The marks crudely etched into the boy's flesh were letters: Latin letters, roughly arranged in a square array. PEEO NERR OSRI ACTA
As they stared, the boy turned his head, a spark of curiosity showing in his eyes for the first time since he had been brought here. Thalius wondered if he even knew he had been carrying around a message inscribed on his back, perhaps all his life.
III
Thalius was profoundly relieved to get back above ground, even if the climb left him winded.
Volisios escorted Thalius and Tarcho to his site office, a mudbrick block a little better appointed than the rest of the shacks here. Tarcho took the boy away to clean him up and inspect him a bit more closely. Thalius was happy to leave the boy in Tarcho's hands. Tarcho was no doctor but he had commanded soldiers in the field, and knew a little basic anatomy and medicine.
While he waited Thalius wanted only to rest, too exhausted even to speak. Respecting this, Volisios served Thalius with some watered-down wine, a rather rough British-grown vintage, and turned to some paperwork.
Thalius reflected on how lucky he was to have Tarcho's support. Tarcho was in his fifties, about the same age as Thalius himself, but a greater contrast between the two men was hard to imagine. Thalius was a man of property and business. He ran a pottery partnership, selling cups and plates to the army. It was a business that had been in the family for generations. He wasn't as rich as he might have been, however, for he had also inherited his father's position on the Camulodunum town council, the curia. His responsibilities for tax collection, upkeep of the town walls and other civic duties were onerous and expensive-which was, of course, why they had been made compulsory and hereditary.
By contrast Tarcho, descended from a long line of soldiers of German origin, was a pillar of a man, calm, solid and stolid, with a ferocious crimson beard now laced with grey. He had served most of his twenty-five years in a garrison on Britain's eastern shore-though some of those years had been accumulated under the reign of Carausias, the notorious usurper. It had been a pragmatic gesture by Constantius Chlorus, leader of the great Roman Invasion of Britain nearly twenty years ago, to have decreed that if soldiers like Tarcho were prepared to switch sides, their service under Carausias would count towards their retirement privileges.
But what was a retired Tarcho to do? He was unmarried. He was too restless to farm, and too scrupulous to serve as some tax collector's hired thug. So he had come to Camulodunum looking for more suitable work, and through friends of friends had run into Thalius, who had been on the look-out for a dependable bodyguard. Thalius had certainly been glad of his company as he had ventured out of the safety of Camulodunum's walls and made this journey to the far west, travelling through one of the four British provinces and into another.
A contrasting pair they might have been, but Tarcho had become a right-hand man to Thalius, a sounding board as much as protective muscle. Both childless bachelors, their company was congenial. And they were united, and divided, by a shared religion: Christianity. On their travels the two of them had had long and interesting debates on the nature of the faith. But then, as Volisios had remarked, everybody was a theologian nowadays.
Tarcho's expressions of his tough creed had actually crystallised for Thalius his own doubts about the new Emperor, and the direction he was taking the faith. It was these doubts, in fact, which had brought Thalius to this mine-and what he hoped to achieve here was but a step towards his own ultimate goal, a confrontation over the direction of Christianity with the Emperor himself.
Christianity was a long-standing passion within Thalius's family, said to go back centuries to Lepidina daughter of Severa, who had lived not long after the death of Christ Himself. Thalius's faith was of an old-fashioned sort, a faith of love and hope, his community united in charitable associations of mutual aid-a faith derived from the teachings of Christ Himself, Thalius liked to believe. Tarcho, though, was a Christian of the new type. Like his Emperor's, Tarcho's was a robust soldier's faith, his god a warrior who had proved His mettle by beating off other deities in battle. It was this metamorphosis of Christianity into a military creed he could no longer recognise that Thalius, gravely concerned, had been forced to reject. But the new direction came from the Emperor himself. What was a man of conscience to do?
When he heard that the Emperor was coming to Britain to do some troop-raising, an idea had struck Thalius, a seed planted in his mind. The Emperor would receive audiences-and so why, then, shouldn't Thalius himself be received, and make his doubts known? Any rational ruler would surely accept the ideas and viewpoints of those he aspired to rule. Why not Thalius?
But as soon as he conceived this thrilling idea he was plagued by doubt. Was he taking himself too seriously? Who was he, a member of a mere provincial curia, to comment on imperial policy?
That was when, casting around for a way forward, it occurred to Thalius to turn to the old family story of the Prophecy, the lost poem of the future. It was a forlorn hope that he might recover it, perhaps, but even in these days of bleed-you-white taxes Thalius was prosperous enough to afford to be able to indulge a fascination for family history. And in a time of such uncertainty, if the Prophecy really did contain a glimpse of the true future it was worth a try to find it. With its authority behind him-always assuming the Prophecy existed, and could be found, and was worth presenting-perhaps he would have an excuse to face an emperor and his court, and the courage to do it.
It was spurious, perhaps, and not even very logical, but it was a plan, a strategy, and he had followed it through this far. And after all it was the family story, passed down from long-dead Lepidina, that the Prophecy actually had something to do with the destiny of Christianity. If that was true-if he could decode it and apply its message, if he could relay its truth to the Emperor himself, Thalius told himself with a kind of breathless anticipation-he might do mankind a great service indeed.
His strength recovering, and as Tarcho had still not come back with the boy, Thalius felt a little restless. He put down his cup and, under Volisios's uneasy stare, prowled around the room.
It was a working office heaped with paperwork. One pile of lawyers' letters was weighted down with a bit of quartz shot through with gold, a pretty stone brought up from the earth no doubt at the cost of much human suffering. There were few personal touches, but there was a small lararium, a household shrine, with tokens to gods Thalius didn't recognise. But in among this pagan clutter there was a rough Christian fish symbol, a brooch done in a bit of bronze wire. Such mixings-up of creeds were common. Despite the Emperor's promotion of the faith Christianity wasn't compulsory, paganism not a crime, and Rome's cheerful pantheism was, for now, able to absorb Jesus as just another god.
The most interesting item in the room was a framed set of coins. They had been struck during the reign of Carausias, and showed the usurper's proud profile alongside the legitimate continental emperors he had claimed as his 'brothers', and icons that portrayed him as a fulfilment of Virgilian prophecies of a saviour of Rome.
Volisios was still watching him uneasily.
'So,' Thalius said, 'you were a supporter of Carausias?'
'Never,' Volisios said quickly. 'I just collect the coins. They are already rare, and quite valuable. Just think! The coins of a British emperor. That's all this is, Thalius, a coin collection.'
Thalius had never been one for bear-baiting. 'Oh, you needn't worry, man. I'm no government spy. Though I've no doubt you've plenty of murky secrets-what, a coin hoard? A few sons secreted away to evade the labour levies?'