Emperor (4 page)

IV

Agrippina sat up sharply.

Cunedda was startled. ‘What’s wrong?’

She pressed her finger to his lips. When she stared out to sea she could see nothing at all. But there it was again, the unmistakable slap of a clumsily handled oar, the clunk of wood striking wood–and a muffled curse, a man’s voice.

‘I heard
that
,’ said Cunedda, whispering now. ‘You have sharp ears.’

A growl from the dark. ‘Keep your yapping down.’ Nectovelin was a shadow against the night. Agrippina wondered if he had been awake all the time after all.

Cunedda asked nervously, ‘You think they are pirates?’

Agrippina said, ‘Who else makes landfall in the dark?’

Nectovelin grunted softly. ‘Who indeed?’

‘What do you mean?’

Cunedda said, ‘Whoever it is, we don’t want them to know we’re here. We should douse the fire.’

‘Already done,’ Nectovelin said. ‘But they’ll smell the smoke—’

‘Hello!’ The small voice came drifting up from the beach. It was Mandubracius, of course. He was carrying a torch, and as he walked down to the sea he was suspended in a bubble of flickering light, a slight, spectral figure.

For a moment there was utter silence from the water. But now came a reply. ‘
Hello?
’ A man’s voice, heavily accented.

Nectovelin cursed colourfully. ‘I thought he was still sleeping. My fault, my fault.’

Cunedda tried to rise. ‘We should stop him.’

‘No.’ Nectovelin held his arm. ‘They may just let him go. Better to risk it than to reveal ourselves now.’

Agrippina felt as if a leather rope attached her heart to the little boy walking down the beach. ‘He’s only a child. He’s curious, that’s all.’

‘Hush,’ said Nectovelin, not harshly.

Mandubracius reached the edge of the water. Now, indistinctly, by the flickering light of his torch, Agrippina made out the boat that had landed. It was bigger than she had imagined, flat-bottomed, evidently for ease of landing on the beach. She saw men aboard, faces shining like coins in the torch’s dim glow. One of them stepped into the water and spoke to Mandubracius. Gruff laughter rippled around the landing craft. Mandubracius seemed to take fright. He threw down the torch and turned to run.

But the man standing in the water drew a short, blunt sword, and with it he cut down Mandubracius.

Immediately Nectovelin’s hand clamped over Agrippina’s mouth. There was a sharp word from the boat, perhaps of reprimand. Agrippina thought she heard a name:
Marcus Allius
. And then the light died at last.

All this in a heartbeat.

‘Listen to me,’ Nectovelin said, and Agrippina could hear the grief in his own whisper. ‘There must be fifty of them in that boat alone, and there will be more boats, hundreds perhaps, landing all around this harbour. If we try to take them on we will die too. Instead we must stay alive, and tell what we saw.’ Still Agrippina struggled, but Nectovelin’s grip tightened. ‘Believe me, I feel as you do. Worse.
I am responsible
. And I won’t rest until I have avenged his death–or given up my life for his. But not now, not tonight.’

Gradually he loosened his grip and uncovered her mouth.

Breathing hard, the sand harsh on her skin, she whispered, ‘Very well.’

Cunedda was panting too, eyes wide. He nodded.

‘Follow me, then,’ Nectovelin said. ‘Keep low. Try to leave no track. We’ll get the horses, and then–well, we’ll see. Come now.’

He began to pick his way across the dune. Agrippina followed, and Cunedda brought up the rear.

Aware of the intense danger they were all in, Agrippina concentrated on following Nectovelin’s instructions, trying not to disturb so much as a blade of dry dune grass. But she couldn’t rid her head of the images of those few moments when the torch had fallen to the water: the armour that had glistened on the chest of the man with the sword, the helmets of the men arrayed in the boat–and the eagle standard held aloft.

V

From his bench in the rear of the landing craft, Narcissus was able to see the first wave of boats driving onto the beach. Under the stars, there was nothing to be seen of the darkened land beyond, nothing but the swell of a dune or two–that, and what might have been the embers of a solitary fire on the beach.

Around Narcissus the legionaries, stinking of sweat, leather and horses, worked their oars under a centurion’s softly spoken commands. The rowers held the boat in its place against the tide, for Vespasian’s order had been that the Emperor’s secretary was not to be allowed to land until the general judged the beachhead had been made reasonably secure.

