Emperor

Tarcho grunted. 'I see what you're driving at about Hadrian, Nennius. But she's right. If it's decisions and their dire consequences you want to talk about it's Constantine you have to consider. After all he did move his capital to Constantinople, taking all the money with it.'

'Then there's another possibility,' Nennius said. 'Suppose Constantine, instead of moving his capital to the east, had moved it west-to Gaul, even to Britain itself, where he was after all elevated. Imagine the empire run from Londinium or Eburacum! Why not? Britain was stable, relatively, and rich too: its corn and metals supplied the armies on the Rhine and the Danube for generations. That is why Britain has been the seat of one usurper after another, including Constantine himself. And with the British garrison behind them, and the focus of the emperors here rather than in the greasy fleshpots of the east, isn't it possible the empire could have been saved?'

Londinium as the capital of the Roman empire! The thought was so breathtaking it silenced them for a moment-and Isolde knew it wasn't such a terribly implausible idea. After all many of the usurpers of the last few decades before the final British Revolution had tried to set up a separatist empire of the western provinces.

'But I don't see what difference any of this talking makes,' Maria said now. 'Maybe things could have been different if somebody had done this instead of that-but so what? What's done is done. The past may have been malleable for those who lived in it, Nennius, but to us it is surely fixed.'

'Ah, but is it?' Nennius asked. 'Have you read what Augustine has said of eternity-in between his diatribes against Pelagius, that is? God is eternal, not time-bound as we are. He is supreme above time-I think that was the phrase. And to Him past, present and future coexist in one timeless moment. And if that is so, isn't it possible that God could intervene in the past as well as in the future?'

Tarcho pulled his moustache. 'Ah. I think I see where you're going with this, cousin.'

Nennius nodded. 'This is why I came here. We must talk of the Prophecy of Nectovelin.' And he pulled parchments from the leather case on the table before him.

IV

Nennius sketched the history of the Prophecy: how it had been uttered by Nectovelin's mother during his birth, how it appeared to predict events that occurred during the reigns of Claudius, Hadrian and Constantine. A trace of it had survived, as tattoos on the skin of generations of slaves, all the way down to Audax himself. But apart from that it had been lost to history-perhaps.

'I have this,' Nennius said, brandishing one of his documents, a dog-eared scroll. 'It is a memoir of the Emperor Claudius, who, it seems, actually saw the Prophecy for himself. This book was my father's, in fact, given to him by Audax, and he left it to me on his death. The Prophecy as Claudius describes it had sixteen lines, and though he doesn't reproduce it here-he seems to assume his readers would have it available-he summarises most of it well enough to reconstruct.

'This story of the Prophecy has fascinated me ever since I was a boy and heard it at my grandfather's knee. It is about emperors, you see, three emperors of Rome who would come to Britain. And it contains a crucial passage on Constantine. From my reading-and what my grandfather told me of the events of his own youth-it implored the reader to kill the Emperor! I believe that the assassination of Constantine was the purpose of the Prophecy. All the rest of it, predictions about Claudius's invasion and the building of the Wall, were included only as proof of the Prophecy's authenticity. They were there to make those who owned the Prophecy in Constantine's day take its mandate seriously.

'But these are only guesses. How I long to know more! I have written down my own reconstruction of the piece-here, somewhere…' He scrambled in his bag, producing more bits of parchment. 'But the last few lines are not recoverable from Claudius's memoir, for he seems uninterested in them. He describes them only as "maunderings on freedom and the rights of peoples".'

Maria said, 'You spoke of God having the power to rewrite the past. Are you suggesting God himself ordered our family to kill an emperor?'

Nennius struggled to reply. 'Surely not God-but if God has such powers, who's to say that humans won't be able to emulate Him some day? What if it was a man, a man or woman of our time-or even of our own future-who, through the power of prayer, reached back to meddle with the past through the Prophecy? The family legend is of a Weaver, who stands outside the tapestry of time and can pluck at the courses of our lives as if they were mere thread.'

Tarcho said, 'And if he did, this Weaver-what was the point? Why murder Constantine?'

'To save Christianity,' Nennius said briskly. 'That was clearly the meaning our grandfather and his companions extracted from the surviving acrostic. If Constantine had died then, he could not have corrupted Christianity into an arm of the state-and it would not have become as intolerant as it has. There would have been no persecution of one Christian by another, no hounding of a thinker like Pelagius.'

Tarcho nodded. 'So Christians of the future tried to have Constantine killed, and their faith restored to a lost purity. Is that what you're getting at?'

'Yes,' Nennius said. 'Well, perhaps. I don't know! I am reconstructing events of centuries ago, and the mysterious motives of figures behind them, without even having available the primary evidence, the Prophecy itself.'

Tarcho frowned. 'It all sounds a bit devilish to me.'

Maria mused, 'But if you had such power, if you could deflect history-why use it that way? The Church is surviving even where the empire isn't-like here, in Britain. It's like a suit of clothes worn over the body of the empire, still standing even though the skeleton within has rotted away. If I could change history, I wouldn't worry about the Church, for the Church is robust enough to withstand the meddling of a thousand Constantines. I think I would find a way to hurry up the day when Britain returns to Rome.'

Nennius nodded sagely. 'Of course. Britain has always been part of the Roman world. It is only a matter of time-'

Tarcho snapped, 'No. It's different now. Rome is the last of a line of antique empires that go back to Alexander. But the world has changed, and Rome has had its day. If the Caesars ever do come back they won't be welcomed.' He eyed Nennius. 'You know, you should stay here, cousin. Here in Brigantia. Our family has been many things, soldiers, stonemasons and scholars. But at heart we have always been Brigantians.'

Nennius frowned. 'But Aeneas of Troy came to Britain and-'

Tarcho waved a hand. 'Forget that garbage. Here in the north, we haven't forgotten who we are. Our grandfather Audax grew up a slave, yet he remembered he was a Brigantian. And now the Romans have gone we're in a position to restore Brigantia to her old power. Think of that. Why not an empire of the Brigantians this time-and with us at the top? Why, we could take on the Caesars themselves.' His eyes gleamed.

Isolde wondered what the Duke of the Britains and the Eburacum government would have to say about such an ambition. And Nennius looked confused. Isolde knew that exiled Britons in Rome boasted that they were descended from Trojans who had fled the Greek siege, and that such groupings as 'Brigantians' were just artificial labels, imposed by the Romans for their administrative usefulness.

Was the future to resemble the past, then? Would Rome return, as Maria seemed to hope? Or, if they ever existed, could Tarcho's old erased nations really be reborn? And what of all the Saxons milling around in the south? They weren't going to disappear. She had a feeling that the future would be much more complicated than either Maria or Tarcho imagined, or hoped for-complicated, and bloodier-