Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  It was hard to know how to take all this. The mention of profit got his attention, but he recoiled from the talk of family histories and prophecies. The superstitious Romans were obsessed with past and future, with dead ancestors and presagings of time to come. Better to live in the present, he thought, and enjoy the now. As time wore on and he sat on this milestone with the smug Cantiaci citizens bustling past him, he wondered if he was wasting his time.

  But then the two women arrived. And within a heartbeat of his first meeting with Severa – or rather her daughter, Lepidina – all his doubts were dispelled.

  II

  Claudia Severa and her daughter arrived in a small carriage covered by an awning of bright red cloth. A servant, probably a slave, led two docile horses. Severa and Lepidina stepped down from the carriage with unreasonable grace, and walked towards Brigonius. The mother might have been forty, the daughter eighteen or nineteen. The two of them were very alike, both very pale, with strawberry-blonde hair piled high in exotic sculptures.

  The older woman wore a stola, a swatch of brilliant white cloth embroidered with purple. Under her loose clothing Severa’s figure was shapely, her bust prominent and her hips swaying as she walked. She was sensual, but she looked solid, almost muscular. This was a formidable woman, Brigonius thought immediately.

  The daughter, though, was slighter, slimmer, and she walked with a loose-jointed beauty. She wore a long skirt and tunic of pink and silver-grey, the colours somehow blending perfectly together, and she wore a scarf around her neck, some purple-pink fabric as light as mist. She was so delicate, so pale-white, she seemed only loosely attached to reality. Again he felt like a clod with his black hair and dark colouring, a lump of earth compared to this creature of air and fire.

  Severa was watching him. ‘You must be Brigonius,’ she said dryly.

  He was staring at the girl, still sitting on his milestone like a child. He clambered to his feet, making dust rise in a cloud. The daughter’s eyes widened as he revealed his full height. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I am Claudia Severa. My daughter, Lepidina.’

  The girl turned away coyly. He tried to fix his attention on Severa. ‘How did you know me?’

  ‘You weren’t hard to spot,’ Severa said. ‘I just looked for the beard. The Cantiaci go clean-shaven, you know, like all good Romans!’

  ‘I, ah—’

  The girl spoke for the first time. ‘You seem fascinated by me, Brigantius.’

  ‘Brigonius. I am a Brigantian. My name is Brigonius—’

  ‘Do you like my scarf?’ She touched it. Its colour perfectly complemented the grey of Lepidina’s tunic, and it cast reflected sunlight over the soft white flesh of her throat.

  He was staring again. ‘I’ve never seen material like it.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have. It’s silk. It comes from a land far to the east, even beyond the Parthians. Nobody knows how it’s made – imagine that!’

  He saw now that the scarf was fixed by a small brooch: a crossed-over curve of silver wire, a stylised fish perhaps. ‘That’s a pretty design. The fish.’

  Severa evidently hadn’t known the brooch was there. She glared at her daughter. ‘Cover that up, you little idiot!’

  With bad grace, Lepidina tucked the brooch out of sight.

  Severa walked around Brigonius, eyeing him up and down as she might a horse. ‘Well, you’re evidently a lust-addled fool, like all men. But you’re healthy enough, and you seem honest. I think we’re going to be able to do business, you and me. But first we’ve an emperor to greet. Will you ride with us to Rutupiae? We’ve room.’

  Lepidina, girlishly friendly now, linked her arm through his. She was soft and fragrant, like a scented cloud. ‘Oh, yes, do. We’ve got fruit and wine. It will be fun!’

  So Brigonius found himself sitting between mother and daughter in the shade of the carriage’s awning.

  The carriage joined the flow towards Rutupiae, the slave guiding Brigonius’s horse. As they rolled across the flat coastal plain, it wasn’t long before Brigonius caught the first whiffs of salty sea air – and through the awning he glimpsed the gleaming white shoulders of the monument at Rutupiae, a landmark visible for miles around. Meanwhile the air in the carriage was filled with the tickling scent of cosmetics, and the women plied him with a fine light wine and strawberries dipped in ground pepper.