The delay was perhaps half an hour–or so it seemed to Narcissus, sitting in the dark and silence. The length of an hour was dependent on the length of a day, twelve hours slicing up the interval from sunrise to sunset. He had read from the memoirs of long-dead Carthaginian explorers that in these northern places the length of the day could be quite different from Rome’s, the days longer in summer, shorter in winter. That even time was slippery here added to Narcissus’s sense of unreality on this swelling sea, in the dark, surrounded by the grunts of irritably frightened soldiers. He had come a long way from home, he admitted to himself.

Not that he was about to show weakness in front of these men. A lot of them, no more than half-civilised barbarians from Germany and Gaul themselves, were predictably more superstitiously terrified of the Ocean than of anything their half-cousins on the British shore could throw at them. And judging from the retching sounds and the stink of vomit, many of them were having a harder time coping with the sea’s gentle swell than Narcissus, who could at least pride himself on a strong stomach.

Narcissus was comforted, too, by a deep sense of being present at a pivotal moment in history. He was sorry, in fact, to be making his own landing in the dark like this, though it had been necessary for him to be present at the very spearpoint of the invasion. Somewhere out there were the flagships, the big triremes. By day these grand forms, looming on the horizon with their oars glittering, would be a marvellous sight, enough to strike fear into the heart of any transoceanic barbarian; he wished he could see them now.

At last a light showed on the shore: a lantern, swung back and forth. The centurion growled, ‘That’s it, lads. You’ll be treading on good dry land before you know it. Work those oars now. One, two. One, two…’

His rhythmic voice brought unpleasant memories of the ship Narcissus had sailed along the coast of Gaul, with the relentless booming of a timekeeper’s drum keeping the banks of enslaved oarsmen in step. Narcissus was a freedman, a former slave. In his position he had had to get used to handling slaves. But to be so close to such extreme servitude, where hundreds of men were used as bits of machinery, had been unsettling.

The shallow-draught landing boat grounded on the sand, and the centurion hopped out into ankle-deep water. With a couple of the lads holding the boat steady the centurion offered the secretary his arm. Thus Narcissus strode onto the British shore, barely wetting his feet.

The general himself was here to greet him. Narcissus expected nothing less than a personal welcome from Titus Flavius Vespasianus, legate of the Second Legion Augusta and commander tonight of the beachhead operations–nothing less, for even if Narcissus’s formal title was no more than the Emperor’s correspondence secretary, he had the ear of Claudius.

‘Secretary. Welcome to Britain. I apologise for keeping you waiting.’ Vespasian was a stocky, dark man in his mid-thirties. The son of a farmer in Asia, he had a gruff personal manner and an unfortunate provincial accent, but he looked as if he had been born in his armour. Vespasian led Narcissus a little way up the beach, away from the damp littoral. They were trailed by two of Vespasian’s staff officers.

Narcissus said, ‘I take it the landing was unopposed.’

‘Virtually. It seems our bluffs worked.’ As the Roman forces had been drawn up in Gesoriacum in Gaul, rude armies had gathered on the British shore to meet them–but when the Romans hadn’t crossed quickly, those farmer-warriors had gone back to their lands. The eventual crossing was being made so late in the campaigning season that the British had evidently given up waiting for them altogether.

But Narcissus asked, ‘ “Virtually” unopposed, legate?’

‘A boy came running down the beach to meet the very first landing craft.’

‘A boy?’

‘Alone, we think. My decurion Marcus Allius dealt with him.’

Narcissus winced. ‘Was it necessary to spill an innocent’s blood as soon as a Roman boot touched British soil?’

Vespasian said neutrally, ‘We found the remains of a fire, a crude leather tent, a few trails. But we believe we are still undetected. Just a boy, camping on the beach–wrong place, wrong time.’

‘Wrong for him, indeed.’ As he walked, Narcissus drew himself up to his full height and sniffed the salty, night-cool air. ‘And did we make a good choice of landing site?’

‘It’s as good as we expected from the traders’ maps,’ Vespasian said. ‘In future this place, Rutupiae, will no doubt become a significant entry point.’ He pointed into the dark. ‘I imagine a sea wall over there, perhaps a fort there–ah, but all of it will lie in the shade of the triumphal arch dedicated to Claudius.’ Vespasian spoke respectfully enough, but Narcissus knew him well enough to detect a little gentle mockery. Vespasian went on, ‘Our purpose tonight is to prepare the beachhead so that the main body of the force can be landed tomorrow—’

Narcissus held up his hand. ‘I don’t need all the details.’

