Emperor

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 melee 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 payments 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.'