Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One

by Stephen Baxter

  Then there was pandemonium. Helena screamed, the soldiers yelled and drew their weapons, and Thalius and Aurelia were both grabbed and held. But nobody dared touch the Emperor himself, or the boy.

  Constantine raised his hand, and everything stopped.

  The Emperor was breathing slowly, carefully, and he kept his eyes locked on Audax. ‘Don’t move,’ he said in Brigantian.

  Audax was surprised enough to speak. ‘You know Brigantian.’

  Perhaps his arm moved, just a tiny bit, as he spoke. Constantine gasped, and his huge body shuddered, as if he was a puppet controlled by the boy, and the knife.

  Constantine said breathlessly, ‘I was a soldier here, serving under my father, for many years. This was my home. I learned British. What is your name? Nobody thought to tell me.’

  ‘Audax, sir.’

  ‘Audax. All right, Audax, listen to me carefully. There are two very important things that I must tell you. The first is that I know that it wasn’t your fault. I saw the woman push you – what is her name?’

  ‘Aurelia.’

  ‘Yes. I saw it. So whatever happens today, if I live or die, you won’t be punished. Do you believe me?’

  Audax thought it over. ‘No,’ he said.

  Constantine gritted his teeth. ‘I wish my advisors were half as honest. I am the Emperor, Audax. If I make a promise it is kept. So believe me.’

  ‘What is the second important thing?’

  ‘The second thing is that as a soldier I learned a lot about the human body. Mostly by cutting holes in other people. And I know that if you move that knife, even a little bit, you will puncture the vessels of my heart and I will surely die. If you do not move it, I might yet live. Do you understand now why I asked you to stand still?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Audax.

  Yes, he understood. But his arm, held out straight, was tiring, and the blood was seeping out of the Emperor’s robes, bright crimson, and soaking his hand in slippery warmth. He did move, just minutely, no matter how hard he tried to keep still. He couldn’t help it. And with every jerky motion he felt the Emperor shudder and twist in response. It was the way Audax had seen crucified slaves jerk and twitch, tiny motions as they tried to relieve the pain in their chests and feet. And just as Audax had learned to recognise mortal fear in the faces of the crucified, so he saw fear on Constantine’s greying face now, beneath the clamp of calm.

  The Emperor said, ‘Can you see the man behind me? The tall man with the spectacles – I mean the bits of glass on his nose? He is my physician – a Greek, and a very good one. He is called Philip. If you want you can let Philip take the knife from you, then I will live. Or you could choose to twist the knife and I will die.’

  Audax heard Aurelia yell, ‘Kill him, slave! Kill the monster—’ Then her voice was muffled, perhaps by a soldier’s heavy hand.

  Audax stayed still, his arm aching.

  The Emperor said, ‘Why do you think that woman wants me dead?’

  ‘The words on my back say you will die.’

  ‘All right. But what do you think, Audax? Do you think your choice should depend on a prophecy? Look at me. What do you see?’

  Audax considered the man before him: heavyset, powerful. He reminded Audax of Tarcho. ‘A soldier,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Good. That is what I am above all, and always will be.’

  ‘I want to be a soldier,’ Audax said.

  Constantine nodded, just a little. ‘Then I promise you shall be – if you choose to let me live. But it is your choice, Audax. Quite a thing, isn’t it? Here we are, Emperor and slave, the highest and the lowest, the top and the bottom. And yet because of a simple knife, at this moment it is you who holds more power than anybody else in the world – you, at whose every tremble all history shudders.’

  ‘It is true,’ Thalius whispered. ‘It is true! The unravelling of a Prophecy three centuries old – the fate of the whole world to come – all of it boils down to this moment, a knife in the hand of a slave!’ But Tarcho hushed him roughly.

  Constantine whispered, his voice growing weaker, his face greyer, ‘The world is a complicated place, Audax. The future is unknown. And yet we must make choices even so. What do you think such choices should be based on? Words burned into your back, or the judgement of a man like me?’

  Audax felt detached from the world, as if he was going to faint. His arm, outstretched, was so stiff, his blood-soaked fingers so numb, that he could barely feel the knife any more, and he didn’t know if he was keeping still or not.

