Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  The trouble was, if the Wall was ever to get built they had to convince Tullio.

  Tullio was prefect of the auxiliary troops stationed at the fort at Vindolanda, just south of the line of the proposed Wall. He was a Batavian, who had begun his career as commander of a unit of troops from that Germanic nation. Tullio had very visibly done well out of his career in the army. Through his service he had become a citizen, and a member of the equestrian class – Rome’s highest below that of senator. He had a handsome apartment here in Eburacum. He had even taken a wife; a dark-haired British woman. He was a walking exemplar of the fact that the army was not just a tool for subjugation and control, it was a machine for processing barbarians into serving soldiers, useful veterans and loyal citizens. And as the officers, senatorial-class, were merely working through military postings en route to more glittering career destinations, Tullio was possibly the most experienced soldier at Vindolanda, or indeed in any of the northern postings.

  Now Nepos, who as governor was commander-in-chief of the army in Britain, had given this solid man a peculiar commission.

  The Wall would be built by the legions, which, descended from Rome’s first soldiers, phalanxes of farmer-soldiers from the plains of Latium, remained the core of the army. All three of Britain’s legions would send detachments. Legionaries were trained in construction work, and each legion had its own specialist teams of engineers, architects and master builders. There was probably no workforce in the world better suited to such a mighty task.

  But once built the new Wall would be manned, not by legionaries, but by auxiliaries. Some auxiliaries were infantry like the legions, but many were specialists: cavalry, slingers, archers. These days many auxiliaries were provincials, co-opted into the army for their special prowess. Auxiliary units were more suited to the rapid-response policing operations of a frontier fortress than the legions, who were trained for set-piece battles in open countryside.

  The governor, a practical man, saw the need for a ‘foreman’ accountable to Nepos himself to oversee the project. As an auxiliary commander Tullio would not command any of the legionary detachments who would build the Wall. But as it was his troops who would use the Wall, Tullio had a vested interest in making it work. And so, wise councils had agreed, Tullio was just the man for the job.

  The trouble was, here was this competent, trusted man laughing Xander’s precious scheme out of court.

  Karus stood grandly. ‘Gentlemen, this is an imperial commission. We all have an interest in fulfilling that commission. And you are scarcely being respectful to the lady. Let’s have a little gravity, shall we?’

  The ploy seemed to work, and Tullio calmed down. ‘All right. And you, Butimas, if you swallow that fort you’ll be for it!’ Tullio aimed a kick at his sons, who fled, laughing at their own jokes. Tullio turned back to Xander. ‘Sorry, friend. Try again. Sell me this Wall of yours.’

  Trembling a little, Xander restored his increasingly battered model, and turned to a folio of sketches on parchment. ‘Here is the Wall itself. Fifteen feet high, ten wide. A foundation of slabs in clay, then two courses of dressed sandstone around a core of clay or cement. In front of the Wall – that is, on the north side, facing the barbarians – you will have a berm eighteen feet wide, and then a ditch, shaped like a V, you see? Twenty-seven feet wide, ten deep, with a drainage channel cut into the bottom.’

  ‘And this thing will cut right across the country, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Local streams will be culverted through the Wall. Over significant river crossings we will need bridges.’

  ‘Bridges, of course,’ Tullio said, still mocking.

  The aide, Annius, said cheerfully, ‘And on top of this you want forts and turrets, I suppose.’

  ‘A fort every mile, with a gate, and two turrets set into the curtain wall between each pair of forts. I have the drawings here…The Wall will be plastered and painted white.’

  ‘Oh, very nice,’ said Annius.

  ‘Such an edifice laid across the neck of the country will be an imposing statement.’

