Since that fateful and last visit to Britain all those years ago, Constantine had pressed ahead steadily with his programme of converting his empire to Christ. He had played a long and patient game, but as the power of pagans in the ruling classes and the army had steadily diminished, he had at last felt able to proclaim Christianity as the empire’s prime religion – and to command a reformation. The wealth of the pagan temples was turned over to the Church, and the imperial treasury.
Audax rubbed a clean-shaven chin. ‘I was involved in some of that. As moneymaking schemes go that was a good one, even for an emperor who always had a nose for cash like a dog for a bone.’
Thalius laughed, but winced at the pain. ‘That’s cynical for a soldier of the Emperor’s bodyguard!’
Audax shrugged. ‘You can be realistic and loyal at the same time, can’t you?’
‘True. As was Tarcho, always.’
‘I’m not surprised the Temple of Claudius has survived. Even Constantine could hardly order the stripping of shrines to his own deified predecessors – especially as he is to be made a god himself.’
Thalius gaped. ‘You’re joking! After a lifetime of promulgating Christianity? Well, it will be a popular move here. They always loved Constantine in Camulodunum. Soldiers’ town, you know. And that mother of his – they are thinking of adopting her as a patron saint!’
‘Well, I know one thing for sure. Tarcho was a good Christian, of his kind. And he would never wish to be buried here.’
‘No indeed,’ Thalius said. ‘Come, let’s visit him.’
They crossed the temple floor, threaded their way down the steps through the crowded market stalls, and made their way along the city’s principal street. Once an axis of the invaders’ fort of Claudian times, it was rubbish-strewn, its gutters clogged with dirt.
And as they walked, they spoke of the aftermath of the night of Aurelia’s attempted assassination of the Emperor, the night that had entwined their fates forever.
Constantine himself survived. His Greek doctor said that though his wound was deep, the narrow blade had fortuitously missed any major organs. Aurelia herself, who had hidden her fanaticism from Thalius until the moment of the attack, was cut down immediately by the blades of the Emperor’s guards, and that was the end of her. Tarcho shielded Thalius and Audax from the guards, but they had all been taken into custody as the search for complicity began. The worthy missive Thalius had haplessly carried might have been enough, in the fevered atmosphere of a paranoid court, to see him executed. Thalius always believed it was Tarcho himself who saved him, by arguing forcefully with his military accusers for Thalius’s naiveté and innocence – not to put too fine a point on it, his stupidity.
As for Audax, he could have been executed with no questions being asked at all – or at the minimum tortured, for under Roman law slave testimony was only valid if extracted under torture. But if Tarcho had saved Thalius it was Constantine himself who saved Audax. In those moments when they had been joined in an embrace of life and death, the Emperor had seen something he liked in the slave, and he had pledged to protect him. When the fuss had died down Thalius hastily granted the boy his freedom and gave him into the care of Tarcho, who he judged was likely to do a much better job of keeping the boy safe than Thalius himself ever could.
As for the other principal in the drama, Ulpius Cornelius had made noises about the betrayal of his trust, receded into the shadows of the court, and Thalius had never seen him again. And he never knew if Cornelius had been complicit in the attempted assassination – if Thalius was the only dupe.
Tarcho had made good the Emperor’s promise that Audax would have the chance to try life as a soldier. At the age of sixteen he was enlisted into the frontier garrison at Banna. He immediately flourished under the healthy food, medical supervision and training regime of the army; by the time he was eighteen he had shed the last shadow of the pale-as-a-ghost slave boy Thalius had dug up from the mine.
But he had rapidly proved too effective to be wasted in the stasis of a frontier post. On a letter of recommendation from Banna’s commander, Audax was transferred away to the field army units in Gaul. Thalius saw him only rarely after that.
Audax was too young to fight in Constantine’s first serious engagement with Licinius, Emperor of the east. It was a partial victory for Constantine; Licinius ceded territory but survived. The showdown came ten years after Constantine’s visit to Britain, and by now Audax was old enough to serve.
