Emperor

by Stephen Baxter

  The bishop’s palace was one of the grander buildings. It was a townhouse about thirty years old, built in something like a classical style, with separate blocks set out around an atrium. Isolde learned it had once been owned by a diocesan tax official.

  Bishop Ambrosius himself was here to greet them. With receding silver hair, richly dressed in a ground-length purple robe, he was about Nennius’s age, but he looked as if he could still throw a healthy punch. When he took her hands Isolde felt reassured for the first time since she and Nennius had left Rome.

  After days on the road they were all hot, dirty, hungry, and the stench of the city lingered even here. There was no bath house, but the house had underfloor heating and hot water, and after an hour of pampering herself with her scents and creams Isolde felt almost human. She joined her host and his guests in a large, well-appointed triclinium.

  The meal they were served relied heavily on meat, mostly mutton and pork, but there were olive oils and dates and a rather good fish oil, imports from the continent which, the bishop said, were a luxury these days. No wine, though, and Ambrosius apologised for serving them watery British beer, but it was strong enough to warm Isolde’s blood.

  Her father, as usual, seemed to have forgotten she was here, and made no effort to include her in the conversation, and nor did Damon. But the bishop was gracious to her, and his servant, another young monk, was attentive to her needs. In the light of the low fire, as the aches of the journey were soothed away, Isolde was content to let the talk wash over her.

  Ambrosius and Nennius were churchmen of a similar age, both in their late fifties, one from the heart of the empire, the other from its now-amputated limb, and they had lived through tumultuous times. And, like all men of their age, Isolde thought fondly, they believed the world was in decline, from a Golden Age a few decades before. Born a generation after Constantine, now known as ‘the Great’, they spoke reverently of the first Christian emperor, whose reign had been an interval of comparative peace.

  But all over the known world the weather was bad. Even within the empire the great crops of wheat and millet which fed the large urban populations began to fail. Among the barbarians, as famine descended, pulses of refugees washed out of the heart of Asia, driving others before them, to press ever more relentlessly on the borders of the empire.

  Constantine himself had stabilised the border by allowing barbarian peoples to establish new homelands inside the empire’s borders–vast numbers of them, for instance no less than three hundred thousand Sarmatians. This policy of ‘federation’ brought peace for a while, but there was much muttering about whether the empire could absorb such huge influxes.

  There was trouble with the barbarians in Britain too. When Ambrosius was a boy of five, there was a ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’, a major invasion from several directions at once: by the Picts across the Wall, the Scots and Irish and Saxons from across the Ocean. For a whole year order was lost. Ambrosius and his family, he said, huddled inside the town walls as the children told each other blood-curdling tales of the baby-eating foreign savages who roamed the countryside.

  Meanwhile after Constantine’s death fratricidal war between his three competing sons brought renewed turmoil at the heart of the empire. Britain threw up usurpers, such as one Magnentius, who had killed one of the sons, only to be defeated by another, at Mursa in Pannonia. The empire once more became an arena of conflict between strong men and their armies. Then, when Constantine’s treaties were repudiated by one barbarian group, the Visigoths, decades of simmering conflict finally led to battle at Adrianopolis–a battle the Romans lost, at a terrible cost.

  Times had changed, and a weakened empire could no longer afford such bloodletting, and after Mursa and Adrianopolis the Roman army had never been able to recover its strength. The emperors employed barbarian federates in their armies, and still more alien peoples settled within the borders–following Constantine’s precedent, but now the process was all but uncontrolled. Thus the army was barbarised, and the empire was hollowed out by foreign polities.

  The British felt increasingly exposed, and its elite and officer corps threw up one usurper after another–roughly one a generation, as young rebels dreamed they could do better than their fathers. And as soon as he took power each of them headed overseas, taking yet more troops with him from the British garrison. One, grandly named Magnus Maximus–‘the Great, the Greatest’–killed another emperor, and had the dubious honour of being the first western ruler to order the execution of a Christian heretic.

