Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  The crowd stirred as men in togas came filing onto the stage – officials of the imperial court, Severa told Brigonius. She pointed some out. ‘Those two are important for our purposes. The short, squat fellow is Platorius Nepos.’

  ‘The new governor.’

  ‘Yes, and an old friend of the Emperor’s. It is under his control that our wall will be built, if at all. And the skinny chap in the toga is called Primigenius.’

  ‘A slave’s name.’ First born. But Primigenius, wiry, bald, watchful, did not look like a slave to Brigonius. His face was well-proportioned, perhaps once beautiful, his eyes darkened and cheeks whitened by powder.

  Severa murmured, ‘He’s a freedman but he kept his birth name. Now he runs the Emperor’s household – and once, it is said, he warmed his bed. It is through Primigenius that we will obtain access to Nepos, and the Emperor. So if he glances at you, remember to smile. So what do you say, Brigonius? Will you work with me? As far as I can see you have little to lose.’ She eyed Lepidina. ‘And perhaps a great deal to gain.’

  Brigonius was astonished at the implied offer. Could a mother be so cold and calculating as to tout her daughter like this?

  But Lepidina was distracted by what was happening on the stage. ‘There he is!’ she squealed, excited.

  A man came striding out onto the stage. The crowd surged forward and roared.

  He was tall, vigorous, well-muscled, wearing shining gold armour. His skin looked tanned, and his curling hair and beard were sun-streaked brown. Brigonius judged he was about forty. He glanced over the crowd – and his gaze lit on Brigonius, who with his height stood out from the mob. Thus Brigonius found himself subject to the complex inspection of a man, an emperor, a god – Hadrian.

  ‘He’s taller than he looks on the coins,’ Lepidina breathed.

  IV

  Severa arranged an audience with the court. They would meet the new governor, Platorius Nepos, and, with luck, perhaps even the Emperor himself.

  ‘It cost me plenty. Every chancer in the province is trying to get to Hadrian, as you can imagine. And that manipulative snake Primigenius is fiendishly difficult to work with. But I got there in the end. If this comes off, we will have years of profitable business ahead of us – plenty of time for me to pay back my debts.’

  ‘If,’ Brigonius said. ‘You’re a gambler, Severa! And if Hadrian decides on turf as he did in Germany?’

  ‘You mustn’t think like that, Brigonius. You must be positive – seize this chance – and deal with the consequences later.’

  In any event they would have no access to the Emperor until he reached the colonia of Camulodunum. And it was going to take many days for the imperial circus to travel that far, Brigonius learned. The whole purpose of the trip was for the people to see Hadrian. There would be stops in the new city of Londinium and elsewhere, so the wealthier citizens of the towns, already heavily taxed in this heavily militarised province, could feel they got their money’s worth from the huge expense of this visit.

  Rather than wait, Severa decided that she, her daughter and Brigonius would go on ahead. Arriving early at Camulodunum they would have more time to prepare their pitch.

  On his journey south Brigonius had travelled fast and light. He rode all the way, changing his horses at roadside inns – mansiones, as they were called, stations primarily intended for official despatch riders and the cursus publicus, the fast public postal service. But he didn’t sleep in the inns. He had a leather tent, in fact a Roman army surplus item he’d purchased at Vindolanda. He didn’t like towns; he had been happy to sleep in fields with his own small fire and his horse tethered nearby. Cheaper too.

  Going back with two Roman ladies was a different matter. They weren’t about to sleep in a field; the question never even arose. Severa lavished money to hire a new carriage, slaves and horses. Then, armed with a schematic map of the province, she plotted out a route. From Rutupiae they would travel west through Durovernum and along the south bank of the Tamesis estuary – said to be the route once taken by Claudius’s conquering army – and then via smaller towns to Londinium. There they would cross the river by the Romans’ new wooden bridge, and head north.

  This route would incidentally take them through the homelands of several British nations, including Brigonius’s own ancestral people the Catuvellaunians. But these were not marked on Severa’s map, which showed only the Romans’ new towns, their roads, and the rivers with their new Latin names.

