Emperor Page 3

  ‘Not just the Romans—’

  ‘Those who ape them. The Trinovantes, the Iceni, the Atrebates. Those who live under their protection. Certainly not to us Brigantians.’ Nectovelin jabbed his finger in Cunedda’s chest. ‘If not for the Romans you wouldn’t make a living at all, would you?’

  Agrippina said, ‘Go easy, old man. Don’t forget he’s paying your wages.’

  Cunedda said, ‘Anyway what’s wrong with taking money off the Romans? I would have thought you’d approve.’

  ‘Why does it matter to you what I think? You’re shagging my cousin, aren’t you?’

  Cunedda coloured.

  Agrippina snapped, ‘So you knew all the time?’

  Nectovelin tapped his forehead. ‘You think I lived to the ripe age of forty-seven without eyes that see, ears that hear? Anyhow Bala told me.’

  Agrippina gasped. Bala of the Cantiaci had once been a friend; they had fallen out over Cunedda. ‘That malicious bitch, I’ll rip her throat out.’

  Cunedda laughed. ‘Now you do sound like Nectovelin’s cousin.’

  Nectovelin pinched one nostril and cleared the other, leaving a trail of mucus on his beard that he wiped away with his sleeve. ‘And that’s why you came to the beach. To get around me.’

  Agrippina linked his arm affectionately. ‘Oh, don’t be difficult, you ridiculous old fraud. You know you’ve been the nearest thing to a father to me, since my own father died.’

  ‘But you don’t need my say-so to spread your legs.’

  ‘Don’t be crude! No, but I want you to be part of us, part of our relationship.’

  Nectovelin eyed Cunedda. ‘There are worse choices you could have made.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Cunedda said dryly. ‘But I thought you didn’t like us Catuvellaunians.’

  ‘It’s nothing personal. I don’t like any of you soft southerners.’ He glared around at the sunlit beach. ‘This is the arsehole of Britain. And that’s why Caesar shoved his Roman sword up it.’

  ‘And if this is an arsehole,’ Cunedda said carefully, ‘are you the turd that is passing through, old warrior?’

  Nectovelin frowned, and for a dreadful moment Agrippina thought he would take offence. But he winked at Agrippina. ‘Nice reply. But I was the wittier, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Oh, you’re a regular Cicero,’ Agrippina said dryly. ‘You must have a little bit of Roman in you after all—’

  ‘As did Cassivellaunus once Caesar got hold of him.’

  They all managed to laugh at that.

  Nectovelin said suddenly, ‘But if you hurt her—’

  ‘I won’t,’ Cunedda said.

  ‘Are you afraid of me, boy?’

  ‘Not you,’ Cunedda said bravely. ‘Her, yes.’

  Nectovelin’s stern expression broke up into another laugh, and he clapped Cunedda on the shoulder.

  Agrippina walked forward, and the deeper water lapped deliciously against her bare legs. ‘Look.’ With her pointing finger she sketched the line of the coast. ‘This bay would make a good harbour. It’s sheltered by that island, and by the shingle banks over there to the south.’

  Cunedda said, ‘Somebody else has thought of that.’ He pointed out a heap of nets, a crowd of seagulls squabbling over fish guts on the beach. ‘In fact I don’t know why this place isn’t teeming with ships.’

  ‘Because it’s too new,’ Nectovelin said. ‘There was a great storm here, a few years back. A sand bar was breached. That island didn’t even exist when I was born.’

  Cunedda nodded. ‘Then the harbour wasn’t here in Caesar’s time?’

  ‘No. And he didn’t land anywhere near here.’ Nectovelin described how Caesar had made a tough landing beneath the white chalk cliffs of the south coast.

  Agrippina reflected, with the faintest unease, on a titbit of information she had picked up from a trader in Durovernum, the main town of the Cantiaci, the local people. Though the Cantiaci didn’t have a name for this new harbour, the Romans did: they called it Rutupiae. In their endless obsessive mapping and surveying, and the low-level spying they carried on through their traders, the Romans had spotted the potential of the place, even if the locals hadn’t.

  Her eye was distracted by another silhouette on the horizon. Perhaps it was another hide-sailed trading ship from Gaul. There seemed to be a lot of traffic today. But the air was misty, and she couldn’t quite make it out.

