Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  "All right," I said gently. I thought fast. "What about Uncle Lou? Is he still alive? Where does he live?"

  He was alive, and lived, it turned out, not far from Gina. "Florida is heaven for the elderly," she said dryly.

  "You have his address? And you must have a contact for the Order. An address — maybe an intermediary... Dad gave you a damn grandfather clock. I can't believe he wouldn't have given you a contact for your sister. Come on, Gina."

  "All right," she said dismissively. "Yes, there's a contact. A Jesuit priest in Rome."

  "Have you checked it out?"

  "What do you think?"

  "But you'll give me the addresses."

  "I'll give you the fucking addresses. Now," in flat, brutal Mancunian, "piss off out of my kitchen."

  The boys hadn't heard what we said, but they had picked up the tone of our voices. We ate our summer puddings in awkward silence. Dan just looked at me, evaluating.

  Chapter 11

  ...The notion that man has been innately flawed since the Creation is nothing but an artifact of our own difficult times. Just as the wise farmer gathers his harvest and sets aside his store for the winter, so a just man will, through good works, love and the joy of Christ, earn his passage to God's eternal kingdom..."

  The voice of the Christian philosopher was thin and high, and only fragments of what he had to say carried to Regina on the soft breeze that swept over the hilltop. The crowd pressing around her did their best to listen to what was said, and to the replies of the rival thinkers who rejected this "heresy of Pelagius," preferring the depressing notion that humans were born into the world with ugly, flawed souls.

  She suppressed a sigh, her attention drifting. It had come to something, she thought, when the most exciting event in her life was a debate between two splinter sects of the followers of the Christ. She didn't actually like the Christians; she found their intensity, and their habit of praying with arms spread, hands raised, and faces lifted, disturbing and off-putting. But at least they knew how to put on a show.

  And at least the little Christian community, here on the hill, was flourishing. It was outside Verulamium itself, close to the gaudy shrine that had been constructed over the presumed grave of Alban, the town's first martyr — indeed, it was said, the first Christian martyr in all of Britain. A group of wooden roundhouses, rectangular huts and even a little area set aside as a marketplace had gathered around the focal point of the shrine. You could see how marble from one of the old town's arches had been cut up and reused to build the shrine itself, the only stone building here; inscriptions in Latin, a language that few spoke anymore, had been sliced through unceremoniously and then scratched over with the chi-rho, the symbol of the Christians.

  This hilltop village was still small and, in its rough unplanned clutter, hardly a Roman community. But pilgrims came from afar to visit Alban's martyrium, bringing their wealth with them. Even today, listening to this dry stuff about the nature of sin, there might have been forty people — a big gathering for Verulamium nowadays — and many of them were brightly dressed for the occasion, in jauntily dyed tunics and cloaks. People had brought their children, who played at their feet. There was even a seller of roast meat working the crowd, adding to the odd carnival atmosphere.

  She looked back down the hill to the old town itself. From here she could easily trace the lines of its walls, the lozenge shape sketched on the plain by the river, and she could make out the neat gridwork of the street layout, connected up to the roads that marched away to north, south, and west. There was plenty of activity, carts and pedestrians passing along the main roads and through the gates, and a bustle of activity around the stalls in the Forum. But she could see how stretches of the wall had been broken down, and how, even in the six years she had been here, the green had risen like a tide, encroaching the center of the town and flooding the broken-down shells of abandoned buildings.

  Carausias complained of how the community around the shrine was drawing the last blood out of the old town. But Regina cared nothing for that. Why should she bother about the upkeep of public buildings, or the problems of paying soldiers, or keeping bacaudae out of the town? She was seventeen years old. All she wanted was to have fun. And the fact was, such excitement as there was to be had was up here on the Christians' hill.

  "...Who would ever have thought that my little Regina would grow up to be a student of theology?"

  It was Amator. At the sound of his voice Regina whirled.