  ‘We heard of your trouble,’ Severa said.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘The revolt in Brigantia. News of such things reaches Rome, you know!’

  ‘I’d hardly call it a revolt,’ Brigonius said. ‘It started with a riot outside Vindolanda. Came from a bit of heavy-handedness by a decurion.’ In fact the officer had beaten a Brigantian labourer he accused, falsely, of thievery. ‘Next thing you know there was trouble all over the place. Some of the lads took the opportunity for a little petty banditry.’

  ‘I thought it was more serious than that,’ Severa said.

  ‘Oh, the army had to deploy.’ Once roused from its brothels and bathhouses the army had, as usual, stamped down with maximum force on the dissidents. Heads were broken, a few villages burned, a gaggle of wives and children taken off into slavery. ‘They cleared up the trouble quickly.’

  ‘I don’t understand why people even want to fight the army,’ Lepidina said. ‘I mean, what if they won, somehow? Why, without the army…’ She tailed off. Her face was empty, her eyes and mouth wide, like a child’s.

  Her life had been remarkably sheltered, Brigonius thought. He felt an impulse to protect her – an impulse no doubt deriving from lust, but genuine despite that, he thought.

  ‘Not everybody likes the Romans,’ he said gently. ‘Their taxes, their forced-labour levies—’

  ‘You must like them,’ Lepidina said sharply. ‘You sell them your stone.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they’re my friends.’ He grinned. ‘I follow my father. I bleed the Romans white, if I can.’

  Severa nodded, apparently approving. ‘You learned much from your father?’

  ‘He died a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Yet you still rely on his wisdom, as you wait to accrue your own. A sound strategy. We are all shaped by the past, aren’t we, Brigonius? In fact we wouldn’t be sitting here now if not for deep historical links we share.’

  ‘In your note you talk of your grandmother, who was a Brigantian but went to Rome.’

  ‘Agrippina, yes. She died before I was born, but my mother told me all about her. Fascinating life! Somebody ought to write it down. And, you see, she knew your great-grandfather, Brigonius, who was called Cunedda—’

  ‘Like my own father.’

  ‘Yes. And his father before him. The story goes that Agrippina and Cunedda knew each other at the time of Claudius’s invasion of Britain. Your family were Catuvellaunians, Brigonius. My grandmother’s family owned an interest in a quarrying concern. Later in life she passed it to your family – to the son of that first Cunedda. And that is how your family came by their interest in quarrying, and moved to Brigantia to take possession of it. So, you see, in a way you are in my debt, aren’t you?’

  Brigonius, feeling manipulated, wasn’t sure about that.

  Lepidina had evidently heard all this before. ‘I think they were more than friends,’ she said mischievously. ‘Agrippina and her Cunedda. Otherwise why make such an extravagant gift? I think they were lovers!’ She whispered, her eyes huge, ‘What do you think, Brigantius-Brigonius? Does love cross the generations, does love stand outside time?’

  She was playing games, of course. But he felt a warm flush inside.

  It got noisier. Lepidina ducked and looked out of the awning. ‘Rutupiae!’ she said. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  III

  Soon the carriage could move no further in the crush of traffic. The three passengers clambered out, Brigonius briskly, the women elegantly, and, leaving the unnamed slave with the carriage, they walked.

  The air off the sea was fresh, and the
sun was bright. The road was packed with people, their vehicles, slaves and animals. Everybody was funnelling towards the coast, where the road ended at the feet of the mighty arch. Children ran excitedly around the legs of the adults, and there was a hum of conversation. Vendors worked the slowly moving crowd, selling bits of meat on skewers, and oysters – a speciality of Rutupiae – and tokens and trinkets to welcome the Emperor, pennants in imperial purple, and miniatures of the grave, bearded face that had become so familiar from his coinage.