‘It was magnificent, Thalius,’ he said now. ‘They say it was the largest war for a century – there were perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand men on each side, and it raged across Europe and Asia for a year before Constantine’s final victory near Byzantium…’
Audax forbore from telling Thalius any war stories, and the older man was glad of it. The civil war had been another terrible internal grinding-up of resources that could surely have been better deployed against external enemies, like the Franks and the Alamanna, new barbarian federations on the Rhine border, and the Goths on the Danube, and the revived Persians in the east. Even while Constantine fought Licinius, Visigoths had taken the chance to cross the Danube, and Constantine found himself at war along a front three hundred miles long.
After Constantine’s victory over Licinius he called for Audax to join his own personal bodyguard, the scholae palatinae. ‘You saved my life once already,’ he said in Brigantian, on greeting the boy. ‘So I believe I can trust you to do it again!’
So it was that Audax followed Constantine on the next great adventure of his reign – the move to the east. Again Aurelia had been right, and decade-old rumours were proved true. The site Constantine chose was Byzantium, a minor Greek city in Asia Minor – the place where he had won his final victory over Licinius. The new city was inaugurated only two years after that victory, and after some frantic rebuilding was dedicated four years after that.
‘The new capital must be a marvellous place.’
‘Not really,’ Audax said candidly. ‘It was thrown up quickly. Some of the new buildings are pretty shoddy, and it has attracted a scruffy class of people, I can tell you. It does have a forum and a senate of its own, and a dole of free grain, just like Rome. But it isn’t Rome yet!’
‘Ah, but it will grow.’ And, Thalius thought sadly, soon the empire’s wealth would flow from the east, from trade routes to India and beyond, and nobody would care about the western provinces with their poverty and long, vulnerable land borders: it was just as Aurelia had feared. But he said none of this to Audax. ‘It is the epicentre of empire, and will be for a thousand years. And it was founded in our lifetimes, Audax. Think of that!’
The young man’s eyes shone. ‘I do miss you, Thalius. You always did fill me with a sense of wonder.’
Thalius, moved, took his arm. ‘Then we must write. That way perhaps my fancy will enrich your life as your strength and courage have always enriched mine.’
They reached, at last, a small church. One of several in Camulodunum, it was modest, a boxy building on a rectangular plan. But it was neatly built of stone reused from some expensive ruin, and a wooden cross rose up above its tiled roof.
‘Towards the end of his life, this is where Tarcho came to worship,’ Thalius said. ‘In fact this church grew out of a soldiers’ chapel – there was once a mithraeum here, I think.’
Audax seemed briefly unable to speak. Then he said gruffly, ‘And he is buried here?’
‘Inside the church. His grave isn’t marked.’
‘It’s a fitting place for a soldier.’
‘Yes. The time was right for him to go, perhaps. He was always an admirer of Constantine, you know. A “good lad”, he would say. He enjoyed reports of the preparations for a campaign against Persia. The dream of Alexander revived again, Tarcho said! I think it pleased Tarcho, in a way, to die in the same year as such a man.’ He prompted gently, ‘But Tarcho gone, and Constantine too – what next, do you think, Audax?’
‘Things may be a littl
e difficult,’ Audax said with grim understatement. ‘The campaign against Persia was controversial even in the Emperor’s court. The east has always defeated the Romans if they push too far. And then there is the succession. Constantine’s three sons have spent their youth fighting like puppies in a sack. I fear blood will be spilled before one of them emerges as top dog.’
Thalius sighed. ‘And more strength bled from the body of the empire, while our enemies watch and wait. Audax, you must be careful.’
‘I will be,’ Audax said. ‘I’m thinking of a change of posting, away from the court.’
‘Then you’re wise. You know, sometimes I am glad I am no longer young – sometimes it seems a comfort I won’t see much more of the drama. But perhaps every old man thinks the world is decaying as fast as his body.’
‘You mustn’t think like that.’
‘One must be realistic,’ Thalius admonished him. ‘But, Audax…’ He asked cautiously, ‘What of the Prophecy?’
