Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Let me try,’ Tarcho said. He lumbered forward massively, and knelt before the boy. He spoke softly, in a variety of tongues; perhaps one of them was a British dialect, the native tongue of Audax’s ancestors, and Thalius’s. The boy didn’t look up, but at least he didn’t flinch as he had from Thalius.

  Nodding reassuringly, the old soldier took the boy’s left hand and then the right, inspecting the palms and nails. He ran his hands along the boy’s arms and legs, and brushed through the boy’s matted hair–Thalius could see lice squirming–looked into his mouth, and ran a hand over his belly and back. It was a brisk inspection he might give a dog. The boy had evidently been through this sort of thing before and submitted passively.

  Then Tarcho turned the boy around and lifted up the rag that served him as a tunic. ‘Thalius. I think you’d better come see this.’

  Thalius stepped forward. The boy’s bare back was a mass of purple-red scarring. Thalius recoiled in disgust and turned on Volisios. ‘He has been beaten, and savagely by the looks of it.’

  Volisios glared back. ‘If he has it’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘No,’ Tarcho said firmly. ‘Thalius, look again. These are not the marks of a whip. See this circle, the curve here.’

  The marks crudely etched into the boy’s flesh were letters: Latin letters, roughly arranged in a square array.

  PEEO

  NERR

  OSRI

  ACTA

  As they stared, the boy turned his head, a spark of curiosity showing in his eyes for the first time since he had been brought here. Thalius wondered if he even knew he had been carrying around a message inscribed on his back, perhaps all his life.

  III

  Thalius was profoundly relieved to get back above ground, even if the climb left him winded.

  Volisios escorted Thalius and Tarcho to his site office, a mudbrick block a little better appointed than the rest of the shacks here. Tarcho took the boy away to clean him up and inspect him a bit more closely. Thalius was happy to leave the boy in Tarcho’s hands. Tarcho was no doctor but he had commanded soldiers in the field, and knew a little basic anatomy and medicine.

  While he waited Thalius wanted only to rest, too exhausted even to speak. Respecting this, Volisios served Thalius with some watered-down wine, a rather rough British-grown vintage, and turned to some paperwork.

  Thalius reflected on how lucky he was to have Tarcho’s support. Tarcho was in his fifties, about the same age as Thalius himself, but a greater contrast between the two men was hard to imagine. Thalius was a man of property and business. He ran a pottery partnership, selling cups and plates to the army. It was a business that had been in the family for generations. He wasn’t as rich as he might have been, however, for he had also inherited his father’s position on the Camulodunum town council, the curia. His responsibilities for tax collection, upkeep of the town walls and other civic duties were onerous and expensive–which was, of course, why they had been made compulsory and hereditary.

  By contrast Tarcho, descended from a long line of soldiers of German origin, was a pillar of a man, calm, solid and stolid, with a ferocious crimson beard now laced with grey. He had served most of his twenty-five years in a garrison on Britain’s eastern shore–though some of those years had been accumulated under the reign of Carausias, the notorious usurper. It had been a pragmatic gesture by Constantius Chlorus, leader of the great Roman Invasion of Britain nearly twenty years ago, to have decreed that if soldiers like Tarcho were prepared to switch sides, their service under Carausias would count towards their retirement privileges.

  But what was a retired Tarcho to do? He was unmarried. He was too restless to farm, and too scrupulous to serve as some tax collector’s hired thug. So he had come to Camulodunum looking for more suitable work, and through friends of friends had run into Thalius, who had been on the look-out for a dependable bodyguard. Thalius had certainly been glad of his company as he had ventured out of the safety of Camulodunum’s walls and made this journey to the far west, travelling through one of the four British provinces and into another.

  A contrasting pair they might have been, but Tarcho had become a right-hand man to Thalius, a sounding board as much as protective muscle. Both childless bachelors, their company was congenial. And they were united, and divided, by a shared religion: Christianity. On their travels the two of them had had long and interesting debates on the nature of the faith. But then, as Volisios had remarked, everybody was a theologian nowadays.

