Emperor

III

For Isolde the journey north to the Wall was a long and brutal haul along the spine of this dismal island. Following poor roads they passed through town after shabby walled town, and they had to pay more tolls as they crossed invisible provincial boundaries.

Isolde was so immersed in the oceanic aches of her own body she barely noticed the change in the character of the country as they headed north, from the rolling chalk hills of the south with their abandoned farms and fortified country houses, to the more rugged north with its bristling forts. But the further north you went the fewer Saxons you saw. Perhaps the people in the north had found other ways to look after themselves.

They arrived at last at the line of the Wall. Though the paintwork was faded, and in places you could see where damage had been roughly repaired, the Wall was still intact and very impressive, its powerful lines cutting across the neck of the countryside.

And the Wall was manned. Nennius turned westward, planning to travel to a fort called Banna. They soon reached what Nennius called a mile-fort, built around a gate that was roughly blocked with stones. Two grubby soldiers in woollen tunics flagged them down, to extract still more tolls. According to the soldiers the whole line of the Wall was under the command of the 'Duke of the Britains'. The soldiers gave them a chit scribbled on a wood slip, so they wouldn't have to pay any further tolls.

Isolde found the Wall and its soldiers, even the process of paying the toll, reassuringly familiar. Sooner this semblance of the Roman way than relying for your protection on the bands of blond-haired barbarian thugs like in the south. But no standard was erected over the mile-fort's eroded stones; no eagles flew here.

They continued westward, passing more mile-forts and watchtowers, and arrived at Banna. The fort sprawled on an impressive escarpment, and to the south a river with shining gravel banks curled through woodland. The northern wall of the fort was built into the line of the Wall itself. There were houses and other buildings outside the walls of the fort, but they looked abandoned, their roofs missing, walls of mud subsiding back into the earth.

They passed through a gateway in the eastern wall. The soldiers on duty let them pass with a brisk inspection of the chit from the mile-fort, and a letter of passage Nennius carried from his cousin Tarcho, the commander here. The fort was crowded and busy, with men, women and children going about their business. The civilian settlement outside might have been abandoned, but the people hadn't gone away, they had just moved inside the fort's walls. And the soldiers were still here, evidently.

Isolde recognised a granary, its floor raised for ventilation, a second granary which looked abandoned, and blocky buildings which might be the fort's headquarters. Some of the buildings were quite impressive, large and stone-built. But many were derelict, their roofs collapsed, their walls robbed of stone.

Nennius was excited to be here. Once their remote ancestors had lived here, he said. He knew that because his grandfather, Audax, had told him that the famous Prophecy had actually been created here at Banna. But there was no sign of that lost primeval home in this decaying fort, and even Nennius's nostalgic enthusiasm soon faded.

To Isolde's surprise, they were led to the intact granary. As they walked inside Isolde realised that it had been converted into a hall, its interior divided up by wooden partitions. But there was still an agricultural smell about the place, Isolde thought, the dry tang of the grain that had once been piled up here to feed hundreds of long-dead soldiers.

They were greeted by Tarcho, Nennius's cousin and commander of Banna, and by his wife, Maria. Evidently about the same age as Nennius, in his fifties, Tarcho was a big, slightly plump man with a bristling moustache, and his hair was a pale strawberry-blond laced with grey. He wore the insignia of a Roman soldier, including a handsome officer's belt, but also a shoulder-brooch and a belt heavy with knives, like a Saxon. His wife, too, a plump ball of energy and bustle, wore silver sleeve-clasps, Isolde noticed with faint envy. The Saxons hadn't come this far in great numbers, but their fashions had, it seemed.

Nennius greeted Tarcho eagerly. For him the end of a long quest was nearing. For Isolde, though, it was just another day of her pregnancy, and a long, hard day at that.

Maria saw this and immediately took Isolde under her wing. 'Oh, my dear, I know exactly how you are feeling. I should, I had five of my own, all boys, all of them as fat as their father, and look at him. Come,' she said, taking Isolde's arm, 'let's see if we can make you comfortable in this soldiers' hovel…' She led Isolde to a small private room with a couch and pillows, and brought her hot water in a bowl. Her palm was rough, her grip strong, her skin dry, a worker's hand. 'I know you're far from home,' Maria said, 'and you must be frightened. But your father and my husband are cousins, so you're with family, aren't you? And believe me you're better off here than anywhere else. The soldiers always did have the best doctors. You'll be in good hands, I promise.'

