Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  Regina said, "Why doesn't she get a carriage? She could put her stuff in the back. I certainly wouldn't like to carry my luggage along the road like that..."

  Aetius grimaced. "I doubt if anybody other than Hercules could carry your luggage, child. But I'm afraid she doesn't have a choice."

  "Because she's poor."

  "Or a slave. And look, over there." A group of people, shuffling behind a slow-moving carriage, were bound together by ankle chains. "Carriages and horses are faster, but not everybody can afford a horse."

  She frowned. "Are slaves cheaper than horses?"

  "Yes. Slaves are cheaper than horses. Look at the countryside. I bet you've never been so far from home before, have you?"

  She had no idea if she had or not. She looked around at fields and hedgerows. There were a few buildings scattered here and there, small square huts and a few roundhouses with timber frames and thatched roofs; in the distance she saw the bright red roof tiles of something bigger, probably a villa.

  It was farming country. Much of the Roman diocese of Britain was like this. Nobody knew for sure how many people lived in Britain south of the Wall, but there were thought to be at least four million. Only perhaps one in ten of the population lived in the villas and towns. The rest worked the land, where they cultivated wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, vegetables, and herbs, and raised their cattle, sheep, and goats. Many of them had worked this land for generations, since long before the coming of the Romans: Regina might have been traveling through the landscape of five centuries earlier.

  It was this way from end to end of the Empire, across two thousand miles, from Britain to the Middle East. The Empire was the most materially sophisticated civilization the western world had yet seen — but the overwhelming majority of people lived off the land, as they had always done.

  Aetius spent a long time trying to explain some of this, but he got stuck on the meaning of the word million. Regina's attention drifted, distracted by the sway of the horses, the clatter of the wheels, the buzzing of flies.

  "Oh, stop fidgeting," Aetius snapped. "If only I could just order you to sit still..." He pointed with his switch at a little cylindrical pillar set beside the road. "Well, what's that? Do you know?"

  She knew very well. It was a waystone. "It tells you how far it is to the nearest town, and who the Emperor is."

  He grunted. "Somehow I doubt that poor Honorius has gotten around to painting his name on the stones... But, yes, that's the idea. Now, the stones are set every thousand paces or so along each main road. And if you count them, you'll know how far we've come, won't you?"

  "Yes!" She rubbed her nose. "But what if I fall asleep? Or what if it's dark?"

  "If you fall asleep I'll count for you. And don't rub your nose. You have to start now. That's one..."

  "One." Solemnly she folded a finger back as a marker, and peered along the road for the next pillar. But it seemed an awful long time coming, and by the time she saw it she had forgotten what she was supposed to be doing, and had let her finger fold out again.

  Her grandfather seemed determined to keep up her schooling, and as they rattled along he told her the story of the road itself. The soldiers from the army of Emperor Claudius had first come this way, surveying the route. The road had been built by the soldiers themselves, and people drafted in from the countryside.

  "How much did they get paid?"

  "Paid? Hah! Everybody was a barbarian in those days, child. You didn't get paid. Look. You put down a gravel core, and lay on a surface of crushed limestone. You use stone slabs where you can find them. The water drains out into those side ditches — can you see?..."

  She was good at pretending to listen, while being occupied with her own thoughts. But eventually she drifted asleep, slumped against Aetius's sturdy form, dreaming fitfully about the little girl in her hobnailed boots.

  • • •

  She dozed through the day, or listened to Aetius's complicated talk, or played word games with Cartumandua. They stopped only to water and feed the horses; the passengers ate on the move in the cart, bread with fish and meat.

  The last time Regina woke up that day, the cart was pulling into a courtyard. As Aetius and the others jumped down and began to unload, Regina stood up on her seat, stretched and massaged a sore rump, and looked around. The light was fading from the sky, and high, thin clouds had gathered. To her right she could see a wall, tall and formidable, a great curtain of slate gray two or three times her height that curved away across the ground.

