Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  Nepos held up his hand. ‘We’ll discuss the practical consequences later. I think we all agree that some system such as this will be necessary. Now, Sabinus, concerning your legate’s objections about the gates—’

  Sabinus directed their attention to another corner of his sketch. ‘It is clearly impractical to have the major forts set back from the line of the Wall, and to have crossing points so narrow as the mile-forts. The solution is clear. We must build new forts, each large enough to house an auxiliary unit, along the line of the Wall itself.’ He showed a sketch of a fort, the classic rectangular shape lying astride the line of the Wall. ‘You can see that half the fort’s gates will give directly into the northern area, giving it the equivalent of six mile-fort gates. The unit will be able to deploy immediately from its fort into the north.’

  Nepos glanced at Tullio. ‘Prefect? Will this do?’

  Tullio shrugged. ‘The northern walls of the forts will be vulnerable—’

  Annius said cheerfully, ‘You can fix that. A few pits with stakes would do the job. But this will cut the number of crossing-points in the Wall. The locals will resent it.’

  Nepos eyed him. ‘The locals just tried to burn the Wall down, soldier. Let them resent.’

  Tullio growled, ‘Sir, you told me to bring this project in on time, within your governorship. We already had to make compromises–the turf sections for a start. Now to build these new forts–how many, tribune?’

  ‘Twelve,’ the Roman said smoothly.

  ‘Twelve, then—’

  Sabinus added, ‘And I’d advise rebuilding the turf sections in stone while you’re at it. A mix of turf and stone in the long run will only invite attacks along the more vulnerable turf section.’

  Tullio laughed. ‘Yes, let’s chuck that in too! Look, governor—’

  Nepos said, ‘I know, Tullio, I know. Before we accept the inevitability of a rescheduling, is there any way we can speed things up? What if we reduce the width of the stone curtain, for instance? Does it have to be ten feet? What if were eight feet, or six? Wouldn’t that do?…’

  They began to talk around such time-saving compromises. Sabinus expertly made himself the centre of the technical discussion, excluding Xander and his sponsor Severa. Xander rolled his eyes in mute horror at this destruction of his vision.

  Brigonius was more interested in Severa. As the scope of the project changed before her eyes, she was clearly losing any control over events she might once have had. Not that anybody had any sympathy for her; she had made too many enemies for that. But Brigonius wondered what was going on behind her cold, bitter face.

  At last Nepos sat back. ‘Well, I think we have a solution, for all but one of our problems: the timescale. Tullio?’

  Tullio sighed. ‘I don’t imagine the Emperor will assign me the Rhine legions to finish the job?’

  Nepos smiled. ‘You’re an honest man. I don’t want you to commit yourself until you’re ready. But we’re talking of years more, aren’t we?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

  Nepos tapped his teeth. ‘So whatever the future holds the Wall will no longer be my problem–or my glory. Well.’ He stood stiffly. ‘I had better begin composing my letter to the Emperor. Good day to you all.’

  As he left, the others gathered up their belongings. Everybody was silent, sullen.

  But Tullio slapped Brigonius on the back. ‘I don’t know why you’re looking so serious, Brittunculus,’ he said. ‘Seems to me the governor has just ordered an awful lot more of your stone.’

  XVIII

  It took another month for the final act of the rebellion’s aftermath to play itself out.

  The execution was to take place outside the camp at Banna. Everybody within half a day’s walk of the place was summoned to attend, as were the leaders of the civitas.

  At the appointed hour Brigonius walked out of the camp. He joined a dismal gathering, a hundred people or so, men, women and children, gathered around the cross on the ground. The August day was unusually warm: it was a Roman heat, Karus said, a heavy heat that flattened your lust and puddled your thinking, the heat of the conquerors.

  To Brigonius’s surprise, Severa joined him, with Karus. ‘I wasn’t expecting you two. I didn’t know you had a taste for such a spectacle.’

  ‘I certainly don’t,’ Karus said, his face grey. ‘I see it as duty, of a grim sort. It is sometimes my role to argue for the death penalty. I think I should remind myself from time to time what that entails.’