  He stood close, not a hand's breadth away. He was dressed in a bright tunic of yellow and green, and he wore an elaborate scarf of what looked like silk, pinned at his throat by a small brooch. His thick black hair, brushed back from his tanned face, was heavy with powder and oil. At his side was a man she did not recognize: perhaps about the same age, he was a thickset fellow wearing a tunic in the barbarian style, made of leather and wool and studded with a big, crudely constructed silver brooch.

  Regina had not seen Amator for three years, not since he had left for Gaul — to "make his fortune," as he had said. And yet his gaze had the same searching intensity it had always had, and she couldn't help but respond with a surge in her belly, a flush she could feel spreading to her cheeks. But at seventeen she wasn't a child anymore. And by now he wasn't the only man who had ever looked at her that way.

  She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. "You made me jump."

  "I bet I did. And have you missed me, little chicken?"

  "Oh, have you been away?" Regina lifted her finger and drew it down Amator's cheek. His eyes widened; he almost flinched at her touch. "The sun has changed you."

  "It shines more strongly on southern Gaul."

  "It has turned your face to old leather. Shame — you were so much better looking in the old days."

  Amator glowered.

  The friend laughed. "She has the measure of you, Amator." His accent was thick, almost indecipherable. "You have run your sword through him, madam; every morning he spends an enormous time plastering his cheeks with cream and powder to restore his pale color." This other turned out to be called Athaulf; he bowed and kissed her hand, his gaudy barbarian jewelry glinting. "A pretty face and a sharp tongue," he said.

  Amator said, "But you, Regina — you have become still more beautiful — but perhaps I shouldn't have left you alone so long, if this dry-as-dust theology is the highlight of your life."

  She sighed. "Life has been a little duller since you left, Amator," she admitted. Duller, and lacking the edge, the sparkle, the frisson of danger that she had always associated with Amator.

  "Well, now I'm back..."

  "Back to work," Athaulf reminded him. "Hard though it is to drag myself away from this young lady, aren't we due to meet those landowners?"

  "So we are, so we are. I'm a man of business now, Regina. Business, property, wealth, great concerns beyond the ocean. And so I must deal with old corpses like my father, when I would much rather be flirting with you."

  "But your business won't take all day," she said, as coolly as she could.

  "Indeed it won't." He glanced at Athaulf. "Tell you what. Why don't we have a party?"

  She clapped her hands, though she was aware she must look childish. "Oh, wonderful! I will tell Carausias and Cartumandua and Marina — we will prepare the courtyard—"

  "Oh, no, no," he said gently. "We don't want to be depressed by that gloomy lot. Let's make a party of our own. Come to the bathhouse. Shall we say a little after sunset?"

  "The bathhouse — but nobody goes there anymore. There's no roof!"

  "All the better, all the better; nothing like a little faded grandeur to make the blood flow. After sunset, then." He cocked an eyebrow. "Unless you need to catch up on your theology."

  "I'll be there," she said evenly. "Have a good day, Amator. And you, sir." With that she turned and walked away, letting her hips sway, aware of their silence as they watched her.

  But once out of their sight she ran down the hill, all t
he way home.

  • • •

  Even in the few years she had lived here it had gotten a lot harder to make her way through the streets of Verulamium.

  Some of the abandoned houses, roofless and gutted by fire, had begun to crumble seriously. Serious looting for tiles and building stone had advanced that decay, although that had tapered off as most new buildings were wattle and daub, and nobody had much use for stone. There were plants sprouting on top of walls and ledges. What had once been gardens and orchards were choked with weeds: dandelions, daisies, rose bay willow herbs. On some, longer abandoned, the shrubs and saplings grew waist-high, or higher. As the population of the town had continued to fall, nobody even used these bits of wasteland for pasture. The few new buildings, just wattle and daub with crudely thatched roofs, had mostly been built on the surface of the old streets, where the risk of falling masonry was least. So you had to step off the road and dodge around the houses, clambering over piles of rubble, and passing by broken drains and clogged sewers that nobody ever got around to fixing, and trying to avoid the children and chickens and mice that ran everywhere.

