Emperor (30 page)

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 carrying 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.

Isolde was relieved when a young monk came pushing through the throng to greet them. He dressed as Nennius did, in a plain robe of heavy brown cloth, tied off with a belt of rope. He was young, perhaps not much older than Isolde. But his tonsure, severely cut, looked rather old-fashioned to Isolde, though she was no expert on monkish modes. His name was Damon, he said. ‘I bring greetings from the bishop of Camulodunum, and I come to escort you there.’

‘Oh, how kind, how thoughtful,’ Nennius burbled. ‘The exchange of letters I have already enjoyed with Bishop Ambrosius has been delightful, and I am sure the gift of his hospitality will be most welcome…’

Damon guided them to a carriage, crude but covered and serviceable. He had a man with him, a rough-looking servant too surly to be a slave; he hauled the visitors’ baggage from the wharf to the cart. Damon went on, ‘The bishop asked me to stress that the honour is all his. Any friend of Pelagius is welcome in his palace.’

Nennius nodded. ‘Britain has become something of a refuge for we Pelagians, I fear. But then Pelagius was born here; he is one of our own.’

Damon said cautiously, ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard the most recent news.’

‘About Pelagius’s excommunication by Pope Zosimus? Quite a victim for Augustine and his crew!’

‘Bishop Ambrosius comforts us that truth and goodness will prevail in the end,’ Damon said mellifluously.

They walked to the carriage as they talked. Isolde felt tired, bloodless, even a little giddy, but her father was oblivious to her, of course, and so was Damon, the young monk, and nobody helped her.

The Saxons, going about their own business, ignored them as they passed. The shoulder straps of the women’s gowns were fixed with brooches, they had sleeve-clasps around their cuffs, and around their waists they wore belts from which dangled odd metal good-luck charms like large keys. Isolde thought the style was rather attractive, and the quality of the metalwork looked good. She wondered if they would stop at any markets where she could do some shopping.

II

It would take two days’ travel to reach Camulodunum. The three of them set off in Damon’s carriage, with the servant walking silently, leading the horses.

To get out of the harbour area they had to pay a toll, in Roman coin, to a fat, hairy Saxon. Isolde wondered who the toll was being paid to, and the young monk explained that the governments of the four provinces of Britain still functioned, and still collected taxes–though nothing on the scale of ‘the old days’, as he called them, before the British Revolution and the expulsion of the diocesan tax collectors, a revolt that had occurred when he, Damon, had been about fifteen.

Beyond the harbour, it wasn’t an easy journey. The road they travelled was one of the first Roman roads ever built in Britain, her father proclaimed. That might be so, but that must make it very old, and it was so tatty! You could see where cobbles had been prised out, the holes never filled in, and so the road was full of potholes that shook Isolde painfully. Once the servant had to calm the shying horses. He said curtly that there was a body lying in the clogged drainage ditch; flies rising from the decaying corpse had spooked the animals. Isolde looked away and tried to breathe shallowly.

The country itself was quiet. It was a landscape of farms, of stone-walled fields and small wooden buildings. There were even some grand farmhouses, tile-roofed, enclosed by bristling walls. But many of these were evidently empty, shut up or even burned out, and many of the fields were clearly abandoned, their rain-eroded furrows strangled by weeds. It was rare that Isolde saw anybody working the land.

Nennius remarked on this to Damon.

‘It’s the Saxons,’ said the young monk. ‘Too many of them around here. So people are packing up and going off to the towns, or to live with relatives further west or north, or in Gaul. Even the rich have sold up, if they can, and cleared out.’ He murmured, ‘The Saxons are pagans, you know. They don’t mix with us.’

Isolde wondered what tensions were concealed behind those simple phrases.

They came upon Camulodunum in the evening. The city itself sat within massive walls; it looked more like a vast fortress than a town.

And in the rolling fields outside the town and beside the river there were more Saxons–many, many of them, warriors with their horses and wives and children, camped out in tents or in clusters of small wooden huts, some of them set up in the bowl of a disused circus. The travellers picked their way uneasily through this loose camp, along the old Roman road. It was almost as if the Saxons were besieging the city. Damon reassured them there was nothing to fear; the Saxons were mercenaries and had been hired by the townsfolk for their protection. Isolde had no doubt that these fierce-looking warriors would be useful to have on your side. But she wondered what might happen if the money to pay them ever ran out.

They entered the city through the west gate. It was a big double archway that had been almost blocked up by chunks of stone, so that only one person could pass at a time. A soldier in very worn armour stood here collecting more tolls, this time on behalf of the curia, the town council.

