Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  That red mouth descended towards him, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t struggle, couldn’t even cry out.

  XIII

  Brigonius rode west towards Banna, along the line of the Wall.

  A year after Hadrian’s decision, this part of Brigantia had been transformed into a vast construction yard. On this bright late spring morning, from the higher ground Brigonius could see how from horizon to horizon a corridor of broken ground cut across the crags and green-clad hills, mapped out by surveyors’ flags and poles, and scarred brown by the ruts of wheels and the prints of feet and hooves. It was a slash through the countryside’s green flesh. And all along its length legionaries toiled, hauling and laying stone, maggots in the wound.

  In what had been left of last summer, Governor Nepos had set his workforce the target of completing three miles of Wall, which had been achieved easily. This year, in the first full season, the three legions working on the Wall were each to complete five more miles.

  The mile-forts and turrets came first. The forts were built to a simple rectangular plan, fifty feet wide and sixty deep, with gateways in the north wall and the south. Inside there were small buildings and an oven, and a staircase leading to a viewing platform. The turrets were even simpler, just thatched towers set on bases twenty feet square, each with a hearth and a shelter for the soldiers. The turrets and forts were intended to be part of the fabric of the Wall itself, so they were built with ‘wings’, stubby extensions on their east and west faces where the curtain wall would be attached.

  Such was the speed of construction that in some places the curtain wall was already being built. On a foundation of slabs set in puddled clay, two courses of dressed stone were laid, rows of neat square blocks. Then a core of rubble bonded with clay or mortar was poured in to fill the space between the skin of cut stone. Drains were built under the Wall, and more significant streams were culverted. The completed stone sections were already being plastered and painted white with lime-wash render, and red stripes ran along the line of the wall, picking out the curtain’s courses of stonework.

  Brigonius, a stone man himself, marvelled at the pace of the work. It wasn’t just the hugely efficient transport of stone that impressed him but the Romans’ use of concrete. Without a core of concrete the Wall could never have been built so rapidly, or so robustly. Concrete even set hard under water, allowing the construction of firmly founded bridges. If the facing stones were robbed or decayed in the future, the concrete core would stand; the Romans were building for centuries.

  The Wall was not meant to be a defensive barrier, in the way that the wall of a fortress was designed to withstand a siege. Its purpose was control. The regularly placed fortified gates would allow the army to control the flow of population through the area – and, indeed, levy tolls from it. The Wall was imposing enough to deter any small-scale raids, but if there were any larger-scale disturbance the legionaries would mass from their bases in the south and ride out through the Wall gates to meet the enemy in set-piece battles in open country. In fact, Brigonius was coming to understand, the Wall was a mere component in a system of deep control, defence and communication that stretched south of here through roads and forts back into the Roman province, and even to the north, where manned outpost forts would be maintained beyond the Wall itself.

  But, watching the Wall rise grandly over the crags, Brigonius wondered how much this military theorising mattered compared to the brute physical reality of the Wall. It was a monument to the power of the Roman mind like nothing ever seen before in Britain – or, according to Tullio, in the whole world – and even if it were not manned by a single soldier such a structure would surely deter all but the most fanatical enemies of Rome.

  But then, Brigonius reminded himself, despite certain harm done to him, he was not a fanatical enemy of Rome.

  Brigonius arrived at his own limestone quarry. This was a great scoop out of the south side of a hillside, not far from the line of the Wall, some miles to the east of Banna. He rode up from the north, so he could stand at the lip of the artificial cliff that had been cut into the crag and view the activities in the pit. Long lines of men snaked from the quarry face to massing points by the carts, lugging stone. They were the men of the sixth legion, mostly drawn from Gaul and Germany but some from further afield. Day after day they hacked into British limestone, roughly cutting the stone blocks and dragging them to the carts to be hauled off to the construction sites.

