Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  "And the parents didn't mind? These people they'd never seen before, relatives or not, just turn up and take their kid away—"

  "Hey." He put a broad, heavy hand on my arm. "You're raising your voice... You're thinking about your sister."

  "There does seem an obvious parallel. Gina said you brokered that deal, too."

  "I wouldn't put it like that. Your sister wasn't sick. But she was in need — your whole family was. Your parents just couldn't afford the two of you. They put out feelers in the family for help—" I could imagine how my father would have felt about that. "It got to me, by a roundabout route. And I thought of the Order."

  "How could any parent give up a child to a bunch of strangers?"

  Lou's gaze slid away from mine. "You don't get it. The Order aren't strangers. They're family." Again that heavy hand on my arm. "I knew I could trust them, and so did the Casellas in Rome, and so did your parents."

  I said nothing, but he could read my expression.

  "Look, kid, you're obviously mixed up about this. If you've come to me for some kind of absolution, you're not going to get it."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Or is blame the game? Your father isn't around anymore, so you're looking to come take a shot at me. Is that it?"

  "I'm not here to blame you."

  "Nor should you. Or your parents, God rest them." He jabbed a nicotine-stained forefinger at my chest and glared up at me. "We all did the best we could, according to the circumstances, and our judgment at the time. If you're a decent person, that's exactly what you do. We're human. We try."

  "I accept that. I just want to know."

  He shook his head. "I suppose I'd be the same if I was in your shoes. But I warn you, you might be disappointed."

  I watched him, baffled. I was reminded of the headmistress. What was it about the Order that made people thousands of miles away want to defend it like this?

  I gazed toward the setting sun. Anyhow, I knew now that this Order had taken my sister, as it had the little girl in 1944, and no doubt many other girls and maybe boys, relatives, over the decades — or centuries, I wondered coldly. But what I needed to know now was what they took them for. Lou was wrong. Trust wasn't enough. Even being family wasn't enough. I needed to know.

  I asked him, "Do you send the Order money?"

  "Of course I do." He eyed me. "I guess your father did, but that must have stopped now. I guess it's your turn. Do you want some bank account details?..." He searched for numbers in his billfold.

  Chapter 15

  In the dense, moist heat of noon, Brica's gentle, lilting voice carried easily through the trees. "...The sidhe live in hollow hills," Brica was saying. "They are invisible. They can be seen when they choose, but even then they are hard to spot, for they always wear green. They are harmless if you are friendly to them, which is why we drop bits of bread in the furrow when plowing, and pour wine on the ground at harvest time..."

  Not wishing to disturb her daughter, Regina approached as silently as she could. Not that that was so easy now she was forty-one years old, and already an old woman, and anyhow her forest skills would never match those of the younger folk.

  "...But you must never eat sidhe food, for they will lead you into their hollow hills, which are entrances to the Otherworld, and you may never find your way out — or if you do, you might find a hundred years have passed, and all your family, even your brothers and sisters, have grown old and died, while you have aged only a day. But if a sidhe frightens you, you can always chase her away with the sound of a bell — but it must be made of iron, for the sidhe fear iron above all..."

  Her daughter sat at the center of a ring of children, their faces raised intently. Nearby a fire flickered. Brica saw Regina, and held up a hand in apology. She had been due to meet her mother at the farmstead.

  Regina was content to wait in the cool of the shade and let her heart stop thumping from the climb up the hillside from the farmstead. The sun was almost overhead now, and its light, scattered into green dapples by the tall canopy of trees, lit up the curl of white smoke that rose from the fire. Regina recognized the rich, strong scent of burning oak, stronger than beech or ash. She sometimes wondered what Julia would have thought if she could have known that one day her daughter would become an expert on the scents of burning firewood. But they had all had to adapt.

