Among the Barbarians
We travelled up to Eboracum on the bad, British roads. They weren’t paved like the ones everywhere else. Instead they were covered in a layer of gravel, which flung chips and dust up and stung the horses’ legs. But a Roman road is never a dull place, and there was plenty to break up the boredom and the discomfort, though sometimes I felt so jolted that I thought my head would shake loose from my body and tumble to the ground like a stone.
There were carts full of clucking chickens and barrels of wine all the way from Lugdunum in Gaul; there were oxen hauling timber and grit, driven by sweating, swearing men up the hills. There were Northern barbarians with hair the colour of flame. There were pedlars and beggars and every so often, a speedy rider carrying official business, their horses’ hooves thundering up the dust. There were sheep and pigs and slaves and goats on their way to market.
The Emperor was carried in a litter all the way. I barely saw it, for it was surrounded at all times by the Praetorian Guard, his personal guard: a wall of scarlet and gold and steel. Not all of these were Roman. Some were barbarians. My father said that he had a much bigger guard than previous emperors had had.
“The Emperor doesn’t care where men come from as long as they are good soldiers,” Marcus told us. “The army love him. He has made us rich and given us freedom and honours. I can marry my wife now, and not fear leaving her penniless when I die.”
Of course he had to say that, but it seemed true – the Emperor was greeted with great cheers whenever we entered an army town or garrison. And Britain seemed full of army towns and garrisons, as we went further and further north. A grey, bleak land, I thought, full of hard stones and hard faces. But wherever the Emperor stopped, he made things appear. As if he were a god, from whose feet – gouty and painful as they were – gold flowed and flowers blossomed. Timber buildings were torn down and new stone ones leaped up, soldiers building them faster and in a more organised way than I had ever seen building happen before. New temples were built to honour the Emperor, and palaces were created almost overnight for him to rest in.
We stopped at Lindum first. The land all around was flat and marshy, and boats seemed to move across the fields by magic.
“It’s the canals,” Marcus said with clear pride. “We dug them out and connected the rivers, and drained the land. Now everything that was useless, fever-ridden marsh is as good as a road. Better!”
Wherever we stopped, my father drew a small crowd of suffering, hopeful locals who had heard that a doctor travelled with the Emperor. Just as in Leptis Magna, he did not turn anyone away, day or night. He took their pulses and drew their blood and prescribed medicine for them if their four humours – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – were out of balance.
“The more patients you treat, the more you learn about how the human body works,” he told me.
Ever since we left Rome, he had been treating the Emperor’s chalkstones with a method he had learned from the great doctor, Galen: mix rancid cheese with cooked, pickled pig’s meat, and apply to the feet as a plaster. I had the job of pounding up the cheese and the meat in a mortar and pestle.
“There is no one I trust as much as you,” he told me.
The mixture smelt eye-wateringly bad, but the Emperor dutifully reclined every evening with his feet up and the stinking mixture lavishly smeared all over them.
I found myself mixing up and dispensing medicines, and I actually found it interesting. After a while, a few people started coming to me for help – the humblest ones, like the slaves, who would not dare go to my father. I was especially flattered when Marcus, who had been watching us closely and curiously, one day shyly showed me an infected fingernail and asked what I suggested for it. Not that I was sure what to suggest. It seemed to me that my father could perform wonders with surgery, but the medicines we gave out were much less reliable. Certainly, the cheese-and-ham treatment did not seem to be working for the Emperor. His chalkstones were as bad as ever.
I also began fetching and carrying for Julia Domna. She had discovered somehow that I was educated, and knew how to read and write Greek and Latin, and so I found myself in charge of her social correspondence.
“Call my maids to undress me,” the Empress would tell me with a yawn, and then, as the women removed the sandals from her feet and bathed them in rose water, she dictated her letters to me. The letters were usually notes to the wives of the most important men in the area, summoning them to meet her. Sometimes though, they were written to people in Rome, or in Syria, and seemed to hide mysteries under polite words. I realised I was useful to her because I was educated, obedient and completely ignorant of politics. I was a writing machine: too far beneath contempt to pose any kind of danger to them. I hoped – as I handed the sealed notes to the messenger – that they would continue to see me that way.
“Try to swim silently, little fish,” my father murmured to me. “It’s a big pond – hide yourself well.”
It was by being so close to the Empress that I came to realise that Caracalla and Geta fought endlessly. They bickered under their breath as soon as they saw each other – anything could set it off, from one stepping through a door before the other, to a quarrel over the merits of some charioteer back in Rome. As soon as the doors to whatever palace we had stolen for the night had closed behind them, the bickering broke out into real, bitter arguments. When I first saw them snarling and shouting at each other, I was terrified. I thought the Emperor would have them executed. But he just looked at them with weary contempt, and I realised that this must have been going on for a very long time. It was almost, I thought, as if they knew that all their father wanted was for them to get along, and that this was the one thing they could withhold from him. After all, they were his heirs. What could he do to punish them without putting himself in danger?
Everywhere we went, we stood out for more reasons than simply being the Emperor’s household. We were Libyans, Africans – our accent, our curly hair and our skin colouring all showed it. Some of the barbarians we passed on the road gaped at us as if we were gods. That was a surprise.
In Rome, the great aristocratic Roman families, the senators, were deeply proud of their heritage that went all the way back to the earliest days of the city of Rome. They looked down on people from the provinces – anywhere in the Empire that wasn’t Rome itself. People from senatorial families, like Publius’ mother, had always privately mocked the Emperor’s Libyan accent, even if they didn’t dare to in public. Septimius Severus might spread gold and death around like a god, but to the senators, he would still be a nobody from the provinces, an outsider. They feared him, but they did not respect him. Things were different in Britain. No one looked down on us for being from the provinces, because everyone here was just as provincial as we were. It was rare, in Britain, to find anyone who spoke with a pure Roman accent the way that Publius’s family did.
It was clear to see, even with the discomfort of travel and the pain his feet gave him, that the Emperor was happier here than he had been in Rome. After all, this was what he was used to – being away from Rome, on campaign with the army. This was how he had made himself emperor. He wanted Caracalla and Geta to enjoy this life, too. But wherever we stopped, the brothers would skulk off sooner or later to find the nearest bear baiting or boxing match or gladiator competition. If it was violent, Caracalla enjoyed it, and Geta just seemed to like throwing money around, especially in company with soldiers. Meanwhile, a light burned till late at night in the imperial apartments, as the Emperor and Empress sat up, ruling the Empire – alone. And in the case of the Emperor, with cheese and ham slathered over his poor, aching feet.