  The speed of the work was remarkable here too. In less than a full season’s working the quarry had already been hugely extended, following the seam of rich creamy rock, from the small bite into the turf-covered crag that Brigonius had inherited. The legionaries had a variety of specialist tools that Brigonius coveted, such as heavy hammers, steel-tipped wedges and crowbars, and cranes for lifting heavy blocks. In one part of the quarry a watermill worked a trip-hammer, flailing arms which battered at intransigent rock. He had heard a rumour that in another quarry further along the Wall stone was being cut by a water-driven saw.

  But in the end it was brute labour that was getting the job done. Even from here Brigonius could see how the sweat glistened on the backs of the legionaries as they toiled. The Wall would be seventy miles long, and somebody had to cut out every single block of stone, haul it to the Wall line and mortar it in place.

  ‘Brigonius.’

  He turned. Here was Matto, his cousin, a stocky man ten years older than Brigonius. Matto was black-bearded, dark-haired, and he wore a heavy woollen coat dyed deep blue-black, so he was a knot of darkness in the middle of a bright summer day. It was hard to imagine a figure more anti-Roman in his style.

  ‘Cousin. You crept up on me.’

  Matto grinned, and Brigonius saw yellow-brown quarry dust embedded deep in his pores. ‘Just as you sought to creep up on us – eh?’

  He was right. It was a trick Brigonius had learned from Tullio the prefect, who was becoming a brusque sort of friend. ‘All soldiers are lazy blighters,’ Tullio would growl in his thick Germanic-tinged Latin. ‘It’s in the blood. The only thing to do is to sneak up on them from a direction they don’t expect, at a time they don’t expect it. The small hours is my favourite time. You should see the whores and catamites run, like pink rats!’

  Brigonius asked Matto, ‘Am I that predictable?’

  ‘You’ll have to find some new spying-points. Here’s the latest tally.’ Matto handed Brigonius a fold-out notebook of taped-together wood leaves.

  Brigonius looked over the figures; at first glance they seemed in order. ‘Any problems?’

  ‘None but the Romans,’ Matto growled. ‘The numbers add up in their neat columns. But they are stealing our stone, cousin.’

  ‘No, they aren’t,’ Brigonius said patiently. They had had this argument many times before.

  ‘The prices they are paying are ruinous,’ Matto insisted.

  So they were, even compared to the prices Brigonius had been able to extract from the soldiers at Vindolanda before the coming of Hadrian and his plan. But at least they did pay, when they could have just taken the stone. Brigonius thought he understood. For one thing by paying rather than stealing, even a pittance, the Romans kept their own consciences clean; they might be hypocrites, but they preferred to run their affairs according to the rule of law – that is, their law.

  And there was a subtler purpose. When he had come to work for Brigonius Matto had had to learn Latin, and to write and tally well enough to keep adequate records. Matto may not have realised it – and Brigonius wasn’t going to point it out – but by being forced to deal with the army he was becoming, little by little, literate and numerate, and locked into the Romans’ economy.

  The Roman army wasn’t just a tool of conquest. The largest organisation in the world, boasting three hundred thousand men deployed from the Tinea to the Euphrates, everywhere it worked it used Latin and paid in the imperial coin. The army was a source of Romanness, its walls and forts a stony wave of acculturation.

/>   Anyhow, such was the quantity of stone being extracted to build the Wall that even at the Romans’ ‘ruinous’ prices Brigonius and his family were growing quietly rich.

  Matto was recounting a long and complicated anecdote about the behaviour of a particularly obnoxious decurion in the quarry. Brigonius cut him off. ‘You’re even more sour than usual today, cousin. Something’s been twisting your crab-apples. What’s up?’

  ‘Everybody’s stirred up,’ Matto said. ‘It’s the tax census.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘Brigonius, they are actually building their precious Wall right on top of freshly ploughed land. My land. Now I’m told I will have to cough up higher taxes to pay for it. And in future to take my cattle from one field to another I will have to pass through a Roman gate and pay a toll!’