'Thank you,' Isolde said sincerely. It was a huge relief not to be totally dependent on her father.

It was already late afternoon. She lay on her cot and slept a while, to gather her strength before the evening meal.

That evening Isolde was the last to join the group. They were in the largest room in the granary-hall, set out like a Roman triclinium with couches around a small central table. Nennius was holding forth about politics in Rome. He had a small leather satchel on the table before him. Isolde knew it contained documents about the purpose of his quest-to retrieve the Prophecy, as he called it, lost so long ago.

Her belly feeling heavier than ever, Isolde levered herself down onto a couch. The light from lamps and candles was cheerful enough, and the food, meat, bread and stewed vegetables, was warming and palatable, if it lacked spices for Isolde's taste.

This corner of the old granary was walled on two sides by unplastered stone through which holes had been roughly knocked to make windows. It was a working room, an office of sorts, with desks heaped with scrolls and tablets. Christian symbols could be seen in the clutter on the desks-a bronze fish, a chi-rho medallion. And the papers on Tarcho's desk were weighted by a stone statue, a reclining woman painted crudely in blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary. Isolde learned later it was a much older piece, a Roman soldier's carving of a local goddess called Coventina of whom nobody remembered anything but her name, now repainted as Christ's mother.

But despite these hints of civilisation, of religion and literacy, there was something brutal about the place, Isolde thought. Uncivilised. Armour and weaponry hung from the walls, along with the heads of animals: deer, a fox, a wolf. There was even the outstretched wingspan of a buzzard, evidently brought down by a soldier's arrow.

Tarcho, knives glinting at his belt, seemed in his element here. To Isolde's eyes he seemed more barbarian than Roman, and there was something in his hard, calculating expression she didn't like.

Maria prompted Tarcho: 'So you and Nennius share the same grandfather.'

Tarcho spoke around a mouthful of dripping meat. 'His name was Audax. He was born a slave but died a soldier. He named his son Tarcho, after the soldier who took him in and cared for him. That Tarcho was my father, and he named me for himself.'

'Ah, yes,' Nennius said, 'but Audax came from an old family who hadn't always been slaves. He was evidently a clever man, and that hereditary intellect seems to have been passed down to his second son, who was my father, called Thalius after another of his patrons. Thalius moved to Rome where I was born, as was my daughter. I'm sure old Audax would have been proud to see you in command of a place like this, Tarcho.'

Tarcho shrugged. 'Ten years ago I was a serving soldier in the Roman army. Then the British Revolution came. Farm boys in turmoil,' he said dismissively. 'We didn't really know what was going on up here. We just kept the peace along our stretch of the Wall. But there was no more pay…'

Without pay, some of the soldiers stationed on the Wall drifted away from their posts, some turned mercenary, others resorted to brigandage and robbery-and others, Tarcho said, had gone off to Gaul with their service records in their packs, wistfully hoping to get their back pay. But most of the Wall troops, born and bred where their forefathers had served for generations, just stayed put. This was home; where were they to go?

'When the dust settled we got new orders from the Duke.'

Isolde asked, 'The Duke?'

'The Duke of the Britains.' The military commander who, under the emperors, had been in command of the Wall and the northern forts that supported it. 'He was no longer receiving orders from the diocese, or indeed from the prefect in Gaul, or the Emperor.'

The Duke of the Britains, suddenly finding himself free of his chain of command, took control. The troops would continue to function as army units, he ordered; they would continue to protect and police the population. But without central pay it was up to the local people, the farmers, to supply the fort, paying in kind in foodstuffs, materials, animals, labour.

'There was some grumbling,' Tarcho said honestly. 'But then the Picts came. One night they tried to sneak over the Wall, as bold as you please. Well, my men dug out their Roman armour and weapons, and we formed up and sent those brutes packing. After that the farmers were happy enough to cough up, and they turned out to cheer the Duke when he stayed at Banna a few months back…'

Isolde cynically wondered what choice the farmers had but to pay up. This Duke of the Britains, a Roman commander, seemed to be setting himself up as a warlord of a very old type, with the Wall his seat of power. No wonder this granary had the trappings of a barbarian chief's hall. Still, perhaps the locals were glad of some order and protection, for any was better than none. And perhaps to many of them, toiling at their land, it made no difference who called himself their lord from one day to the next.