  And as the world turned to grey, he thought he saw the walls of the room break down, like a collapsed wall in the mine, revealing corridors leading off to misty destinations. Dimly he discerned that the Emperor was telling the truth, and so was Thalius, that momentous events affecting the lives of people for generations unborn depended on what he did in the next few heartbeats. Who was he to trust, then – who or what?

  If Constantine had been Tarcho he would not have hesitated – Tarcho, the only person in his life save perhaps his dimly remembered mother who had ever been truly kind to him. And yet Constantine was enough like Tarcho that he found he trusted him. People were real, Audax thought. People and their characters and their judgements. That was all that mattered in the world. Words, prophecies, were nothing.

  ‘Call your doctor,’ he said.

  Constantine’s eyes did not move, but his expression softened. ‘Philip. Come here. As slowly as you like, sir…’

  Nobody dared move until the Greek doctor had taken the knife from Audax’s hand, and then slowly extracted it from the Emperor’s chest. Audax, released, fell back, his head ringing, and that strange sense of detachment evaporated, and the room closed up to become just a room once more.

  After that there was an explosion of movement, a flashing of blades. Tarcho grabbed Thalius and Audax and pulled them out of the mêlée.

  XIV

  In the autumn of the year that Constantine died, Thalius arranged to meet Audax before the steps of the Temple of Claudius in Camulodunum.

  He fretted how he would even find Audax. After all, twenty-three years had elapsed since that extraordinary audience with the Emperor. And besides, he dreaded leaving home. It was a market day, this bright autumn morning, and the town would be full of farmers and their wives and brats, their dogs and sheep and cattle, and the traders, prostitutes and petty thieves who preyed on them. Some days Camulodunum was more like a vast cattle pen than a town, he thought grumpily. At the exceptional age of seventy-five years old, Thalius found it increasingly difficult to get around, and on days like this he preferred simply to hole up in his townhouse.

  But he had no choice, for this was the only day Audax could meet him. The boy had had to travel all the way from his posting in far Constantinople, using up most of his leave on the complicated journey across the western empire, and even then he was required to spend most of his time in Londinium, at the headquarters of the diocese of the four Britains. Well, if Audax was prepared to come so far, Thalius could pluck up the courage to step out of his own front door to greet him.

  And after all, they were both here for old Tarcho.

  The mêlée before the Temple was just as difficult as Thalius had feared. Vendors had set up stalls on the steps and even inside the colonnade itself. They filled the air with the stench of broiling meat, and sold clothes, bits of cheap jewellery, second-hand pottery, little miniatures of the divine Helena – endless bits of tat. There was hardly an item here that was new, hardly anything that hadn’t been manufactured within a mile of this very spot.

  Thalius could see a lot of barter going on, rather than cash sales – half a chicken for a pretty bit of jade, a scrip promising a day’s labour on a thatched roof in return for a much-used, much-repaired amphora. Those who did have cash hoarded it, out of sight of the tax collectors, but Thalius was aware that the collectors and their spies were probably circulating through the marketplace even now. In an age when even the army was prepared to accept payme
nts in kind, a black market didn’t stay black for long. The market was a vastly unpleasant place to Thalius, making him feel like a mouse among a swarm of mice feeding off each other’s garbage.

  The people around him were unpleasant too. Almost all of them younger than him – well, he had been used to that for years – and they were coarse, uncivil, disrespectful to each other and worse to old duffers like Thalius. It was an age of selfishness, he thought, an age of ill manners. And it was all because of Constantine. Poor, foolish, long-dead Aurelia had been right, in her narrow way. The burden of excessive taxation, the huge and still growing gulf between rich and poor, had coarsened society at every level. But what other way was there?

  Here, though, amid all the rubbish, was a table piled high with books. There were scrolls, heaps of wood slips, even some densely inscribed wax tablets. Thalius began to rummage; it was a relief simply to be handling books. But none was mint, and some didn’t even look complete. And very many of them were utterly uninteresting (to him) treatises on various aspects of the Christian faith.