  ‘Matto, this is the way things are. Take it to the council if you’ve a complaint.’

  Matto was disgusted. ‘What would be the point of that? That bunch sold themselves to the Romans long ago.’ Much of the Brigantian nobility had been subsumed into the government of the civitas, the Roman administrative region which had taken the name of the old nation. ‘Well,’ Matto said darkly now, ‘there is talk of doing something.’

  Brigonius grew impatient. He had to put up with this bluster every time he tried to do business with Matto. ‘Like what? What will you do, throw stones at the governor?’

  ‘You would say that,’ Matto sneered. ‘Some say you’re more Roman than the Romans, now.’

  Brigonius kept his face closed. ‘Then there’s no more to be said, is there?’ He tapped the record. ‘Thanks for this. I’ll see you next week.’ And he turned back to the spectacle of his quarry and the toiling legionaries. He heard Matto stomp off to his horse.

  Brigonius knew he was an easy target for local resentment, because he was much more accessible than a council member. But what twisted him up about such encounters was his memory of what had been done to him a year ago at Eburacum. He had been conscious, helpless but conscious, as Primigenius had used him. When he had at last dared to approach Lepidina again she had recoiled, as if the stink of the freedman still polluted him. He was pretty sure that the harm he had suffered was more grievous than any petty land-grabbing suffered by Matto and his pals.

  But the Romans were like the weather, or the passage of time; you couldn’t do anything about them, you had to work with them, or slink away and die. That was what Matto couldn’t see.

  And as for what had befallen him that night it was not the Romans he blamed, not the Emperor, not even the bitter freedman Primigenius. It was the woman who had set the trap into which he had fallen: a Roman but by descent his own countrywoman, Claudia Severa.

  In the meantime there was work to be done. He turned his horse’s head and set off for Banna.

  XIV

  Brigonius’s birthplace happened to be close to the site where the Wall’s western turf construction met the stone eastern sections. Thus as he reached Banna that evening the turf Wall came into view.

  If anything it was an even more spectacular sight than the stone Wall, for along its line the legionaries had stripped away the vegetation right down to the pink-white boulder clay beneath. The turfs they cut – and hauled here sometimes from miles away, for good turf was hard to find – were heaped up on a central strip of remnant greenery. The finished curtain wall was fourteen feet high and twenty feet wide at the base, punctuated by turrets of stone or timber, and a rampart of white clay was laid out before the Wall on the northern side. So as Brigonius looked down from the higher ground, the cleared strip of land stood out, a gash in the landscape brilliant white in the sun, with the green-brown line of the Wall itself running along its centre line.

  At length he arrived at Banna. To the south of its escarpment the valley still cut deep, and far below the river washed as it always had. But the landscape bore the mark of the Romans. To the north a road set off straight as an arrow, heading for the northern outposts, and the hills where men had once seen the reclining form of a goddess now glimmered with the fires of watchtowers.

  Banna itself was now the site of a Roman camp. As he approached Brigonius saw sentries silhouetted against a setting sun, their bare heads and spear tips clearly visible above wooden ramparts. The place bristled with activity, the roughly laid roads that led from east, west and south were full of traffic, and the turf all around had been churned to mud. The camp itself huddled against the escarpment, protected from any threat by a complex of ditches and a palisaded trench to the north, and the cliff to its back.

  As he approached the camp’s defences Brigonius was passed through a line of sentries. Within was a neat array of the Romans’ leather tents. There were soldiers everywhere, of course, in their leather tunics and trousers, their woollen cloaks, their strapped-up military boots. Even more of them were sporting beards, such was the impression Hadrian had made during his visit last year. The camp was a sketch of the fort that would soon be built here, but it was already functioning, already an operational element in the system of the defence of the province.

  Once there had been a Brigantian community here. A Roman watchtower had been built here long before Brigonius was born, a blocky stone pillar that had loomed over his boyhood. The watchtower still stood, but his home had gone, the roundhouses demolished, the defensive ditches filled in. Brigonius wouldn’t have recognised the place, save for the essential shape of the landscape.