Audax’s face hardened. ‘I suppose I have to thank it for saving my life. I’d have surely died in that hole in the ground if you hadn’t come to find me, and it. But when I joined the army I had the tattoo burned off my back.’
Thalius winced. ‘But the scarring—’
‘I’d rather wear that than the hateful thing which preceded it. Thalius, do you still believe the true purpose of the Prophecy was to change the destiny of the Church?’
That took Thalius aback. He had spoken with nobody about such matters since the day of the attempted assassination. ‘So you have been thinking this through.’
‘Look, I’m no philosopher,’ Audax said. ‘But I had that thing tattooed on my back since birth, and, on long campaigns, there was plenty of time to puzzle about its meaning. The way I see it is this: the Prophecy was a message, and somebody sent it. Now, whether it was God or demon, or even a wizard—’
‘The Weaver,’ Thalius said softly. ‘And if Constantine had been killed, Christianity might not have been incorporated into the empire, and the capital might not have been moved east. History would have been changed – the history of the whole world, for all time.’
‘Yes. Well, whoever sent back the Prophecy had a purpose. The question is, what could that purpose be? Christian symbols were written into that acrostic, the A and the O. Could it really be that the sender was trying to deflect Constantine’s adoption of Christianity?’
Thalius said, ‘It is what I believed at the time, I think – though others made their own interpretations of the Prophecy, and its lost promises of “freedom”. Perhaps the Weaver wanted what I always wanted – strange thought! Certainly Constantine has remade the Church, and the results have been just as I feared. The bishops have taken to chastising those who won’t follow the official line. The persecuted turned persecutor! Oh, I believe that thanks to Constantine the Church will live forever. It is just that it is not my Church.’
Audax grunted. ‘So if the intention of the author of the Prophecy was to “save” the Church, he or she failed.’
‘Really? Perhaps you just don’t want to believe, Audax, that all of the future hung on your choices in those few terrible heartbeats when you held that knife – but it did, you know. And consider this.’ He shivered, an inchoate dread stealing over him. ‘If history has been changed around us, Audax, if we are now living in the wrong history – how would we know?’
Audax had no answer.
‘Will you tell your son about the Prophecy?’
‘No.’
‘You must,’ Thalius said firmly. ‘Ours is a remarkable family with a remarkable story. You would be depriving him of his past, his identity otherwise. Here,’ he said impulsively, and he handed Audax the scroll of Claudius’s memoir. ‘You take this. Keep it for when he’s older. Claudius was bound up with the Prophecy too, and perhaps it will help little Tarcho fill in the blanks in the story. If he’s as clever as you say, he may end up understanding far more of this strange business than I, than any of us, ever did. I never even saw the Prophecy itself,’ he recalled wistfully, ‘not even the few lines which might have described the great upheaval of our own lives…’
Audax hesitated, then took the book. ‘Very well, Thalius. I’ll make sure he understands it is from you.’ He looked around a cloudy sky, seeking the angle of the sun. ‘Thalius, I must go. My duties – I have people to see here on behalf of the imperial heirs.’
‘I understand,’ Thalius said.
Audax stepped away, returning to the crowded street. ‘I hope I’ll see you again before I leave.’
‘You know where I am – I never go far these days!’
But Audax was already lost in the crowd. Thalius, alone, empty-handed, felt his bruised belly twinge again. Moving cautiously he turned away and headed for home.
EPILOGUE
AD 418
I
Isolde hated the idea of travelling to Britain with her father.
For one thing Isolde, nineteen years old, didn’t know anybody in Rome who had even been as far as Gaul, much of which was in the hands of foederati, German ‘allies’ of the empire. All Isolde’s friends knew about Britain was that giants had built a mighty Wall across the neck of the island to keep out capering monsters.
Nonsense, said Nennius, her father, predictably. You could tell when he got really angry because a pink flush spread all the way up his round cheeks to the shaven patch at the top of his head. Britain was just a place, its inhabitants just people, not monsters – and there was a Wall, but it had been built by Romans, not giants. Why, it was less than a decade since the British Revolution, when ‘ragged-arsed rebels’ had refused to pay their taxes. Britain had been detached from the empire many times before, and would no doubt be rejoined to the mother state when time and resources permitted.
