Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  Amator pulled at his arm. "No, Come away, my love, come away with me. I will make you safe — you don't need this witch and her hole in the ground—"

  Regina felt a cold satisfaction. She had not planned the arrival of the barbarians that day, but by keeping Sulla and Amator close to her, she had set up this opportunity. And now it was unfolding perfectly.

  She stepped close to Sulla and whispered, "You can join us." You and Amator's legacy, she thought. "But first you must free yourself." Sulla looked confused. She let a knife fall from her sleeve — a knife she always carried in these difficult times — and slipped it into his hand. "Free yourself."

  His eyes widened. He nodded and pulled away.

  Castor approached Regina. "Is Brica—"

  "She is safe."

  He nodded. "Soon I will be with her."

  "No. I have an assignment for you. When the last of us has descended, close the hatch and cover it over with turf. Move the furniture — a table, a couch — conceal the entrance. Do you understand? I know it means you will be kept apart from Brica. But it is the only way she can be safe. She is counting on you, Castor."

  His eyes narrowed, and she wondered briefly if he read her calculation: that despite the marriage only that morning, already she was separating him from Brica, drawing her back into the family. But he nodded, and he hurried to help the elders usher the children to the shaft.

  Regina stayed by the trapdoor, helping the students descend into the dark, until she saw Sulla embrace Amator — and Amator fell to the ground, unnoticed in the chaotic confusion in the garden — and then, as the smoke of the fires grew thick in the air, she clambered down into the ground herself.

  • • •

  The Vandals remained in the city for two weeks. They invaded the homes of the rich, broke into the Christian churches, stripped the gilded tiles from the ancient Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. And they murdered, maimed, and raped Romans both high and low.

  Regina had prepared for a siege. She had installed a lead-pipe feed from the main water supply, and there were caches of food — dried fruit, meat, nuts. Even if the trapdoor entrance in the peristylium was discovered and broken open, the Catacombs were a warren that extended far underground, and there were many places where the tunnels could be blocked off and defended. There was even another tunnel that led out of here altogether to one of the main city sewers, out of which they could find a way to the daylight. It wouldn't be a pleasant journey, but it would lead them to safety.

  Stuck in these soot-stained tunnels, it wasn't a happy time for anybody. But despite their protests at deprivation, fear for their families, and plain discomfort in this place of corpses, Regina knew that her charges accepted that she had delivered them to safety, out of sight of the black-painted monsters rampaging above.

  Brica pined for Castor, but Regina was unconcerned. In the final crisis Brica had shown her true loyalties — to the family buried in the ground, not to the boy on the surface — and she sensed that their marriage, even children, would not change that. Brica, after all, carried Regina's own blood, and the blood of Julia, and it was no surprise that her instincts had in the end proven similar.

  At last the Vandals marched back to their camps, with thousands of captives and wagons piled high with plunder. Regina kept her charges safe until she was certain the last of them had gone.

  Chapter 29

  It was only two days after her meeting with Giuliano that Rosa came for Lucia. Maria Ludovica had, peacefully, died. And Lucia must be prepared.

  It took a month. Then the day of her final induction arrived.

  • • •

  In a small chamber, deep on the third level, Lucia was asked to strip. She was examined quickly by a female doctor. In the last few days she had already endured a whole battery of medical tests.

  Then she was dressed in a simple smocklike dress called a stola. It was white, but with a little purple fabric sewn in. The cloth was very soft, and she wondered how old it was. Her watch and bits of jewelry were taken from her. She wasn't allowed any underwear; she would be naked, save for the stola. But she was given leather sandals to protect her feet from the cold rock. Murmuring wordlessly, Pina braided Lucia's hair and tied it up into a bun.

  Nothing had been explained to Lucia in advance. She did not know what to expect today. Since Pina had woken her that morning she had felt detached — as if she were a mere observer of what her body was going through, or as if she were fading back into the ghostlike, invisible, unreal figure she had become during her ostracism. She only wanted to be part of the Order, a sister again. She didn't want her head cluttered up with more questions. She simply accepted each event as it happened, trying not to think any further.

