Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  Inside the harbor, the water was a little calmer — but this harbor was so vast it was itself like an enclosed sea. Ships of all sizes cut across its surface. Most of them were wallowing cargo ships, decorated with the dark green of the imperial navy: grain transporters, scores arriving here every day from Italy and Africa. The seamanship required to maneuver these huge ships in such cramped and crowded conditions impressed Regina, and there was much mocking rivalry between the crews as they hailed each other across the narrow strips of water between their vessels.

  Regina's ship passed through this crowd and approached another concrete-walled entrance at the far end of the harbor. When they passed through, Regina found herself in yet another harbor, much smaller, a landlocked inner basin. It was octagonal in form and was lined with wharves and jetties, where ships nuzzled to unload their cargo. This harbor within a harbor had been constructed by the emperors to provide a port close to Rome capable of taking large oceangoing ships in all conditions. A canal had been cut from here to the Tiber, and grain and other goods were carried on smaller freshwater vessels to Rome itself. The engineering was mighty. This inner harbor alone could have swallowed the whole of Verulamium or Durnovaria, and the port complex would probably have drowned Londinium. But it was necessary; the flow of grain into the city could not be allowed to fail, no matter what the weather.

  As the ship nuzzled toward a jetty, Regina tried to ignore the fluttering in her stomach. Already, long before reaching Rome itself, she was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all. Here in this bright, liquid Italian air, Britain seemed a remote, murky, underpopulated, undeveloped place, and everything she knew, all she had built, seemed petty indeed.

  But she did not have time to be overwhelmed. She had a tablet on which was scrawled an address: that of Amator, the rogue son of Carausias, the last legacy of that stubborn old man. That address was where she would begin her Roman adventure — and where, she thought coldly, Amator would begin to pay back the debt he owed her.

  Standing at the prow of the ship she raised herself to a fuller height. As Artorius had said, once this great city had been overwhelmed by the Celtae, her people. And indeed, only decades before, it had suffered its first sacking at barbarian hands in eight centuries. I have nothing to fear of Rome, she thought. Let Rome fear me.

  • • •

  They landed safely, and their few scraps of luggage were briskly off-loaded. Regina's first steps were unsteady. After so many days at sea, it felt odd to walk on a surface that did not swell under her. The land behind the wharves was crowded with warehouses and manufactories. Great machines, powered by slave muscles, were used to off-load the grain into giant granaries. Spanish oil, Campanian wine, and many other goods came in amphorae, carried by dockworkers who filed back and forth from ship to shore like laboring ants. The bustle, noise, and sense of industry was overwhelming.

  There were plenty of negotiatores to be found at the quaysides. It did not take Regina long to secure a carriage that would take them to Rome itself.

  The road to Rome cut across marshy farmland, studded with olive groves and red-tiled roofs of villas. The road was crowded with pedestrians: great files of people plodded to and from the port, their heads and shoulders and backs laden with crates and sacks. Carriages, chariots, and horseback riders picked their way through the crowds. They passed strings of way stations, and vendors competed to sell food, water, footwear, and clothing to the passing traffic.

  Regina checked the contents of her purse. "That's nearly the last of Ceawlin's money."

  Brica peered down glumly at the throng. "I hope you thought it was worth it," she said coldly.

  "Yes, it was worth it," Regina said. "It was worth it because we had no choice. Listen to me, Brica. I'm not sure what waits for us in Rome. It will surely be another challenge — as great as I faced on the hill farm when you were born, or when we were taken to Artorius's dunon. We will overcome it. But we must support each other. And we must lance this festering sore between us. Remember how I saved you from the Saxon. I risked my life—"

  "Yes, you saved me from the Saxon. But that was long ago, far away. I don't know what's happened to you since then, Mother. I don't know what you have become."

  "Brica—"

  "I am your daughter, your only child," Brica said tonelessly. "I am the future, for you. I am everything. That's how it should be. Perhaps that was once true. But you, you have destroyed my life, bit by bit. You took me away from Bran, and then from Galba, who made me happy, and with whom I wanted to have children of my own. And then you sold me to that pig of a negotiatore."

  Regina grimaced. She had never told her daughter how she, too, had been used by Ceawlin. "I had no choice."

  "There is always a choice. I think your mind has died, or your heart—"

  Regina grabbed her by the chin and forced her head around. "Enough. Look at me."

  Brica resisted, but she had never had her mother's physical strength. Her head turned, and her eyes, smoky gray like Regina's, met her mother's.

  Regina said, "Do you think you are the only one who has made sacrifices? You are precious to me — so precious. If I could save you from harm I would. But there is something more precious still, and that is the family. If we had stayed in Britain while Artorius got himself killed posturing on the battlefields of Europe, we would not have survived him for long. And if you had married Galba, your children would have been farmers, their minds dissolving in the dirt, and within two generations, three, they would have remembered nothing of what they once were—"

  "But they would exist," Brica snapped. "My children. Mother, it was my choice, not yours." She pulled her face away. "And now you're looking for your own mother, who abandoned you all those years ago. Whether or not she lives, you are selfish and morbid. Your relationship with your mother no longer matters. You do not matter. All that matters is me, for my womb is not yet dry, like yours. The future is mine—"

  "No. The future is the family." And even you, my beautiful child, Regina thought sadly, are only a conduit to that future.