  But the troops stripped from the British garrison by each failed rebellion, and indeed by each officially ordered transfer to reinforce the centre, were never returned. Without the army to enforce collection the taxation system began to break down. People hoarded their coins in the hope of better times, and a barter economy sprang up. But as demand dwindled there was much destitution, and Ambrosius, by now a young priest, found himself ministering to the starving poor.

  Then, one New Year’s Eve, a vast horde of Alans, Suebi and Vandals crossed the frozen Rhine, and pushed their way into Gaul and Iberia.

  Britain was cut off. Now no money was coming from the central treasuries to pay the remaining British troops. The imperial standard still flew over the forts and towns, but there was little left of the Roman army beneath it. After a succession of bloody, panicky coups a low-born general who styled himself ‘Constantine III’ put together yet another ragged army, and just like his predecessors immediately crossed to the continent. Constantine was the last throw of the dice, the last British attempt to save Britannia.

  As Constantine’s campaign on foreign fields descended towards defeat, another turning point was reached. This time it wasn’t the officer corps or the ruling elite in the cities who rose up but the comparatively poor and lowly. What was the point of being taxed white by a centre which was better at producing usurpers than keeping out the barbarians? The revolt, once it broke out, spread like wildfire. The tax collectors were expelled from their offices and plush townhouses, and then the Christian poor turned on the still-pagan rich. The diocesan government collapsed. The middle-ranking officials in the towns and the four provincial governments decided to join the rebels, and legitimised and organised the revolt.

  This ‘British Revolution’ was less than ten years old, and Isolde thought she detected pride about it in the calm voice of this churchman. Not that things were perfect. The four provincial governments had started to develop independent armies, mostly made up of Germanic mercenaries. But civilisation had been saved until the day came, as it must, when Britain was reunited once more with the centre of the Roman world of which it had always been part.

  ‘And it was a blow for freedom,’ Nennius said, enthused, eager for revolution in a way, Isolde thought a little sourly, only a comfortably plump old man far removed from the action could be. ‘Isn’t that a deep tradition in Britain? Why, you could say it informs the work of Pelagius himself.’

  ‘Ah, but never let Augustine hear you say that…’

  Isolde had met Pelagius herself once, as a little girl. About ten years older than her father, born in Britain, he was not a cleric, but he had developed forceful views about the direction of the Roman church, which he saw as corrupted, immoral and slothful. And he took great exception to the teachings of Augustine, a bishop from Africa, who argued that human beings were born fundamentally flawed, and that human actions depended on the will of God. Pelagius insisted that humans were essentially good, and were responsible for their own moral advancement.

  ‘But a church of free men and women cannot be controlled by the centre, and so it won’t do for an imperial cult,’ Nennius said gloomily. ‘Perhaps in future the Roman church will deal with all Pelagians as it has with Pelagius himself…Think of it, Ambrosius! Excommunicated for proclaiming that mankind enjoys free will! What is the world coming to? Where is our church going?’

  ‘The question is, where are you going, my friend?’ Ambrosius asked with gentle humour,
pouring more beer. ‘Are you still determined to find your cousin on the Wall? It won’t be an easy journey.’

  ‘No. But as I told you in my letters it is a dream of freedom that draws me there. Pelagius would approve! A dream, or rather a hint, a tantalising hint of a better future…’ And he began to speak of family legend and of fragmentary prophecies, of emperors and of history.

  But the evening was ending for Isolde. Exhausted by travelling, heavy with food and drink, and with the baby slumbering softly within her, she made her excuses and left for her bed. The old men talked on softly, as young Damon, huddled by the fire, listened as attentively as a puppy before its master.

  III

  For Isolde the journey north to the Wall was a long and brutal haul along the spine of this dismal island. Following poor roads they passed through town after shabby walled town, and they had to pay more tolls as they crossed invisible provincial boundaries.

  Isolde was so immersed in the oceanic aches of her own body she barely noticed the change in the character of the country as they headed north, from the rolling chalk hills of the south with their abandoned farms and fortified country houses, to the more rugged north with its bristling forts. But the further north you went the fewer Saxons you saw. Perhaps the people in the north had found other ways to look after themselves.