Isolde was glad to enter the town, just to get away from the desolate and depopulated British landscape. But this was not Rome. The town within its walls was a bowl of rubble, a shattered townscape of derelict houses, weed-choked gardens and silted-up ditches. The baths were shut down, the theatre was a rubble-filled rubbish tip, and even the main road was ankle-deep in filth. There were none of the public buildings she would have expected in a town this size, or if they existed they were being used for something else. There were some grand houses here, but many of them were abandoned, and as they walked by Isolde saw cooking-fires set up on tessellated floors.

Damon said that in the darkest days of barbarian incursions and banditry, the army had moved its weapons workshops and depots and stock pens within the protection of the town walls. So the town had become a fortress once more, as it had been centuries ago at the beginning of its life. Now the Roman army had gone away, of course, but Saxons and other mercenaries still used the infrastructure it had left behind.

Amid the roofless shells, heaps of building rubble and lakes of sewage, there were functioning offices, however, where the town council or the provincial government still collected taxes, organised work levies and administered justice. And Camulodunum seemed to be full of churches, small but solidly built of reused stone and tile, rising out of the general rubbish like mushrooms from compost. ‘There are more churches than people,’ Nennius joked wistfully.

Damon picked his way along the rubbish-strewn road quite cheerfully. All this was normal to him. To Isolde and Nennius, though, the whole place stank like the vast garbage heap it was. And there were so few people that Isolde felt like a child creeping through a huge house abandoned by adults.

The bishop’s palace was one of the grander buildings. It was a townhouse about thirty years old, built in something like a classical style, with separate blocks set out around an atrium. Isolde learned it had once been owned by a diocesan tax official.

Bishop Ambrosius himself was here to greet them. With receding silver hair, richly dressed in a ground-length purple robe, he was about Nennius’s age, but he looked as if he could still throw a healthy punch. When he took her hands Isolde felt reassured for the first time since she and Nennius had left Rome.

After days on the road they were all hot, dirty, hungry, and the stench of the city lingered even here. There was no bath house, but the house had underfloor heating and hot water, and after an hour of pampering herself with her scents and creams Isolde felt almost human. She joined her host and his guests in a large, well-appointed triclinium.

The meal they were served relied heavily on meat, mostly mutton and pork, but there were olive oils and dates and a rather good fish oil, imports from the continent which, the bishop said, were a luxury these days. No wine, though, and Ambrosius apologised for serving them watery British beer, but it was strong enough to warm Isolde’s blood.

Her father, as usual, seemed to have forgotten she was here, and made no effort to include her in the conversation, and nor did Damon. But the bishop was gracious to her, and his servant, another young monk, was attentive to her needs. In the light of the low fire, as the aches of the journey were soothed away, Isolde was content to let the talk wash over her.

Ambrosius and Nennius were churchmen of a similar age, both in their late fifties, one from the heart of the empire, the other from its now-amputated limb, and they had lived through tumultuous times. And, like all men of their age, Isolde thought fondly, they believed the world was in decline, from a Golden Age a few decades before. Born a generation after Constantine, now known as ‘the Great’, they spoke reverently of the first Christian emperor, whose reign had been an interval of comparative peace.

But all over the known world the weather was bad. Even within the empire the great crops of wheat and millet which fed the large urban populations began to fail. Among the barbarians, as famine descended, pulses of refugees washed out of the heart of Asia, driving others before them, to press ever more relentlessly on the borders of the empire.

Constantine himself had stabilised the border by allowing barbarian peoples to establish new homelands inside the empire’s borders–vast numbers of them, for instance no less than three hundred thousand Sarmatians. This policy of ‘federation’ brought peace for a while, but there was much muttering about whether the empire could absorb such huge influxes.

There was trouble with the barbarians in Britain too. When Ambrosius was a boy of five, there was a ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’, a major invasion from several directions at once: by the Picts across the Wall, the Scots and Irish and Saxons from across the Ocean. For a whole year order was lost. Ambrosius and his family, he said, huddled inside the town walls as the children told each other blood-curdling tales of the baby-eating foreign savages who roamed the countryside.

Meanwhile after Constantine’s death fratricidal war between his three competing sons brought renewed turmoil at the heart of the empire. Britain threw up usurpers, such as one Magnentius, who had killed one of the sons, only to be defeated by another, at Mursa in Pannonia. The empire once more became an arena of conflict between strong men and their armies. Then, when Constantine’s treaties were repudiated by one barbarian group, the Visigoths, decades of simmering conflict finally led to battle at Adrianopolis–a battle the Romans lost, at a terrible cost.