  So they set off. They rolled through peaceful farmland. The fields were marked out by hedgerows or stone walls, given over on this summer’s day to wheat or barley. Away from the towns, the buildings were mostly round thatched houses; here and there smoke seeped into the sky.

  From the start it was an unhappy journey. Lepidina and her mother had already journeyed all the way from Rome, and were frankly tired of travelling. Brigonius had hoped he could at least use the trip to get to know Lepidina a little better. Lepidina did some perfunctory flirting with Brigonius for the first day or two, but soon grew bored and retreated into the back of the carriage, where, curled up among bundles of clothing, she immersed herself in books of poetry.

  She showed these to Brigonius. Written out on papyrus scrolls they were poems by somebody known as Ovid. Brigonius found this difficult to read; his Latin wasn’t good enough to spot all the allusions and verbal trickeries. But the poetry was racy stuff and he found it embarrassing.

  Severa teased him mercilessly. ‘You’re like all young people. Do you imagine your generation invented sex?…’

  But these intervals of banter were moments in a rather dreary progression.

  In the event it wasn’t Lepidina whom Brigonius got to know better during the journey but her mother, in the long hours he spent riding with her at the front of the carriage. Alongside Severa, he saw his own landscape through her sharper eyes.

  Eighty years after Claudius, Britannia was divided into two distinct parts. The south and east had been pacified, and a civilian government was emerging based on the new towns. But the north and west remained essentially under military control. Thus Brigonius had grown up under an occupying power. The Romans even had different names for the two populations, the Brittani of the south and the Brittones of the north.

  ‘The country here makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?’ Severa said. ‘Home for you is different from all this. The south-east of Britain has more in common with Gaul or Italy than with Britain’s own north-west.’

  He tried to put his feelings into words. ‘At least at home you know who you are. Things are clear. You’re Roman or you’re Brigantian. Here it’s all – muddy.’ He said defiantly, ‘But even here the touch of the Roman is light.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Look around you. The farms were here before the road. You can tell from the way the road just cuts through the fields. And the farmers are working the land just as they always did, long before the Romans came. So you see, the Romans have made hardly any difference at all.’

  ‘You think so?’ Severa said slyly. ‘Look at that.’ She pointed to a farmhouse, a complex of whitewashed tile-roofed buildings surrounded by gardens and set amid extensive fields: it was grand, even palatial. ‘You could transplant such a house as that to the Mediterranean and it wouldn’t look out of place. And what about that?’ On a riverbank to the east, dimly seen in misty air, a great wheel turned slowly. ‘It is a mill,’ she said. ‘For grinding corn, using the power of flowing water where once human muscle or oxen would have done the job. You can use the wind, too, if you’re clever enough. The farmers are even breaking land on hilltops and in river valleys they previously thought not worth working. The population is rising too. I know this is true because the Romans measure such things.’

  Brigonius snorted. ‘The Romans count us so they can tax us. The farmers only grow more wheat to meet the demands of the soldiers who push us around. And then they have to pay tax on the coin they earn.’

  ‘Yes,’ Severa sai
d, a touch impatiently, ‘but that’s the point. You have to see all of this as a great wheel, Brigonius – like the waterwheel of the mill over there. Once the farmers grew only for themselves. Now they grow a surplus, which they take to the towns to sell. The taxes they pay on their profits are used to develop the towns and to pay the soldiers, who, hungry, must be fed by the farmers’ surplus…Around and around it goes, a wheel driven by a river of money. And everybody benefits, everybody grows prosperous, and everybody is at peace. Why, there have probably never been more people alive in Britain than today. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘But what’s the point of it all? The mill-wheel grinds flour for bread. What purpose does your money-wheel serve?’

  ‘Why, it grinds up people. It smashes up petty tribes like your own and bakes the fragments into an empire.’

  ‘It makes everybody the same,’ Brigonius said resentfully.