  In one place she walked past a grave, crudely dug into the raw earth and marked with a wooden slab. Strictly speaking burial inside the town walls was still against the law, just as under the rule of Rome. But the magistrates rarely met, or if they did nobody listened to their pronouncements.

  Even the great Basilica was affected by the general decay. Its walls still stood, but after its final abandonment by the landowners and their councils, its roof had collapsed, and birds nested in the glass-free frames of its gaping windows. But the building still had its uses. Even without the roof, the great walls provided some shelter from the weather — and a miniature village had grown up in there, on the floor of the great hall itself, with roof posts and beams driven into the walls to support small wooden lean-to shacks. It was an extraordinary sight. If you wanted proof of the Emperor's gross dereliction of his duty to sort things out, Regina thought, it was in this single image of lean-tos huddling timidly in the lee of the mighty walls. When things got back to normal there would be an awful lot of work to do to put all this back together again.

  Still, the Forum, the beating heart of the town, was as crowded as ever. Regina plunged into its noisy, smelly melee with a will.

  Regina was popular with the Forum vendors, if only because she was younger than most of them. There were few young people to be seen in town nowadays, and fewer still with money. The town had never been able to sustain its own population numbers; infant mortality had always been too high for that. But because there was no work for them to do anymore, the flow of immigrants from the countryside had long dried up. Anyhow Regina played on her youth and energy for all it was worth, ruthlessly haggling with middle-age men who should have known better.

  The stalls nowadays sold mostly fruits, vegetables, and meat from the local farmsteads, gardens, and orchards. There were very few manufactured goods for sale. But sometimes there were treasures to be found. A shipment of brooches or scents or fabrics from the continent might find its way here, or the contents of a town house or villa would be sold off by its owners, who had decamped in search of a better life elsewhere.

  Today, in her rummage through the stalls, she was lucky. She found a shawl made of bright yellow wool that its vendor swore had come all the way from Carthage, and even a set of rings — only bronze, but one of them was set with an intaglio, a cut stone once used by some grand lady to seal documents. She was able to pay for all this in coin, though she had to pass up a pretty iron brooch in the shape of a hare, for its vendor insisted on payment only in kind.

  After that, bursting with energy, she raced back to the town house. Everybody knew Amator was home, and Carausias was beaming that his son, so long away, had returned. Regina yelled for Cartumandua. On a day like today it was only Carta, trained by Julia herself at the villa, who could help Regina prepare for her party.

  Regina ran to the room she still shared with Marina, and threw her purchases onto her bed. She rummaged through her cosmetics and jewelry. She was running out of space on the little wooden shelves she used to store her things, so she shoved the three little matres out of the way and spread out her newest brooches, trying to decide which was the brightest. Beside the jewelry the matres looked like what they were, just dull lumps of crudely carved stone.

  Once she had finished her chores in the kitchen, Carta came to help Regina with her toilet. She brought hot water, towels, and a scraper to cleanse Regina's skin. She used tweezers, nail cleaners, and ear scoops to ensure that every part of her was perfect, and she patiently braided her hair. And she dripped perfume onto her skin, scooping it out of little bottles with a bronze spoon. Meanwhile Regina went through her growing collection of hairpins and enameled brooches, beads of glass and jet, and rings and earrings, trying to decide what to wear.

  But as she prepared charcoal — she ground it up in one of her own most precious possessions, a tiny mortar and pestle small enough to be held between thumb and forefinger — Carta let Regina know how much she disapproved. "To spend good money on brooches and hairpins and shawls! You know what Carausias is saving for..."

  Things had gone from bad to worse in Britain. It was just as Aetius had tried to explain to her, long ago. There had been a great wheel of state taxation and spending, with the towns at the hub; but now that wheel was shattered. The towns had lost their key functions as center of revenue collection, administration, state expenditure, distribution, and trade. And now that money was disappearing altogether, nobody could buy fancy pottery or ironware or clothing, and the towns' manufactories had all but collapsed, too. Carausias and the other landowners had a deepening dread that the towns were simply becoming irrelevant to the lives of the people in the countryside, on whom, in the end, everything depended.