  Tullio growled, ‘My cock is an imposing statement, but that won’t stretch from sea to sea, and neither will this Wall. Look, friend, let me put you out of your misery.’ He took a notebook, a fat block of wood, and shook it out into a strip of leaves hinged at their edges. He dipped a pen in ink and briskly began to scribble numbers. ‘Seventy-one miles, you say? Ten feet by fifteen? If there are, um, so many feet to the mile…The point is, friend, I’ve worked with legionaries. I know how much stone or earth a man can shift in a day…’ He came to a result; he tapped the wood leaf with his pen. ‘To haul all that stone from the quarries to the Wall line will add up to about twenty million legionary work-days. We’ll have fifteen thousand legionaries at most, and each man can manage perhaps two hundred days per year – less this year, as it’s June already. And if you divide one number by the other – yes, here we are – you’ll find it is going to take you over six years to build this Wall. Not three!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. Look at the numbers!’ Tullio threw his notebook at the architect. ‘Oh, it’s always possible to shave off a bit. Use only local stone. Push the legionaries that bit harder. Maybe make some use of local labour or slaves, but if they’re untrained they won’t be useful for much. But none of that will make any real difference. No, I’m saying you simply can’t do it, friend.’

  Old Xander seemed about to burst into tears.

  Severa glared at Tullio. ‘I don’t know why we’re even having this debate. The command for this Wall comes from the Emperor Hadrian himself.’

  Tullio sat back and folded his massive arms. ‘I don’t care whether he’s the Emperor of the Romans or the King of the Bog People. You can’t build a six-year Wall in three years, love.’

  Severa’s fury was cold. ‘Don’t you call me “love”, you fur-backed—’

  ‘Severa!’ Karus snapped.

  Annius was studying the model. ‘Tell you what. Why not build it in turf? Just as good at keeping out the hairy lads from the north, and be done in less than half the time.’

  ‘Turf? Turf?’ Severa said menacingly. ‘Why, you insolent fool, if I had a clod of turf in my hand right now, I would gladly shove it down your throat—’

  Brigonius touched her arm. ‘Wait,’ he whispered. ‘I’m a quarryman. I deal with fellows like this all the time. It’s all a game. Just give us some time.’

  Karus stood hastily. ‘Quite right. Let’s sleep on it, shall we?’ He stood massively over Severa until she allowed herself to be escorted from the room. Then he sat down, blowing out his jowled cheeks with relief.

  ‘Feisty piece, isn’t she?’ Tullio said.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Karus said dryly.

  Brigonius faced Tullio. ‘Let’s get down to business, shall we? You heard her, prefect. This is the Emperor we’re dealing with. And the Emperor wants a stone wall.’

  Tullio said heavily, ‘Listen, black-beard, the Emperor can want to build his Wall on the moon, but that doesn’t mean it can be done.’

  ‘Then what can you do?’

  Annius was pulling his lip. In his dull way he seemed the more creative of the two, Brigonius thought, and was at least trying to come up with solutions. ‘Tell you what,’ he said slowly. ‘How about half in turf and half stone? You could probably manage that in the time. Then you get the best of all worlds, a complete defensive barrier in three years and a nice bit of stonework to impress the boss.’

  Brigonius was about to reject this out of hand, but Xander said wearily, ‘Four-tenths.’

  Brigonius turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘Not half. Four-tenths in turf, the rest stone according to the plan.’ He tapped Tullio’s notebook. ‘That is feasible from the figures, if you are honest in your calculations, prefect. Besides I worked it out for myself earlier.’

  Tullio took back the notebook and revised his figures quickly. ‘All right. Yes, four-tenths turf, six-tenths stone. Yes,
you could do that.’

  Xander turned to Brigonius. ‘This is the best we can do in the time.’

  Karus said darkly, ‘And you knew this before we came in here? Why didn’t you say something when we put the plan before the Emperor?’

  ‘Because I didn’t know we would only have three years,’ Xander said. He sounded exhausted. ‘Severa didn’t let slip that little detail until the audience. What could I do, argue with her before Hadrian himself?’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ Annius said cheerfully. ‘Everybody goes away happy. And you could always replace your turf with stone later.’

  Karus growled, but subsided.

  Brigonius glanced around. ‘All right,’ he said cautiously, not wishing to overstretch the consensus. ‘Then the question is, which half will be turf?’

  After another hour’s discussion, and after a tankard or two of Tullio’s coarse German beer, they came to a conclusion. From Segedunum at its eastern extremity, the Wall would run west as stone for forty-five miles, and then turf the rest of the way to the western coast. The eastern half of the Wall was closer to local sources of good stone – not least Brigonius’s own quarry – and the two soldiers regarded the security situation along this part of the border as more critical, so stone was appropriate for this stretch.