  She pointed. "There's a town! Is it Durnovaria?"

  Aetius snorted. "We've come a little farther than that. Haven't you been counting the waystones? We passed twenty-three — not a bad pace after a slow start. That is Calleva Atrebatum."

  "Aren't we going to stay there?... What's this place? Is it a villa?"

  It was no villa but one of the mansiones, a way station designed to support the messengers of the Imperial Post. It was here, Aetius said, that they would spend the night, for it was safe enough, and he would "swim to Hades before I give over any more 'gate tax' to any more swindling landowners in any more towns."

  The station turned out to be comfortable enough. It even had a small bathhouse, where Aetius retired with a pitcher of wine and a plate of oysters, bought for a price that made him groan out loud.

  After a day spent largely sitting on a wooden board, Regina was too full of energy to sleep. And so, after she had eaten, despite the lateness of the hour, she, Macco, and Carta played trigon, a complicated three-person game of catch-the-ball. Regina ran and laughed, burning up her energy, and her voice echoed from the station's plaster walls. Macco stayed as silent as ever, but his smile was broad.

  The next day Aetius was again up and ready to go not long after dawn. It didn't take long to reload the carriage, and soon the four of them were on the road again — though not before Aetius sniffed the air and inspected the clouds and the trees and the birds, seeking omens for their journey.

  They continued to head steadily east. The road ran straight and true, unchanging, the way markers sliding past one by one. But the landscape changed slowly, becoming more hilly, and some of the plowed-up fields gleamed white with chalk.

  Some of the villas looked abandoned, though, even burned out. On one farm, close to the road, Regina recognized a vineyard, rows of vines set out on a south-facing hillside. But though the vines were green and heavy they looked untended, and the nearby buildings were broken down. Aetius did not comment on the abandoned vineyard, and Regina thought nothing of it. If she had, she would have said that things must always have been this way. She did want to go see if there were any grapes, but Aetius ignored her pleas.

  That night they again stayed in a way station.

  And the next morning, soon after the start, when they passed over the crest of a hill, Regina glimpsed Londinium itself. The town was a marvelous gray-green sprawl of buildings contained within a far-flung wall. A shining river ran through it. Smoke rose everywhere, thin threads that spiraled to the sky. Regina thought she saw a ship on the river, a green-sailed boat that sparkled in the low morning sun, but she couldn't be sure.

  "Are we going on a ship?"

  "No — child, I told you already. We aren't stopping in Londinium. We're going on. Don't you listen?" Aetius seemed to be getting angry. But Carta put her hand on Regina's shoulder, and he subsided.

  They turned their backs on Londinium, heading north. Regina looked back at the city as it receded. "I'll go there one day," she said. "I'll go far beyond it, too! I'll go all the way to Rome!"

  Aetius grimaced, and hugged her with his massive arm.

  For Regina, after the city, this third day turned out to be the most difficult so far. The sky lidded over with gray cloud, and although the sun was gone the temperature rose steadily. They were all soon sweating uncomfortably, and they had to stop frequently to allow the horses to drink.

  Aetius, apparently trying to compensate for the absence of Regina's tutors, c
hose this difficult day to lecture her on the essentials of Roman Britain.

  Britain was a diocese within the Praetorian Prefecture of Gaul. So the vicarius, the governor of Britain, reported to the prefect of Gaul, who reported to the Emperor. Similarly there was a hierarchy of towns, from the lesser market towns, up through the local and provincial capitals, to Londinium, the capital of the diocese.

  The most important activity of the central administration was the collection of taxation and the spending of government funds. Most of the tax money came from the countryside, because that was where most people lived. Landlords, like Regina's father, collected the Emperor's taxes from his tenants, along with his own rent. The tax revenue paid the salaries of the army and the sailors of the British fleet, who kept Britain safe from the barbarians who would otherwise swarm from the north and across the sea.

