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  Emperor

  ( Time's tapestry - 1 )

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter

  Emperor

  oraculum nectovelinium (the prophecy of nectovelin, 4bc)

  aulaeum temporum te involvat, puer, at libertas habes: cano ad tibi de memoriam atque posteritam, omni gentum et omni deorum, imperatori tres erunt. nomabitur vir germanicus cum oculum hyalum; scandabit equos enormes quam domuum dentate quasi gladio. tremefacabit caelum, erit filius romulum potens atque graeculus parvus erit. nascitur deus iuvenus. ruabit roma cervixis islae in laqueui cautei. emergabit in brigantio, exaltabitur in romae. pudor! comprecabit deum servi, sed ispe apparebit deum. ecclesiam marmori moribundi fiet complexus imperii. reminisce! habemus has verita et sunt manifesta: indico: omnis humanitas factus aequus sunt, rebus civicum dati sunt ab architecto magno, et sunt vita et libertas et venatus felicitae. o puer! involvaris in aulaeum temporum, fere!

  the prophecy of nectovelin (freely translated with acrostic preserved):

  ah child! bound in time's tapestry, and yet you are born free come, let me sing to you of what there is and what will be, of all men and all gods, and of the mighty emperors three. named with a german name, a man will come with eyes of glass straddling horses large as houses bearing teeth like scimitars. the trembling skies declare that rome's great son has come to earth a little greek his name will be. whilst god-as-babe has birth roman force will ram the island's neck into a noose of stone. emerging first in brigantia, exalted later then in rome! prostrate before a slavish god, at last he is revealed divine, embrace imperial will make dead marble of the church's shrine. remember this: we hold these truths self-evident to be- i say to you that all men are created equal, free rights inalienable assured by the maker's attribute endowed with life and liberty and happiness's pursuit. o child! thou tapestried in time, strike home! strike at the root!

  PROLOGUE 4 BC

  I

  It was a hard day when Brica's baby, Cunovic's nephew, struggled to be born, a hard, long day of birth and death. And it was the day, Cunovic later believed, when the wintry fingers of the Weaver first began to pluck at the threads of the tapestry of time.

  The labour began in the bright light of noon, but the midwinter day was short, and the ordeal dragged on into the dark. Cunovic sat through it with his brother Ban, the child's father, and the rest of his family. In the smoky gloom under the thick thatched roof, Brica's mother Sula and the women of the family clustered in the day half of the house, uttering soothing words and wiping Brica's face with warmed cloths. The watchful faces of the family were like captive moons suspended within the house's round walls, Cunovic thought fancifully. But as the difficult birth continued Ban grew quietly more agitated, and even the children became pensive.

  The druidh was the only stranger here, the only one not related by blood ties to the unborn child. The priest was a thin man with a light, sing-song accent, which, according to him, emanated from Mona itself, the western island of prayer and teaching where he claimed to have been born. Now he wandered around the house and chanted steadily, his half-closed eyes flickering. No help to anybody, Cunovic thought sourly.

  It was old Nectovelin, Cunovic's grandfather, who lost his patience first. With a growl he got to his feet, a mountain of muscle and fat, and crossed the floor. His heavy leather cloak brushed past Cunovic, smelling of blood and sweat and fat, of dogs, horses and cattle, and he limped, favouring his left leg heavily, an injury said to be a relic of the war against Caesar fifty years ago. He stalked out of the house, shoving aside the leather door flap. The other men, who had been sitting quietly in the house's night half, stood stiffly, and one by one followed Nectovelin out of the door.

  When Ban himself got up Cunovic sighed and followed. Nectovelin was old; he would be the great-grandfather of the child being born tonight. But all Cunovic's life it had been Nectovelin with his size and power and legacy of youthful combat who had led the family, and especially since the death of his only son, father of Cunovic and Ban. So it was tonight: where Nectovelin led, others followed.

  Outside the night was crisp, cloudless, the stars like shards of bone. The men stood in little groups, talking in low voices, some of them chewing bits of bark. Their breath-steam gathered around their heads like helmets. The dogs, excluded from the house tonight, pulled at their leashes and whined as they tried to get to the men. Even in the frosty cold there was a rich moistness in the air; this was an area of wet moorland.