  There was an awful lot of this stuff around. After Constantine’s imposition of Christianity his bishops and theologians, drunk on sudden power and money, indulged in ferocious infighting over heresies and counter-heresies. People were addled by intriguing theological complexities, and nowadays read only the Bible and commentaries on it – if they read anything at all. And as the numbers of the illiterate grew, and as the literate retreated into mysticism, nobody thought any more, nobody questioned, nobody remembered that things had ever been different from the way they were now.

  But Thalius quickly identified a Tacitus, a Pliny, a Cicero, relics of an age when people could still think, and argue, and write.

  He looked into the gloom of the covered stall behind the table. A youth sat on a stool, chewing on some herb, watching a girl on the next stall with a lascivious leer. Thalius snapped his fingers. ‘You!’

  The boy’s head swivelled to face him. ‘You’re talking to me?’

  ‘Not by choice, but it does seem you’re the purveyor of these books. What is their provenance?’

  The boy scowled. ‘What?’

  Thalius sighed. ‘Are you selling these books? Where did they come from?’

  ‘House breakage,’ said the boy. ‘Prices as marked.’ His Latin was coarse, simplified. He was perhaps sixteen, with a hard, surly expression. Thalius wasn’t frightened of him, but he was somehow disturbed. Here was a boy who had grown up almost outside society as Thalius had known it, with no compulsion to obey the rules of civilised discourse. What a resource for the future of Britain and the empire!

  Thalius ran a finger over the scrolls. They were probably the debris of a minor tragedy, no doubt once owned by some member of the curia, more or less like himself, who had failed to maintain his balance in the endless cliff-top walk that was civil life these days.

  But there were some interesting titles. One was a story called The True History by a Syrian-Greek called Lucian. Thalius had read it as a boy, and had since sought out other tales of fantastic voyages to strange corners of the world, or beyond the earth altogether – not myths, which always seemed a little hollow to him, but notions of what might actually be possible. But he had learned to keep his interest in these speculations quiet. Literary snobs always claimed that such tales were for adolescent boys, that the authors were running out of plots, and characterisation was sacrificed for the sake of ideas. It did Thalius no good to protest that the ideas were the whole point. With regret he replaced the Lucian; he already owned a better copy, though not one he kept on display.

  As he browsed he was aware of a younger man beside him, also pushing through the heaps of scrolls. He jostled Thalius, to his intense irritation, as he tried to study the books.

  The boy behind the counter took an interest in Thalius. ‘If you’re serious about buying, you might want to see this.’ He dug around under the table and produced a scroll even more dog-eared than the rest. Thalius, his eyes rheumy but still sharp, saw that it was a memoir by the Emperor Claudius. ‘Talks about his time here in Camulodunum. This is his Temple,’ he said, casually jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘I know whose Temple it is!’ snapped Thalius.

  The boy was expressionless. ‘Good souvenir then.’

  Thalius knew it was true that such an item was indeed difficult to find outside the great libraries of the Mediterranean cities – and even harder since Constantine had moved his capital hundreds of miles east. And he supposed the price would reflect its rarity. ‘Let me see it. Is it complete, good condition? What generation copy is it?’ Books nowadays were as tatty as everything else; you always had to check. He reached out for the scroll. The boy held it up before his chest. Grumbling at his lack of consideration, Thalius leaned forward over the table.

  And as he was off balance the young man next to him punched him in the belly, and there was an explosion of quite unreasonable pain, while a hand rummaged inside his tunic.

  Another hand, much stronger, grabbed him by a fistful of cloth at the back of the neck. ‘Thalius. Are you all right?’

  For two, three long breaths Thalius felt his heart racing, and his vision greyed. But he did not fall. Gradually the pain in his punched belly receded. He looked up.

  A man stood before him, in his thirties perhaps, tall, well-built, his hair bright strawberry-blond. He was a soldier, as you could tell from the elaborate military brooch at his shoulder, and his expensive-looking belt. He held up his hands. He was holding two items: the Claudian memoir, and Thalius’s leather purse. ‘Those two rascals were hunting in a pack.’ He tossed the purse to Thalius, who caught it clumsily. ‘I’m afraid I had my hands full and had to let them go.’