  ‘And besides,’ as Tullio pointed out, ‘the eastern half is where the Emperor is. He’s going to want to lay a foundation stone, not dig a lump of sod.’

  The four of them stood up and shook hands. ‘Then we have a plan,’ Brigonius said, weary but relieved. ‘Now all we’ve got to do is sell it to the Emperor.’

  ‘That’s the easy part,’ Karus muttered. ‘It’s Severa I’m frightened of…’

  XII

  The climax of Hadrian’s visit to Eburacum was the twenty-fourth of June, a day of religious celebration for soldiers wherever they were posted across the empire. After this Hadrian would ride north and ceremonially install the first foundation stone of the great Wall which would soon divide the island of Britain in two.

  Brigonius had been forced to learn a lot about the habits of his sole customer, the Roman army. A soldier’s religious life was complicated. To begin with he brought along his own gods. A German here in Britain, for instance, celebrated his feast of Matronalia on the first of March. He would also be expected to pay respect to any local deities. The soldiers seemed to like Brigantia’s own Coventina, and thanks to the army’s mobility she was gaining adherents even overseas, in Gaul and Germany. But the soldiers’ statues of her, crudely made, were alien in the eyes of the Brigantians, who found Coventina in the hills and the streams and in the wind, and did not recognise these busty Romanised cartoons.

  The centre of a soldier’s religious life, however, was a calendar based on feasts of the traditional Roman deities, principal city days, the anniversaries of the emperors, and dates associated with his unit itself. And of all the feasts on the calendar none was more significant than today, the twenty-fourth of June, the feast of Fors Fortuna, a popular goddess among the troops.

  Brigonius had hoped to spend the day in the company of Lepidina. He wasn’t sure what Severa’s plans would be now, and how much more time he and Lepidina would have together. But as the day’s festivities began Lepidina was nowhere to be found.

  Then Severa herself peremptorily requisitioned him as an escort. Beside Severa, her face set as hard as Roman concrete, Brigonius found himself trailing the Emperor as he toured the troops.

  Accompanied by his courtiers, Hadrian walked slowly from barracks block to training field, and inspected displays of infantry field manoeuvres and formation riding by cavalry units. It was a festival day, and the imperial party grew raucous on wine and British beer. Brigonius had a policy of staying sober around Romans, but Severa seemed determined to ply him with drink, and he saw no point in defying her. As the ale filled him even her company seemed less than icy.

  Hadrian drank his share, but he remained focused on the part he was playing. He was good at detail; Brigonius heard him sympathise with one unit of mixed cavalry and infantry that it was harder for them to put on a spectacular display than for a dedicated cavalry unit with their larger numbers of horse. Each man seemed to grow in his presence, and Brigonius could see why he was so loved by his troops.

  It wasn’t a bad life, Brigonius was coming to think, to be a soldier of Rome. You received regular pay and reasonable food. You had camaraderie in the barracks, and there was always the civilian town outside your fort, with its shops and inns and brothels and temples, where you might find a little relief, or a companion who could one day become a wife. The barracks could be rife with lice, and the town with diseases. But you could get rid of the lice in the bathhouse, and if you got sick you could go to the hospital – the army ran the only professional hospitals in the world. You might go through your whole twenty-five-year career with only two or three campaigning seasons, and perhaps without seeing any fighting at all. You were almost certainly better off than the Brittunculi or other half-civilised provincials beyond the walls of your fort…And every so often an emperor came to visit.

  Many of the troops had grown beards, in defiance of the usual Roman custom, imitating Hadrian’s coin images. This amused Severa. ‘Look at them. The Emperor’s beard is more famous than he is!’

  At noon the Emperor and his retinue, with Brigonius and Severa in tow, retired to the fortress’s headquarters. Today the largest reception room in the block had been decked out as a shrine to many gods, and the party settled down to a long afternoon of eating, drinking and fortune-telling. At the inception of his mighty project Hadrian was seeking good auguries. Since dawn his philosophers had been inspecting the sky, looking for unusual clouds and the flight of birds with auspicious patterns. Now animals were put to death on charcoal braziers, entrails were prodded, statues venerated and libations poured, as scholars worked their way through scrolls of prophecies and interpretations.