  Brica, given an old British name after Regina's own grandmother, shared Regina's features — the pale, freckled skin, the somewhat broad nose, lips bright as cherries, the eyes of smoke gray. But at twenty-one years old she was more beautiful than Regina had ever been. Her face had a symmetry that Regina's lacked, and there was a kind of exquisite perfection in the oyster-shell curl of her ears, the fine lines of her eyebrows. Even her one undeniable gift from her never-seen-again father Amator, her black hair, was thick and lustrous.

  And she was very good at holding the children's attention. This morning she had shown them how to start a fire, with a bit of flint and a scrap of char-cloth. It was their most essential skill of all, and one that the children were shown over and over again, just as Brica had been taught as she had grown up. And buried in the fables Brica told the children were warnings that might ensure their safety: even this tale of the sidhe, the fairies.

  Few adults believed in supernatural beings moving among them. But you would sometimes glimpse strangers: a very odd kind of stranger, moving over the sparely populated hills, often wearing green — just as in the stories. These were humans, no doubt about that, and they carried tools of stone or bronze. And they were robbers. Rather like foxes, they would take chickens and the odd sheep, or even — if they could get it — bread or cake. It was said they were dangerous when cornered, but they would flee when challenged. And it was true that they were terrified of iron — especially iron weapons, Regina thought dryly, against which their flimsy bronze was little protection.

  Nobody was sure where they came from. Her own theory was that the sidhe came from the west, perhaps the southwestern peninsula or Wales, or even the far north beyond the Wall. Perhaps in those distant valleys an old sort of folk had persisted — older even than the barbarian culture that had preceded the arrival of the Romans — so old they didn't even have the skills to make iron. Now that the legions were gone, and the land was emptying, they were, perhaps, slowly creeping back.

  If they seemed to Regina's folk as furtive, creeping, uncanny spirits, she wondered how her folk must seem to them. And after all, she thought wistfully, nowadays we can't make iron, either.

  The children all wore simple shifts of colorless wool. Some of them wore daisy chains around their heads or necks, and one small boy had a broad black stripe of birch-bark oil on his cheek, a lotion applied by Marina to a deep graze. Sitting there they looked like creatures of the forest, Regina thought suddenly, quite alien from the little girl she had once been.

  At length Brica's fable was done. The children scattered through the woods in twos and threes, to find mushrooms and other fruits of the forest for that evening's meal, and then to make their way home.

  Brica approached her mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

  Regina tried to be stern. But she cupped her daughter's cheek and smiled. "Let's just get on."

  Brica briskly stamped out the little fire, and the two of them walked out of the belt of forest and into the sunshine. They looked down the broad breast of hillside at the farmstead's three roundhouses, and beyond that to the valley where the silver-gray thread of the river glistened like a dropped necklace. But they turned away and began to walk along the crest of the hill, making for the ruined villa. Brica was always busy, always alert. She would run away to inspect a trap, or pick a handful of berries from a cane, or dig mushroom flesh from a fallen tree trunk. She was like fire, Regina thought, filled with a blazing energy Regina herself couldn't even envy anymore.

  "So," she said carefully, "have you seen Bran again?"

  "Not for a few days." But Brica turned
away, her smoky eyes dancing. Bran was a boy, a little younger than Brica herself, from a farmstead a couple of hills away. He was the grandson of old Exsuperius, in fact, their first grumpy, grudging neighbor, now long dead. Brica said, "He isn't a bad sort, you know, Mother."

  "Not a bad sort behind a plow, no, but he can read no better than you could at the age of five. And as for his Latin—"

  Brica sighed. "Oh, Mother — nobody reads. What use is it? A papyrus scroll won't plow a field, or tend the birth of a calf—"

  "Maybe not now. But when things—"

  "—get back to normal, yes, yes. You know, there are girls five years younger than me who have husbands and children."

  "You aren't those girls," Regina snapped.

  "You don't think Bran is good enough for me."

  "I never said that."

  Brica slipped her hand into her mother's. "The only reason he's learning to read at all is to please you."

  Regina was surprised. "It is?"

  "Doesn't that show how he cares about me — even about you?"

