Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  Regina's old friend Marina ran the largest of the cloth works, from a big roundhouse she ruled as firmly as Artorius did his kingdom. The looms themselves, three sturdy frames taller than Artorius himself, were set just inside the entrance to the house, so the weavers could get the best light.

  Regina liked to watch the weavers. The most skillful of them was another Marina — a docile sixteen-year-old, one of the old woman's own grandchildren. Young Marina worked steadily. A warp, threads of spun wool, was suspended from a top bar and kept under tension by small triangular stones. Marina pulled the horizontal heddle bar toward her, opening up a gap between alternating warp threads. She pulled the weft, a horizontal thread, through the shed, and then released the heddle to pull the alternate threads backward, and then passed the weft back through the gaps. Every few passes Marina would pause to push her weaving sword, a flat wooden board, into the gap between the warp threads, and thus compacted the weft. All this was done fluidly and without pause, and her speed of working was remarkable; just standing here, Regina was able to see how the cloth's crisscross pattern was emerging, row by row.

  Regina had been proud of the success they had had with her own weaving experiments back on her farmstead, but all they had been able to produce was coarse cloth. This loom design had come from another of the experts Artorius had gathered up in his sweeps across the countryside, and the results were far better.

  She passed a little time with old Marina. Marina liked to talk of old times in Verulamium, and Regina knew that the skill and loyalty of her granddaughter had been a great comfort to Marina since the death of poor Carausias a few winters before. But Regina escaped before Marina produced her foul-smelling buckets and asked her to contribute. Marina's vegetable dyes needed a fixing agent, and the best fixer of all was stale urine: a vintage half a month old was generally thought to be just right.

  Regina made more marks on her wax tablet, and moved on.

  Of all the industries that had sprouted here on the dunon's plateau, the most significant was iron: fully half the manufactory area of the plateau was given over to its complex production. Myrddin ruled his little empire of iron and fire and charcoal as if he were king of the underworld. As she approached the forges, two of Myrddin's helpers — unfree, recent arrivals both of them — were working on a charcoal clamp. Myrddin insisted on training up his clamp workers personally, and from the look of the hollow, sleepless eyes of these two men, his training regime had been as brutal and unrelenting as ever.

  This clamp was a few days old and several paces across. A mound of timber had been covered with a thick layer of damp leaves and bracken, turf, and soil. Fire had been started inside with embers poured into a hole in the top, and then the mound was capped off, so that the wood within could only consume itself. Running the clamp was a skilled job. A constant watch had to be kept on it by day and night, for as the wood turned to charcoal it would shrink, and the clamp could collapse on itself — and if air got in the whole thing would go up in an unproductive blaze. When the burning was done the mound had to be dismantled carefully, and the charcoal doused with water, for while hot it had a tendency to erupt into flames spontaneously. There were many such clamps, some much larger, in operation day and night beyond the hill fort, for Myrddin's works demanded a constant and heavy supply of charcoal. You could smelt some metal ores with wood fires, but only charcoal could provide the high temperatures needed for iron.

  Myrddin himself ran the next stage in his process. His shaft furnace was just a tube of wattle and daub, vitrified by repeated firings. By the time Regina arrived the furnace had been running since early morning, and two more unfree were laboring mightily at their animal-skin bellows. They were naked save for loincloths, and their bodies were slick with sweat and soot. Myrddin was supervising the day's first charge of charcoal and ore.

  He preferred charcoal made from alder, which he said burned hotter than any other sort, and ocher, a relatively easy ore to smelt. The furnace would be worked all day, and then allowed to cool; by tomorrow Myrddin would be able to pull out a bloom, a dense, irregular mass of metal and impurities. This would be subject to repeated hammering and heating until the last of the slag was gone. It took several blooms for Myrddin to produce one of his ingots, a flat bar about the size of a sword blade, ready for further work. All this had baffled Regina — it seemed an awful lot of work for a small piece of iron — until Artorius had gently explained that even charcoal ovens were not hot enough actually to melt iron, and Myrddin's elaborate practices were necessary to coax the iron out of its ore.

  Though she despised the way Myrddin used his secret knowledge as a source of power, she could not deny the reality of that knowledge. Watching his careful, almost delicate work as he constantly inspected and assessed his furnaces and clamps, she thought she could see something of the centuries, or millennia, of trial and error and constant study that had led to the development of such techniques.

  And the end product was iron, the most precious resource of all, pieces of iron that, remarkably, had not existed before. Piled up in Myrddin's workshops were some of the final products of all this industry: carpenters' tools like adzes and saws, tools for the farmers like harness buckles and sickles and reaping knives, weapons for warriors like swords and knives — and even tools for Myrddin's own use, like tongs and an anvil. It was Myrddin's proudest boast that he was the only craftsman who produced all his own tools.

  But Myrddin was Regina's enemy.

  When he spotted her, he greeted her with a kind of snarling smile. "Here to check up again, Regina? Tap, tap, tap with your stylus... a shame we can't eat your words, or nail our soles to our shoes with your letters, eh? But at least we can wipe our arses on your scrolls..." And so on. She endured it, as always, and walked on.