  ‘Look,’ Cunedda said, ‘Mandubracius is waving. He’s got the tent up!’

  At that moment the shapeless black mound the boy had erected subsided to the sand.

  Nectovelin harrumphed. ‘He’s done his best. Let’s go rescue him.’ He led the way out of the sea and up the beach.

  III

  The four of them spent the day playing games, talking, eating, drinking. It was near midsummer, and the light faded only slowly from the sky. Nectovelin even grudgingly accepted some of the Roman wine Cunedda had brought.

  Agrippina was glad Mandubracius was here. He was a good-hearted child, full of affection, who wanted nothing more than for everybody to have a good time. In fact she wondered if, unconsciously, she had planned it this way, to have Mandubracius around when she faced Nectovelin over her relationship with Cunedda, as a way to lighten the mood.

  First Mandubracius and then Nectovelin succumbed to tiredness, and retired to the tent.

  Cunedda and Agrippina walked a little way away from the light of the fire. They brought some spare clothing to spread out on the cool sand, and lay side by side, peering up at the slow unveiling of the stars, while the sea lapped softly.

  Cunedda took her hand. ‘Do you think he’s really asleep? I’ve heard that old soldiers never sleep.’

  ‘You make fun of him, but he really is a warrior. After all his birth was attended by a Prophecy!’

  ‘Really? Tell me,’ Cunedda said, intrigued.

  So Agrippina told him how Nectovelin’s mother had supposedly started babbling during her difficult labour. ‘Brica never explained how come she spouted Latin, for she died in childbirth–although the baby, Nectovelin, survived.’ Her grandfather Cunovic had written out a fair copy of the ‘Prophecy’ on parchment, and had given it to Nectovelin as he grew older.

  ‘I love stories like this,’ Cunedda said. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know for sure. Something about the Romans, something about freedom, a lot that made no sense at all. Cunovic had a theory about it, that it was a scrying of some kind, poured into Nectovelin’s mother’s head by a god, or perhaps by a wizard of the future meddling with the past. A “Weaver”, Cunovic called him. He was rather frightened of the Prophecy, I think. He dared not destroy the copy he had made, but he was happy to pass it on to Nectovelin…I’m told Nectovelin has carried it around all his life, even though he can’t read it!’

  ‘And yet it shaped him.’

  ‘Yes. Because of the Prophecy Nectovelin believes he is destined to be a warrior, destined to fight Romans–just as his own great-grandfather fought Caesar. It probably hasn’t helped that that great-grandfather gave him his name too.

  ‘But for most of his life he has been a warrior without a war to fight. In Brigantia there is only a little cattle rustling, and a warrior can’t get his teeth into that! And he certainly never fit in as a farmer. He was always moody and aggressive. “Like living with a thunderstorm in the house,” my mother used to say. He never had children, you know–lovers, but never children. And so, when he heard that you young Catuvellaunians were becoming adventurous–even though he was in his thirties by then–he came down here for a bit of fighting. Cracking a few Trinovantian skulls suited him. But he’s still restless. You can see it in him…’

  Since the days of Cassivellaunus, while the Romans brooded across the Ocean, the Catuvellaunians had been busy building an empire of their own.

  The Catuvellaunians still boasted of their ‘victory’ over Julius Caesar, even though in fact Cassivellaunus had won no more than a stand-off with the overstretched Romans. Befo
re he left Britain for good, Caesar had insisted on the Catuvellaunians respecting their neighbours the Trinovantes, who had been friendly to Caesar. Well, that hadn’t worked; before long, with brazen cheek, the Catuvellaunians had actually taken the Trinovantes’ base of Camulodunum as their own capital.

  Then had followed the decades-long reign of Cassivellaunus’s grandson Cunobelin, when the Catuvellaunians had been content to sit on their little empire. Agrippina had the impression that Cunobelin had been a wise and pragmatic ruler, able to balance the competing forces of internal pride within his nation with the constant danger represented by Roman might–and all the while growing rich on lucrative trade with Rome.

  But then Cunobelin had died. His empire had devolved to the control of two of his many sons, Caratacus and Togodumnus–both in fact uncles of Cunedda, though they weren’t much older than he was. To them Caesar’s incursion was beyond living memory. And under them the Catuvellaunians had gone in for aggressive expansion.