  But she was glad Pina was here. Lucia had asked for her. At this strange time it would be comforting to have somebody who knew her so deeply close by.

  Pina led her from the brightly lit changing room, out into the dark.

  They followed a narrow, dank passage. Arches supported the roof — small red bricks embedded in thick mortar, just as you would see in Rome's imperial ruins. This was a very old place, she thought, very old indeed.

  They came to a small, poky chamber. It was a kind of theater, Lucia realized. It had a raised stage, rooms for actors and scenery, and curved rows of seats, all carved from the tufa. It was very primitive, more or less cut out of the raw rock, and could hold no more than fifty people or so, but an elaborate chrome kissing-fish logo adorned one wall. There was a couch on the stage, which was otherwise bare.

  The lighting was dim and smoky, coming from lamps in alcoves carved into the walls: Lucia could smell burning oil. And it was cold. She felt goose bumps on her arms, and her nipples hardened with the cold and pushed against the fine cloth of her shift. She longed to cover herself with her hands, but she knew she must not.

  Rosa was here, waiting for her, and Rosetta, one of Lucia's sisters from her age group, and a couple of older women she didn't recognize. All of them were dressed in simple garments, like her own stola. Rosetta's shift had no purple inlay, though, and the round-eyed girl was wearing training shoes and socks.

  The older women — older meaning perhaps Rosa's age — looked at her intently. She sensed hostility in their steady glare, as if they didn't really want her to be here, as if they would have preferred it to be somebody else. Rosa by comparison seemed triumphant, glowing. Lucia remembered how Rosa had said she had had to fight to ensure Lucia's acceptance as a new mamma. Perhaps these two women had fought for other candidates. Lucia knew nothing of these battles. But she was still fragile from her ostracism, and she quailed from their glares; she didn't want anybody to dislike her.

  And finally, two very old-looking ladies sat in wheelchairs. They were swathed in silvery high-tech heat-retaining blankets that looked very modern and out of place here. They were matres, mamme-nonne — perhaps even older than Maria Ludovica. Their eyes were like bits of granite, sparkling in the lamplight as they stared at Lucia.

  Rosa walked toward her, smiling. She was holding three little statues; they were the tiny, crudely carved figures from the alcove. "Lucia, welcome to your new life."

  She turned away and began to talk softly in an unfamiliar language — it was Latin, Lucia realized after a time. Occasionally the mamme-nonne mumbled responses. Their voices were as dry as dead leaves.

  Rosa beckoned Pina forward. Pina produced a small, folded white towel. She unfolded this, to reveal a scrap of linen, stained brown.

  Lucia recoiled.

  Rosa said, "A little of your first bleeding. You tried to destroy it all, didn't you? It took poor Pina a long time to find it. Well, now we can finish the job..."

  Rosetta carried over a lamp. It was just a wick floating in a pot of oil, small enough to hold in cupped hands. Rosa fed the bit of cloth to the lamp's flame. It scorched, curled up, and vanished.

  All through this the matres were chanting bits of Latin — the same phrases, it seemed, over and over.

&nb
sp; Lucia whispered to Pina, "I don't understand what they are saying."

  "That your blood is precious," Pina whispered back. "And they are saying, Sisters matter more than daughters. Sisters matter more than daughters..."

  "It's just like kindergarten," Lucia whispered, trying to make her voice light.

  Pina forced a smile. But her eyes were wide, scared.

  "Now," Rosa said, "it's time." She looked past Lucia's shoulder.

  Giuliano stood on the stage, beside the couch. He was wearing a shift like Lucia's, and he was barefoot. He was looking at her with an intensity that burned through his smile. And an erection pushed out the front of his smock.