  A young apprentice called Galba was working at a forge, and Regina paused.

  He wore a sleeveless tunic, and his bare arms were pocked with hot-metal scars, already a little like Myrddin's. He was working a piece of iron — a short blade, perhaps for a knife — in the forge, while an unfree toiled at the bellows. Galba would thrust the blade into the furnace until it became red hot, beat it into shape while still heated, and then quench it quickly with water. It seemed that the fire didn't just make the iron soft enough to work; something about the charcoal in the furnace made the iron stronger. And sometimes the iron, beaten flat, would be folded over and beaten again, the invisible layers adding strength. There were many subtleties to Myrddin's art, which Galba and other apprentices were learning slowly.

  The blade appeared to be done. Galba quenched it once more and set it aside. Then he noticed Regina. "Madam — good day — would you like me to call your daughter?"

  "If you please," she said stiffly.

  He went into the back of the workshop, calling Brica's name. Regina sat on a low wooden bench and waited.

  • • •

  As Artorius's kingdom had grown, so it had become necessary to find efficient ways to shape it, and to run it.

  Despite Regina's own inclinations the order that was emerging had little to do with imperial forms, but was based on older Celtae structures. The center of it all was the dunon itself. The hill fort provided facilities for trade and exchange, a religious center, a resident population of craftsmen with growing expertise — and, most importantly, administrative control.

  Artorius's nation was divided into three classes. The nobles included the soldiers, but also jurists, doctors, carpenters, bards and priests, and metalworkers like Myrddin. Artorius's rule was moderated by a meeting on every feast day of the oenach, an assembly of the nobles. Below the nobles were the free commoners, the lesser craftsmen and the farmers, who were actually the productive level of society. It was their rents, taxes, and tithes that sustained Artorius's nascent government, and paid for his army and their campaigns. Finally, the lowest level were the unfree: former criminals, slaves, and late-arriving refugees who found no free land to farm. Their fate was simply to serve, and they p
rovided the bulk of the labor.

  The basis of society was the family. According to the old tradition the property and other rights of a man extended to his derbfine, his descendants as far as his great-grandchildren, through four generations. Basic rights were assured by each person having an "honor price," a level of compensation to be paid in case of injury, insult, or death. But the system extended only to the free; the unfree had no rights, and no views that were listened to at higher levels.

  It was a crude system, of course, a barbaric structure to regulate the relationships of a warrior people, with nothing like the sophistication of Roman law. But any attempts Regina made to reform the ancient code were resisted, especially by Myrddin, who seemed to have appointed himself a kind of keeper of the truth here in Artorius's kingdom. Perhaps more civilized forms would emerge with time.

  Still, in this great project, Regina had found a place.

  She had never forgotten the lessons Aetius had taught her. Aetius would say that it was information as much as sword blades that had enabled the emperors to take and hold such a vast territory: not just military knowledge, but records of wealth and taxes, payments and savings, gathered by the officials in the towns and transmitted by the cursus publicus along the great network of roads, which had been built as much to carry facts as soldiers' feet.

  It had not been hard for her to convince Artorius of the truth of this. Her very first attempts at record keeping rapidly bore fruit in exposing unpaid tithes and unjust levies. He had since granted her all the time and resources she needed.

  She had pupils in her work — she, at least, was not jealous of her knowledge. She taught her pupils to read and write, and to argue and analyze in the forensic tradition of the Roman system. Literacy was very important to her. It was a peculiar horror to her that most Saxons couldn't read. Records and literature were the memory of humanity: if the Saxons were ever to overrun this place her past would truly be lost, lost forever.

  Aside from her moments of solitude with the calendar, this brief tour of inventory compiling was the most pleasurable part of her daily routine. She never forgot that all the dunon's busywork was primitive compared to what had been available in the poorest of the towns in the old days, when the old continentwide trading routes had still worked, and there was little here that hadn't been made on the spot. But they had come a long way since the time, only a few years ago, when she had scoured the rubble of abandoned villas in search of iron nails for her shoes. She felt she was in an island, a haven where civilization was slowly recovering, in the midst of the country's devastation and collapse.

  • • •

  Brica came running out to her mother and kissed her on the cheek. They sat together on the bench.

  "I heard you talk to Myrddin," Brica said. "That old monster gives you a roasting every day."

  Regina shrugged. "I can't take him seriously, not with a beard like that."

  Brica snorted laughter. "But he does know his craft. I think he just resents being watched over."

  To Regina, Brica showed an alarming lack of interest in the subtleties of human interaction. "It isn't that," Regina said slowly, massaging her daughter's hands. "Not really. Myrddin is no fool, whatever else he is. He knows the value of record keeping as well as I do. His problem is not the record keeping but who's keeping the records."

  "You?"

  "Myrddin sees me as a rival for Artorius's attention. He whispers in one ear about the glory of the Celtae and the magic of the old ways; I whisper in the other about record keeping and tax revenues. We are like two poles, like past and future."

  Brica grinned. "But you are the one who sleeps with the riothamus."

  "Yes. Though I think that if Myrddin thought he could lure Artorius to his bed he would cut himself a new hole—"

  Brica's mouth gaped. "Mother!"