  People grumbled about the taxes they had to pay. But most of the money collected came back into circulation. And the fact was the vast volumes of foodstuffs, animals, clothing, metalwork, pottery, and other goods bought by the government to supply the army and its other agencies was central to the working of the economy...

  Aetius struggled to explain: "It's like a wheel, Regina. It goes around and around, a great wheel of money and goods, taxing and spending, keeping everyone safe and wealthy. But if a wheel comes off its hub—"

  "We'd fall over."

  "Exactly. Everything would fall over. Now then, when my old chum Constantius took us soldiers away for his adventure in Europe, some people in the towns decided they didn't need to pay his taxes anymore, and threw out his collectors and officials, and said they would collect the money for themselves and keep it for their own towns, rather than give it all to some distant Emperor they never saw. But while people will pay up for an Emperor, especially if he has an army to collect for him, they're a lot less willing to pay some fat fool of a local landowner..."

  Regina was a bright child, and capable of understanding a great deal. But at seven she was an experienced enough student to know that while Aetius might be a fine soldier he was no teacher. He was boring.

  And as the day wore on and the heat continued to stifle, Regina got more and more uncomfortable. It had been days now since she had seen her mother. Aetius never mentioned Julia, and Regina was wary of asking. She missed her mother even so, and wondered where she was. She grew withdrawn, sullen.

  Eventually Aetius relented and let Regina sit in the back with Carta. They tried to play ludus latrunculorum — "soldiers," a fast-moving game a little like chess played only with rooks — but the rattling of the carriage knocked the colored glass counters away from their squares. So they settled for par impar, a simple game of odds and evens, played with pebbles held in the hand.

  That night they stayed at yet another way station. The next day they made another early start, but Regina found it increasingly hard to sit still.

  Things came to a head when, about midday, the weather abruptly broke, and an immense storm lashed down from a gray lid of sky. Aetius insisted they kept going, but soon they were all soaked through. Regina was cold and frightened; she had never been exposed to such elemental rage before.

  When the storm finally let up she pushed away from Aetius and jumped down from the carriage. "I won't go any farther! I want to go home, right now! Turn around and take me home! I command you!"

  Aetius was angry, placating, demanding, but he got nowhere; and when his will broke against her seven-year-old stubbornness, he stomped around the road, fists bunched.

  Cartumandua, with some courage, intervened. Soaked herself, she clambered down to the road surface and brushed at Regina's hair, calming her down. She said to Aetius, "Sir, you can't speak to her as if she's one of your legionaries. And you can't expect her to sit there day after day on that wooden bench and listen to you lecture about procurators and prefects."

  "She needs discipline—"

  "It's not natural. You need to give her time."

  "But every heartbeat we stand here in the road is wasted time."

  "The Wall has stood for three centuries, and I daresay it will still be there if we take a few days more. If you don't make allowances, I don't think we'll get there at all."

  He walked back grudgingly. "Catuvellaunian princess or not, you are a feisty one for a slave."

  She dropped her head submissively. "I'm just trying to help."

  Aetius crouched down before Regina. "Little one, I think we have some negotiating to do..."

  They continued the journey, but after that to a different pattern. They would ride a while, and break a while, generally long before Regina got too bored or uncomfortable — although Aetius retained the right to keep on if he was ill at ease with the countryside, or the company they kept on the road. Their pace dropped, from fifty or sixty waystones a day to less than forty.

  But for Regina, though she lost count of the days, and had only the dimmest idea of where they actually were by now, the trip became much easier — even fun again, as the days settled into a new routine.

  • • •

  As they worked steadily north the countryside changed character.

  Though the road still arrowed past farmsteads, there were far more roundhouses of the old British type, rather than the rectangular Roman-style buildings. The towns here were more like bristling forts, with tall walls and looming watchtowers. Here and there Regina saw plumes of dust and black smoke rising up. Aetius said they were mines. Once they passed a man driving muzzled wolves along the road; he was a trapper, hoping to sell these animals to a circus.