  During the ensuing raids and petty wars Nectovelin had risen quickly, and found a place in the princes’ councils.

  As his personal wealth grew Nectovelin brought some of his own family down from Brigantia to help him spend it. But he hadn’t always been pleased with the results, such as when Agrippina’s mother had accepted an offer to let her young daughter, like two of Cunobelin’s younger sons, be educated in the empire. The Romans claimed this strengthened links between the peoples, but harder heads described it as ‘hostage taking’. Still, Agrippina’s mother had seen the benefits of a Roman education. She had even given her daughter a Roman name.

  So Agrippina had spent three years of her life in Massilia on the southern coast of Gaul, cramming Latin, learning to read and write, absorbing rhetoric and grammar and the other elements of a Roman education, and soaking up Mediterranean light. It had left her transformed in every way, she knew. And yet she had had no hesitation in coming home when the time was up.

  ‘I went to Massilia against Nectovelin’s wishes,’ Agrippina said. ‘But I wouldn’t have been here in the south without him. I wouldn’t have met you. And none of it would have come about without the Prophecy.’

  Cunedda shook his head. ‘A strange story. How dramatic it must have been, that moment–the painful labour, the attending women, the brothers, the brooding grandfather–and then the drama of the spouting Latin words! And that one moment, lost in the past, has echoed throughout Nectovelin’s life.’

  This romantic musing reminded Agrippina of why she had fallen so firmly in love with Cunedda in the first place. She curled up her fingers and gently scratched the palm of his hand. ‘But even though it shaped his life, Nectovelin can’t read his own Prophecy.’

  ‘You could read it for him.’

  ‘I offered once. He pretended not to hear. He hates my Roman reading. I may as well have waved an eagle standard in his face.’ She suppressed a sigh. She had debated this many times with her cousin. ‘Words give you such power. If he could read he would be the equal of any Roman, the equal of the Emperor Claudius himself.’

  He looked up at her, the stars reflected in his eyes. ‘Dear ’Pina. A head full of words, and dreams!’

  ‘Dreams?’

  ‘We need to speak about the future. Our future.’ He hesitated. “Pina–Claudius Quintus has offered me a position in Gaul.’

  This sudden, unexpected news turned her cold. She knew that Quintus was one of Cunedda’s principal contacts for his pottery business.

  ‘Quintus is expanding,’ Cunedda said, uncertain what she was thinking. ‘He likes my work. He’ll be a partner in the new concern, but it will be my business, just as here.’

  ‘And you didn’t bother to tell me any of this?’

  ‘I wanted to be sure that old Nectovelin wouldn’t just keep me away from you anyhow. But he seems to accept me, doesn’t he? And now that he does, we have to decide what to do. Think of it, Agrippina. If I go to Gaul the trade routes across the whole empire will be wide open to me. And I won’t have to train up another woolly-arsed Briton every time I open up a new line!’

  ‘Now you sound Roman yourself,’ she said.

  He gazed at her, evidently trying to judge her mood. ‘Well, is that so bad? It’s you who grew up in Gaul.’

  ‘But I came back,’ she said softly.

  He frowned. ‘Look, if you’re unhappy we don’t have to do this. I’ll find some other way to build on Quintus’s faith in me.’

  ‘You’d do that for me?’

  ‘Of course. I want us to share the future, ’Pina. But it must be a future we both want…’

  She sighed, and lay back. That was the trouble, though: what did she want? In Gaul her friends, while kind, had always looked down on her as a barbarian from a place beyond civilisation. But now there seemed to be no room for her in Brigantia either, where nobody could share the sparking in her mind when she read. There were more practical issues too. In Britain a woman could rise to be the equal of a man–or better. Why, the ruler of her own nation was a woman, Cartimandua. In Rome, though, she could never aspire to be more than somebody’s wife–and even if that somebody was as delicious as Cunedda, could it ever be enough?