  Rosa and Pina took her hands and led her toward the couch on the stage. The others were watching, wide-eyed Rosetta, the matres with their eyes like hawks. They chanted Latin, and Pina softly translated: "Your blood is the blood of the Order itself. It must not be mixed with water. I think that means, diluted by the blood of an outsider, a contadino. Your blood is precious..."

  It was like a dream — the rhythmic chanting, the uncertain light, the ancient, rounded walls of the theater — everything was unreal save the prickle of cold on her arms. Yet she submitted, as she had at each step.

  On the stage, Rosa bade her lift her arms. With a swift motion Pina and Rosa peeled her shift up and over her body. She was left truly naked now, and the little warmth that the cloth had given her was gone.

  When she met Giuliano's eyes, she thought she saw uncertainty. She wondered what he was thinking, how he was truly feeling. But then his gaze strayed to her neck, her breasts, and she was alone again.

  Submitting to Rosa's gentle prompting, she lay down on the couch. It was covered by a thin mattress and a rich crimson cloth, but the couch felt hard under her back, and the cloth prickled her skin.

  "Lift up your arms," Rosa whispered. "Welcome him."

  Lucia did as she was told.

  She was looking up at the ceiling, grimed by centuries of smoke, through the frame of her white arms, her limp fingers. In this frame appeared Giuliano. She felt his hands on her thighs. She opened her legs. He lifted up his shift, and placed his arms to either side of her body, to support his weight. His face descended toward hers like a falling moon. She folded her arms over his back; she felt a mat of thick hair there.

  Unbidden, a memory of Daniel's face floated into her mind.

  "This is the end of my life," she whispered to Giuliano.

  He frowned. "We mustn't talk."

  "The end of all choices — "

  "I will be gentle." He leaned down and kissed her on the lips. She smelled garlic and fish on his hot breath.

  She still had Daniel's business card, hidden in a corner of her bag.

  When Giuliano entered her it hurt, terribly.

  • • •

  Once the ceremony was over, Rosa told Lucia that she would never see Giuliano Andreoli again. Love, it seemed, was over for her.

  And it was only a few days after the ceremony that she found out she was pregnant.

  Chapter 30

  In the morning of every seventh day, the Order's governing Council would meet in the Crypt's peristylium. Such meetings dated back to the difficult times after the Vandal incursion, already fifteen years ago, when the seniors, Julia, Helena, and Regina, had gathered with selected others to thrash out the priorities for the week.

  Regina, now sixty-five years old and, since her mother's death, the most senior survivor of the Order's founding days, had deliberately developed a habit of being late for these meetings. This morning, instead of making for the peristylium, she began her day with a walk to the Crypt's farthest reaches, where the tunnels were steadily being extended into the soft tufa rock.

  These days the Order employed experienced miners for this work. They used socketed picks and axes, and carried out rubble in framed leather sacks. To crack harder rock faces they would set fires; water would be thrown on the heated rock, and the sudden cooling would shatter the face. All this used a lot of wood, and more wood was required for lumber to prop up the shafts they dug; there were generally more lumbermen at work, in fact, than miners.

  The miners were working under much the same conditions as in mines of coal and metal ore across Europe. Their working lives in these dark, sulfurous, smoke-choked conditions were short — not that that mattered, as most were slaves. But here, of course, their legacy would not be what they extracted from the ground but the holes they left behind.

  When the miners had roughly shaped out the new chambers and corridors, engineers followed to line and reinforce the walls with concrete, which they would later face with brick. The concrete was made from an aggregate of stone and tile set in mortar made with water, lime, and a particular volcanic sand called pozzolana. Making concrete like this took a toll on the slave labor used to ram it in place. But the use of that labor made it immensely durable.

  The work was going ahead satisfactorily. After a curt talk with the foremen, Regina made her way back to the core of the Crypt, and, reluctantly, the Council meeting.

  • • •

  When she arrived, the meeting was well in progress — as it ought to have been, for Regina would fly into a fury if the sessions were held up for her absence.