  In the roadside dirt Aetius sketched a map of the island of Britain, and slashed a line from southwest to northeast, from the Severn to the Humber. "Southeast of this line there are plains and low hills. Here you'll find fields and citizens, with everything run from the towns — under the greatest town of all, Londinium, capital of the diocese. Northwest of this line there are mountains, and barbarians, and tribes and chiefs who run their own affairs and have barely heard of the Emperor, and pay his taxes with the utmost reluctance. To the southeast there are a thousand villas, but none at all in the northwest. That is why, to the northwest, the diocese belongs to the army." But Regina continued to have only a dim grasp of the country's geography, or indeed of where they were.

  In the final days, as the endless northward journey continued and they rattled across high, bleak moorland, Aetius told her something of his family's past.

  "We were all Durotriges. Your father's people were aristocrats — landowners — even before the Romans came," he said. "My people — and your mother's — were farmers, but they were warriors." He glanced back at Cartumandua. "The Catuvellaunians call themselves a great warrior people. But when Claudius came they rolled over and bared their arses to him..."

  Regina gasped at this language, shocked and delighted, and Carta colored.

  "But we fought back. While the Emperor Claudius was still in Britain, one of his generals, Vespasian, had to fight his way west, taking hill fort after hill fort, supported by the fleet tracking him along the coast. It was a mighty feat of generalship — and later Vespasian himself would become Emperor — but, by my eyes, we made him earn that throne. And that is why the men of the Durotriges became such good soldiers for the Empire."

  "Like you, Grandfather."

  He said gruffly, "You'd have to count my lumps. But, yes, I've been a soldier all my adult life. As was my father, and his before him. But things have changed. There have always been barbarians—"

  "In the north, and beyond the sea."

  "Yes. They aren't soldiers but professional savage fools, farmers, bound to the land. They could not even mount a genuine campaign. They were no match for the Empire — not until the barbarica conspiratio."

  It had come more than forty years earlier, a great barbarian conspiracy, a coordinated attack on Britain by the Picts across the Wall from the north, the Franks and Saxons from across the North Sea, and the Scotti from Ireland. Defenses designed to hold agai
nst an attack from any one of these enemies had been overwhelmed. There was much muttering of espionage, for the British military commanders on the northern frontier and the coasts were ambushed and killed.

  "It was a terrible time," Aetius muttered. "I was not fifteen years old — no older than you, Cartumandua. For a time the countryside was full of roaming bands of barbarians — and, I have to say, of deserters from the army itself. Even Londinium was sacked. It took the Emperor two years to restore order. My own view is we're still trying to recover from that great shock."

  Carta spoke up again. "Sir, she is only a child."

  Aetius said grimly, "She needs to hear it even so, Cartumandua, and to hear it again until it sinks in. Let me say this. Six years ago I was on the Rhine — Gaul's great river frontier. In the middle of winter it froze over, and into Gaul swarmed the Vandals and the Alans and the Suebi and Jove knows who else. They just walked across the damn river, as cool as you please. We couldn't hold them — we fell back and fell back. And they are still there now, crawling around the prefecture, far inside the frontier. I was glad to get a posting back to Britain and away from all that, I can tell you... I suspect this poor child will spend much of her life seeking a place of safety."

  Regina sniffed. "This poor child understands every word you say, you know."

  Aetius looked at her, astonished. Then he laughed, and clapped her on the back. "So now I've got you to contend with, as well as the Vandals and the Picts and the Saxons..."

  "Look." Behind Regina, Cartumandua stood up and pointed. "I can see it."

  Aetius reined in the horses. Regina stood on her seat, shielded her eyes with her hands, and stared until she saw it, too.

  A line of darkness stretched across the world, from one horizon to another, rising and falling over the contours of the moorland. Along that line, smoke rose up everywhere, and mud-colored buildings huddled. Suddenly she knew exactly where she was, exactly how far she had been brought: from one end of the country to the other.