Emperor

XIX

The letter from Lepidina was a slip of wood covered in her own rounded, still girlish handwriting. She had returned to Britain from Rome, she said, and would visit the Wall. She said that her mother was coming too-indeed, the purpose of her visit was somehow connected with Severa.

And so Brigonius was going to see Lepidina again. He was shocked to reflect that since the fateful day of the Decision, when before governor Nepos the Wall had been redesigned from end to end, fifteen years had already passed. And Lepidina was no girl now; she was to stay in the fort at Banna with a party led by her husband of fourteen years: Galba Iulius Sabinus, once a pushy young legionary tribune, now a senator.

Brigonius clutched the letter to his heart, wondering what to tell his wife.

On the appointed day he made his way to the fort at Banna. He was passed through the west gate. The double-arched gateway alone, he sometimes thought, was grander than anything seen in Brigantia before the Romans came.

Leaving his horse to be stabled by a slave, he walked along the main drag through the fort, called-as in every Roman fort of this type right across the empire-the via praetoria. Banna was no tent city now. Buildings clustered around him like huge bricks: the barracks to either side, and before him the squat blocks of the praetorium, Tullio's commander's residence, and the principia, the fort's formal headquarters. Beyond that he glimpsed the hospital, and more barracks, stables and workshops. An empty area was laid out with the foundations of two granaries, enough to store a year's supply of grain for a thousand men, which would have raised floors for protection from the elements. But these were yet to be constructed. Progress was always slow, hampered by a lack of local resources. One of the grandest buildings was a drill hall where the soldiers could be trained during the most inclement northern weather; it was a monument of stone big enough to allow javelins to be thrown indoors.

The streets were busy, not just with soldiers but with their slaves, and with local traders and workmen. Pay day had been only a couple of days ago, and the vendors prowled the streets and pushed their heads inside open doors, looking for likely buyers of their wares and services. Enclosed within its walls, self-contained, the fort shut out the untamed countryside around it; it was like an island of Romanness, Brigonius thought, independent of the world outside.

But of the Brigantian settlement that had once stood here not a trace remained. The old Roman watchtower had been demolished, the forest cleared and marshland drained. Even the ancient barrows that had lined the escarpment, the tombs of deep ancestors, had been levelled. This was the place where Brigonius had been born, and the ancestors of Severa and Lepidina; it was here that Nectovelin's birth had long ago been heralded by the strange Prophecy. These days the only Brigantians lived in a shanty-town that had grown around the walls of the fort, just as at Vindolanda. Coventina was banished now.

Brigonius reached the headquarters building. He crossed the broad cloistered courtyard with its well, heading for the central cross-hall, the basilica. These two areas were large enough to hold all the troops in the fort. To the rear of the basilica was a row of offices, at the centre of which was the shrine, the aedes, with its statue of Hadrian, the standards of the fort units, and other religious tokens. Two rooms to either side were the offices of the adjutant, the cornicularius, and of the signiferi, the standard-bearers. The shrine and offices had open fronts with low ironwork screens. This little area was the fort's heart. The signiferi were responsible for the crucial issues of the soldiers' pay and savings, and behind the shrine itself was a strongroom containing the fort's cash. Brigonius had watched this being built from the ground up, and indeed had sold the Romans much of the stone they had needed. It was all still so new he could smell the mustiness of fresh plaster.

And today, in the basilica, the fort commander was holding a reception for Sabinus's party. There was little left of the pretty-boy tribune about Sabinus; he had become a tough-looking man of his world, competent and corpulent.

Sabinus was leading this delegation from Rome, representing both the senate and the Emperor's household. It was here to make a regular inspection of the Wall and the situation in the north in general-and, so the rumours went, to deal with a spot of unpleasantness concerning the conduct of Claudia Severa. Brigonius was surprised that Sabinus should have been put in charge of a problem concerning his own mother-in-law. But perhaps this subtle cruelty was characteristic of Rome these days, ruled over by an ageing, detached and increasingly capricious Hadrian.

As if to symbolise the complicated unpleasantness of the imperial court, among the Emperor's representatives was Primigenius. The freedman looked as sharp and wily as ever. But, stick-thin, his head shaven and his sunken face laden with cosmetics, he had not aged well, his beauty long lost. Brigonius was actually introduced to the man, but Primigenius didn't show a flicker of recognition.

And here, of course, was Lepidina with her glowering husband. She looked her age-she was thirty-four now-but she was still heartbreakingly beautiful. Through his sparse correspondence with Severa, Brigonius had been aware of Lepidina's marriage to the Roman. But still he was somehow shocked as, for the first time, he saw Lepidina on the arm of Sabinus. Brigonius understood from whispers that Sabinus's career hadn't progressed quite as well as he had once planned. Perhaps that explained the darkness around his eyes, the lines around a down-turned, rather cruel mouth, and an air of patient wistfulness Brigonius sensed about Lepidina.

During the course of the formal occasion Brigonius met her only briefly. There was nothing they could do but exchange pleasantries; Brigonius even found himself asking after her mother's health. But as the evening ended he asked to see her again-just for old time's sake, he said. They agreed to go for a ride together along the Wall the following day. She seemed neither reluctant nor eager, merely polite. And then she was gone, whirled away in the complicated choreography of Roman high society.

That night he could barely sleep. It had been fifteen years, and lying in the dark beside his wife, it seemed that every day of those years hung heavy on his heart.

After the day of the Decision, Claudia Severa had retreated to the sanctuary of the south. Even now Brigonius still had to deal with Severa on matters of business. She had investments in many of the partnerships that had sprung up to serve the needs of the Wall project, including Brigonius's own. He heard rumours that Severa even had a stake in some of the thriving brothels that mushroomed around the Wall forts. She was nothing if not enterprising. But she had lost any real control she had had over the Wall project on the day of the Decision, her final falling from grace in the eyes of the imperial court. And she did not visit again. Brigonius was happy to deal with her only through letters and the dry wordings of lawyers' agreements. He was glad to be shut of Severa.

But when she retreated south she took her daughter with her, and Brigonius had more complex feelings about that. He felt it even more when he heard that while Severa had remained in Britain, Lepidina had gone back to Rome, where she had grown up.

He'd talked this over with Tullio. In one late-night drinking session, as they downed flagons of British beer by the light of the torches that flickered along the Wall curtain, the brusque old Batavian said he understood. 'Of course you miss her. It doesn't matter that you can't have her. You can't have the moon either, but you'd miss its beauty if it were plucked out of the sky, wouldn't you? There are lots of ways to love a woman, Brigonius. You don't need to be waving your cock at them. You can love from afar. I should know.' Tullio's heavy face was a mask of shadows and scars. It was a rare glimpse for Brigonius into the soul of this bluff, competent man, and he wondered how it must have been for Tullio to be taken from his home as a young conscript, transported across the very Ocean, and then to live out his life in such a place as this, so far from home.

Gradually the trauma of that night in the den of Primigenius faded. At last, Brigonius loved again. But he never forgot Lepidina.

And now she was back.

His wife, lying beside him in their bed, was awake too. Cloda, practical and warm, was the daughter of a timber merchant. Her husband had no secrets from her-not even about Lepidina. And so Cloda knew that this spirit of the past had returned to haunt her for a while; and she knew that Lepidina would soon fade into the mists, and she would have Brigonius back again.