  ‘I’ve upset you,’ Cunedda said softly. ‘I’m sorry. We’ll talk of this tomorrow.’ He cupped her cheek in his warm hand. ‘Can you read the sky, Agrippina? Are the stars the same, where you were born? There.’ He picked out one bright star. ‘That is the star we call the Dog, because when we first see it, early in the mornings, we know it marks the start of the summer. It is the lead dog of the pack, you see. And in the winter we look for that one’–he pointed again–‘for when it rises in the east, we know we must plant the winter wheat. We believe that once a girl was washed up on a beach, perhaps not unlike this one, having swum from a faraway land. In her belly was the seed that would grow to be the first king of the Catuvellaunians. But that first night she was cold and it was dark. She built a fire, and the embers flew up into the air. And that is how the stars were formed.’

  ‘We have similar stories,’ she said. ‘And we read the sky.’

  He ran his hand down her side, thrillingly. ‘Tell me about Brigantia.’

  She smiled in the dark. ‘Brigantia is a huge country that stretches from sea to sea, east to west and north to south. You can ride for days and not come to the end of it. The name means “hilly” in our tongue. I was born in a place called Eburacum, which means “the place of the yew trees”. Our holy animal is the boar. And Nectovelin was born in Banna, on a ridge overlooking a river valley that looks as if it has been scooped out with a spoon. It’s a beautiful place.’

  ‘And sexy Coventina, this huge goddess Nectovelin jokes about?’

  ‘She is all around, in the landscape. You can see her breasts in the swelling of the hills, her thighs in the deep-cut valleys…’ She moved with the stroking of his hand. ‘Oh, Cunedda…’

  On the dark water, an oar splashed.

  IV

  Agrippina sat up sharply.

  Cunedda was startled. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She pressed her finger to his lips. When she stared out to sea she could see nothing at all. But there it was again, the unmistakable slap of a clumsily handled oar, the clunk of wood striking wood–and a muffled curse, a man’s voice.

  ‘I heard that,’ said Cunedda, whispering now. ‘You have sharp ears.’

  A growl from the dark. ‘Keep your yapping down.’ Nectovelin was a shadow against the night. Agrippina wondered if he had been awake all the time after all.

  Cunedda asked nervously, ‘You think they are pirates?’

  Agrippina said, ‘Who else makes landfall in the dark?’

  Nectovelin grunted softly. ‘Who indeed?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Cunedda said, ‘Whoever it is, we don’t want them to know we’re here. We should douse the fire.’

  ‘Already done,’ Nectovelin said. ‘But they’ll smell the smoke—’

  ‘Hello!’ The small voice came drift
ing up from the beach. It was Mandubracius, of course. He was carrying a torch, and as he walked down to the sea he was suspended in a bubble of flickering light, a slight, spectral figure.

  For a moment there was utter silence from the water. But now came a reply. ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, heavily accented.

  Nectovelin cursed colourfully. ‘I thought he was still sleeping. My fault, my fault.’

  Cunedda tried to rise. ‘We should stop him.’

  ‘No.’ Nectovelin held his arm. ‘They may just let him go. Better to risk it than to reveal ourselves now.’

  Agrippina felt as if a leather rope attached her heart to the little boy walking down the beach. ‘He’s only a child. He’s curious, that’s all.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Nectovelin, not harshly.

  Mandubracius reached the edge of the water. Now, indistinctly, by the flickering light of his torch, Agrippina made out the boat that had landed. It was bigger than she had imagined, flat-bottomed, evidently for ease of landing on the beach. She saw men aboard, faces shining like coins in the torch’s dim glow. One of them stepped into the water and spoke to Mandubracius. Gruff laughter rippled around the landing craft. Mandubracius seemed to take fright. He threw down the torch and turned to run.

  But the man standing in the water drew a short, blunt sword, and with it he cut down Mandubracius.

  Immediately Nectovelin’s hand clamped over Agrippina’s mouth. There was a sharp word from the boat, perhaps of reprimand. Agrippina thought she heard a name: Marcus Allius. And then the light died at last.

  All this in a heartbeat.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Nectovelin said, and Agrippina could hear the grief in his own whisper. ‘There must be fifty of them in that boat alone, and there will be more boats, hundreds perhaps, landing all around this harbour. If we try to take them on we will die too. Instead we must stay alive, and tell what we saw.’ Still Agrippina struggled, but Nectovelin’s grip tightened. ‘Believe me, I feel as you do. Worse. I am responsible. And I won’t rest until I have avenged his death–or given up my life for his. But not now, not tonight.’

  Gradually he loosened his grip and uncovered her mouth.