  "Perhaps." Regina shook her head. "You must make your own decisions, I suppose. I made many foolish choices — but if I had not, I wouldn't have you. I just want you to be sure what you want. And in the meantime be careful."

  Brica snorted. "Mother, I go to Marina every month."

  Regina knew that Brica was talking about the herbal teas Marina made up as a contraceptive treatment. Marina had, over the years, become something of an expert on remedies gathered from the forests and fields; in the absence of a doctor such wisdom was the best anybody could do.

  "Well, you know what I think of potions like that," Regina snapped. "If Bran really did care about you he would use a condom. There's no tea that's as effective as a pig's bladder."

  Brica flushed red, but she was suppressing a laugh. "Mother, please!"

  "And another thing..."

  Bickering, laughing, gossiping, they made their way along the broken ridge.

  • • •

  There were more than twenty people at the farm now, a community grown from the seed of that panicky flight from Verulamium. Around the old core of Regina and her daughter, Marina and Carausias, others had gathered: refugees from an old town to the south, the second eldest son of an overcrowded farmstead to the west and his family.

  In the beginning, in this dismal ruin on its breast of green hillside, Regina had felt utterly lost. The sense of isolation was the worst. The richer parts of the countryside were inhabited and cultivated as they had always been, but scattered farmsteads like this one on more marginal land, farmed only when it had been necessary to pay Roman taxes, now lay abandoned. Their neighbors were few and far between — there were few lights to be seen on the hills at night. The crown of forest at the top of the hill became a source of almost superstitious dread for Regina, a thick green-black tangle within which lurked boar, wolves, and even a bear, a shambling, massive form she had glimpsed once. She suspected that as the years went by the forest was gradually creeping down the hillside, and wild animals of all kinds were becoming more numerous, as if nature were seeking to reclaim the land it had once ruled.

  The endless labor had been hard on them all. Regina counted herself lucky that she hadn't been afflicted by the chronic back problems many had suffered, or the worms and other parasites. But it broke her heart that a third of all the children born here had died before their first birthdays.

  Still, she and the others had persisted. They would not be driven from this place — after all, they had nowhere else to go. And slowly, they had managed to improve things.

  After a time, as their numbers had grown, they had plucked up the courage to try to build another roundhouse — but its roof had blown off in the winter's first storm. There was a trick to the angle of the thatch, it turned out; a perfect one-in-one slope would wash away the rain and resist the wind, and if you didn't allow the lip to dangle too close to the ground it remained safe from the mice.

  And now, by Jupiter's beard, there were three roundhouses. It was a little village, a busy place. They had dug pits in the ground for surplus grain, and every day you could hear the steady grinding of quern stones.

  In the spring and autumn there was the plowing to be done — twice a year, for in the autumn they would seed the fields with winter wheat and other seasonal crops. They cultivated emmer wheat, spelt wheat, hulled six-row barley, kale, and beans. Wild garlic and parsnips could often be found, and in summer blackberries, elderberries, and crab apples. They kept a few chickens, sheep for their wool and milk, and pigs, useful creatures that could be turned out into the fields to root in the stubble, or driven into the forest for forage in the winter. Only old animals were butchered. Most of their meat came from hunted deer and occasionally boar, and they still used the simple traps for hares they had made from their very earliest days.

  And then there were all the other essentials of life. It still startled Regina sometimes that you really couldn't buy anything anymore. Anything you couldn't barter for, from shoes to clothes to tools to new roofing for your house, you had to make.

  Take clothing, for instance. As their few garments had quickly worn out, Regina had had to find out how to pluck wool off their sheep with combs of wood or bone, and to spin it into yarn, and even to weave it with simple looms. The clothes they made were simple — just tubes of cloth, made into tunics and undershirts and braecci, trousers for the men, and a peplum, a sleeveless dress for the women — but they did the job.

  Shoes were more of a challenge. When their old town-bought shoes had worn out, their first attempts at making leather replacements had been disasters, ill-fitting lash-ups that had rubbed and burned and caused blisters. Even now they were only beginning to learn the knack of cobbling a good serviceable boot. It amazed her how much time she spent thinking about her feet.