  Regina patted her hand. "Reassuring to know I can still shock you, dear. Anyhow, I think the riothamus likes having us both around, even having us fight, so he can take in contrasting opinions. The mark of a wise leader..."

  Artorius still called her his queen, his Morrigan. But their relationship nowadays had little to do with the fierce love of gods — little to do with passion, in fact, for he rarely visited her bed, even in the rare intervals he broke off from his campaigning and alliance building to return to the fort by the Caml.

  Artorius's bold early notions of stepping down and submitting himself to election had long been quietly dropped. But he and Regina had privately spoken of his own eventual succession, and the need for him to find male descendants. It was unspoken between them, but it was obvious that she would not be the source of his children and the derbfine that would follow. She suspected he was also talking to other advisers, such as Myrddin — and perhaps he was already taking other women to his bed. But she cared nothing for that; her liaison with Artorius, in ensuring her own survival and Brica's, was serving her purposes.

  As Regina mused, Brica's attention was drifting. Galba was moving about at the back of the manufactory, wiping his hands on a rag and joking with another worker.

  Galba was short, stocky, with broad heavyset features; he had a pale complexion and thick red hair, which betrayed his people's probable origin among the Picts north of the Wall. He was young — younger than Brica, who was now a venerable twenty-eight. He had come down from the north with his family, en route to Armorica. They had fallen afoul of Saxons, but a chance encounter with a party of Artorius's soldiers had saved their lives. Galba's family had taken over an abandoned farm only half a day's a ride from here, and had become commoners in the new kingdom. Brica had met Galba at a feast on one of the farmsteads. She had prevailed upon Regina to bring the man into the dunon for a trial at the forge. Galba had acquitted himself so well that Myrddin had taken him on at the manufactory permanently.

  And Galba's move into the dunon had made Brica more than happy, too, to Regina's chagrin. Galba was cheerful, sturdy, competent, and obviously attractive — but, to Regina, crushingly dull. In that way he was astonishingly like Bran, Brica's farmboy first love, a relationship Regina had crushed long ago.

  Now Galba came out of the workshop, softly calling Brica. Somehow he had managed to scorch a lank of soot-filled red hair at the side of his head. Brica took a knife and carefully began to saw at the blackened ends. Galba crouched a little so she could reach, and as she worked her body moved closer to his, her cheek resting on the side of his head.

  They belonged together. It was a sudden, unwelcome truth, and yet it could not be denied. But Regina found jealousy gathering inside her. I can't allow this, she thought suddenly.

  Not for the first time, she found she had come to a decision intuitively, and had to unravel it retrospectively. She felt as hostile to Galba as she had once to Bran. Why?

  Galba was now a larger part of Brica's life than Regina was. So he should be. There were women younger than Brica who were already grandmothers. It was the way of things. A daughter matters more to a mother than a mother can ever matter to the daughter, for the daughter represents the future, and the future must predominate over the past. Regina should simply — let go.

  And yet the past contained everything Regina valued in her life: the villa, her own mother, the towns, the fine things. Peace and order, richness and beauty. If she were to let Brica go into the arms of this cloddish boy, this apprentice smith who thought better with his muscles than with his head, then Brica's future would count for everything, and Regina's past for nothing. It was a tension between past and future — and it was a tension that resolved in her head, as suddenly as clouds might clear from the face of the sun, and a warm determination filled her.

  I will stop this liaison, she thought, just as I got rid of Bran. I don't know how yet, but I will find a way. I have to, for the sake of the past, which is more precious than the future, and which must therefore be preserved.

  A braying of trumpets drifted from the west: it was a peal that announced the return of the riothamus and his army. All
over the dunon work was abandoned, and everybody ran to the gate.

  • • •

  In the six years since Regina and Brica had been brought here, the predations of the rebellious Saxons from their fastnesses on the east coast had become a severe problem across southern Britain.

  In her long conversations with Artorius about his diffuse foe, she had learned much about the Saxons. For a start they weren't really "Saxons," even though that was what everybody called them. After they had erupted from their homeland in the north of Germany, the Saxons had become sea pirates, traversing the Mare Germanicus, which facilitated links among Jutland, Frisia, and Francia. Now nobody could precisely say who or what they were — they were all kinds of Germanics — not that that mattered if you were on the receiving end of a Saxon blade.

  The Saxons were not savages. Some of the booty Artorius had brought home from his wars, particularly the fine metalwork, was as beautiful and complex as anything she had ever seen. But they were not remotely civilized in the Roman sense. They were not even like the Vandals and Goths and Franks who were moving through Gaul. Those barbarians often tried to ape the rulers they displaced, and even tried to maintain the forms of society that had prevailed there, with more or less degrees of incompetence.

  But the Saxons were adventurers, wanderers, marauders, pirates. They were certainly not capable of running anything like the old imperial administration — and besides, Regina thought ruefully, in Britain there really wasn't much left of the old system to run anyhow, for it had all collapsed even before the Saxons got here. The Saxons actually seemed to hate the towns and other relics of the Empire. They were intent not just on plunder but also on massacre, conquest, and destruction.