  Severa was expressionless, wrapped in a white cloak. ‘As for me, I thought I should drain the dregs of a foolish disturbance which did so much damage to my ambitions. I thought that my daughter might be here, however. After all she worships a god who died in such a manner. You’d think she would see this as part of her theological education.’

  ‘You’re too hard on the girl,’ Karus murmured. ‘This isn’t the place for her, you know. You’re crushing her spirit.’

  ‘I know my own daughter, I think.’

  Karus regarded her. ‘Once I admired you. I lusted after you–I’m sure you knew it. And your mind astonished me; your gaze pierced centuries. But perhaps your aloofness from history has leached you of your humanity, Severa. Perhaps you have something of the Weaver’s manipulative coldness in your heart…’ But his words tailed away, and Severa’s glare held only contempt for this man who had been her closest ally.

  As for Brigonius, he had nothing to say to Severa. Somehow the company of this vicious, thrusting woman felt appropriate on this awful day.

  There was a disturbance. Brigonius turned to see a detail of soldiers dragging a prisoner out of the camp. They towered over him; he was only a boy. Brigonius and his companions had to step back to allow the party through. For a moment the boy’s glance met Brigonius’s. It was Similis, Tullio’s British slave. The boy seemed to recognise Brigonius, who had once thanked him for bringing him a drink. Then the moment was lost, the link between their souls broken.

  The soldiers briskly pushed the boy to the ground. They strapped his arms to his cross. Then they laid one foot over the other, and to pin both feet to the cross upright, drove a long iron nail through them. The sound was extraordinary, like a skewer driven into a side of pork. The boy stayed silent; he panted hard, panicky. Brigonius had heard that there was comparatively little pain associated with the nailing, oddly. With a grunting effort the soldiers raised the cross, and pushed its base into a hole in the ground. As the cross was jolted into position, Brigonius thought he heard the flesh in the boy’s feet tear. Now the screaming began.

  ‘Oh, have mercy!’ Karus said, but it was a whisper, too quiet for the soldiers to hear.

  Severa said bleakly, ‘Mercy? The suffering is necessary. Not for him and the crime he committed, but for us, so we will not transgress in future.’

  ‘But he didn’t commit a crime,’ Karus blustered. ‘That’s what’s so monstrously unfair about it!’

  The boy’s guilt or otherwise didn’t matter, Brigonius knew. Severa was right about that. The rebellion had been broken up, its leaders punished. But for the soldiers at Banna one loose thread had remained. Nobody had been found who had supported Matto in his strike at the very heart of their camp, nobody who had ordered him to do it, nobody who had helped him. The soldiers couldn’t bear the idea that one individual acting alone could have penetrated so far into a base they thought of as secure. So somebody had to be blamed, a conspiracy concocted. And there, conveniently, was a Brigantian boy serving the prefect himself. Some whispered he had been seen at the gate when Matto arrived, or at the headquarters building before it was torched, or—

  ‘All lies,’ Karus moaned. An empathetic man for a lawyer, Brigonius thought; he felt the boy’s agony himself. ‘All rumours, misunderstandings–a will to see blame where none exists!’

  Brigonius put a hand on his shoulder. ‘For once Severa is right. His suffering is necessary; it is closure. Let’s just be grateful it isn’t one of us.’

 
; Karus spat on the ground, an uncharacteristically crude gesture. ‘Sometimes you are too pragmatic, Brigonius. This may be necessary but it isn’t for me.’ He stalked off, and Severa, her face unreadable, followed.

  Blood dripped steadily from Similis’s feet. If he let himself hang from his arms, so sparing his torn feet, he couldn’t breathe. But if he tried to raise himself on his feet so he could get some air, the tearing got worse. So he jerked and struggled, shifting his weight from one source of pain to another, his movements minute but agonised.

  As the boy fought to stay alive, one by one the crowd drifted away. Brigonius felt he ought to stay, though he wasn’t sure why.