She noticed Tarcho made no mention of the provincial government at Eburacum, nominally still in control of this area. Evidently, ten years after the British Revolution, the political situation had still to sort itself out.

'Ah,' Nennius said, 'but need it have been this way? Need the great tide of empire have drawn back from Britain?'

Tarcho frowned. 'I don't know what you mean.'

'Pelagius preaches of free will,' Nennius said. 'Each of us is free to shape his or her destiny. The future is unfixed-it depends on the decisions we make-and so the past too was malleable, dependent on human actions.' He smiled. 'There is a passage in Livy, written before the time of Augustus, in which he speculates what might have happened if Alexander had lived on, rather than die so young. Suppose he had turned his attentions west, rather than dissipate his strength in the endless deserts of the east?'

'He'd have come up against Rome, even then,' Maria said.

'Yes-a young but vigorous Rome which would have defeated him-so said the good Roman Livy! The history which seems so fixed to us is actually a fragile tapestry whose weave depended on human whim. And that's my point. If the decisions of the emperors had been made differently perhaps the eagle would still fly over Britain even now.'

'I don't see how,' Tarcho said reasonably.

'Then take one example,' Nennius said. 'What if this Wall had never been built? What if the Emperor Hadrian had decided that rather than fix the border here he would complete the conquest of the whole island of Britain, all the way to the north, and devote a legion or two to keeping it? For it was tried, you know, several times, from the age of Claudius himself, and by the Emperor Severus, and later Constantius Chlorus led a force to the far north.'

'But the land up there is poor and the people are ugly savages who live in bogs,' Tarcho said practically. 'What use would it have been? Better to draw a line here.'

'In the short term, perhaps. But we are living with the long-term consequences of Hadrian's decision, Tarcho. And what do we find? Secure beyond a frontier fixed in stone, the barbarians have organised, federated, found capable leaders, and now break through the Wall to crush us. But if Hadrian had taken the land of the Caledonians they would be Roman by now, and Britain would be secure, at least internally. Think of it-a whole island to serve as a garrison for western Europe. Couldn't Gaul and Spain then have been defended when the Franks and the Goths came?'

'Yes, well, if you want to know what I think,' Maria said suddenly, 'we all got into this mess because of the way Constantine barbarised the empire. That's my view. That's why Gaul is full of Franks and Spain is full of Goths and the south of Britain is full of Saxons. I know, I've been down there. They care nothing for our ways and they're only out for themselves. And now, who is strong enough to throw them out? Nobody, that's who.'

Tarcho grunted. 'I see what you're driving at about Hadrian, Nennius. But she's right. If it's decisions and their dire consequences you want to talk about it's Constantine you have to consider. After all he did move his capital to Constantinople, taking all the money with it.'

'Then there's another possibility,' Nennius said. 'Suppose Constantine, instead of moving his capital to the east, had moved it west-to Gaul, even to Britain itself, where he was after all elevated. Imagine the empire run from Londinium or Eburacum! Why not? Britain was stable, relatively, and rich too: its corn and metals supplied the armies on the Rhine and the Danube for generations. That is why Britain has been the seat of one usurper after another, including Constantine himself. And with the British garrison behind them, and the focus of the emperors here rather than in the greasy fleshpots of the east, isn't it possible the empire could have been saved?'

Londinium as the capital of the Roman empire! The thought was so breathtaking it silenced them for a moment-and Isolde knew it wasn't such a terribly implausible idea. After all many of the usurpers of the last few decades before the final British Revolution had tried to set up a separatist empire of the western provinces.

'But I don't see what difference any of this talking makes,' Maria said now. 'Maybe things could have been different if somebody had done this instead of that-but so what? What's done is done. The past may have been malleable for those who lived in it, Nennius, but to us it is surely fixed.'

'Ah, but is it?' Nennius asked. 'Have you read what Augustine has said of eternity-in between his diatribes against Pelagius, that is? God is eternal, not time-bound as we are. He is supreme above time-I think that was the phrase. And to Him past, present and future coexist in one timeless moment. And if that is so, isn't it possible that God could intervene in the past as well as in the future?'

Tarcho pulled his moustache. 'Ah. I think I see where you're going with this, cousin.'

Nennius nodded. 'This is why I came here. We must talk of the Prophecy of Nectovelin.' And he pulled parchments from the leather case on the table before him.