Emperor

VIII

The caravan at last approached the bristling walls of Camulodunum. The lead carriages came to a gate in the west wall which had once, curiously, been a triumphal arch before being incorporated into the wall, and was now mostly blocked up. Here the caravan broke up.

Thalius, happy to see the back of Ulpius Cornelius for a while, led his own companions to the townhouse he owned just a short walk from the forum. It had actually been some months since Thalius had been back to the city. Even though he had grown up here, and his affairs were closely bound up with the city, he much preferred his country estate half a day's ride out of town. Now, as he walked through a grubby, decayed town crowded with hawkers, chancers, beggars and prostitutes all drawn to the tawdry gleam of a soldier-emperor's court, Thalius was reminded why.

The grand old Temple of Claudius still stood, however, rising out of a sea of vacant lots, rotting houses, tatty public buildings and filth-strewn streets. As they passed the colonnade Thalius peered inside to see the great statue of the wily old fox, lit up by candles and lamps, his arm still raised in victory as it had been for three hundred years. But a small Christian chapel had been set up within this temple to a long-dead emperor, whose exploits had been forgotten by almost everybody who passed by this way.

Thalius was relieved to reach his own modest but well-maintained townhouse. He was too old for travelling, he thought, too old to be dealing with complicated and poisonous individuals like Ulpius Cornelius. At least within the walls of his house he could be in control of things for a while, and find some peace.

So he was dismayed to find he had a visitor, waiting for him in the living room. Sitting beneath his most expensive tapestry, a scene of a colonnaded courtyard under a bright Mediterranean sun, she was sipping watered-down wine served to her by the elderly freedman Thalius employed as a housekeeper.

She stood as Thalius approached. She was a woman of about sixty, Thalius judged, well-dressed and poised. Her cheekbones were high, her chin well-defined. Her complexion was dark, and she wore her grey-streaked black hair swept back from her face. She was unafraid of showing her age, then. She was immediately intimidating, with something of Ulpius Cornelius's air of cold command.

And she was remarkably attractive. Despite her age, there was something sensual about her, even animal, and she seemed to use the fumes of her scents as a weapon to confuse him.

Thalius, still grimy from the road, felt inadequate in his own home. He was weakened by the helpless attraction he felt for her, which she must perceive, and had no doubt calculated to inspire. Suddenly his life had become even more complicated, he thought tiredly.

'I think you know who I am, sir.' Her voice was husky.

'You must be Claudia Brigonia Aurelia. Your correspondence with Ulpius Cornelius-'

'What a helpful man he is.' She gazed at Audax, her eyes rheumy but bright. 'And this must be the mysterious slave boy.' She reached out a bony hand.

Audax cowered behind the massive form of Tarcho.

'You're frightening him.'

She looked puzzled. 'Cornelius warned me about your sentimentality. You're a Christian, aren't you? A faith of soldiers and slaves, so they say.'

'Madam, what is it you want here?'

'Why, the same thing you do, I believe. To know the future.' And she eyed the cringing boy as if wishing she could simply flay him and take his marked hide away with her.

Thalius sent the boy off with Tarcho, and ordered the housekeeper to bring more wine and plates of light food. As social routines cut in, Aurelia calmed. But she watched Thalius constantly, as an owl watches a mouse.

She told him something of herself. Born and raised in Eburacum, she had been widowed young. She had inherited her husband's business interests, and had run them herself ever since, evidently not needing the shadow of a man to win herself a place in society. Her husband's interests were an old family business of quarries in the north country, which supplied stone to army installations, including the Wall itself. And it was in the north country that the paths of their families had once crossed, she said.

'It's all family legend,' she purred. 'Tittle-tattle. But the legend is that my husband's remote grandfather, one Brigonius, was the lover of your remote grandmother, Lepidina. But they never married, and had no offspring.'

'And this was when?'

'Two centuries ago. At the time of the famous visit of Emperor Hadrian,' she said, sipping her wine. 'And that is how the Prophecy of Nectovelin entered the mythology of my family. I grew up fascinated by the tale. A Prophecy all one's own. Think of the power! So when I came across Ulpius Cornelius and his not-very-discreet inquiries I was fascinated.' She glanced somewhat dismissively at his expensive tapestry. 'It was a thread, I thought, a loose thread in time's tapestry that I couldn't resist tugging. And when I did it led me to you, and here we are.'