‘And anyhow,’ he told her with a certain malicious glee, ‘we’re off to visit a cousin of mine, who lives on the famous Wall. We share a grandfather, cousin Tarcho and I, a slave who became a soldier called Audax, who was at the heart of the Prophecy story. And do you know how I happen to have a cousin there? Because you and I are British ourselves, daughter – a couple of generations removed, but British all the same…’
Nennius’s latest scheme was all to do with a Prophecy, he said, a Prophecy lost and now partially found again, a Prophecy made but never fulfilled – a Prophecy that might have shaped the world. The key to reconstructing this puzzle, he believed, and perhaps even to recovering the Prophecy itself, lay in Britain. And so because of this old man’s legend Isolde must travel beyond the empire itself.
Isolde had learned long ago that it did her no good to argue. Her whole life had been shaped by her father’s ambitions, and so it was now. But as they crossed a Gaul in which you heard nothing spoken but German, and as they took to the sea in the leather-sailed boat of a blond Saxon trader with bad teeth, she felt terribly vulnerable. She was a pregnant woman accompanied only by an absent-minded old man. Not only that, her stomach churned with every tip and rock of the boat. The trader offered her a remedy, a cold tea of German herbs, but Nennius forbade her even to try it.
She tried to tell herself she was safe with her father, but she had never believed that even as a small child. He simply didn’t pay enough attention to you to make you safe.
Isolde’s mother had died young, and even as a young girl she had seen how unworldly Nennius was. Respected thinker and monk he might be, famous for his friendship with the great theologian Pelagius, but there were mornings when he couldn’t put his own trousers on the right way round. In fact Isolde grew up thinking of herself as the adult in their relationship.
Isolde had briefly escaped when she married a young man called Coponius, of ancient Roman stock. But his good looks had belied a sickly nature. Only a month after Isolde found out she was pregnant he had been carried off by a nasty little plague, one of a series that had nibbled at the population of Rome in recent years. So Isolde had had no choice but to return home to her father, a widow at nineteen, and car
rying a child. Nennius was not uncaring; Isolde knew her father loved her. But with his head forever filled with one dream or another – and now stuffed with his determination to make this extraordinary journey across the known world – there was no room for Isolde.
The boat landed at a place called Rutupiae, where a grim-looking fort loomed over a good natural harbour. The fort had seen better days. Its elaborate earthworks were clogged with rubbish, and the facing stones of its massive walls were crumbling away under the assault of the caustic sea breeze. In places they looked as if they had been robbed, quarried out.
Nennius was excited, for it was here, he claimed, that Roman invaders had, centuries ago, first set foot on the island. The only Roman from such incomprehensibly ancient history Isolde had ever heard of was Julius Caesar, and when it turned out not to have been him who had conquered Britain, she lost interest.
Anyhow there were no emperors here now, and the place swarmed with Saxons. Living in clusters of small wooden buildings outside the fort’s earthworks these Germans handled the sparse trade from the continent. They used this old fort, built to repel their own piratical ancestors, as a storage depot, and just as in Gaul the only tongues you heard were Germanic.
Isolde and her father found a small timber-built church set on the fort’s north-west corner. It had a pretty baptismal font, made of reused red Roman tile. They said prayers of thanks for their safe passage this far. Then they returned to the small wharf and stood together uncertainly while the trader unloaded his boat.
The Saxons looked extraordinary to Isolde. Many of them were blond and blue-eyed. The men shaved the front of their heads and let the hair grow at the back, an effect that made their faces look long, like a wolf’s. There were plenty of kids running around the wooden-hut settlement. Perhaps their fathers had been pirates, but these were clearly immigrants and had no plans to go anywhere. But every adult wore a knife at the waist; even some of the older children carried weapons.
Emperor: Time’s Tapestry Book One Page 31
