen to so many conversations that I did not understand. I did pick out some words though: ‘Caledonians’, ‘massacre’, and – I shivered – ‘Caracalla’.

  I took Avitoria’s hand and together we moved slowly and unnoticed through the crowd, just a young woman out shopping with her slave. I could feel the blood pulsing in her wrist, too fast. I stopped by one of the public water spouts and she drank deeply. Her face was pale.