  Cunovic spotted his brother standing a little way away from the others, at the edge of the ditch that ringed the little huddle of houses. Cunovic walked over, frost crackling under the leather soles of his shoes.

  The brothers stared out into the stillness. This little community, which was called Banna, stood on a ridge that looked south over a steep-walled wooded valley. There was no moon tonight, but starlight glinted on the waters of the river at the foot of the cliff, and Cunovic could make out the sensuous sweep of the shadowed hills further south. This was the home of the Brigantian nation. In the morning you could see trails of smoke spiralling up from houses studded across a landscape thick with people and their cattle. People had been here a very long time, as you could tell from the worn burial mounds that crowded this cliff edge, amid tangles of ancient trees. But now there was not a light to be seen, for the houses sealed in their light and warmth like closed mouths.

  Cunovic waited until his brother was ready to talk. Ban was only twenty, five years younger than Cunovic himself.

  'I'm glad you're here,' Ban said at last. 'I could do with the company.'

  Cunovic was touched. 'I know I've been away a lot. I thought we were growing apart-'

  'Never.'

  'And besides, I'm not much use. I have no children of my own. I haven't been through this, not yet.'

  'But you're here,' Ban said solemnly. 'As I will be for you. I suppose you miss the comforts of your travels. On a night like this a dip in a pool of steaming water would be welcome.'

  Cunovic grunted. 'Don't believe everything you hear. The king of the Catuvellaunians has built himself a bath house. He paid through the nose for a Roman architect to design it for him. But the traders from Gaul say that to them it's no more than a muddy hole where you'd let your pigs wallow. Not that they would say such a thing to the king's face, of course.'

  That made Ban laugh, but Cunovic was uncomfortably aware that some of the Latin terms he sprinkled in his conversation, unthinking-architect, design, even paid-meant little to his brother.

  Ban said, 'But you got away. You're making a success of your trading. Doesn't it feel strange to come back? You're a grown dog returning to the litter, brother.'

  Cunovic looked around at the sleeping landscape. 'No,' he said simply. 'In the south they have fussy little hills and valleys, so jammed in together you can't see past the next brow. The soil is clogged with chalk. The summers are too hot and the winters too muddy. And you don't get nights like this,' and he took a deep, cleansing breath of the ice-laden air.

  'Ah.' Ban smiled. 'You miss Coventina.'

  Coventina was the goddess of this place. You could see the curves of her body in the swelling of the hills, her sex in the green shadows of the valleys. 'Yes, I miss the old girl,' Cunovic admitted.

  He was startled by a loud snort, close by his ear. It was Nectovelin. 'Home you call it. But you weren't around to help with the building of the new house, were you? I think we know where your heart is, Cunovic.'

  II

  Nectovelin had a way of sneaking up on you. Despite his bulk and his limp he could move stealthily, and he always stayed downwind. He still had a warrior's instincts, Cunovic thought, grooves like wheel ruts cut deep into his personality that told more about Nectovelin's past than all his boasts. />
  It always hurt Cunovic that this impressive man, his grandfather, seemed to think so little of him. 'You're wrong about me, you know,' he said. 'Maybe I didn't put my back into building the house, but the gifts I sent home helped pay for it, didn't they?'

  Nectovelin hawked and spat. 'You talk like that bowel-creasing druidh. But words are as dust. Look at what you are! You wear a woollen tunic like your brother's, but your face is smooth, your hair brushed-even your nostrils and ears plucked, if I'm not mistaken. The house of your body shows what you aspire to be.'

  Cunovic took a step closer to the old man, a deliberate challenge, and Nectovelin stiffened subtly. 'And you're a hypocrite,' Cunovic said softly. 'I don't recall you turning down my silver brooches and my amphorae of wine, with which only yesterday you bought five head of cattle from Macha, that other old curmudgeon from the valley. You may not like it, grandfather. It may not be like the old days. But this is the way the world works now.'