‘Let me summarise, then. During the night we will throw a fortification across this semi-island from coast to coast, multiple ditches and a palisade, and within we will set up a tent camp to process the rest of the landings.

‘Then, tomorrow, when the legions are mustered, we will move out. We have landed at the eastern tip of a peninsula. From here we will proceed west, following the south bank of an estuary, the outflow of a tidal river which we call the Tamesis. Once over the river we will proceed north to Camulodunum, which is the centre of the Catuvellaunians.’

‘Ah yes, those troublesome princes. This “centre”–is it a city, fortified?’

Vespasian smiled. ‘Camulodunum is no Troy, secretary. But the Catuvellaunians are the key power in this corner of the island, and Camulodunum is their capital. Their defeat will go a long way to achieving the Emperor’s ambitions.’

‘And the timetable for this grand scheme?’

‘We are confident of taking Camulodunum in this first campaigning season, truncated though it is.’

‘The Emperor himself must take the capital.’

Vespasian inclined his head. ‘It is understood.’

‘It all seems rather simple, legate.’

Vespasian shrugged. ‘Simple schemes are best, Plautius says, and I agree. War has a habit of throwing up complications.’

That word briefly puzzled Narcissus. ‘Complications?–ah, you mean the British.’ In the mesh of personal, economic and political motivation that had brought them all here, it was easy to forget that this land was not an empty arena for Roman ambition but was actually full of people already.

They reached the line of dunes above the beach itself. Narcissus climbed a shallow bank and looked inland, but he could see nothing of the land he had come to claim for Rome, nothing but more dunes.

He breathed deeply. ‘It
smells
different, doesn’t it? Britain smells of salt and wind. Now I’m standing here I can see Julius didn’t entirely exaggerate the strangeness of the crossing in his memoirs. Are your superstitious soldiers right, Vespasian? Have we really gone beyond the end of the world, have we come to conquer the moon?’

Vespasian grunted. ‘If we have, let’s hope the moon men pay their taxes on time.’ He touched the secretary’s shoulder. ‘Now I must insist you come down from there and let us get you under cover.’

Narcissus smiled. ‘Please do your job, legate.’ And he clambered down from the sand dune, awkwardly, in the dark.

VI

While the legionaries constructed their camp, Vespasian entertained Narcissus in a small tent pitched close enough to the water that the secretary could hear the lapping of the waves, close enough to the landing boats for a fast escape if trouble should unexpectedly appear. They drank wine and ate fruit and watched the sea, talking softly. Some of the guard detail took the chance to bathe their feet in the Ocean, letting its salt cleanse them of fungi and other blights. Soldiers always took care of their feet.

After some hours the camp was ready. As Vespasian escorted him through it, Narcissus was struck by the calm, almost cheerful orderliness of it all. Huddled against the natural cover of a river bank, it was like a little town, an array of leather tents enclosed by neatly cut ditches. Sentries were posted around the perimeter, and Narcissus knew that scouts would be working further out in the countryside, operating a deep defensive system.

Unexpectedly the freedman felt a touch of pride swelling his chest. He dared believe there wasn’t so orderly a community on this whole blighted island as this place, though this was just a marching camp and just hours old. You could say what you liked about Roman soldiers, and Narcissus wouldn’t have wanted one as a neighbour, but they knew their business.

And the camp was proof that the Romans were serious, that they were here to see through this great project, here to stay. Everybody was here to further his own ambition, of course, from Vespasian and himself down to the lowliest auxiliary. Even the Emperor, already wending his own slow way from Rome, was out for what he could get. But the sum of all their individual ambitions was a dream of empire.

Vespasian brought Narcissus to a tent of his own. A legionary was stationed outside, a brute of a man who seemed suspicious of Narcissus himself. The interior of the leather tent, lugged across the Ocean on the back of some other hairy soldier, was musty, and smelled vaguely of the sea. But it contained a pallet, a bowl of dried meat and fruit, pouches of water and wine, and a small oil lantern that burned fitfully. Vespasian offered Narcissus company, but the secretary declined. It would soon be dawn, and he felt he needed time for sleep and reflection.