  Regina's determination was strong, clear, untroubled. She was dismayed, she admitted to herself, by the iron coldness she saw in Brica. It was as if the recent events had crushed the life and warmth out of her — and thoroughly wrecked her relationship with her mother. Well, a lifelong battle with Brica would be hard, but Regina was used to hardships, and to overcoming them.

  And it wasn't as if Brica could get away. Ironically the narrowness of her upbringing on the farmstead and the dunon, against which Regina had always railed, now left her stranded and baffled away from her home ground; Brica couldn't leave Regina's side no matter how much she wanted to.

  Now they were both distracted, for they approached the city itself.

  Ahead, the air was striped with a thick layer of orange-yellow: the cumulative smoke from thousands of fires and lanterns, not yet dispersed in the morning light. On the horizon Regina glimpsed aqueducts, immense structures that strode across the landscape, imposing straight-line geometries of astonishing lengths. There were ten of them, she knew, ten artificial rivers to water a city of more than a million souls. As they neared the city, gaudy mausoleums sprouted beside the roadway. Citizens were allowed to inter bodies only outside the city walls, so routes out of the city became lined with sarcophagi. And around the cemeteries of the rich crowded the remains of the poor, the ashes of cremations stored in amphorae stuck in the ground, only their necks protruding into the air.

  "The scale of it, even of their dead, is astounding," Regina murmured.

  Their driver turned to grin at her. He must have been more than sixty years old, and a single tooth stood like a stump in his mouth. He spoke a coarse country Latin she found it hard to make out.

  Brica said, "What was that?"

  "He welcomed us to the caput mundi. To the head of the world..."

  They fell silent, each locked into her own thoughts, as the carriage wound its way along the crowded road.r />
  • • •

  Rome was dominated by mud brick and red tiles. But at its heart were the Capitoline and Palatine Hills with their great palaces and temples, like a floating island of gleaming marble. Regina thought she glimpsed the curving wall of the Flavian Amphitheater, astoundingly huge, like a house for giants.

  But as the carriage approached the center of the city it entered a maze of streets, and the wider view was lost. The closer they got to the center the more crowded the buildings were, and the taller they seemed to grow; they were rickety heaps of wattle, daub, and crimson-red tiles, two, three, four stories high, like unhealthy plants competing for light. In some places these insulae, islands, were so closely packed together that their balconies touched, shutting out the sky altogether. The stink was overwhelming, of rotting sewage, cooking food. And the noise of the city seemed to engulf Regina, a constant clamorous racket. It was the noise of a million people, she thought, a million voices joining into one great unending roar, and as they penetrated deeper into this crowded, unplanned maze, Regina felt as if she were becoming lost in a great formless sea of people.

  Brica grew even quieter, receding into herself. Probably, Regina thought, in the last hour her daughter had seen more strangers' faces than she had seen before in her entire life.

  On the driver's recommendation they were brought to a restaurant. The owner, who happened to be the driver's brother-in-law, also owned some of the apartments in the block above the restaurant, and the driver had promised he would rent the women a room.

  Set on a street crowded with shops, the restaurant occupied the block's ground floor. It was a low-roofed, well-lit place: people sat on benches at the front, eating snacks and drinking wine as they watched the bustle of the street. Regina glimpsed marble counters on which samples of dishes were displayed, and behind them was a green-lit central atrium, set with more tables.

  From the outside the insula actually had an attractive appearance, with its roof of terra-cotta tiles, its stucco facade decorated with tiles and small mosaic images. Balconies of wood and brick projected from each story, and potted plants were set on each one. But the apartments were small and cramped, and got steadily worse as you climbed the stairs. And Regina's and Brica's, on the topmost floor, must have been the worst of all.

  The windows were covered with sheets of bark. The only furniture was two beds fixed to the wall, some shelving and cupboards, and a few stools and low tables. There was a brazier for heating and an open stove for cooking, appliances Regina immediately vowed she would use sparingly, for she was convinced that they would set the insula and the whole district on fire, and would be the death of them both. Even in this cramped setting their few belongings, homemade at the dunon, looked pathetic and provincial. But Regina unpacked the three matres and set up an improvised lararium in one corner of the room.

  Even up here the smells from the restaurant reached them, and soon they were both very hungry. Regina ventured back down the stairs. The menu food was predominantly cooked meat, highly spiced with pepper and fish sauce and garlic — but she didn't have the money to spare. She went out to the street stalls and bought a little bread and salted meat, and a small pitcher of wine.

  While she was gone Brica waited for her, curled up on her couch with her knees tucked into her chest. When Regina returned, Brica didn't seem to have moved at all.