  With Brigonius and his broad shoulders taking the lead, the three of them made their way through the crush. Brigonius loomed taller than most; perhaps Brigantians ate better than these Roman-owned Cantiaci. His spirits rose to be part of this cheerful mob. He said, ‘It feels like a festival.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ Severa said. ‘That’s the whole point. The emperors have always shown themselves to the crowds, at feast days, in the amphitheatres. Now this new Emperor is displaying himself to the provinces – I believe he means to travel from end to end of his empire, as if it were one vast amphitheatre.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he comes to unite,’ she said. ‘Not to conquer like Claudius, or to indulge his vanity like Nero. The consolidator, they call him. Look around, Brigonius. Do you imagine any of these people, even the smallest child, will ever forget the day they saw the Emperor himself in person?’

  Brigonius grunted. ‘From what I hear, there will be plenty of people who won’t forget how much it’s costing them to entertain him.’

  Severa laughed. ‘So young yet so cynical!’

  At last they broke out of the crowd. They came to a cordon patrolled by soldiers in dress uniform, with bright red cloaks and colourful plumes on their helmets. Severa spoke to one of the soldiers and passed him a note on a slip of wood; he glanced at it and hurried off to find a superior officer.

  From here Brigonius could make out Rutupiae itself. It was a major port, in fact quite a large town. Blocky buildings of stone and wood sprawled around a harbour, and the tiled roof of a very grand mansio, there to host particularly distinguished visitors, gleamed, polished. On the sea ships floated at anchor, perhaps the ships that had transported the Emperor across the Ocean from Gaul. Heavy and complex, their sails furled, they looked as if they had been painted on the blue sky.

  And in the foreground, dominating everything, that quadruple triumphal arch loomed over the arrow-straight road from the west, its four columns like the legs of a giant. Clad in white marble imported from Italy, with lettering in bronze and its top ornamented with trophies of victory, it shone in the sun, no less than eighty feet high: the gateway to Roman Britain. Brigonius the quarryman wondered how its architect had ensured it would not sink into the soft coastal sand. It must have had deep and massive foundations.

  Around the feet of this imposing structure people swarmed, dwarfed. Carpenters erected a stage in the crossroads beneath the arch. There were plenty of soldiers; Brigonius saw legionary pennants, the curling glitter of signal trumpets. It was quite a spectacle.

  A decurion approached Severa and beckoned her forward. With some relief Brigonius moved out of the crush of the crowd, and with the women walked towards the stage.

  Severa murmured, ‘I don’t imagine you’ve been here before, Brigonius. Does it call to something in your blood?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It is here that the Romans under Claudius first made their landing in Britain. Of course there was nothing here then, just a bit of beach, no docks—’

  Lepidina said, ‘And no ugly monument.’

  ‘And,’ Severa said, ‘it was a landing witnessed by my grandmother, and by your great-grandfather Cunedda. Or so Agrippina always claimed.’

  Brigonius was unimpressed. ‘Well, there are plenty of Romans swarming here today.’

  ‘An emperor can hardly travel alone. I’m told there are eight thousand troops, and probably as many administrators – clerks and accountants and lawyers – the imperial government travels with his person. And then there are all the cooks and cleaners and doctors and vets, and poets and musicians and architects and actors. The court is a mobile city. No wonder the provincials bleat about the expense!…’

  They found a place amid the crowd gathering before the stage, and prepared to wait.

  Severa pressed him, asking, ‘Do you ever think of the past, Brigonius? Of the age of Agrippina and Cunedda, of the invasion, those brief days which have shaped our lives ever since? Time heaps up remorselessly. Your northern country is restless still, but it is already sixty years since the last great revolt in the south, when the cities burned. Sixty years.’

  Brigonius knew about that. His grandparents had been children then, and had survived Boudicca’s burning of Camulodunum. Until they died they had been fearful of alarms, of disorder – and of the smell of fire.

  Severa said, ‘But the invasion was some twenty years before that. It is all fading away now, fading into the past. Nobody alive remembers a Britain without the Romans.’

  Lepidina seemed bored. ‘Why are you going on and on about the dead past, mother?’

  Severa said, ‘Because of the Prophecy. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it, Brigonius?’ She drew a leather satchel from a fold in her tunic. ‘In here,’ she said, her eyes bright, ‘is a single sheet – old-fashioned Latin, scratched onto a bit of parchment. Only sixteen lines. It’s the Prophecy, Brigonius. The Prophecy I mentioned in my letter. It was written down at the birth of Nectovelin, a cousin of my grandmother, Agrippina.’