  Meanwhile, without pay — as Regina knew too well — even the standing armies of the north and the coasts had dispersed. It was said that some of their leaders were setting themselves up as kinglets in their own right. Seeking security, the Verulamium town council had even tried to contact the civitates, the tribes of the north and west who had always stayed somewhat independent of the Empire, content to pay the Emperor's taxes. But there wasn't much leadership to be had there, either, and there was much bloody conflict between factions and rival bands. It was as if Britain, amputated from the Empire, were withering like a detached limb. There was no obvious solution in sight, not until the Emperor returned to sort everything out.

  In Verulamium things were peaceful for now, if a bit shabby, despite wild rumors from the countryside of roaming bacaudae and vicious barbarian hordes. But sometimes, even to Regina who tried not to think about all this, it felt like the calm before the storm.

  Meanwhile Carausias was hoarding all the coinage he could get his hands on.

  He hoped to secure passage for the family from Britain to Armorica. This was a British colony in western Gaul, where a cousin of Carausias's had a villa. There the imperial mandate still ran strong, and it was a refuge for many of the elite and wealthy from Britain. And there, as Carausias put it, the family could "ride it out until things get back to normal."

  But Carausias needed coins. Whereas the economy of the towns was mostly run by barter nowadays, the captains of the few oceangoing ships that still called at Londinium or the other main ports would accept payment only in the Emperor's coin — and, it was said, at exorbitant rates at that.

  That was why Carta was scolding Regina. "It would break Uncle's heart if he knew—"

  "Oh, Carta, don't nag me," Regina said, pouting into her hand mirror to see if her black lip coloring was thick enough. "You can't get this sort of stuff for a handful of beans. You have to pay for it. And it is my money; I can do what I want with it."

  Carta stood before her, mixing the charcoal with oil on a little palette. "Your allowance is a gift from Carausias, Regina. He means to teach you some responsibility with money. But it isn't yours. You must
remember that. You came here from the Wall with nothing but the clothes on your back..."

  Which was true, as she had learned over the years. Poor Aetius had had nothing but his soldier's salary and a few meager savings. Even his chalet under the Wall had, it turned out, belonged to the army. Nobody knew what had become of her family's money. It wasn't a pleasant subject to be reminded of. Sometimes Regina regretted throwing away that dragon brooch of her mother's. She could never have borne to wear it, but at least she could have sold it, and had a little of her mother's wealth.

  But all this was a bother. "I know all that," Regina said crossly. "I just want to have a little fun, just for one night. Is that so much to ask?..."

  Carta sighed, put down her cosmetic palette, and sat with Regina. "But, child, yesterday was just one night, too. As will tomorrow be. And the next night, and the next... What about the future? You don't keep up with your share of the chores, in the kitchen, cleaning, in the stables."

  Regina pulled a face. She found her future hard to imagine, but she was sure it wasn't going to involve mucking out stables.

  Carta said, "And what about your studies? Aetius would be disappointed if he could know that you've all but given them up."

  "Aetius is dead," Regina said. But she said it brightly, as if it were a joke. "Dead, dead, dead. He died and left me all alone with you. Why should I care what he would have thought?" She got up and skipped lightly. "Oh, Carta, you've become such an old woman! I'll deal with the future when it comes. What else can I do?"

  Carta glared at her. But she said, "Oh, come here and be still. We aren't done yet." She bade her lean down and carefully painted the charcoal around her eyes. "There," she said at last. She held up a hand mirror.

  Even Regina herself was startled by the effect. The darkness of the charcoal paste made her eyes shine, while the pink of her light woolen tunic was perfect for bringing out their smoky gray. As she slipped on her new bronze rings Regina's mood of anticipation deepened. Briefly she thought of Aetius, and the responsibility he had tried to instill in her. You are the family now, Regina... But she was seventeen, and her blood was wine-rich; surrounded by her jewelry and clothes and cosmetics she felt light, airy, floating like a leaf on a breeze, far above the earthy stonelike concerns embodied by the matres.