  They arrived at last at the line of the Wall. Though the paintwork was faded, and in places you could see where damage had been roughly repaired, the Wall was still intact and very impressive, its powerful lines cutting across the neck of the countryside.

  And the Wall was manned. Nennius turned westward, planning to travel to a fort called Banna. They soon reached what Nennius called a mile-fort, built around a gate that was roughly blocked with stones. Two grubby soldiers in woollen tunics flagged them down, to extract still more tolls. According to the soldiers the whole line of the Wall was under the command of the ‘Duke of the Britains’. The soldiers gave them a chit scribbled on a wood slip, so they wouldn’t have to pay any further tolls.

  Isolde found the Wall and its soldiers, even the process of paying the toll, reassuringly familiar. Sooner this semblance of the Roman way than relying for your protection on the bands of blond-haired barbarian thugs like in the south. But no standard was erected over the mile-fort’s eroded stones; no eagles flew here.

  They continued westward, passing more mile-forts and watchtowers, and arrived at Banna. The fort sprawled on an impressive escarpment, and to the south a river with shining gravel banks curled through woodland. The northern wall of the fort was built into the line of the Wall itself. There were houses and other buildings outside the walls of the fort, but they looked abandoned, their roofs missing, walls of mud subsiding back into the earth.

  They passed through a gateway in the eastern wall. The soldiers on duty let them pass with a brisk inspection of the chit from the mile-fort, and a letter of passage Nennius carried from his cousin Tarcho, the commander here. The fort was crowded and busy, with men, women and children going about their business. The civilian settlement outside might have been abandoned, but the people hadn’t gone away, they had just moved inside the fort’s walls. And the soldiers were still here, evidently.

  Isolde recognised a granary, its floor raised for ventilation, a second granary which looked abandoned, and blocky buildings which might be the fort’s headquarters. Some of the buildings were quite impressive, large and stone-built. But many were derelict, their roofs collapsed, their walls robbed of stone.

  Nennius was excited to be here. Once their remote ancestors had lived here, he said. He knew that because his grandfather, Audax, had told him that the famous Prophecy had actually been created here at Banna. But there was no sign of that lost primeval home in this decaying fort, and even Nennius’s nostalgic enthusiasm soon faded.

  To Isolde’s surprise, they were led to the intact granary. As they walked inside Isolde realised that it had been converted into a hall, its interior divided up by wooden partitions. But there was still an agricultural smell about the place, Isolde thought, the dry tang of the grain that had once been piled up here to feed hundreds of long-dead soldiers.

  They were greeted by Tarcho, Nennius’s cousin and commander of Banna, and by his wife, Maria. Evidently about the same age as Nennius, in his fifties, Tarcho was a big, slightly plump man with a bristling moustache, and his hair was a pale strawberry-blond laced with grey. He wore the insignia of a Roman soldier, including a handsome officer’s belt, but also a shoulder-brooch and a belt heavy with knives, like a Saxon. His wife, too, a plump ball of energy and bustle, wore silver sleeve-clasps, Isolde noticed with faint envy. The Saxons hadn’t come this far in great numbers, but their fashions had, it seemed.

  Nennius greeted Tarcho eagerly. For him the end of a long quest was nearing. For Isolde, though, it was just another day of her pregnancy, and a long, hard day at that.

  Maria saw this and immediately took Isolde under her wing. ‘Oh, my dear, I know exactly how you are feeling. I should, I had five of my own, all boys, all of them as fat as their father, and look at him. Come,’ she said, taking Isolde’s arm, ‘let’s see if we can make you comfortable in this soldiers’ hovel…’ She led Isolde to a small private room with a couch and pillows, and brought her hot water in a bowl. Her palm was rough, her grip strong, her skin dry, a worker’s hand. ‘I know you’re far from home,’ Maria said, ‘and you must be frightened. But your father and my husband are cousins, so you’re with family, aren’t you? And believe me you’re better off here than anywhere else. The soldiers always did have the best doctors. You’ll be in good hands, I promise.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Isolde said sincerely. It was a huge relief not to be totally dependent on her father.