  Brigonius found Tullio sitting in his own tent. Tullio had moved his household and his aides here for the building season; it was a place where he could watch over the progress of both the stone Wall to the east and the turf to the west. Some of his officers were here, including his close adviser the bucket-headed decurion Annius, and also his household slave. Karus and Xander were here, sitting with Lepidina, who looked bored. When Brigonius joined them they were winding down what sounded like a wide-ranging discussion of problems to do with the Wall, a conversation fuelled by wine served by the slave.

  As usual Tullio was surrounded by heaps of paperwork. The army’s system of assignments was quite complicated, Brigonius had learned, with detachments being sent all over the province, and perhaps only half or two-thirds of the nominal strength of a given unit actually being in its home base at any time. But as a soldier of Rome, in your unit’s Acts your duties were recorded daily. It was the army’s meticulous record-keeping that enabled the commanders to know exactly not just where each soldier was supposed to be but where he actually was. And to maintain this vast mountain of recording whole teams of clerks were required, an army within the army.

  But today the discussion concerned the Wall.

  ‘A fort every mile, two turrets every mile,’ Xander said firmly. ‘That’s the design. That’s what we are building.’

  ‘And I’m telling you,’ Tullio said, ‘that it can’t be done. You see, your design is all very well. I’m all for design. My cock would tumble out of my underpants without design. What I’m talking about now is fact, legionaries out there right now putting stones and turf blocks on the ground, one on top of the other. And if you try to follow your every-mile rule rigidly, Xander, you find yourself planting forts at the bottom of a gully where you can’t open the gates, or at the top of a crest where if you did open the gates you would fall out.’

  ‘Roman roads run straight,’ Karus said, himself faintly mocking. ‘Up hill and across valley; everybody knows that. Are you saying you can’t build a simple Wall to the same standard?’

  Tullio ignored him. ‘And it’s not just the position of the forts. I’m hearing grumbles from the legionary tribunes who’ve been up on inspection from Eburacum. If an assault were to come, how are they supposed to deploy through those toy-town gates?’

  Xander said stiffly, ‘I carefully computed the width and frequency of the gates to ensure—’

  Annius said, ‘Yes, but the local farmers have to use them too. What are we going to say to the legate of the sixth when he finds himself queuing up
behind a flock of sheep?’

  The image was so absurd it made Lepidina laugh prettily. Brigonius tried not to look at her.

  Brigonius knew that the Wall-building project was actually running to schedule, somewhat to everybody’s surprise. But Tullio was genuinely concerned about this issue of the useless mile-forts.

  Tullio’s slave, a boy aged maybe fourteen, approached Brigonius with a wine cup. Brigonius accepted it and said, ‘Thanks.’

  The boy looked surprised to be noticed at all. He said, ‘Enjoy it, sir,’ and resumed his station.

  Brigonius watched him go and sipped his drink; it was soldiers’ wine, strong, filthy stuff. The boy’s tongue was British, Brigantian. His litter-name was Similis. Brigonius wondered what Matto would have thought if he could have seen his cousin now, being served wine by the British slave of a German officer in the pay of the Roman army, as he worked on a Wall which was meant to secure the servitude of the north of Britain forever.

  And he looked at Lepidina. He couldn’t help it.

  She was sitting quietly, head down, her hands folded around a half-empty cup of blood-red wine. A year under her mother’s thumb in northern forts had not been good for this city girl, and there was no sign of the bright spirit she had shown during that first visit to Camulodunum. She was a bird in a cage of stone.

  Karus seemed aware of the glum silence between them. As the conversation about the practicalities of mile-forts ran down, the lawyer lumbered across to Lepidina, sat down, and let the slave boy fill his cup. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how’s your marvellous mother? I don’t see so much of her these days.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Lepidina said. ‘She’s too busy writing letters to the governor.’