  ‘Yes! And that is the power of it.’ Severa dug into her purse and produced a coin, stamped with Hadrian’s head. ‘Look at this, Brigonius. You could travel along roads just like this one from Britain to Asia, and everywhere you could ask for your daily bread in Latin, and pay for it with this coin. A single language, a single currency, right across a continent. And Britain is part of it! Don’t be sentimental, Brigonius! Open your eyes and see the shining future – and embrace it.’

  As she made this little speech she touched his hand. Her grip was strong, her flesh oddly cold. Looking at her pale eyes he saw her ambition, and he wondered uneasily just how unsentimental she would prove to be in pursuing her goals.

  In the back of the carriage, Lepidina puzzled out a fresh bit of wordplay in Ovid’s poetry and laughed softly, her voice light as a bird’s.

  V

  Unlike most other British towns Londinium had not been founded on the site of an older settlement. When Claudius came this way there had been nothing at all, Severa said, nothing but the mud huts of a few fisherfolk. Now along the shining river barges and seagoing ships cruised purposefully, and docks sprawled along both north and south banks of the river, with cranes rising like gaunt birds. Beyond a hinterland of warehouses and granaries there were signs of still more impressive buildings under construction.

  Using her sketchy map Severa showed him why Londinium had risen. ‘You see, the river is tidal, all the way to this point, and navigable much further inland. And the city itself is a node of road systems that arrow off across the island north, west, east and south. It is a natural port for trade with Gaul and further afield…’

  It was a port for an imperial province, Brigonius saw, a port for continental trade. Britain did not need Londinium; Britannia did.

  After a final overnight stop they approached Camulodunum. It was early in the morning. As they neared the town the road, growing busier, was lined with tombstones, urns half-buried in the ground. Severa told Brigonius that the Romans didn’t allow burials within a town’s boundary, so cemeteries grew up on the major routes out of town.

  The wall of Camulodunum itself became visible, a dark line cutting across rising ground. For miles around the wall, however, Brigonius made out roundhouses, barns and earthworks, most of them abandoned. The Roman town seemed to have been planted on a low hill, overlooking what had once been a much more extensive settlement, now disappearing under the plough.

  Outside the town they glimpsed a vast walled structure of bright new stone, too small to be a town, the wrong shape to be a fort. It turned out to be an arena where chariot races were run, under the auspices of priests from the town’s temple. Brigonius was amazed at the extravagance. But the arena’s upkeep was paid for by the betting on the races, and the eyes of Severa, an instinctive gambler, lit up at the thought.

  Severa sent a slave running ahead to prepare for their arrival. As a result they were met on the road by one Flavius Karus, whom Severa introduced as a lawyer with whom she had corresponded over the business of Hadrian’s frontier works.

  Brigonius and Karus eyed each other suspiciously. Karus was a tall man, as tall as Brigonius, but his belly was heavy and rippled like a sack of water when he walked. His hair was as dark as Brigonius’s, though peppered with grey, and he was clean-shaven where Brigonius was bearded. He had donned a toga for the occasion, albeit a bit grubby and splashed with mud at its hem, but he was clearly every bit as British as Brigonius.

  Not only that, Brigonius thought, Karus paid rather too much attention to Lepidina. ‘So this is the delightful daughter whose company you promised in your letters!’

  Lepidina was used to male attention, welcome and unwelcome. But Brigonius thought he saw a gleam of calculation in Severa’s eye. He wondered if she used her daughter’s charms as a lure to snare fat old fools like Karus as well as youngsters like himself.

  The four of them were to walk to Karus’s home, inside the walled town; the slaves would follow with the luggage. Karus led the way along the crowded road. The town wall loomed over them: twelve feet high, Karus said with mock pride, not counting the parapets, and eight feet thick. The road passed through an immense double gate. Karus said this had once been a triumphal arch, built to celebrate Claudius’s visit here. After Boudicca’s disastrous uprising it had been built into the town’s stout new walls.

  Under the gate Brigonius was stopped by a patrol of soldiers who roughly searched his clothing. The Romans had a law that you couldn’t carry a weapon inside any town, and they enforced it, especially where Brittani were concerned. Brigonius submitted; he was used to it. The women watched this little exchange, Severa with a jackdaw’s fascinated stare, Lepidina rather bewildered. Brigonius imagined they had never seen people of their acquaintance treated this way.

