understanding. Surely it had sunk in that Thalius had saved him from the mine, that Thalius was his distant relative. But the boy seemed distrustful, perhaps because Thalius had been so obviously interested in the message he carried, not in him.
The boy's head seemed to be a jumble. Certainly Audax had no idea who the Emperor was. Why should he? The brutes with whips who had run his life in the mine had had far more power over him than Constantine, even the power of life and death. He hadn't even seen the cycles of daylight for much of his young life, and in open spaces, crossing abandoned fields or moorland, he would cower, as if longing for the safe enclosure of the grimy walls that had confined him.
Audax stuck to Tarcho, though. The big soldier in turn was careful never to raise his voice to the boy. Thalius thought that with Tarcho's support there might be hope for the boy yet; he was still young, and had time. And as for Tarcho he seemed to be developing a duty of care towards this helpless, half-formed child. What did that say about Tarcho? That he should have had children, Thalius thought.
And it was this fragile boy Thalius was going to present to an emperor, he thought, his nervousness growing the closer they got to Rutupiae.
He had a way in, of sorts. When he had heard Constantine was returning to Britain he had written to a friend of a friend of a friend in the imperial court, one Ulpius Cornelius, pulling in favours in the Roman way, to request an audience during the Emperor's stay. Constantine had begun his career as a soldier, and as a consequence many of his advisors were soldiers. Cornelius was no exception; he had once been a senior army officer, and now served as a prefect under Constantine, one of the inner circle who ran the empire.
Somewhat to Thalius's surprise, this Ulpius Cornelius had responded to Thalius's letter with a note inviting him to come to the court at Rutupiae, soon after Constantine's landing. And so here was Thalius travelling to confront an emperor-not for himself, not even for the good of the empire, but for Christ.
But what was he going to say to Constantine? Distracted by his own deep thinking, and by a gathering dread of his meeting with the Emperor, Thalius failed to puzzle out the Prophecy-acrostic on poor Audax's hide, its dense pattern of letters mocking his ageing mind.
VI
As Thalius and his companions neared Rutupiae they crawled along a road crowded with carts, horses and pedestrians, with officials and civilians, rich and poor, here on business or for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see an emperor in the flesh.
Thalius's heart lifted as it always did when they first glimpsed the Ocean, glimmering in the east. There was something magnificently primal about the Ocean, something you couldn't tame, even to the extent that you could tame the land by slicing it up into farms and studding it with cities. It was odd for a town-dweller like Thalius to feel that way, perhaps, a man whose whole life depended absolutely on the continuance of order, but there it was.
Of course even the Ocean had changed. Once the Ocean had been thought of fondly by the British as a great moat, mightier than any of Hadrian's works, which excluded the barbarians who caused such havoc in Gaul and Roman Germany. But now the Ocean was less a barrier to brigands than a highway for them to travel over.
Thalius had read that there were reasons for these 'Saxons' from north Germany to make the hazardous journey to Britain. Their narrow coastal homelands had been squeezed between vast movements of peoples from further east in the mysterious heart of Asia, and the Ocean itself which, year on year, rose inexorably higher. Thus the world was changing, reshaped by vast forces of population movements and even shifts in the tides that not even an emperor could command.
In response to this threat Rutupiae, once an open town, had become a fortress.
The fort itself was surrounded by an immense system of double ditches, and the streaming crowd had to cram itself onto a narrow causeway that approached the east gate. Ahead, thick walls with angular towers glowered down. The walls were built in the solid Roman fashion, with slave-worked concrete so strong it was said it would withstand the sea-coast weather for ever. But embedded in the walls Thalius identified fragments of broken columns, bits of statuary, even what looked like soldiers' tombstones, all smashed and reused. Thalius wondered how many people here today knew that Claudius's invasion force had once landed here, or mused on the irony that a triumphal arch commemorating that epochal landing had been demolished to build a fortress intended to repel new invaders. This was a grim age, an age of closure and huddling, not a time for grand gestures.
Still, regardless of its complicated history, today the fort was hosting Constantine himself, the Emperor of all the western provinces, ruler of half the known world. And on the Ocean beyond the shoulder of the fort walls Thalius glimpsed the purple sails of the ships that must have brought the Emperor and his retinue here. Thalius felt excitement grow inside him, a thrill he had barely known since he had been a child younger than Audax, waiting for the chariot races to begin in the circus outside Camulodunum.
As they passed through the fort's west gate, Thalius and his party found themselves working through an access system mediated by officials from the local towns, the provincial government, the diocese of Britannia, even the prefecture of Gaul, and from the imperial court itself. All these officials, taking the chance to make a profit out of the Emperor's visit, seemed to expect to have a coin or two stuffed in their hands for the favour of passing you through. The process was watched over by hard-faced members of the Emperor's own German bodyguard-not the Praetorians, Constantine had run down those overpaid emperor-makers-who were not averse to a few hand-outs themselves. Tarcho grumbled as he handed over yet more coins from the heavy purse he carried.
But Thalius found it impossible to be sour, despite the queuing and the petty corruption. You couldn't ignore the eagerness and anxiety, the hopes and dreams of the supplicants, for today Rome was here, on this windy British shore.
At last, thanks to his note from Ulpius Cornelius, Thalius found himself part of a crowd of petitioners drawn up before a stage, hastily erected just off the road inside the fort's western gate-a stage on which Constantine himself sat, advisers and guards at his shoulders, patiently listening to complaints and pleas.
If Thalius had expected to see a soldier on that wooden throne, he was disappointed. Constantine was a big-boned, strong-looking man in his early forties, but he wore his hair down to his shoulders, so luxuriantly blond Thalius was sure it had to be false. He was dressed in a long, flowing robe of what looked like silk, embroidered with flowery designs done in gold. Even his shoes were studded with gems. And though Thalius thought he detected a soldier's bluff amiability in Constantine's not unhandsome face, to approach him you had to go down on your knees and press your head to the floor.
He muttered, 'Why, he's not like a Roman at all. He looks like something out of Egypt or Persia. Augustus would have been horrified.'
Tarcho growled, 'He looks like what he is-the Emperor. Do you expect him to dress like a latrine cleaner? He has to put on a show. And he's a good lad, this one.' He cupped his hands and called out, 'Good on you, Constantine!'
Thalius knew that Constantine had always been popular among the British troops. After all it was they who in Eburacum, on the death of his father Constantius Chlorus, had elevated thirty-five-year-old Flavius Valerius Constantinus as the new 'Augustus', one of the college of emperors, and then had fought under him when Constantine had achieved his greatest victory so far in dislodging a rival, Maxentius, to become sole ruler in the west.
And he had won with the help of the Christian God, Constantine declared. On the night before the decisive battle outside Rome, he had a dream that the Christian God came to him. In the morning he had his troops chalk crosses on their shields. That victory had cemented God into his life, and his empire, for good.
The fruits of Constantine's conversion were visible before Thalius now. The Emperor's mother Helena travelled with him; once a concubine, she was becoming a kind of pilgrim with a mission to travel across the empire to Judea in search of relics of Christ Himself. And there were bishops among the Emperor's retinue, on the stage with him, almost as grandly dressed as he was, Thalius observed with disgust, men of wealth and power a world away from the vision of the carpenter's Son. There were cynics who muttered that it only took a mote of dust in the eye to enable anybody to see a cross in the sky, and Constantine's 'conversion' may have owed a lot to the manipulation of events by the wily bishops in his court.
And some Christians of the old school, including Thalius himself, were deeply troubled that it was a warrior