Times had changed, and a weakened empire could no longer afford such bloodletting, and after Mursa and Adrianopolis the Roman army had never been able to recover its strength. The emperors employed barbarian federates in their armies, and still more alien peoples settled within the borders–following Constantine’s precedent, but now the process was all but uncontrolled. Thus the army was barbarised, and the empire was hollowed out by foreign polities.

The British felt increasingly exposed, and its elite and officer corps threw up one usurper after another–roughly one a generation, as young rebels dreamed they could do better than their fathers. And as soon as he took power each of them headed overseas, taking yet more troops with him from the British garrison. One, grandly named Magnus Maximus–‘the Great, the Greatest’–killed another emperor, and had the dubious honour of being the first western ruler to order the execution of a Christian heretic.

But the troops stripped from the British garrison by each failed rebellion, and indeed by each officially ordered transfer to reinforce the centre, were never returned. Without the army to enforce collection the taxation system began to break down. People hoarded their coins in the hope of better times, and a barter economy sprang up. But as demand dwindled there was much destitution, and Ambrosius, by now a young priest, found himself ministering to the starving poor.

Then, one New Year’s Eve, a vast horde of Alans, Suebi and Vandals crossed the frozen Rhine, and pushed their way into Gaul and Iberia.

Britain was cut off. Now no money was coming from the central treasuries to pay the remaining British troops. The imperial standard still flew over the forts and towns, but there was little left of the Roman army beneath it. After a succession of bloody, panicky coups a low-born general who styled himself ‘Constantine III’ put together yet another ragged army, and just like his predecessors immediately crossed to the continent. Constantine was the last throw of the dice, the last British attempt to save Britannia.

As Constantine’s campaign on foreign fields descended towards defeat, another turning point was reached. This time it wasn’t the officer corps or the ruling elite in the cities who rose up but the comparatively poor and lowly. What was the point of being taxed white by a centre which was better at producing usurpers than keeping out the barbarians? The revolt, once it broke out, spread like wildfire. The tax collectors were expelled from their offices and plush townhouses, and then the Christian poor turned on the still-pagan rich. The diocesan government collapsed. The middle-ranking officials in the towns and the four provincial governments decided to join the rebels, and legitimised and organised the revolt.

This ‘British Revolution’ was less than ten years old, and Isolde thought she detected pride about it in the calm voice of this churchman. Not that things were perfect. The four provincial governments had started to develop independent armies, mostly made up of Germanic mercenaries. But civilisation had been saved until the day came, as it must, when Britain was reunited once more with the centre of the Roman world of which it had always been part.

‘And it was a blow for freedom,’ Nennius said, enthused, eager for revolution in a way, Isolde thought a little sourly, only a comfortably plump old man far removed from the action could be. ‘Isn’t that a deep tradition in Britain? Why, you could say it informs the work of Pelagius himself.’

‘Ah, but never let Augustine hear you say that…’

Isolde had met Pelagius herself once, as a little girl. About ten years older than her father, born in Britain, he was not a cleric, but he had developed forceful views about the direction of the Roman church, which he saw as corrupted, immoral and slothful. And he took great exception to the teachings of Augustine, a bishop from Africa, who argued that human beings were born fundamentally flawed, and that human actions depended on the will of God. Pelagius insisted that humans were essentially good, and were responsible for their own moral advancement.

‘But a church of free men and women cannot be controlled by the centre, and so it won’t do for an imperial cult,’ Nennius said gloomily. ‘Perhaps in future the Roman church will deal with all Pelagians as it has with Pelagius himself…Think of it, Ambrosius! Excommunicated for proclaiming that mankind enjoys free will! What is the world coming to? Where is our church going?’

‘The question is, where are
you
going, my friend?’ Ambrosius asked with gentle humour, pouring more beer. ‘Are you still determined to find your cousin on the Wall? It won’t be an easy journey.’

‘No. But as I told you in my letters it is a dream of freedom that draws me there. Pelagius would approve! A dream, or rather a hint, a tantalising hint of a better future…’ And he began to speak of family legend and of fragmentary prophecies, of emperors and of history.

But the evening was ending for Isolde. Exhausted by travelling, heavy with food and drink, and with the baby slumbering softly within her, she made her excuses and left for her bed. The old men talked on softly, as young Damon, huddled by the fire, listened as attentively as a puppy before its master.