At last alone, Narcissus loosened his tunic and lay down on the pallet. He felt tension in his body–the clenched fists, the trembling in his gut. Resorting to a mental discipline taught him in his slave days by a captive brought from beyond the Indus, he allowed his consciousness to float around his body, soothing the tension in each finger, each toe, each muscle.

He tried to focus his mind on the needs of the coming day. He had no doubt that the subjugation of Britain would take months, years perhaps. But in the morning, when Aulus Plautius’s exuberant legates refined their plans for the first stage of their campaign, he had to be sharp. These first few hours were crucial to the realisation of the Emperor’s schemes–and his own.

It was Caesar who had first brought Britain into the consciousness of the Roman world, but of course Caesar had had his own ambitions to pursue. It was a time when the mechanisms of the Republic were creaking under the pressure of Rome’s great expansion of territory, and the Roman world was torn apart by the mutual antipathy of strong men. The invasion of Britain, a place of mystery across the terrifying Ocean, would add hugely to Caesar’s lustre.

Caesar struck at Britain twice, penetrating deep inland. But his over-extended supply lines were always vulnerable. And, as every superstitious soldier in Aulus Plautius’s four legions knew very well, Caesar’s ambitions had foundered when the Ocean’s moody weather damaged his ships. After his second withdrawal, Caesar planned to return once again. But in the next campaigning season rebellions in Gaul occupied his energies, and after that he was distracted by the turmoil that overwhelmed the Republic in its final days–turmoil that cost Caesar his own life.

Not that Caesar’s achievements were insignificant. He had greatly increased the Romans’ knowledge of Britain. He polarised the British, especially those in the south, as pro- or anti-Rome, a division which suited Rome’s diplomats and traders very well.

Under the first emperors, however, Britain’s isolation continued. Augustus, conservative, consolidating and reforming, did not have ambitions that stretched so far–and the loss of three of his legions in a dark German forest did nothing to spur him on. In the reigns of Augustus’s successors peaceful contact between the empire and Britain was assisted by the calming, pragmatic policies of Cunobelin, a local king the Romans called
Cymbelinus
. Even in these times, however, tentative plans for the invasion of Britain had been drawn up. Caligula, though unstable, was certainly no fool, and nor were his generals. He had got as far a building a harbour with a lighthouse at Gesoriacum for the purpose.

But now Cunobelin and Caligula were dead, and a new generation on both sides of the Ocean had new ambitions.

It was only two years ago, in the chaos following the murder of Caligula, that Claudius had been raised to the throne by the Praetorian Guard, bodyguards of the Emperor. Since then, despite proving a surprisingly competent ruler and a fast learner, Claudius had faced opposition from the army, the Senate, equestrians and citizens alike. Military power was the key, as always, and what Claudius needed above all was a military triumph–and all the better if he could be seen to outdo even the exploits of Caesar himself. The predatory antics of the Catuvellaunian princes in Britain gave him the perfect pretext.

As for Narcissus, he would survive only so long as he served his Emperor’s ambitions, even while furthering his own.

Narcissus had been born a slave. With time, relying on his wits and his charm, he had made himself so invaluable to a succession of masters that he had been able to work his way into the households of the emperors themselves–and in Claudius, first emperor since Augustus able to recognise a sharp intellect as the most valuable weapon of all, he had found a true patron. It was Claudius who had freed him. Under Claudius, though his title was merely correspondence secretary,
epistula
, Narcissus had been able to use his position between Emperor and subjects to accrue power. He had amassed wealth of his own. He had even become a player in the most dangerous game of all, the domestic politics of the Emperor’s household, allying himself with Claudius’s latest wife, Messalina, in the endless intrigues of the court.

In Rome Narcissus was a powerful man, then. But now fate had brought him across the Ocean, beyond civilisation altogether. And, worse than that, it had cast him alone among soldiers.

He hated being with soldiers. There was a brutal clarity in their gaze, and he knew that when they looked at him they saw, not the freedman, not the powerful ally of the Emperor, but the former slave. Of course the officers had a duty of protection–and Vespasian especially, who owed Narcissus many favours. But Narcissus knew that in the end he had only himself to rely on–only himself, and the sharp wit which had kept him alive, and raised him so far.

Alone in the alien dark he pressed his eyes tight shut. Even a little sleep would serve him well in the complex hours to come.