Emperor

Primigenius eyed Lepidina. 'Are these grandchildren pretty? They may fetch a better price than a leathery old boot like you.'

Lepidina said coldly, 'You have always manipulated me. You have used me to further your own ends. Now I learn you have lied to me, all my life.'

Severa said, 'Lepidina, regardless of the past, help me now.'

Lepidina turned away.

Primigenius tutted softly. 'More enemies, Severa. Even among your own blood?'

Severa turned to Brigonius. 'You are a decent man. Help me.'

Brigonius recoiled. But he reminded himself that beneath her hard skin there beat a human heart-and she was Lepidina's mother. He said to the freedman, 'She may hold assets your list does not cover, Primigenius. She has invested in my own partnership, for instance.'

Sabinus leaned forward. 'Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the finer points of Roman law, Brigonius.' He seemed pleased to be able to put this old lover of Lepidina's in his place. 'If one is in debt one cannot sell on shares. So her holding in your partnership, and any others, is worthless to her. Do you understand, Brigonius? Do you have anything else to say?'

Even now Severa was unable to look Brigonius in the eye.

And as Brigonius hesitated Primigenius leered at him. 'Don't let her sell you to me again, Brittunculus. Once was enough.'

Brigonius stared at Primigenius and promised himself that he would, some day, somehow, take his own revenge on the freedman. He said, 'You always did make unnecessary enemies, Claudia Severa. It is a character flaw.'

Severa sneered and turned away. Even now she retained her composure. 'Primigenius, you will not win, whatever you do to me. You are a slave, the son of a slave. I am more than that; my family is more. Our future is secured whatever you do to me, for we have the Prophecy.'

The freedman grinned. 'Oh, this old thing?' He held the Prophecy casually, waving it in the air-and he wafted it over the naked flame of a lamp. 'But your grandchildren will have no need of prophecies. As slaves they will never make a decision for themselves again. Besides, in a generation or two your descendants will be illiterate. Whatever is not written down cannot survive.' He began to feed the Prophecy into the flame. 'And the last vestige of this dreadful old curse will be gone for ever.'

Brigonius saw how the burning Prophecy's flame lit up the horrified eyes of Lepidina. And Severa's face showed grief, guilt, and fear-fear of a future now forever unknown.

III EMPEROR AD 314-337 I

The gold mine at Dolaucothi was a wilderness of quarries and shafts and crude shacks, its air thick with dust and acrid smoke. It was the sheer extent of the digging that was so overwhelming. The ripped-up ground covered square miles. There must have been thousands of toiling workers here, all of them filthy, bent and dressed in rags, and even more of them tunnelling like moles underground.

Thalius was a man of letters, based in Camulodunum. He had had no idea such places as this existed; the mine, stranded in the untamed country of the west, struck him as a vision of the Christian Hell that not even the most inventive court theologian could have conjured up. And as the mine overseer, a plump little man called Volisios, escorted him through the workings, Thalius was very glad of the scented cloth he pressed over his nose, and of the massive presence of old soldier Tarcho at his side.

But somewhere among the wretches here, Thalius believed, was the boy he had come to find: a slave and the son of slaves, yet a distant cousin of Thalius's, and a boy who might hold the key to past and future.

'This is the only gold mine in all the Britains,' overseer Volisios boasted. 'You can see we work open-cast and by tunnelling underground. That's where the boy is, down in the deep shafts. I'll take you down there in a moment.'

'I can't wait,' growled Tarcho.

Thalius pointed to the wall of a fort, situated on a rise a way away from the churned-up ground of the mine itself. 'You have the army close by, I see.'

'To deter brigands and barbarians,' Volisios said.

'And perhaps to keep your own workers in order?'

Volisios frowned. Aged perhaps forty, some ten years younger than Thalius and Tarcho, he was a small, rotund man with shaven head and plucked eyebrows-an oily man, Thalius thought, slippery. He clearly didn't know what to make of Thalius, and his story of looking for a particular slave boy. Why would one of the curia of one of the most significant towns in all four Britains come to a place like this, if not to spy, sniff around, look for evidence of tax avoidance and other evasions? And so he squirmed and wriggled as he sought to conceal the petty graft Thalius had no doubt existed. Volisios said, 'You must understand that the workers wouldn't be here at all if they weren't scum, or the spawn of scum-and it's the devil's own job to keep them in order.'

Tarcho grunted. 'And it looks as if the devil has had his hands full.' He pointed.

On a ridge close to the fort Thalius saw a row of crosses, each eight or ten feet tall, stark shapes silhouetted in the afternoon light. Rags appeared to be dangling from their frames.

'You can see from the state of those corpses that it's a while since we had any trouble, and just as well for my purse.' Volisios began to talk of the cost of the last petty uprising. Those who ran this mine did so under licence, for Dolaucothi was an imperial estate, and from their profits its managers had to contribute to the upkeep of the fort and its soldiers. 'We even pay for the wood on which the miscreants are crucified,' he grumbled. 'But we get by. I've run this mine for twenty years, as did my father, and his father before him…'

It was a typical story. Many professions had long been made hereditary, as had Thalius's own position on Camulodunum's curia. People joked that everybody took his father's job nowadays-everybody but the emperors, who killed other people's fathers to take their job.

'My father worked this place in the time of the Emperor Carausias,' Volisios went on. 'He kept working right through the time of the Roman Invasion too. That didn't bother him, but he never got over the way the taxes were hiked up afterwards!'

'Carausias was no emperor but a usurper,' Thalius felt compelled to remind him. 'The purpose of the Invasion was to remove him. And of course taxes are higher now. Things have changed since the days of Hadrian, you know.'

Volisios looked confused. 'Who?'

'An emperor from ancient history,' Tarcho said. 'From a hundred years ago!'

'More like two hundred,' Thalius corrected him mildly. He pointed. 'You'll have to take those crosses down. The Emperor has banned crucifixion.'

'He has? Why?'

Tarcho said heavily, 'Why do you think? Because the Christ was executed on a cross.'

Volisios raised barely visible eyebrows at Thalius. 'Everybody is a theologian now, isn't that true?'

'No doubt,' Thalius said, 'those in your charge will be glad to hear the news.'

'Perhaps I won't tell them until I have to,' Volisios said, and he winked. 'Keep the bastards guessing-eh?'

Thalius looked again at the ugly crosses, and thought how strange it was that his own quest to do service to the man who had once died on such a cross had, in such a complicated fashion, brought him to this dismal place.

Volisios glanced up at the sky, where heavy clouds were clustering. 'Now, gentlemen, I think we'd better go underground. Believe me you don't want to be down there when it rains…Come, come this way. Watch your step, mind.'

He led them across broken ground to the mouth of a tunnel which gaped, black.