  Leda, Regina's half sister, was in the chair. Leda at sixty was a thickset, competent-looking woman. Brica was here, heavily pregnant once again, with her first daughter Agrippina at her side. Brica looked tired, her face drawn, and Agrippina held her hand in silent support.

  The business in progress was a matter of reallocation. Leda said, "Three days ago the air in domain seven was notably foul, but when we moved cohort thirteen up from the second level, we discovered that the cold there became uncomfortable. I suggest we restore thirteen to the second and reallocate fifteen to the first..."

  It was complicated but routine business, and Regina was happy to sit back and allow the discussion to continue. She noted approvingly that Aemilia, daughter of Leda and now fifteen years old, was painstakingly recording the meeting's deliberations on a series of wax tablets. Regina had always insisted on good record keeping. Records were the Order's memory, she said, and she who forgets her past is doomed to a short future.

  And on the specific issue of quarters allocation — or "huddling," as some of the younger members called it — analysis of several years' allocation records, and the movement of the air through the corridors in response to the shifting of warm human bodies, had yielded some valuable lessons in the endless quest to keep the Crypt's air fresh.

  Of course this place was not really a peristylium, for it was buried deep underground. But in a moment of fancy on Regina's part the plastered walls had been painted with vines and flowers, and the little chamber had been equipped with marble paving stones, trellises, and stone benches and low tables, just like a real garden. There was even a flower bed here, of sorts, in a stone tray; but all that grew were mushrooms, prettily arranged, buttons and folds and parasols of gray, brown, and black. Regina was fond of the place. Something about it reminded her of the ruined bathhouse in Julia's villa, where she had once discovered a secret garden of wildflowers. There was even a small, somewhat amateurish mosaic pavement, inset with the symbol some of the younger members of the Order had taken to favoring: two fish, like the old Christian symbol, but face to face, mouth to mouth, like sisters sharing a secret.

  As the Council members talked on, two young girls were washing down the walls, a regular chore necessary throughout the Crypt to keep the walls and ceilings from blackening with soot and lichen.

  All the women at the meeting wore simple tunics and dresses with a woven-in purple stripe: all the same design. There were no uniforms here, no status; this was not the army, or the Senate, and Regina had always been determined to keep it that way. She had even resisted attempts to formalize the religious aspects of the Order's life. There would be no hierarchy of clergy here, no pontifices, for that was just another way for power to accumulate in the hands of the few. The
Order itself was more significant than any individual.

  Even, as she reminded herself every day, Regina.

  She returned her attention to the meeting, which had moved on.

  Agrippina read from a tablet in her clear voice. "...This correspondent is called Ambrosius Aurelianus," she said. "He claims to be a general on the staff of Artorius, the riothamus of Britain." She looked expectantly at Regina.

  Regina said, "I remember him." Ambrosius the bright boy, fierce and strong and handsome, willing to give his life for the dreams of the riothamus — a man in his forties now, she supposed, and yet still, it seemed, willing to follow the old dream. She was a little surprised to hear that Artorius was still alive, still battling on foreign fields.

  The Council had fallen silent. They were looking at her.

  "What? What did you say?"

  "This Aurelianus is coming to Rome," Agrippina repeated patiently. "He wants to meet you, Grandmother. He has sent this note—"

  "No doubt after money to waste on soldiering," Regina growled.

  "It would do no harm for you to meet him," Leda suggested. "As you always tell us, you never know what might come of it."

  "Yes, yes. Don't nag me, Leda. All right, I'll meet him. Next?"

  Next, Messalina got carefully to her feet. Daughter of the long-dead Helena, she was about the same age as Regina, but time had not been kind; she was plagued with arthritis. She said, "I have decided I should stand down from the Council." She spent some time apologizing for this, blaming her health, and emphasizing what an honor it was to have served. "I suggest that Livia take my place." It had become the custom for outgoing Council members to nominate their successors. Livia was her sister, another cousin of Regina's. "Livia is five years younger than I am, and her health has remained strong, and—"