  When people called him ‘pragmatic’, he had learned, it was meant as an insult. He didn’t think of himself as cowardly, or a traitor to his ancient nation. He could see very clearly how the Romans brought unhappiness to many–and misery or death to those who opposed them. It was just that he couldn’t imagine any way of striking at the Romans that would do anybody any good. Surely Matto’s futile gesture proved that. But that didn’t make him feel any better as he stood here and watched an innocent child die on a cross.

  The boy’s whimpering quieted and he fell into unconsciousness. As darkness gathered, one of the soldiers who stood at the foot of the cross, taking pity, smashed the boy’s legs with the hilt of his sword, and the boy’s body slumped further. Unable to support himself, he would surely soon be dead of asphyxiation. But his body would hang there until the crows had his flesh.

  Brigonius turned and walked back into the camp.

  XIX

  The letter from Lepidina was a slip of wood covered in her own rounded, still girlish handwriting. She had returned to Britain from Rome, she said, and would visit the Wall. She said that her mother was coming too–indeed, the purpose of her visit was somehow connected with Severa.

  And so Brigonius was going to see Lepidina again. He was shocked to reflect that since the fateful day of the Decision, when before governor Nepos the Wall had been redesigned from end to end, fifteen years had already passed. And Lepidina was no girl now; she was to stay in the fort at Banna with a party led by her husband of fourteen years: Galba Iulius Sabinus, once a pushy young legionary tribune, now a senator.

  Brigonius clutched the letter to his heart, wondering what to tell his wife.

  On the appointed day he made his way to the fort at Banna. He was passed through the west gate. The double-arched gateway alone, he sometimes thought, was grander than anything seen in Brigantia before the Romans came.

  Leaving his horse to be stabled by a slave, he walked along the main drag through the fort, called–as in every Roman fort of this type right across the empire–the via praetoria. Banna was no tent city now. Buildings clustered around him like huge bricks: the barracks to either side, and before him the squat blocks of the praetorium, Tullio’s commander’s residence, and the principia, the fort’s formal headquarters. Beyond that he glimpsed the hospital, and more barracks, stables and workshops. An empty area was laid out with the foundations of two granaries, enough to store a year’s supply of grain for a thousand men, which would have raised floors for protection from the elements. But these were yet to be constructed. Progress was always slow, hampered by a lack of local resources. One of the grandest buildings was a drill hall where the soldiers could be trained during the most inclement northern weather; it was a monument of stone big enough to allow javelins to be thrown indoors.

  The streets were busy, not just with soldiers but with their slaves, and with local traders and workmen. Pay day had been only a couple of days ago, and the vendors prowled the streets and pushed their heads inside open doors, looking for likely buyers of their wares and services. Enclosed within its walls, self-contained, the fort shut out the untamed countryside around it; it was like an island of Romanness, Brigonius thought, independent of the world outside.

  But of the Brigantian settlement that had once stood here not a trace remained. The old Roman watchtower had been demolished, the forest cleared and marshland drained. Even the ancient barrows that had lined the escarpment, the tombs of deep ancestors, had been levelled. This was the place where Brigonius had been born, and the ancestors of Severa and Lepidina; it was here that Nectovelin’s birth had long ago been heralded by the strange Prophecy. These days the only Brigantians lived in a shanty-town that had grown around the walls of the fort, just as at Vindolanda. Coventina was banished now.

  Brigonius reached the headquarters building. He crossed the broad cloistered courtyard with its well, heading for the central cross-hall, the basilica. These two areas were large enough to hold all the troops in the fort. To the rear of the basilica was a row of offices, at the centre of which was the shrine, the aedes, with its statue of Hadrian, the standards of the fort units, and other religious tokens. Two rooms to either side were the offices of the adjutant, the cornicularius, and of the signiferi, the standard-bearers. The shrine and offices had open fronts with low ironwork screens. This little area was the fort’s heart. The signiferi were responsible for the crucial issues of the soldiers’ pay and savings, and behind the shrine itself was a strongroom containing the fort’s cash. Brigonius had watched this being built from the ground up, and indeed had sold the Romans much of the stone they had needed. It was all still so new he could smell the mustiness of fresh plaster.

