Emperor

'Besides, what would we do with all the slaves? Free them? They would butcher us in a heartbeat.' And, laughing, Volisios turned away.

Thalius peered out of the window, listening to the grinding noise of the giant machines deep underground and the groans of human misery, and his rudimentary vision of a technological future evaporated.

At last Tarcho brought in the boy.

IV

Audax had been washed, that pale hair cut and brushed, and he was dressed in a fresh tunic. He was probably as clean and presentable as he had ever been in his life, Thalius reflected. But he was nothing but skin and bones, and there were marks, like the bruising around his mouth, that no amount of water would wash away. But Audax clung to Tarcho's hand, and Thalius saw that Tarcho was finding a way to win his trust.

It struck Thalius that he had not yet heard the boy speak, not one word.

'Apart from that scarring on his back his health is reasonable,' Tarcho said now. 'Nothing a bit of sunshine and some decent food wouldn't cure.' He said more cautiously, 'He has some bruising around the thighs, however. His mouth and throat are damaged, and-'

'Enough,' Thalius snapped.

Tarcho said to the overseer, 'I know what goes on in these places. A pretty boy like this will be traded for a morsel of food.'

Volisios said, 'What did you expect? But things are more complicated than you probably understand, soldier. The men, trapped in the dark and the damp, turn to each other for comfort, for there is nothing else. Why, some of our longer-lasting workers have 'marriages' that have fared better than my own! This boy may have been hurt, but he's just as likely to have been treated with kindness.' But he didn't look at the boy as he said this, or ask him to confirm or deny it.

Thalius asked carefully, 'And the marks on his back?'

Tarcho nodded to the boy. Audax turned around and lifted up his tunic, exposing skinny legs, flat buttocks, and a back covered with livid scars. But now the dirt was off Thalius could clearly see the shapes of the letters, sixteen of them, in their square grid: PEEO NERR OSRI ACTA

Tarcho scratched his head. 'And is this what you came looking for?'

'It must be.'

'The boy has no memory of having received this tattoo.'

'I'm not surprised,' Thalius said. 'See how the letters are stretched, distorted? He must have received these markings when he was very small, an infant perhaps. As he has grown the marks have grown with him. Perhaps the marks were copied from his own father at his birth, and his father before him…' Thalius imagined it: a slave painfully pricking out letters into the raw skin of his child, perhaps with a bit of quartz from the gold seams, and rubbing in dirt or vegetable dye.

It had been the curse of Severa's sentence to slavery that her grandchildren would not even be literate. So with the Prophecy burned, its words would be lost after a generation, two, three. But evidently, Thalius thought, excited, somebody had come up with a way of preserving at least some of the text, inscribed into the very bodies of children. Thalius had read something of Severa, his remote grandmother of so many generations ago; perhaps it was that hard woman herself who had come up with this way of saving the Prophecy in blood and pain.

Volisios had become a lot less respectful since Thalius had admitted he was no government inspector. 'So you have what you wanted. What will you do with the boy? Throw him back down into the pit? Or would you like him to warm your own bed first?'

'You disgust me,' Thalius snapped.

But Tarcho said, 'Actually he has a point, Thalius. Slaves are expensive, you know.'

'He is blood,' Thalius said. 'Distant blood, but blood. I won't leave him here to be raped to death. Name your price, overseer.'

Volisios nodded and, business-like, reached for a wooden note block and a pen.

The boy watched all this, wide-eyed; surely he hadn't understood a word.

Tarcho studied the tattoo again. 'But what does it mean?'

'I don't know. Not yet. It's clearly some kind of acrostic.'

'A what? Never mind. And where will this quest of yours lead us next?'

'To Rutupiae.'

'The east coast? What for? Who will be there?'

Thalius said simply, 'Constantine.'

V

It would take many days for Thalius, Tarcho and Audax to travel from Dolaucothi in the west of Britain all the way to Rutupiae in the extreme east, where Thalius intended to gain an audience with the Emperor. With the boy in Tarcho's care they set off, the three of them in Thalius's cart.

Once they had crossed the Sabrina river they passed out of what Tarcho called 'soldier country', where wild men of the hills chased flocks of ragged sheep between the walls of Roman forts, to the more settled lands of the south and east. The cart rolled along busy, well-maintained roads through farmland-rather a lot of it abandoned.

On the way to Durovernum Cantiacorum and Rutupiae they stopped in towns, including a night in Londinium. All the towns looked the same, with their basilicas and their forums, their baths and their townhouses: all miniature models of faraway Rome itself. But many of the public buildings had seen better days. Shabby old basilicas had been turned into granaries or stock sheds or arms dumps, and sometimes you could see fire damage nobody had bothered to fix. Even in Londinium there was a monumental basilica only half finished and apparently abandoned; entwined by vines and carpeted by grass and weeds it seemed to be turning into a ruin before it had even been completed. And a new wall ran along the north side of the river, cutting through the wharves and dock facilities that had once served the grand cross-provincial trade routes. People, over-taxed, just didn't put their money into civic developments the way they once had. Most wouldn't even pay to keep the public sewers working, or to clear away rubbish. As a result, the towns stank.

And all the towns had walls: massive thick barricades with cores of rubble and concrete and imposing facing stones. Thalius knew all about fortifications like this; even at Camulodunum, always a walled town, the cost of the renovations of the town's defences had fallen heavily on the curia.

Times had changed since the days when the towns had been planned. The country was a lot more dangerous now, as organised bands of barbarian raiders came breaking through the northern Wall, or sailing across the Ocean. There were plenty of home-grown brigands too. From top to bottom, with everyone tied to their jobs from birth, society was static. But when your farm failed, when the taxes and levies got so tough your land wasn't economical to cultivate any more, you had nowhere to go. Many farmers had just slunk off into the night, to become part of a growing underclass of poachers and bandits living beyond the law.

The towns were like hedgehogs, Thalius thought, their old, shabby buildings huddling behind massive walls that had taken generations to pay for and build, bristling nervously in a dangerous, depopulating countryside. Thalius knew enough history to see how strange this would have seemed to a citizen of Hadrian's time. The towns were no longer centres of commerce and culture; they were like fortified prisons for a trapped population.

But in all the towns there were a few grand new houses, rising up out of the rubble of older developments. In an age when the tax system was squeezing everybody tight, it was still possible to get rich, if you were a landowner buying up the failed properties of the marginalised, or a government stooge on the make.

As they rode, Thalius watched the boy.

He wondered how much Audax understood of what was happening to him. The boy spoke only when asked a direct question, and even then in a guttural, vocabulary-poor British tongue that even Tarcho had difficulty