  Tarcho’s expressions of his tough creed had actually crystallised for Thalius his own doubts about the new Emperor, and the direction he was taking the faith. It was these doubts, in fact, which had brought Thalius to this mine–and what he hoped to achieve here was but a step towards his own ultimate goal, a confrontation over the direction of Christianity with the Emperor himself.

  Christianity was a long-standing passion within Thalius’s family, said to go back centuries to Lepidina daughter of Severa, who had lived not long after the death of Christ Himself. Thalius’s faith was of an old-fashioned sort, a faith of love and hope, his community united in charitable associations of mutual aid–a faith derived from the teachings of Christ Himself, Thalius liked to believe. Tarcho, though, was a Christian of the new type. Like his Emperor’s, Tarcho’s was a robust soldier’s faith, his god a warrior who had proved His mettle by beating off other deities in battle. It was this metamorphosis of Christianity into a military creed he could no longer recognise that Thalius, gravely concerned, had been forced to reject. But the new direction came from the Emperor himself. What was a man of conscience to do?

  When he heard that the Emperor was coming to Britain to do some troop-raising, an idea had struck Thalius, a seed planted in his mind. The Emperor would receive audiences–and so why, then, shouldn’t Thalius himself be received, and make his doubts known? Any rational ruler would surely accept the ideas and viewpoints of those he aspired to rule. Why not Thalius?

  But as soon as he conceived this thrilling idea he was plagued by doubt. Was he taking himself too seriously? Who was he, a member of a mere provincial curia, to comment on imperial policy?

  That was when, casting around for a way forward, it occurred to Thalius to turn to the old family story of the Prophecy, the lost poem of the future. It was a forlorn hope that he might recover it, perhaps, but even in these days of bleed-you-white taxes Thalius was prosperous enough to afford to be able to indulge a fascination for family history. And in a time of such uncertainty, if the Prophecy really did contain a glimpse of the true future it was worth a try to find it. With its authority behind him–always assuming the Prophecy existed, and could be found, and was worth presenting–perhaps he would have an excuse to face an emperor and his court, and the courage to do it.

  It was spurious, perhaps, and not even very logical, but it was a plan, a strategy, and he had followed it through this far. And after all it was the family story, passed down from long-dead Lepidina, that the Prophecy actually had something to do with the destiny of Christianity. If that was true–if he could decode it and apply its message, if he could relay its truth to the Emperor himself, Thalius told himself with a kind of breathless anticipation–he might do mankind a great service indeed.

  His strength recovering, and as Tarcho had still not come back with the boy, Thalius felt a little restless. He put down his cup and, under Volisios’s uneasy stare, prowled around the room.

  It was a working office heaped with paperwork. One pile of lawyers’ letters was weighted down with a bit of quartz shot through with gold, a pretty stone brought up from the earth no doubt at the cost of much human suffering. There were few personal touches, but there was a small lararium, a household shrine, with tokens to gods Thalius didn’t recognise. But in among this pagan clutter there was a rough Christian fish symbol, a brooch done in a bit of bronze wire. Such mixings-up of creeds were common. Despite the Emperor’s promotion of the faith Christianity wasn’t compulsory, paganism not a cr
ime, and Rome’s cheerful pantheism was, for now, able to absorb Jesus as just another god.

  The most interesting item in the room was a framed set of coins. They had been struck during the reign of Carausias, and showed the usurper’s proud profile alongside the legitimate continental emperors he had claimed as his ‘brothers’, and icons that portrayed him as a fulfilment of Virgilian prophecies of a saviour of Rome.

  Volisios was still watching him uneasily.

  ‘So,’ Thalius said, ‘you were a supporter of Carausias?’

  ‘Never,’ Volisios said quickly. ‘I just collect the coins. They are already rare, and quite valuable. Just think! The coins of a British emperor. That’s all this is, Thalius, a coin collection.’

  Thalius had never been one for bear-baiting. ‘Oh, you needn’t worry, man. I’m no government spy. Though I’ve no doubt you’ve plenty of murky secrets–what, a coin hoard? A few sons secreted away to evade the labour levies?’