  It was already late afternoon. She lay on her cot and slept a while, to gather her strength before the evening meal.

  That evening Isolde was the last to join the group. They were in the largest room in the granary-hall, set out like a Roman triclinium with couches around a small central table. Nennius was holding forth about politics in Rome. He had a small leather satchel on the table before him. Isolde knew it contained documents about the purpose of his quest–to retrieve the Prophecy, as he called it, lost so long ago.

  Her belly feeling heavier than ever, Isolde levered herself down onto a couch. The light from lamps and candles was cheerful enough, and the food, meat, bread and stewed vegetables, was warming and palatable, if it lacked spices for Isolde’s taste.

  This corner of the old granary was walled on two sides by unplastered stone through which holes had been roughly knocked to make windows. It was a working room, an office of sorts, with desks heaped with scrolls and tablets. Christian symbols could be seen in the clutter on the desks–a bronze fish, a chi-rho medallion. And the papers on Tarcho’s desk were weighted by a stone statue, a reclining woman painted crudely in blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary. Isolde learned later it was a much older piece, a Roman soldier’s carving of a local goddess called Coventina of whom nobody remembered anything but her name, now repainted as Christ’s mother.

  But despite these hints of civilisation, of religion and literacy, there was something brutal about the place, Isolde thought. Uncivilised. Armour and weaponry hung from the walls, along with the heads of animals: deer, a fox, a wolf. There was even the outstretched wingspan of a buzzard, evidently brought down by a soldier’s arrow.

  Tarcho, knives glinting at his belt, seemed in his element here. To Isolde’s eyes he seemed more barbarian than Roman, and there was something in his hard, calculating expression she didn’t like.

  Maria prompted Tarcho: ‘So you and Nennius share the same grandfather.’

  Tarcho spoke around a mouthful of dripping meat. ‘His name was Audax. He was born a slave but died a soldier. He named his son Tarcho, after the soldier who took him in and cared for him. That Tarcho was my father, and he named me for himself.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Nennius said, ‘but Audax came from an old family who hadn
’t always been slaves. He was evidently a clever man, and that hereditary intellect seems to have been passed down to his second son, who was my father, called Thalius after another of his patrons. Thalius moved to Rome where I was born, as was my daughter. I’m sure old Audax would have been proud to see you in command of a place like this, Tarcho.’

  Tarcho shrugged. ‘Ten years ago I was a serving soldier in the Roman army. Then the British Revolution came. Farm boys in turmoil,’ he said dismissively. ‘We didn’t really know what was going on up here. We just kept the peace along our stretch of the Wall. But there was no more pay…’

  Without pay, some of the soldiers stationed on the Wall drifted away from their posts, some turned mercenary, others resorted to brigandage and robbery–and others, Tarcho said, had gone off to Gaul with their service records in their packs, wistfully hoping to get their back pay. But most of the Wall troops, born and bred where their forefathers had served for generations, just stayed put. This was home; where were they to go?

  ‘When the dust settled we got new orders from the Duke.’

  Isolde asked, ‘The Duke?’

  ‘The Duke of the Britains.’ The military commander who, under the emperors, had been in command of the Wall and the northern forts that supported it. ‘He was no longer receiving orders from the diocese, or indeed from the prefect in Gaul, or the Emperor.’

  The Duke of the Britains, suddenly finding himself free of his chain of command, took control. The troops would continue to function as army units, he ordered; they would continue to protect and police the population. But without central pay it was up to the local people, the farmers, to supply the fort, paying in kind in foodstuffs, materials, animals, labour.

  ‘There was some grumbling,’ Tarcho said honestly. ‘But then the Picts came. One night they tried to sneak over the Wall, as bold as you please. Well, my men dug out their Roman armour and weapons, and we formed up and sent those brutes packing. After that the farmers were happy enough to cough up, and they turned out to cheer the Duke when he stayed at Banna a few months back…’