  Thalius glanced around. The shoppers thronged oblivious; there was no sign of the robbers. ‘The shame of it,’ he growled. ‘To use books as a lure for thievery and violence! What is the world coming to?’

  ‘I rather think you’re owed this, don’t you?’ The man handed Thalius the Claudian scroll.

  Thalius took it uneasily. ‘I long to read it,’ he said. ‘But how shall I pay?’

  The soldier laughed. ‘The same old Thalius – honest through and through, but so unworldly you’re concerned about paying the men who just tried to rob you! Forget it, Thalius. Take the book – they won’t be back for it, it was probably stolen anyhow, and it will only rot otherwise.’

  Thalius nodded. ‘If there is no right course of action—’ He looked up. ‘But how do you know my name?’

  The soldier smiled. ‘You really haven’t changed, dear Thalius. When I arrived here I knew that to find you I only had to follow the smell of musty old books.’

  ‘Audax.’

  XV

  Tears embarrassingly pricked Thalius’s eyes. ‘I’m such a fool. I was somehow expecting the boy. Why, how you have changed! I really wouldn’t recognise this great tree of a man as having grown from the wretched sapling I found in that gold mine, all those years ago.’

  But Audax’s face clouded a little, and Thalius understood there were layers of memory probably best left undisturbed.

  He went on hurriedly, ‘Besides, you know, with my head full of books I had quite forgotten that I was here to look for you. I’m like that nowadays, I’m afraid. And now here you are caring for me, as poor Tarcho looked out for me all those years.’

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘And how is your wife?’

  ‘Melissa is well. We have a townhouse in Constantinople – smaller than yours, Thalius, but it suits us well.’ He said cautiously, ‘Things seem to be better out there. In the east. There are lots of small farmers who own their own land. It’s not like here where you have whole swathes of the country owned by a few super-rich. You don’t have the same—’ He waved a hand, his soldier’s inarticulacy betraying him.

  ‘Gross inequality?’ Thalius finished for him sadly. ‘I know, Audax, it is ruining us all, that and the decline of education…But you have sons
. Tarcho told me all about them. Your letters always thrilled Tarcho.’

  Audax smiled. ‘I called the older boy Tarcho – another soldier I think! But the younger has brains rather than brawn. He’s more like you, Thalius. We are family after all. I’m glad I named him after you.’

  Thalius was thrilled. ‘It would be wonderful if you lived closer, so I could get to know him – tutor him a little, perhaps.’

  ‘My place has always been at the Emperor’s side.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Anyhow I’m here now – here for the first Tarcho…’

  ‘Yes. Poor Tarcho! Come. Walk with me.’

  They moved away from the book stall and, with Audax’s broad shoulders and military insignia easily clearing a way, they walked up the stairs, through the colonnade and into the Temple. It was a relief for Thalius to reach the comparative calm beneath the Temple’s roof, but it was painful to walk.

  Audax touched Thalius’s arm, offering support. ‘How do you feel?’

  Thalius gasped, ‘As if that thug buried his arm in me up to the elbow.’

  ‘If you feel you need a doctor—’

  ‘I’d rather walk with you, old friend.’

  Audax glanced around at the Temple. ‘I haven’t been here since I was a child, and then I was too young, or bewildered, to make sense of it. Surprisingly grand, isn’t it?’

  ‘You mean for a run-down province like this one? Well, so it is, but it’s lasting the years well.’ Though there was some rubbish strewn on the floor, and the dead leaves of the summer just ended, the grand old monument wasn’t in terribly bad shape. You could see where money was being spent on it by those townsfolk like Thalius himself still civic-minded enough to care: repairs to the roof tiles, refurbishment of frost-cracked pillars. ‘But it has been rededicated to Christ, as well as to the divine Claudius.’ Thalius pointed out a labarum propped up in one corner, the emblem of a soldier-Christian.

  ‘It is still standing,’ Audax said, ‘which is more than can be said for many pagan temples these days.’