  In their cramped room they ate their bread, trying to ignore the enticing smells from below. Regina left a little of their poor bread and wine for the goddesses of the family, who sat squat in their corner of this strange, unpleasant little room.

  In the days that followed, they tried to settle in.

  The restaurant had connections to the water supply from the aquifers and to the main sewers. The apartments above did not. Every day you had to fetch your water from a fountain a couple of streets away, where there was always a queue. And every morning you had to carry down your buckets to a cesspit in the insula's basement — that was, if you could be troubled to. Some of the insula's less sociable inhabitants would store up their waste for days without removing it, until protests from their neighbors about the smell forced them to. And others, lazier still, just threw it out the window, with a cry to warn any hapless passersby below.

  As an alternative to the pots in their room, there was a public latrine a block away. The latrine turned out to be a long, dark building with two walls lined with scores of people squatting over holes that fed directly into the sewer system. The stink was astonishing. Though she had scarcely been used to privacy — there was no separate latrine in a roundhouse — Regina found it difficult to let her bowels move in front of so many strangers, all talking and laughing, walking and shouting, and the children, who ran around half naked at the feet of the adults, were even more off-putting. But it was an oddly jolly place, she thought, full of gossip and laughter: obviously a center of the community, a palace of shit and piss.

  Rome, Regina quickly learned, was all about divisions. There were rigid barriers among social classes, from the ancient senatorial families down to the slaves. And the gulf between rich and poor was vast.

  There were rich and poor everywhere, of course; even in Artorius's dunon that had been true. But here in Rome there were families that had spent a thousand years accruing wealth. It was said that at one time just two thousand individuals had owned almost all the cultivated land in the western Empire, from Italy to Britain. Though Rome sprawled over a vast area within its curtain of walls, there were so many public basilicas, circuses, temples, gardens, baths and theaters, and so many privately owned estates from the Emperor's palaces and gardens on down, that it was really no wonder that most people were forced to live in these tottering apartment blocks, crammed into whatever space was available.

  Rome was never quiet, even during the darkest hours. There were always the shouts of drovers and wagoners, the uproarious noise of the taverns, some of which never closed, and the gull-like cries of the night watchmen. And too soon would come the morning, when her neighbors would start their days with clattering and banging, laughter and shouts and even noisy lovemaking that carried easily through the thin walls. One man in the apartment below had a particularly stentorian way of calling into the street, calling up water carriers first thing in the morning.

  The Romans had a saying — It costs money to sleep here. They were right.

  • • •

  On their first afternoon, Regina sent a boy to take a message to Amator's home. There was no reply to her note that day, or the second, and Regina began to fret. She had never forgotten how she had waited for Amator's call after that night in the Verulamium baths, a message that had never come; and she hated to be put in the same position again. Besides, it had taken all but a few bronze scraps of coin from Ceawlin's money to buy them the room for a few nights. They couldn't afford to wait long.

  But on the third day a retainer called, and said that Amator was prepared to meet her.

  And so that afternoon she and Brica walked across the city. Regina stepped out boldly, but Brica walked with eyes downcast and a fine cloth mask over her face.

  It was a long and difficult trek. The streets were so crowded they could barely pass. The lower sections of the apartment blocks were given over to shops, taverns, and warehouses, and from stalls set up in the street itself everything from clothing to wine to cooked meats was on sale. Then there were the street entertainers — jugglers, snake charmers, acrobats. In one place a barber stoically shaved the jowls of a large, prosperous-looking gentleman; he held a spiderweb soaked in vinegar to stanch the bleeding from the frequent cuts he made. All this enterprise made the ways even narrower, and they were crowded with carriages, carts, baggage animals, sedan chairs borne by slaves, horseback riders. The road surface was filthy, littered with garbage and sewage. In the larger streets open trenches bore away the sewage toward deep-buried conduits, ultimately feeding the patient Tiber. And meanwhile dirty children ran around the wheels of the passing carriages, and dog
s sniffed at the debris that piled up in any convenient corner.

  But people pressed cheerfully through the crush, babbling away in their fluent, rapid Latin — although there was a surprising peppering of other tongues. Regina had thought these must be barbarian languages, but she learned that amid this torrent she could hear the tongues of some of the founding peoples of Rome, the Etruscans and the Sabines, relics of days long past.

  Amator's home turned out to be located in a grand complex called Trajan's Forum.

  They entered the complex through a triumphal arch that towered over them, surmounted by an immense bronze sculpture of a six-horse chariot. A central piazza was dominated by a huge gilded statue of the Emperor Trajan himself, mounted on horseback. At one end of the piazza was an immense basilica, a monstrous marble cliff of offices and courts, fronted by tall columns of gray granite. It could surely have swallowed up the basilica of Verulamium whole. And looming beyond the basilica roof Regina could see a statue mounted on a great column — yet another representation of Trajan, who had evidently been a powerful emperor indeed, still peering loftily down at the citizens of the city he had built, centuries after the trivial detail of his death. The whole complex was too huge, out of scale, as if constructed for gods and set here in the middle of this human city.