“The Scythian will meet you at a rather more remote city: ancient Petra.”
“Ah,” said Honorius, and a little more of the life went out of him.
Athalaric knew Petra was in Jordan, a land still under the protection of Emperor Zeno in Constantinople. In such times as these, Petra was another world away. Athalaric took Honorius’s arm. “Master, enough. He is applying storekeepers’ tricks. He is merely trying to draw us more deeply into—”
Honorius murmured, “When I was a child my father ran a shop from the front of our villa. We sold cheese and eggs and other produce from the farms, and we bought and sold curiosities from all across the empire and beyond. That was how I got my taste for antiquities — and my nose for business. I am old but no fool yet, Athalaric! I am sure Papak senses further profit for himself in this situation — and yet I do not believe he is lying about the fundamentals.”
Athalaric lost patience. “We have much work waiting for us at home. To be hauled across the ocean for a handful of decayed old bones—”
But Honorius had turned to Papak. “Petra,” he said. “A name almost as famous as Rome’s itself! I will have many colorful adventures to recount to my grandchildren on my return to Burdigala. Now, sir, I suspect we must begin to discuss the practicalities of the journey.”
A broad smile spread across Papak’s face. Athalaric studied his eyes, trying to assess his honesty.
It took Honorius and Athalaric many weeks to reach Jordan, much of it consumed by the bureaucracy required to deal with the eastern empire. Every official they met proved deeply suspicious of outsiders from the broken remnants of the western empire — even of Honorius, a man whose father had actually been a senator of Rome itself.
It was Athalaric’s self-appointed duty to care for Honorius.
The old man had once had a son, a childhood friend of Athalaric’s. But Honorius had taken his family, with Athalaric, to a religious festival in Tolosa, to the south of Gaul. The party had been set upon by bandits. Athalaric had never forgotten his feeling of helplessness as, just a boy himself, he had watched as the bandits had beaten Honorius, molested his daughters — and so carelessly killed the brave little boy who had tried to come to his sisters’ aid. A fine Roman citizen! Where are your legions now? Where are your eagles, your emperors?
Something had broken in Honorius that dark day. It was as if he had decided to detach himself from a world in which the sons of senators needed the patronage of Goth nobles, and bandits freely roamed the interior of what had been Roman provinces. Though he had never neglected his civic and family duties, Honorius had become increasingly absorbed by his study of relics of the past, the mysterious bones and artifacts that told of a vanished world inhabited by giants and monsters.
Meanwhile Athalaric had developed a deepening loyalty to old Honorius — it was as if he had taken the place of that lost son — and he had been pleased, though not surprised, when his own father had agreed that he should serve as Honorius’s pupil in the law.
Honorius’s story was only one of a myriad similar small tragedies, generated by the huge, implacable historical forces that were transforming Europe. The mighty political, military, and economic structure built by the Romans was already a thousand years old. Once it had sprawled across Europe, northern Africa and Asia: Roman soldiers had come into conflict with the inhabitants of Scotland in the west and the Chinese to the east. The Empire had thrived on expansion, which had bought triumphs for ambitious generals, profits for traders, and a ready source of slaves.
But when expansion was no longer possible, the system became impossible to sustain.
There came a point of diminishing returns, in which every denarius collected in taxes was pumped into administrative maintenance and the military. The empire became increasingly complex and bureaucratic — and so even more expensive to run — and inequality of wealth became grotesque. By the time of Nero in the first century, all the land from the Rhine to the Euphrates was owned by just two thousand obscenely rich individuals. Tax evasion among the wealthy became endemic, and the increasing cost of propping up the empire fell ever more heavily on the poor. The old middle class — once the backbone of the empire — declined, bled by taxes and squeezed out from above and below. The empire had consumed itself from within.
It had happened before. The great Indo-European expansion had spun off many civilizations, high and low. Great cities already lay buried in history’s dust, forgotten.
Although the west had been the origin of the sprawling empire, the east had eventually become its center of gravity. Egypt produced three times as much grain as the west’s richest province in Africa. And while the west’s long borders were vulnerable to attack by land-hungry Germans, Hunni, and others, the east was like an immense fastness. The constant drain of resources from east to west had caused a growing political and economic tension. At last — eighty years before Honorius’s visit to Rome — the division between the two halves of the old empire was made permanent. After that the collapse of the west had proceeded apace.
Constantinople still used Roman law, and the language of the state remained Latin. But, Athalaric found, its bureaucracy was difficult, entangling, altogether more eastern. Evidently Constantinople’s engagements with the mysterious nations that lay beyond Persia in the unseen heart of Asia were influencing its destiny. At last, however, all the paperwork was arranged — even though Honorius’s dwindling supply of gold was diminished further in the process. They joined a boatload of pilgrims, mostly minor Roman aristocracy from the western lands, bound for the Holy Land. After that they traveled by horseback and camel into the deeper interior.
But as the days of their journey wore on, and Honorius grew visibly more frail and exhausted. Athalaric felt increasingly regretful that he had not, after all, persuaded his mentor to turn back at Rome.
Petra turned out to be a city of rock.
“But this is extraordinary,” Honorius said. He dismounted hastily and strode toward the giant buildings. “Quite extraordinary.”
Athalaric clambered down from his horse. Casting a glance at Papak and his porters as they led the horses to water, he followed his mentor. The heat was intense, and in this dry, dusty air Athalaric did not feel protected at all by the loose, bright white local garment Papak had provided for him.
Huge tombs and temples thrust out of a steppe so arid that it was all but a desert. It was still a bustling city, Athalaric could see that. An elaborate system of channels, pipes, and cisterns collected and stored water for orchards, fields, and the city itself. And yet the people looked somehow dwarfed by the great monuments around them, as if they had been shrunken by time.
“Once, you know, this place was the center of the world,” Honorius mused. “There was a battle for ascendancy between Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Egypt — all centered on this region, for under the Nabataeans Petra controlled the trade between Europe, Africa, and the east. It was an extraordinarily powerful position. And under Roman rule Petra grew even richer.”
Athalaric nodded. “So why did Rome come to rule the world? Why not Petra?”
“I think you see the answer all around,” Honorius said. “Look.”
Athalaric could see nothing but a few trees straggling for life among the shrubs, herbs, and grasses. Goats, tended by a ragged, wide-eyed boy, nibbled low branches.
Honorius said, “Once this was woodland, dominated by oak and pistachio trees: so say the historians. But the trees were felled to build houses, and to make plaster for the walls. Now the goats eat what remains, and the soil, overfarmed, grows dry and blows away into the air. As the land has grown poor, as the water is pumped dry, so the population flees — or starves. If Petra did not exist here already, it could never be sustained by such a poor hinterland. In another few centuries it will be abandoned altogether.”