  Inside the town narrow streets divided the city into blocks of housing Karus called insulae, islands. Every surface was covered with slogans and sketches. To Brigonius the town was cramped and crowded, all straight lines and square angles and a jumble of distracting imagery. It was strange to think that somewhere under all this painted stone and plaster Cunobelin had once held court at the heart of his own empire, a capital now erased from the earth.

  Karus’s home was in a side street. It was a tall, skinny sort of building on a square base, its plastered walls gleaming white, roofed by red tiles. At street level the doors were flung wide to reveal a shop, with a broad counter set out with food: meat, pastries, bits of fruit. Still early in the morning, customers crowded the counter, buying their breakfast. The smell of cooked meat made Brigonius’s mouth water, but he wondered why all these folk had not simply eaten at home.

  Karus led his guests through the shop and to a staircase at the back. It turned out that Karus owned the space on top of the shop, which was, to Brigonius’s surprise, like a second house piled up on top of the first. The space up here, small to begin with, was sliced up into smaller rooms by inner partitions. Karus went around lighting wall-mounted oil lamps and candles. The rooms had tiny windows with panes of bluish glass, but it was dark inside the apartment, even on so bright a morning, for the building was in the shadow of others.

  Severa and Lepidina made slight noises of appreciation as Karus showed them around. ‘It isn’t terribly large,’ Karus said apologetically. ‘But it’s all a poor lawyer can afford. You wouldn’t believe how expensive land has become close to the town centre.’

  Severa said, ‘Oh, it’s the same everywhere. You should see the apartment blocks in Rome. Some of them are piled so high I swear they would fall over if they didn’t lean against each other. But you’ve made good use of the space, Karus.’

  One small corner room was a shrine. The guests inspected Karus’s idols and tokens, most of them dedicated to his own household gods. But Brigonius recognised a statue of Fors Fortuna.

  Severa said, ‘A soldier’s god.’

  ‘I’m no soldier,’ Karus said, patting his broad belly. ‘But most of my clients are. This is still a soldiers’ town, Severa. It does no harm to seek the blessing of their goddess.’ He led his guests onward.

  B
rigonius touched the wall. The surface was plastered and painted white, but in places the plaster had chipped away to reveal plaited wood stuffed with mud and straw. He felt increasingly cramped in this small, dark space. It was even worse than the stone-walled forts he had to visit when dealing with the army in the north. Here the thin walls didn’t block out the noise from the busy alley outside, or the food smells from the restaurant down below. Not only that, this was Karus’s territory, and the fat lawyer seemed to fill the narrow rooms with his talk.

  Lepidina took his arm. ‘Are you all right? You’re like a bear in a cage.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘It’s just – look, it’s so different for me.’ He waved a hand, trying to find words. ‘It’s the way all the walls are flat, the edges straight, the corners square. And the space is sliced up for different purposes. You sleep over there, you work over here.’

  Severa was interested. ‘And is that different from how you live?’

  He tried to describe the house he had grown up in and where he still lived, its open round space a map of the cycles of time.

  Karus was dismissive. ‘Well, polite people don’t need to live like animals any more.’

  Brigonius bunched his fists, but Severa touched his arm. ‘Your grandfather no doubt lived in such a house, lawyer,’ she admonished Karus.

  Brigonius deliberately relaxed. Karus nodded, which would pass for an apology, and the moment was over.

  Lepidina watched this with wide-eyed glee. Brigonius was sure she knew that on a deep level, if the men had come to blows, it would have been over her.

  ‘And another thing,’ Brigonius said, determined to keep the initiative. ‘Where do you cook your food?’

  Now Lepidina laughed. ‘Nobody cooks for themselves, silly!’

  ‘They don’t?’

  ‘You have a lot to learn.’ She grabbed his hand and began to pull him to the door. ‘Come on. I’m hungry. Let’s go see the town.’