He knew he should be fearful; did not all men fear death, even kings? And to die in an alien land so far from home… But there was a comfort, if the Romans kept their word, in that he would soon be reunited with Medb. And then there was curiosity. He had always been a curious man, eager to discover and understand what others thought mundane and uninteresting. By the end, he had understood the Romans. True, he had not been able to defeat them, but he had made them pay dearly for their forays and raids into the mountain fastness he had made his own. Yet skirmishes and ambushes were not battles and it was battles that won wars. The minds of her commanders had been clear to him, but he had never been able to defeat Rome’s soldiers. Now he was curious about Rome. He remembered his conversation, so long ago, with the keeper of the great beast that had accompanied the invasion force. Even then he had felt a flutter of excitement at the descriptions of buildings as tall as mountains, palaces of pure gold and homes fit for gods. Now, in the twilight hour of his life, he would see the reality of it.
They sent fifty men to guard him; fifty of the Emperor’s elite, in unfamiliar dark tunics and breastplates embossed with silver. All this for a single vanquished enemy who was no more a threat than the women who lined the route hoping for a glimpse of the barbarian in the imperial carriage. And they had given him a travelling companion. Was this part of the insult to a defeated enemy, to be awarded a jailer who had barely begun to shave? The soldier seemed absurdly young for the legionary officer’s uniform he wore; fresh-faced and pink-cheeked, and staring with a frank curiosity that might have been annoying but for the intelligent humour in the pale eyes.
‘I am interested to know what lies ahead.’
The young man blinked, surprised that his exotic prisoner had command of Latin. He looked thoughtful for a moment, the eyes moving from Caratacus’s face to his chains. No harm in answering a question from the condemned man.
‘Gnaeus Julius Labienus, tribune, at your service,’ he said politely. ‘There is to be a parade, from the Campus Martius to the Emperor’s palace upon the Palatine Hill.’
The word Palatine stirred another memory of the long-ago conversation. A hill. One of how many? Six, or was it seven? ‘And I am to be part of this parade?’
‘You are to be the object of it. Its purpose. A thousand captured warriors will be your vanguard, and the trophies taken from you — the gold and the silver, the arms and the standards — will be piled high so all can see the wealth the Emperor has won for Rome.’ Caratacus suppressed a wry smile. He was a king, and kings understood the need to justify wars, but he wondered where this enormous treasure had come from. Arms he had lost in plenty — crude swords made in forest clearings and spear points forged in mountain caves — but the only gold he owned was at his neck and he knew nothing of standards save the eagles he had sought to wrest from the legions. Labienus continued. ‘There will be a fine turnout. Your fame precedes you. The fame of a mighty warrior who never surrendered and won the respect of our commanders and of our Emperor.’
‘And at the end?’
The young Roman studied the man opposite him on the padded bench seat of the carriage and felt an unexpected pang of regret. Perhaps in his mid-forties, the tale of his capture and the long ordeal of his captivity were etched deep in the lines of his face, but his eyes told a different story. The man might have been defeated, but the spirit and the will still burned strong. Tall and severe, greying hair to his shoulders and his moustaches drooping below his chin, Caratacus wore his chains like a badge of honour. Labienus felt an involuntary shiver as he imagined meeting the Briton in battle. Everything about him could be encapsulated in a single word. Pride.
‘At the end your fame will be greater than at any time before.’
Caratacus nodded. ‘May we draw back the curtains? I have travelled far to see this Rome.’
At first, it was a ghost city that danced in the shimmering midday heat. Nothing had prepared him for the scale of it. Mountains he had seen, and great forests, but these were creations of the gods. His imagination could barely accept that men had made this vast escarpment of stone that stretched from one horizon to the other and shone in the sunlight as if it were encrusted with gemstones. Soon they came to the first buildings lining the roadway: pillared and pitch-roofed constructions of golden stone with marble statues staring down from their summits. Each was different in its own way, in either design or scale. Some were small, smaller even than the roundhouses of his homeland, but others were vast, more temple than home. One thing puzzled him. ‘I see no entrances. Do you Romans spirit yourselves in and out of your houses?’
Labienus smiled. ‘Oh, these are not houses. They are graves: the tombs of our forefathers. The greater the man, the greater the memorial.’
They soon reached an area where the true houses rose like cliffs tight on either side of the carriage, and what little space was left between was filled with clamouring crowds so that their progress slowed to a walk. The apartment blocks were so high they shut out the sunlight and Caratacus’s mood darkened with the deepening shadow. For a moment he felt the helplessness and rage of a bear trapped in a pit, and he had to restrain the urge to launch himself across the carriage at young Labienus. One twist of the chains and the tribune’s neck would have snapped like a chicken’s. But the impulse was gone as quickly as it had come and the carriage emerged once again into the sunlight. They crossed a broad river, a sluggish, unwholesome stream that gave off the stench of raw ordure and rotting meat, and the carriage came to a halt. Labienus turned to him. ‘We have arrived.’
When he emerged from the carriage he found himself at the centre of a vast open space encircled by buildings and dominated by the curve of a structure so huge he could see only a small part of it. In front of the buildings an enormous crowd of Romans had gathered and now they stirred as they caught the first glimpse of the rebel commander who had fought the legions to a standstill. He closed his ears to their insults and concentrated on his surroundings. To his front, stretching away towards a wide gap in the wall of stone, a broad column of cowed figures stood motionless, save for a dozen or so at the rear who straightened as they recognized him. As he stared at them, a chained arm was raised in salute and a single word echoed from the marble and the granite and the brick.
‘Caratacus!’
He saw heads rise at the shout, and a murmur ran through the column of slaves as the name was repeated again and again and again, ever louder, until the word turned the space into a great cauldron of sound that made his hair stand on end and his skin prickle with sheer joy.
‘Caratacus!’
A weaker man would have wept, but he was not yet that man. Not even when Labienus appeared at his side leading a slight, dark-haired figure by her chains and he held his Medb in his arms again for what might be the final time. Not when they took her away from him and linked his golden chains to the rear of a gilded chariot drawn by two milk-white mares. Not even when the chariot jerked into movement and he was drawn like a common criminal between rows of jeering faces along a broad avenue lined with more members of the Emperor’s dark-tunicked guard. It was a few minutes before he realized with disbelief that the crowd wasn’t jeering; that the words they shouted were not insults but encouragement. He held his head high and looked to neither right nor left, able to stride out steadily behind the chariot as it advanced at walking pace. What strange people these Romans were, bringing him to this place, where the only gardens were gardens of stone, and the only forest where a man might hunt was a forest of marble pillars, not to debase him, but to hail him as if he were their own Emperor. A mountain appeared before him, a mountain topped by an enormous multi-pillared, marbled edifice he felt certain must be Claudius’s palace, but the procession skirted it and passed through thronging narrow streets to a second long avenue, dominated, to the right, by a second mountain. His feet stumbled on cobbled paving and he was surrounded by extravagant structures that outshone everything that had gone before, but he only had eyes for the mountain — because it wasn’t a mountain at all. Could men truly have made this? At first glance, it was a single structure, walls and columns, great arched windows, soaring frontages that made his head spin, and statues wrought of gold and silver that might come to life at any moment, they were so human in form. As his mind grappled with its complexity it turned into not a single building but many, placed one on top of the other or locked in close embrace, so that the one appeared to be supporting the next. For the first time he came close to losing his composure. How could he have believed he could defeat a people capable of creating this?