  They had even tried their hand at pottery, to replace their cups and bowls of carved wood. They experimented with pit clamps. You would line a shallow pit with hot embers overlaid with green wood. The pots would be carefully placed on top, and the whole thing covered with dry wood, damp straw, and soil to make an airtight mound. If you left it for a full day, making sure the covering of soil was intact, you might be lucky to have a quarter or a third of your pots come out whole — blackened, coarse, but intact.

  Carausias and Marina seemed to find great satisfaction in making such things, while Brica and the children were used to nothing better. But Regina remembered her mother's precious Samian ware, and she wondered how long it would be before the trade routes were restored and the markets opened again, and she would once again be able to buy such treasures as easily as breathing.

  But all that was lazy thinking, she told herself sternly, pointless longing, a distraction from the business of simply staying alive that occupied nearly all their time, from dawn to dusk. After all she had an example to set.

  As the years had gone by, somebody had to lead. It would never be Marina, who, despite her own two children and three grandchildren, had never thrown off her self-denigrating cast of mind as a servant. As he aged, poor Carausias, who after all had led them all here in the first place, became less and less effectual, often sinking into the state of unhappy confusion from which he had never really recovered since his betrayal by Arcadius.

  And so it had become Regina who led, more or less by default. It was Regina who welcomed newcomers or turned them away, Regina who took the floor at their regular meetings, Regina who sat in judgment like a Verulamium magistrate to resolve disputes over share-outs of chickens' eggs, Regina who traveled the area to keep up their tentative contacts with their neighbors — Regina who had discovered in herself the leadership without which, all seemed to agree, the farmstead would long since have failed and they would all have become bacaudae, if they had survived at all.

  It wasn't a situation she liked. She always promised herself that the whole thing was just temporary. But in the meantime there was nobody better to do it.

 
To her frustration they were out of touch with the great events of the world here. There was still no news of the Emperor's return. The old road still bore some traffic, and the travelers or refugees sometimes brought news of kings: there was one Cunedda in Wales, for instance, and a Coel in the north, rumored to be the last of the Roman commanders there, now styling himself the Old King. From the east came rumors of one Vitalinus, who called himself Vortigern — a name that meant "high king" — who, it was said, had taken on the job of uniting the old province and keeping it safe from the marauding Saxons and Picts and Irish. The farmsteaders heard nothing from these grand men. "We'll know they mean business," Carausias would say, "when the taxman comes to call."

  Nobody ever did call. And, almost unnoticed, while Regina built her farmstead into a place of prosperity and safety, more than twenty years passed by.

  • • •

  When they reached the villa Regina and Brica separated and began a systematic search through the ruined buildings.

  The villa had been sited in a natural bowl of green landscape, with a fine view of the western hills. Once it must have been grand indeed, Regina thought — grander even than her parents' villa — a complex of seven or eight stone buildings set around a courtyard, with barns and other smaller wooden buildings nearby.

  But it had been abandoned long before she had first discovered it. Its tile-stripped roofs had already decayed, and weeds had choked the courtyard and had started pushing their way up through the floors. Since then things had only gotten worse, as nature had followed its inexorable cycle. The floor of what must once have been the bathhouse had been broken open from below by the spreading roots of an ash, and the rooms were strewn with dead leaves. Since her last visit, last autumn, fire had burned out one of the stone buildings, removing the last vestiges of the roof and leaving its interior a shattered and smoky mess.

  Despite all the damage, though, she could still see the grand plan of the villa in the great rectangular pattern of its walls, and the stumps of the broken columns that had once formed a colonnade around the courtyard. But she wondered how long it would be before the mortar crumbled and the stones rotted, and nothing was left but hummocks in the green. It was as if the world itself were a constant foe, with its million fingers of plants and insects, frost, sunlight, and fire, a relentless destroyer of all human ambition.