  Only the sinister freedman Primigenius sat aloof from it all, as always watching, watching.

  With Severa at his side like a gaoler, Brigonius had nothing to do but drink. The chanting of the philosophers and the thickness of the air, cloudy with incense, made him feel as if he were floating out of his body. He tried to strike up conversation with Severa. ‘Romans are always superstitious, aren’t they?’

  ‘None more than Hadrian,’ she said. ‘But it’s not surprising. He is a soldier who has to come to terms with the prospect of becoming a god after he dies – indeed in Egypt they worship him already. How would that feel, Brigonius? Can you even imagine it? Wouldn’t you be fascinated by past and future, if you felt you might some day transcend time itself?’

  This kind of philosophising baffled Brigonius at the best of times; now the words flew around in his head. ‘Superstitious or not, he’s still a soldier. And you can see he still has the touch with his men.’ He spotted Prefect Tullio sitting close to Governor Nepos. Tullio was silent, his face like thunder. ‘But there’s one soldier whose life doesn’t seem to have been improved by the Emperor’s visit.’

  ‘Oh, things have gone slightly awry for our friend the prefect,’ Severa said with silky satisfaction. ‘He’s still in his post. But he’s lost a few of his privileges. His wife and kids have been kicked out of the fortress for a start.’

  ‘Why?’

  She inspected her fingers, long, perfectly manicured. ‘Because of this solution you cooked up between you and your drinking pals. A Wall that is half stone, half turf.’

  Brigonius knew how unhappy she had been with the deal, not least because it violated the terms of her Prophecy. ‘Not quite half—’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said without emotion. ‘I had no choice but to accept it. But it took me some effort to sell it to the Emperor – or, more specifically, the freedman Primigenius. I had to promise some favours.’

  He asked uneasily, ‘What favours?’

  ‘And even then I found it necessary to shift some of the responsibility. I’m happy to sa
y that it is our oafish Germanic friend Tullio who is taking the blame for fouling up the estimates for the Wall, not me, not Xander.’

  Brigonius, his head full of beer fumes and smoke, felt as if he was about to pass out. ‘That’s unfair on Tullio. He’s only trying to do his duty. And you have made an unnecessary enemy. That’s a bad habit, Severa.’

  ‘Of course it is unfair, which makes it all the sweeter. That’ll teach him to call me “love”.’

  Something in her tone alarmed Brigonius, but he seemed unable to sit up. ‘These favours you promised—’

  Her face loomed before his eyes. ‘You aren’t completely incapable yet, are you, little Briton? The poison I’ve had dropped in your ale will soon grip you completely, though.’

  ‘Poison?’

  ‘Oh, it won’t harm you. It will just be that for a sunset and a sunrise you won’t be able to impose your will on your own body.’ She ran a fingertip down his chest. ‘How awful for you. But never mind, there is somebody else who will be able to make good use of your fine body while you’re gone. You’ve guessed, have you? You’re the favour, you see, to sweeten the deal you forced me to make. It’s not my choice at all, oh no, it’s simply a consequence of your own actions. You see that, don’t you?’

  Suddenly Brigonius remembered the way Hadrian had looked at him. Anger and fear flooded him, but still he couldn’t move; he lolled on his couch, a helpless doll, his limbs heavy as logs. ‘What have you done – have you promised me to Hadrian?’

  Another face loomed over him now: pale skin, black eyes, lips like a wound.

  Severa was whispering in his ear. ‘Oh, not the Emperor – you aren’t pretty or young enough for him – but Primigenius, who wields the power I needed. He has issues with our proposal, you know, for he has his own pet architect he hoped to promote. And then there is simple jealousy, of one bed-warmer for another. Primigenius lusts for you, yet hates you at the same time, for he knows you caught the Emperor’s eye, if only briefly. Isn’t that a paradox? Won’t it add spice to the night you’re about to spend together?’ She came closer still; he could feel her breath on his ear, smell the spices on her tongue. ‘And after he’s split you open, o Brittunculus, my daughter will never touch you again.’