'You talk about power,' Thalius said uneasily. 'The power to do what?'

'To see where our charismatic soldier-emperor is leading us. And,' she said more coldly, 'the power to do something about it.'

Thalius flinched, but he forced himself to believe that there were no spies from the imperial court in his own home. 'What is it you don't like about Constantine?'

'That's simply answered,' she said. 'I don't like his taxes.' And, just as Cornelius had complained long and loud about Constantine's policies at the heart of the imperial government, so now Aurelia railed about the effect of the Emperor's decrees on her own position.

'You don't appear bankrupt,' Thalius broke in gently.

'No, but I soon will be at this rate! Thalius, I know you're a man of business, and in a curia, as I am. What an onerous chore it is-don't you think? Why, do you know that some criminals and evaders have actually had curia responsibilities thrust upon them as a punishment? And if you default you are beaten up by the governor's thugs. I know it happens, I've seen it! It's not surprising everybody is getting out of town if they can-as you do, Thalius, and don't deny it.'

Thalius sighed. 'I pay my dues,' he said. So he did, but he knew that what she said was true. The worst tax by common consent was the chrysargyron, the 'gold-and-silver' levy imposed on manufacturers and merchants, from owners of the great pottery factories right down to the humblest cobbler. Like farmers of marginal lands, small merchants were being squeezed 'until their bones cracked', Aurelia said. 'In fact literally! You must have seen it, Thalius. How the collectors summon the people from the town and country to the forum-how even children are forced to give evidence against their parents.'

'I have seen such things,' Thalius said stoically. He was well aware too of the shocking corruption that was rife in every level of the system, making it even more of a burden.

She put down her wine cup and leaned forward, her face intent. 'You have already decided I am a selfish old woman who is solely concerned about the contents of her own purse. Don't bother denying it, it's plain enough on your face. But I hope you'll see that my imagination goes beyond my own welfare. I believe that Constantine's taxes will, in the long run, lead to the ruin of us all, and I don't exaggerate. And if the system falls, I fall with it. So I'm concerned. Call it enlightened self-interest.'

It was a hard argument to refute, and Thalius had heard it rehearsed many times before. But just as in his talks with Cornelius he wondered if Aurelia had ever considered that the Emperor, crushed by rising military costs and with no other revenue sources, might have no other choice but to tax his citizens until they bled white. 'Is there any other way?'

'There may be. Do you know how my husband died? Of course you don't. He fought with Carausias. And his father fought under Postumus, the Gallic Emperor, twenty-five years before Carausias. Twice in living memory these islands have broken from Rome. Why not again? Why must Britain pay for Rome? Why must we pay for the upkeep of the Emperor's court-you've seen it, Thalius-and his bureaucracy and his extravagances and his building programme, his endless churches, churches, churches? And now there are rumours that Constantine is planning to build a new capital even farther away, in the east somewhere. Why should we pay for that? That's what I'm asking.'

'And so,' he said carefully, 'would you oppose Constantine?'

'Ah,' she said. She smiled and leaned back languidly, quite unreasonably erotic. 'That's the question-and that's where your Prophecy comes in. I'm no gambler, Thalius.'

'You will oppose Constantine if you think you are sure to win. You want the reassurance of the Prophecy.'

'Isn't that your own game plan? And,' she added earnestly, 'is it true that your Prophecy speaks of freedom? Was this unknown seer, the Weaver of time's tapestry, promising the liberation of the western provinces from Constantine's oppression?'

Thalius recalled Cornelius, whose dream of freedom was the freedom to be a traditional Roman; for this British woman it was the freedom to be loose of the centre, to be British-Roman, not Roman. But surely these were fantasies imposed on tantalising phrases in a document that was, after all, lost.

'I wouldn't know about freedom,' he said dryly. 'Or the Weaver's intentions. Even the name "Weaver" is only a word that has come down from my own ancestor, as it has to you, a fragment of speculation. We know nothing about him, or her, if he even exists.'

She leaned forward. 'Well, now we understand each other, won't you bring me your slave with the tattooed hide?'

Thalius was hugely reluctant. Ever since he had met Cornelius he felt he had been taking one step after another along a very dangerous path indeed. And yet what choice did he have about it, even now?

He turned to his housekeeper, and called for the boy.