Dark Omens

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The story begins in Glevum (Roman Gloucester, a prosperous ‘republic’ and a colonia for retired soldiery) on New Year’s Day AD193. The Kalends of January was perceived as a time of new beginnings and — as today — an occasion for good resolutions and wishes for good luck, as well as little offerings to the two-headed god Janus, for whom the month is named. Everyone did an hour or two of token ‘work’, thus inviting fortune in the year ahead, and visited neighbours (as the tale suggests) for the exchange of good wishes and symbolic sweetened gifts.

This particular Kalends, however, was a new beginning in more ways than the citizens of Britannia could have realized. Their province was, as it had been for two centuries by now, the most far-flung and northerly outpost of the Roman Empire: occupied by Roman legions, criss-crossed by Roman roads, subject to Roman laws and administered by a provincial governor answerable directly to Rome — and thus ultimately to the Emperor himself. The man who had worn the imperial purple for the last twelve years was (to give him the full list of titles he’d bestowed upon himself) Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius, a megalomaniac who was by this time increasingly deranged, and whose lascivious lifestyle and capricious cruelties were infamous. Hated by many, he was fearful of his life, imagining conspiracies on every hand, in consequence of which he was popularly said to have ‘spies in every house’.

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