  Volisios shrugged. ‘Doesn’t everybody try to get away with a little? The taxes these days are too much to bear. And it’s all corrupt anyhow.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ Thalius said grudgingly. ‘Too many are on the take. The Emperor is coming to Britain to raise troops for his war with Licinius.’ Licinius ruled the eastern half of a sundered empire. ‘But I’m hoping that while he is here he will do something to clean up our civic life.’

  ‘And lower these wretched taxes,’ Volisios said.

  ‘Oh, I doubt even the Emperor will be able to manage that,’ Thalius said dryly, and he turned back to the coin images of the doomed usurper.

  Thalius remembered the rule of Carausias well; he had been in his twenties when Carausias took power. The man had commanded the British fleet, responsible for intercepting Saxon pirates as they sailed across the sea from north Germany. It turned out he was allowing the raiders through, then robbing them as they tried to return home. When the provincial government not unreasonably challenged this policy, Carausias led his troops in rebellion. For a decade he (and later his own usurper) held off the continental Tetrarchy and ruled as emperor in Britain.

  It was all very exciting, and Carausias, charismatic and imaginative, had been popular. His island domain was a British Empire sustained by sea power, with a ‘Rome’ of its own at Londinium, and Thalius, rather thrilled, had wondered if this was a glimpse of the future.

  But the hard truth was that for Thalius, at that time a young man assuming his own burdens as part of the curia of Camulodunum, a change of hierarchy at the top of society had made no practical difference. And the fragile rebellion had been decisively crushed when Constantius Chlorus led his massive Invasion of Britain, and reclaimed the island.

  Ironically Constantius Chlorus was destined to be the father of another British-based usurper. Constantius had been one of the Tetrarchy, a college of four emperors who ruled jointly–a system optimistically designed to stabilise the imperial succession that was never likely to survive the abdication of its founder, Diocletian. On Constantius’s death the British army elevated his son at Eburacum. After a complicated series of political, dynastic and military conflicts, the son had become master of the west, though he still faced his rival in the east. But, of course, as a winner he was no longer regarded as a usurper.

  Few of Thalius’s friends had studied history as he had, and few knew that poor, charismatic, doomed Carausias had been only the latest of a series of usurpers across the empire. The first British-based usurper had been a governor, African-born Clodius Albinus, who, seventy years after Hadrian, took the British garrison to the continent, only to be destroyed by the emperor Septimius Severus. Severus had split the province in two, so that no governor could ever be so powerful again. A century later Constantius Chlorus had split the provinces again; there were now no less than four Britains. But the years between Severus and Constantius had seen little peace.

  Thalius had concluded you could trace all this instability at the top of the empire back to Hadrian and his Wall, completed nearly two centuries in the past.

  The Wall itself had proved a durable limit to Rome’s ambitions. Though Severus, conqueror of Clodius Albinus, had ventured beyond the Wall, reaching the furthest point of the highlands, his campaign dissipated on the bleak high ground–just as had Agricola’s before him. The Romans had never again attempted to conquer the far north.

  But there were consequences of the end of expansion. With no new provinces to plunder, the empire’s only income was the taxes and levies it raised on its peoples. Meanwhile beyond the static frontiers, even in Caledonia, the barbarians had the chance to form new and more coherent federations, and were becoming an increasing threat.

  So while the empire’s acquisition of wealth had declined, the cost of defending it was rising–and taxes inevitably rose, generation on generation. The gentry fled their expensive responsibilities in the towns for grand estates in the country, while the poor were driven into evasion, criminality and destitution.

  The army was changing too. Posted for ever at static frontiers, the troops understandably became more loyal to their local commanders than to any distant emperor–and generals who had once looked beyond the borders of the empire for glory were now forced to look inward to pursue their ambitions. These centrifugal tendencies spun off one usurper after another, even in Britain. It had taken a new breed of tough, ruthlessly competent soldier-emperors to pull the empire out of a crisis that might have been terminal. But it seemed to Thalius that the character of the empire had been transformed in these trials–and now, under a new emperor, it might be transformed again, even more drastically.