  And today, in the basilica, the fort commander was holding a reception for Sabinus’s party. There was little left of the pretty-boy tribune about Sabinus; he had become a tough-looking man of his world, competent and corpulent.

  Sabinus was leading this delegation from Rome, representing both the senate and the Emperor’s household. It was here to make a regular inspection of the Wall and the situation in the north in general–and, so the rumours went, to deal with a spot of unpleasantness concerning the conduct of Claudia Severa. Brigonius was surprised that Sabinus should have been put in charge of a problem concerning his own mother-in-law. But perhaps this subtle cruelty was characteristic of Rome these days, ruled over by an ageing, detached and increasingly capricious Hadrian.

  As if to symbolise the complicated unpleasantness of the imperial court, among the Emperor’s representatives was Primigenius. The freedman looked as sharp and wily as ever. But, stick-thin, his head shaven and his sunken face laden with cosmetics, he had not aged well, his beauty long lost. Brigonius was actually introduced to the man, but Primigenius didn’t show a flicker of recognition.

  And here, of course, was Lepidina with her glowering husband. She looked her age–she was thirty-four now–but she was still heartbreakingly beautiful. Through his sparse correspondence with Severa, Brigonius had been aware of Lepidina’s marriage to the Roman. But still he was somehow shocked as, for the first time, he saw Lepidina on the arm of Sabinus. Brigonius understood from whispers that Sabinus’s career hadn’t progressed quite as well as he had once planned. Perhaps that explained the darkness around his eyes, the lines around a down-turned, rather cruel mouth, and an air of patient wistfulness Brigonius sensed about Lepidina.

  During the course of the formal occasion Brigonius met her only briefly. There was nothing they could do but exchange pleasantries; Brigonius even found himself asking after her mother’s health. But as the evening ended he asked to see her again–just for old time’s sake, he said. They agreed to go for a ride together along the Wall the following day. She seemed neither reluctant nor eager, merely polite. And then she was gone, whirled away in the complicated choreography of Roman high society.

  That night he could barely sleep. It had been fifteen years, and lying in the dark beside his wife, it seemed that every day of those years hung heavy on his heart.

  After the day of the Decision, Claudia Severa had retreated to the sanctuary of the south. Even now Brigonius still had to deal with Severa on matters of business. She had investments in many of the partnerships that had sprung up to serve the needs of the Wall project, including Brigonius’s own. He heard rumours that Severa even had a
stake in some of the thriving brothels that mushroomed around the Wall forts. She was nothing if not enterprising. But she had lost any real control she had had over the Wall project on the day of the Decision, her final falling from grace in the eyes of the imperial court. And she did not visit again. Brigonius was happy to deal with her only through letters and the dry wordings of lawyers’ agreements. He was glad to be shut of Severa.

  But when she retreated south she took her daughter with her, and Brigonius had more complex feelings about that. He felt it even more when he heard that while Severa had remained in Britain, Lepidina had gone back to Rome, where she had grown up.

  He’d talked this over with Tullio. In one late-night drinking session, as they downed flagons of British beer by the light of the torches that flickered along the Wall curtain, the brusque old Batavian said he understood. ‘Of course you miss her. It doesn’t matter that you can’t have her. You can’t have the moon either, but you’d miss its beauty if it were plucked out of the sky, wouldn’t you? There are lots of ways to love a woman, Brigonius. You don’t need to be waving your cock at them. You can love from afar. I should know.’ Tullio’s heavy face was a mask of shadows and scars. It was a rare glimpse for Brigonius into the soul of this bluff, competent man, and he wondered how it must have been for Tullio to be taken from his home as a young conscript, transported across the very Ocean, and then to live out his life in such a place as this, so far from home.

  Gradually the trauma of that night in the den of Primigenius faded. At last, Brigonius loved again. But he never forgot Lepidina.

  And now she was back.

  His wife, lying beside him in their bed, was awake too. Cloda, practical and warm, was the daughter of a timber merchant. Her husband had no secrets from her–not even about Lepidina. And so Cloda knew that this spirit of the past had returned to haunt her for a while; and she knew that Lepidina would soon fade into the mists, and she would have Brigonius back again.