  Nectovelin glared back, as still as a wolf, his face a mask pooled with shadows.

  Ban came to their rescue. He stood between brother and grandfather. 'Not tonight, lads. I've got enough to deal with.'

  Nectovelin kept up his unblinking stare a heartbeat more, and Cunovic was willing to be the one to look away first. The three of them moved apart, and the tension eased.

  In awkward silence the three of them turned to face the house. One of a dozen surrounded by a straggling ditch, in the dark its conical profile was low, almost shapeless. But you had to understand the detail. Its big support posts came from trees marked out for their purpose since they were saplings, so securely fixed and well balanced that no central prop was needed. That big open inner space was set out, according to ancient custom, to reflect the cycles of days and seasons. The single doorway faced south-east, towards the rising sun at the equinox. As you walked around the house, following the track of the sunlight through the day, you passed from the morning side of the house to the left, where children played, cloth was woven and grain was ground, to the night side, where food was prepared and people slept. Even now Brica lay on her hide pallet just to the left of the doorway, for this was the place of birth, while the oldest of her grandmothers sat at the right of the door, ready to walk out into the deeper cold of death.

  In Cunovic's experience, stuck-up southern types trying to ape the Romans imagined that such houses were nothing but great middens, heaped up by men with minds like children. They were quite wrong. Brigantians could build any shape they liked. Most of their barns and grain stores were rectangular, for convenience, and sometimes they built of stone, just like the Romans. But they preferred to build their homes round and of living wood, to reflect their minds, the cycles of their lives, and their embedded goddess.

  All this swirled around in Cunovic's head. He was proud of his house and his contribution to it: a Brigantian house of the old style, partly paid for with new money. This place was where he came from; he would always be Brigantian.

  But as a trader of dogs, horses and leather he had to deal not just with thuggish southern kings but with sophisticates from the Mediterranean, the very heart of the huge and mysterious Roman world. He'd had to learn to be a different way. Nectovelin's was a world of family and loyalty into which you were tied with bonds of iron, from birth to death. Cunovic moved in a much looser world, a world where he could do anything he liked, as long as he made money at it. He had learned to cope with this. But before proud old men like his grandfather, he sometimes felt as if he was being torn in two.

  The door flap rustled heavily, leaking a little more torch light, and Cunovic could hear Brica's screams and the obsessive chanting of the druidh.

  Ban stamped on the ground, jerky, restless. 'It's going badly. It's been too long.'

  'You don't know that,' Cunovic said. 'Leave it to the women.'

  Nectovelin growled, 'Maybe it's the prattling of that priest. Who could concentrate with that yammering in your ear, even on pushing out a pup?'

  When Cunovic had been a boy the priests were there to advise you on the cycle of the seasons, or on diseases of cattle or wheat-all lore passed down through generations, lore it was said it took a novice no less than twenty years of his life to memorise on Mona. In recent years things had changed. Cunovic had heard that the Romans were expelling the priesthood from Gaul, declaring it a conspiracy against the interests of their empire. So the priests went around stirring up feelings against the Romans. Besides, Nectovelin always said that the druidh with their foreign notions only served to come between the people and their gods. Who needed a priest when the goddess was visible in the landscape all around you?

  But Cunovic couldn't resist teasing the old man. 'If he's in the way, grandfather, throw him out. It's your house.'

  'You can't do that,' Ban said hastily. 'It's said you'll be cursed if you throw out a druidh.'

  'Whether it's true or not,' Nectovelin said, 'enough people believe it to cause upset. Don't worry, grandson. We'll stomach the priest as we stomach that Roman piss-wine your brother brings home. And we'll get on with what's important-caring for your boy.' His scarred face was creased by a grudging smile. 'Brica told me you're planning to call him after me.'

  'Well, you're seventy years old to the day, grandfather. What other choice could there be?'

  'Then let's hope he grows up like me-strong, and with the chance to break a few of those big Roman noses, for I know he is born to fight.'

  Cunovic said, 'And if it's a girl and she's anything like you, Nectovelin, she'll be even more terrifying.'