  And Thalius, amateur historian, had looked further back in time still. Many of his acquaintances imagined that Constantius’s Invasion of Britain two decades ago had been the first Roman assault on the island–as if Britain had always been Roman. But there had been a history, of a sort, even before Claudius’s adventure three centuries ago. Thalius had read, fascinated, of British rebels who had sought to throw off the yoke of Rome, calling themselves Brigantian or Iceni or Catuvellaunian–names Thalius had thought only referred to Roman administrative units. He had no idea what the deeper history of these lost nations might have been. He had been astonished to find in his family research that he himself was, at least partly, of Brigantian blood.

  Now the British saw themselves as Romans–and if they rebelled, like Carausias, they did so within the system rather than trying to overthrow it. The people of old, his own ancestors, had had minds of a different quality from the modern, Thalius thought. He wondered how much else had been changed, or lost, in the Roman centuries.

  There was a noise outside. Volisios’s office had small blue-tinted glazed windows; looking out, Thalius saw a band of workers being brought up from a mine shaft and marched off to some rough barracks. As they passed they glared at the overseer’s hut. Thalius shivered, despite the heavy irons that bound the slaves’ legs and necks.

  Volisios stood beside him. ‘You don’t need to be afraid of them,’ he said with faint contempt. ‘Most of them have been whipped so hard all their lives that even if you took their chains away they wouldn’t raise a hand against you. You have to do it, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Treat them harshly. I know what you’re thinking, that this is a brutal place. But I have to crush my slaves to get every last drop of blood out of them, because the tax men squeeze me for profits. It’s the way things are.’

  ‘But is this the only way?’ Thalius murmured, suddenly appalled by Volisios’s bloodless rationalising.

  Volisios looked at him blankly. ‘Of course it’s the only way. This is the way things are. This is the way they have always been, and always will be.’

  ‘Must they, overseer?’ Thalius, if unworldly, was an imaginative, deep-thinking man, and it had been a day of vivid impressions for him: the hellish conditions of the mine, the miserable condition of his slave cousin, the mighty churning engines in the mine shaft. Now he plucked a specu
lation out of the air. ‘Consider this. Down there you have men digging out ore, and waterwheels pumping out the shafts. What if you installed more waterwheels, and used them to dig out your ore?’

  ‘Impossible,’ Volisios said immediately.

  ‘Not to an engineer ingenious enough to make a water-powered organ, surely. What if the mine could mine itself, as an amphitheatre organ plays without human hands? Can’t you see it? With such a source of wealth, isn’t it possible that the empire could grow rich again, rich and strong–and nobody would have to suffer for it?’

  Volisios frowned. ‘Are you a fan of gadgets, then, Thalius? I myself have always been drawn more to episteme than to techne–true, deep knowledge rather than to low cunning and trickery.’

  Thalius was irritated by this Greek-quoting snobbery. ‘Must we be so limited in our thinking? I’m more interested in a single waterwheel than a thousand long-dead Greek philosophers!’

  ‘Well, that’s up to you.’

  ‘Yes, but what if—?’

  ‘Besides, what would we do with all the slaves? Free them? They would butcher us in a heartbeat.’ And, laughing, Volisios turned away.

  Thalius peered out of the window, listening to the grinding noise of the giant machines deep underground and the groans of human misery, and his rudimentary vision of a technological future evaporated.

  At last Tarcho brought in the boy.

  IV

  Audax had been washed, that pale hair cut and brushed, and he was dressed in a fresh tunic. He was probably as clean and presentable as he had ever been in his life, Thalius reflected. But he was nothing but skin and bones, and there were marks, like the bruising around his mouth, that no amount of water would wash away. But Audax clung to Tarcho’s hand, and Thalius saw that Tarcho was finding a way to win his trust.

  It struck Thalius that he had not yet heard the boy speak, not one word.