  She told him something of the history of the Prophecy: how Agrippina and Cunedda had penetrated the house of Claudius himself, how a startling bit of foretelling had come true – and how Claudius afterwards had confiscated the document and placed with the Sibylline oracles. ‘My grandmother moved to Rome, and spent many years trying to retrieve the document. She failed – and so did my mother – but at last I found the right person to bribe.’

  Lepidina tutted. ‘You tell me off about breaking the law with a bit of silver at my neck and you raid the vault of the Sibylline oracles! You’re a hypocrite, Claudia Severa.’

  ‘But what is this Prophecy?’ Brigonius asked.

  ‘It is nothing less than a sketch of the future – the future of the Romans, and of Britain under them.’

  ‘The future?’ He tried to guess dates in his head. ‘But it must already be more than a hundred years old.’

  ‘A hundred and twenty-six,’ Lepidina said brightly. She fingered the fish pendant at her neck. ‘It was written down in the same year as the birth of Jesus of Judea.’

  ‘Who?’

  Severa snapped, ‘Just the hero of another mystery cult out of the east, another fad for my daughter and other silly children in Rome.’

  Brigonius grinned. ‘If the Prophecy is so old we are already in the future!’

  Severa nodded solemnly. ‘But that’s the point. Brigonius, the Prophecy has already started to come true. The Prophecy is past, present and future, all combined into one document – and through it our families are united across generations.’

  Brigonius frowned. ‘I’m not sure what you want of me, lady.’

  ‘Listen to what it says.’ And she read three lines from the Prophecy:

  The trembling skies declare that Rome’s great son has come to earth

  A little Greek his name will be. Whilst God-as-babe has birth

  Roman force will ram the island’s neck into a noose of stone…

  Brigonius listened closely. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Why, I think it’s clear enough. Brigonius, the empire has grown huge, with long, unstable borders beyond which barbarians roam restlessly. The new Emperor is concerned to shore up those borders. He travelled to Germany, where he is building long walls of turf. Now here he is in Britain, where he will deal with the northern frontier. He intends to build another of his walls across Britain – in the north, where, I am told, two estuaries converge to make the island narrow. You se
e? Now, to the best of my knowledge this wall is meant to be of turf, like the German frontier. But I have some associates who hope to persuade him to build it of stone.’

  ‘Stone?’ Brigonius felt bewildered. ‘All the way across the country? Are even the Romans capable of that?’

  ‘Oh, they’re capable of a great many things, if they put their collective mind to it. And if we can persuade him to build in stone, then somebody nearby is going to have to provide that stone for him.’ She eyed him. ‘There will be handsome profits to be made, quarryman Brigonius.’

  ‘But how can you know the Emperor will build a wall at all, let alone choose stone over turf?’

  She patted the leather packet. ‘Because the Prophecy says so. “A noose of stone” – what else could it mean?’

  Lepidina seemed sceptical. ‘Yes, but what was all that about a “little Greek”, a “God-as-babe”?’

  Severa was impatient. ‘Prophecies are always cryptic.’

  ‘You can’t just pick out the useful bits, mother! Don’t you wonder what the real purpose of the Prophecy is? Assuming it holds any truth at all. You want to use it to make money. Fine. But what was the purpose of God in sending it to us?’

  Severa merely shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

  Brigonius, though, was impressed by Lepidina’s comment. Sometimes she showed surprising depths. He asked, ‘Severa – why are you doing this? You have a comfortable life in Rome. Why come all the way to Britain?’

  Her face hardened. ‘A comfortable life – perhaps. We think of ourselves as Roman. Lepidina was born there, as was I, as was my mother. Three generations. But to the true Romans, the old blood, we will always be barbarians. Why, even the Emperor is looked down upon, because his father was born in Iberia! It is only money that breaks through such barriers, money and lots of it that washes away dried-up old blood. Is that motive enough?’