  They laughed together.

  Then Brica screamed, a noise that pierced the still night air. And she began to gabble, a high-pitched, rapid speech whose strangeness froze Cunovic's blood.

  Ban cried out and ran back to the house. Cunovic ran with him, and Nectovelin lumbered after them both.

  III

  Inside the house Brica lay on her hide pallet. The circle of women, clearly exhausted themselves after the long labour, sat back, helpless.

  The paleness of Brica's face contrasted vividly with the crimson splash between her legs, as if all her life force were draining away there. But Cunovic saw a small head, smeared with grey fluid and still misshapen from its passage through the birth canal. The baby, its body still inside Brica, was supported by the strong hand of Sula, its grandmother. Like its mother it looked very pale, and it had hair, a reddish thatch.

  And Brica, her eyes fluttering as the druidh's had done as he prayed, was gabbling out that rapid speech. The women were distressed; some of them covered their ears to keep out the noise. Even the priest had stumbled back into the shadows of the house, his eyes wide.

  Cunovic stared, entranced. The speech was indistinct and very fast, an ugly barking-but he could make out words, he was sure.

  Sula, cradling her grandson's head, looked up at Ban in weary despair. 'Oh, Ban, the baby is weak, his heart flutters like a bird's, and still he won't come. She's growing too tired to push.' She had to speak up to make herself heard over Brica's noise.

  'Then you must cut her,' Ban said.

  'We were ready to,' Sula said. 'But then she started this chattering, and we can't think, none of us!'

  Nectovelin growled. With two strides he closed on the druidh, grabbed a big handful of the priest's robe and hauled him close. 'You! Is this your doing? Are these curse words she utters?'

  'No, no! On my mother's life!' The druidh was thin, pale, balding, perhaps forty, and he trembled in Nectovelin's huge grasp.

  'Nectovelin!' Cunovic spoke sharply enough to make his grandfather turn. 'That will do no good. It's nothing to do with him. Let him be.'

  'And how do you know that?'

  'Because I recognise what she is saying. Those aren't the words of gods-not our gods, anyhow.'

  'Then what?'

  'Latin. She's speaking Latin.'

  There was a silence, broken only by Brica's continued chattering.

  Nectovelin released the druidh's robe. The druid
h slumped to the ground, shamed. Nectovelin said heavily, 'How can this be? Who knows Latin here?'

  'Nobody but me,' Cunovic said, 'save for a few words picked up from me or the traders.' And certainly not Brica, who, always a quiet girl, had probably ventured no more than a day's walk from her birthplace her entire life.

  'Then what does this mean?'

  'I've no idea…'

  Cunovic started to hear what Brica was saying, to make out the words. It was only a few lines, like doggerel poetry, repeated over and over. It occurred to him someone ought to write this down. He ought, as the only literate member of the family. He found his bag, dug out a tablet and stylus, and began to scribble. The children watched him, wide-eyed; the letters appearing on the wax must seem like magic to them.

  Nectovelin glared and turned on Ban. 'With a birth like this, with his mother gabbling Latin, his life is already blighted. Call him what you want, Ban. He will be no warrior.'

  Something seemed to snap in Ban. He yelled, 'You arrogant old man! Must you think of yourself even at a time like this? I have no time for you and your antique war. Caesar is long dead, just as you will be soon, and you and your bragging will be forgotten!'

  For a desperate heartbeat Cunovic thought the giant Nectovelin might strike down his grandson, even in this dreadful moment. But Nectovelin merely stared down Ban, contempt hardening his scarred face, and he walked out of the house.

  'We must cut her,' Sula said, wearily practical amid the mysteries of Brica's gabbling and the posturing of the men. 'Ban is right. We must free the baby before they both die.' The other women nodded and moved closer.

  Sula raised a flint blade. This gift of the earth was the traditional tool for such desperate moments, and its carefully worked edge was sharper than the best Brigantian iron, or even Roman steel, Cunovic knew. As the stone blade bit into her flesh, Brica screamed. Ban bit his lip; he knew the risks of the moment.