Emperor

'Thank you,' Isolde said sincerely. It was a huge relief not to be totally dependent on her father.

It was already late afternoon. She lay on her cot and slept a while, to gather her strength before the evening meal.

That evening Isolde was the last to join the group. They were in the largest room in the granary-hall, set out like a Roman triclinium with couches around a small central table. Nennius was holding forth about politics in Rome. He had a small leather satchel on the table before him. Isolde knew it contained documents about the purpose of his quest-to retrieve the Prophecy, as he called it, lost so long ago.

Her belly feeling heavier than ever, Isolde levered herself down onto a couch. The light from lamps and candles was cheerful enough, and the food, meat, bread and stewed vegetables, was warming and palatable, if it lacked spices for Isolde's taste.

This corner of the old granary was walled on two sides by unplastered stone through which holes had been roughly knocked to make windows. It was a working room, an office of sorts, with desks heaped with scrolls and tablets. Christian symbols could be seen in the clutter on the desks-a bronze fish, a chi-rho medallion. And the papers on Tarcho's desk were weighted by a stone statue, a reclining woman painted crudely in blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary. Isolde learned later it was a much older piece, a Roman soldier's carving of a local goddess called Coventina of whom nobody remembered anything but her name, now repainted as Christ's mother.

But despite these hints of civilisation, of religion and literacy, there was something brutal about the place, Isolde thought. Uncivilised. Armour and weaponry hung from the walls, along with the heads of animals: deer, a fox, a wolf. There was even the outstretched wingspan of a buzzard, evidently brought down by a soldier's arrow.

Tarcho, knives glinting at his belt, seemed in his element here. To Isolde's eyes he seemed more barbarian than Roman, and there was something in his hard, calculating expression she didn't like.

Maria prompted Tarcho: 'So you and Nennius share the same grandfather.'

Tarcho spoke around a mouthful of dripping meat. 'His name was Audax. He was born a slave but died a soldier. He named his son Tarcho, after the soldier who took him in and cared for him. That Tarcho was my father, and he named me for himself.'

'Ah, yes,' Nennius said, 'but Audax came from an old family who hadn't always been slaves. He was evidently a clever man, and that hereditary intellect seems to have been passed down to his second son, who was my father, called Thalius after another of his patrons. Thalius moved to Rome where I was born, as was my daughter. I'm sure old Audax would have been proud to see you in command of a place like this, Tarcho.'

Tarcho shrugged. 'Ten years ago I was a serving soldier in the Roman army. Then the British Revolution came. Farm boys in turmoil,' he said dismissively. 'We didn't really know what was going on up here. We just kept the peace along our stretch of the Wall. But there was no more pay…'

Without pay, some of the soldiers stationed on the Wall drifted away from their posts, some turned mercenary, others resorted to brigandage and robbery-and others, Tarcho said, had gone off to Gaul with their service records in their packs, wistfully hoping to get their back pay. But most of the Wall troops, born and bred where their forefathers had served for generations, just stayed put. This was home; where were they to go?

'When the dust settled we got new orders from the Duke.'

Isolde asked, 'The Duke?'

'The Duke of the Britains.' The military commander who, under the emperors, had been in command of the Wall and the northern forts that supported it. 'He was no longer receiving orders from the diocese, or indeed from the prefect in Gaul, or the Emperor.'

The Duke of the Britains, suddenly finding himself free of his chain of command, took control. The troops would continue to function as army units, he ordered; they would continue to protect and police the population. But without central pay it was up to the local people, the farmers, to supply the fort, paying in kind in foodstuffs, materials, animals, labour.

'There was some grumbling,' Tarcho said honestly. 'But then the Picts came. One night they tried to sneak over the Wall, as bold as you please. Well, my men dug out their Roman armour and weapons, and we formed up and sent those brutes packing. After that the farmers were happy enough to cough up, and they turned out to cheer the Duke when he stayed at Banna a few months back…'

Isolde cynically wondered what choice the farmers had but to pay up. This Duke of the Britains, a Roman commander, seemed to be setting himself up as a warlord of a very old type, with the Wall his seat of power. No wonder this granary had the trappings of a barbarian chief's hall. Still, perhaps the locals were glad of some order and protection, for any was better than none. And perhaps to many of them, toiling at their land, it made no difference who called himself their lord from one day to the next.

She noticed Tarcho made no mention of the provincial government at Eburacum, nominally still in control of this area. Evidently, ten years after the British Revolution, the political situation had still to sort itself out.

'Ah,' Nennius said, 'but need it have been this way? Need the great tide of empire have drawn back from Britain?'

Tarcho frowned. 'I don't know what you mean.'

'Pelagius preaches of free will,' Nennius said. 'Each of us is free to shape his or her destiny. The future is unfixed-it depends on the decisions we make-and so the past too was malleable, dependent on human actions.' He smiled. 'There is a passage in Livy, written before the time of Augustus, in which he speculates what might have happened if Alexander had lived on, rather than die so young. Suppose he had turned his attentions west, rather than dissipate his strength in the endless deserts of the east?'

'He'd have come up against Rome, even then,' Maria said.

'Yes-a young but vigorous Rome which would have defeated him-so said the good Roman Livy! The history which seems so fixed to us is actually a fragile tapestry whose weave depended on human whim. And that's my point. If the decisions of the emperors had been made differently perhaps the eagle would still fly over Britain even now.'

'I don't see how,' Tarcho said reasonably.

'Then take one example,' Nennius said. 'What if this Wall had never been built? What if the Emperor Hadrian had decided that rather than fix the border here he would complete the conquest of the whole island of Britain, all the way to the north, and devote a legion or two to keeping it? For it was tried, you know, several times, from the age of Claudius himself, and by the Emperor Severus, and later Constantius Chlorus led a force to the far north.'

'But the land up there is poor and the people are ugly savages who live in bogs,' Tarcho said practically. 'What use would it have been? Better to draw a line here.'

'In the short term, perhaps. But we are living with the long-term consequences of Hadrian's decision, Tarcho. And what do we find? Secure beyond a frontier fixed in stone, the barbarians have organised, federated, found capable leaders, and now break through the Wall to crush us. But if Hadrian had taken the land of the Caledonians they would be Roman by now, and Britain would be secure, at least internally. Think of it-a whole island to serve as a garrison for western Europe. Couldn't Gaul and Spain then have been defended when the Franks and the Goths came?'

'Yes, well, if you want to know what I think,' Maria said suddenly, 'we all got into this mess because of the way Constantine barbarised the empire. That's my view. That's why Gaul is full of Franks and Spain is full of Goths and the south of Britain is full of Saxons. I know, I've been down there. They care nothing for our ways and they're only out for themselves. And now, who is strong enough to throw them out? Nobody, that's who.'