Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  As it turned out, however, for Aetius it was all going to end much sooner than that. And far from everything returning to normal, Regina would have to suffer another great disruption.

  * * *

  After her humiliation before the soldiers, Regina fled to Cartumandua.

  Carta was cooking a haunch of pork wrapped in straw. She had hung a big iron cauldron from a tripod and was using tongs to load in fire-hot rocks from the hearth; they sizzled as they hit the water. Her house was a wooden shack, built in the rectangular Roman way. The “kitchen” was just a space around a hearth built in a stone-lined pit, around which you would squat on the ground.

  When Regina came bursting in, weeping, Carta dropped the tongs and ran to meet her.

  “Carta, oh Carta, it was awful!”

  Carta held Regina’s face to her none-too-clean woolen smock, and let her weep. “Hush, hush, child.” She stroked Regina’s hair as she had when Regina was a pampered child of the villa, and Cartumandua a young girl slave.

  Carta herself was still only twenty. Aetius had long made her a freedwoman, and allowed her to seek out her own destiny in this little below-the-Wall community, but she still had room in her life for Regina.

  When Regina had calmed down enough to show her the blood, Carta clucked disapprovingly. “And nobody told you about this? Certainly not that old fool Aetius, I’ll bet.”

  Regina gazed in renewed horror at the dried blood. “Carta — I’m afraid I’m dying. There must be something terribly wrong.”

  “No. There’s nothing wrong — nothing save that you’re twelve years old.” And Carta patiently explained to her what had happened to her body, and helped her clean herself, and showed her how to pad herself with a loincloth tied with cords.

  In the middle of this Severus came in, carrying a bundle of firewood. He was a soldier, a heavyset man, his stubble grimed with dirt. He glared at Regina. She had never seen him performing strictly military duties. He only ever worked around the little village, carrying food, repairing buildings, even working in the fields where oats were grown and cattle fed. In the shadow of the Wall the lines between the soldiers and the rest of the population had gotten very blurred, especially since marriage between the locals and the soldiers had been made legal.

  Regina didn’t like Severus. She had always hoped that Carta would take up with Macco, the stolid, silent slave who had accompanied them from the villa. But one night Macco had slipped away, apparently gone to seek his freedom in the countryside beyond the Emperor’s laws. For Severus’s part he seemed somehow jealous of Regina’s relationship with Carta, which long predated his own attachment. Regina wasn’t even sure what Severus’s relationship with Carta was. They certainly weren’t married. Regina thought he gave her some measure of protection, in return for companionship. It wasn’t an uncommon arrangement.

  But Carta was in control. Now she just waited until he dropped the wood and went away.

  Carta made them both some nettle tea, and they sat on mats on the ground. Regina tried to describe how the soldiers had taunted her — now she was no longer afraid of dying, that seemed worst of all — and Carta comforted her, but told her such attention was something she was going to have to get used to. Slowly Regina calmed down.

  Regina glanced around at the smoke-stained walls. The hut was wattle and daub, just mud and straw stuffed into the gaps in a wooden frame.

  Carta said, “What are you thinking now?”

  Regina smiled. “About my mother’s kitchen. It was so different. I think I remember a big oven with a dome on it.”

  Carta nodded. “That’s right. You could put charcoal in it and seal it up. It made perfect bread — that wonderful dry heat. And then there was a raised hearth.”

  “I could never see over the top of that. I wonder if it’s still there.”

  “Yes,” Carta said firmly. “I’m sure of it. You know your grandfather put the villa in the hands of a steward.”

  “But in these times you can’t be sure of anything,” said Regina.

  Carta giggled girlishly. “Oh, my. You sound like an old woman! You can trust your grandfather to look after your family’s property. He’s a good man, and family is everything to him. You are everything … Won’t he be worried about you? Maybe I should send a message—”

  Regina shrugged. “Let him worry. He should have told me about the bleeding.”

  Carta snorted. “I think he’d rather face a thousand blue-faced Picts than that.”

  “Anyway he saw which way I came. If he’s worried he’ll come after me.”

  Carta sipped her tea. “He doesn’t often come here, to the shadow of the Wall.”

  “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t fit. For one thing he’s older than anybody here.”

  “What? That can’t be true.”

  “Think about it,” Carta said, eyeing her. “You know a good few people here. You’re popular here, as you are everywhere! How many men over forty do you know? How many women over thirty-five?”

  None, Regina thought, shocked — even though, she was sure, much older people had been commonplace in her parents’ circle of friends, with wrinkles and white hair, the badges of age.

  “Why is it like this?”

  Carta laughed. “Because we don’t live in villas. We don’t have servants and slaves to clean our teeth. We have to work hard, all the time. It’s the way it is, little Regina. Only the rich grow old.”

  Regina frowned. Even now, she resented being spoken to like that by a slave — even a former slave — even Carta. “There was no shame in the way we lived,” she said hotly. “Our family was civilized, in the Roman way.”

  To her surprise Cartumandua gazed at Regina coldly. She said, “ ‘The allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naпvetй the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.’ “

  “What’s that?”

  “Tacitus. You’re not the only one who’s learning to read, Regina.” She got up and walked to her cauldron, and poked at the haunch of meat with a long iron skewer.

  * * *

  It was evening, a few days after Regina’s humiliation on the Wall. By flickering candlelight, she was reading, in halting Latin, from the historian Tacitus. “ ‘Good fortune and discipline have gone hand in hand over the last eight hundred years to build the Roman state, which destroyed will bring down all together …’ “ She had asked for Tacitus after Carta’s mild reprimand. This was a speech said to have been given three centuries earlier to rebelling tribes in Gaul by Petillius Cerialis, soon to be governor of Britain.

  She was in Aetius’s chalet, one of a row in this little community in the lee of the Wall. It wasn’t grand, just a hut of four rooms built of wattle and daub to the rectangular Roman plan. But it had a tiled floor and a deep hearth, and was cozy and warm. It had been erected when long-stay soldiers had first been allowed to marry and raise families. It was here, during an earlier tour of duty with the border troops, that Aetius had brought his bride Brica, and here that Julia, Regina’s mother, had been born.

  Its centerpiece was the lararium, the family shrine that Aetius and Regina had built together after their flight from the villa. The three crudely carved matres in their hooded cloaks sat at the center of a little circle of gifts of wine and food. But this was a soldier’s shrine, and there were also tokens to such abstract entities as Roma, Victoria, and Disciplina, as well as a coin bearing the head of the latest Emperor anybody had heard of, Honorius.

  And it was in his chalet that, at Aetius’s insistence, Regina had continued her education. He expected her to become fluent in both her native language and in Latin — and to know the difference; Aetius despised what he called the “muddle,” the patois of Latin-flavored British much favored by the ordinary people of the behind-the-Wall community. He had her read Tacitus and Caesar, historians and emperors and playwrights, from his store of fragile, ancient papyrus scrolls. She learned to write with
styli on tablets of wax on wood, and with ink made of soot and a pen of metal. Later, he promised, he would train her in the art of rhetoric. But he believed in combining the best of the British and Roman traditions, and he also had her memorize long sagas of heroes and monsters in the old British style.

  “ ‘At present, victor and vanquished enjoy peace and the imperial civilization under the same law on an equal footing. Let your experience of the alternatives prevent you from preferring the ruin that will follow on revolt to the safety that is conferred by obedience …’ “

  There was some disturbance outside. Shouting, what sounded like singing. No doubt the soldiers were getting drunk again. But Aetius didn’t react, and Regina knew she was safe with him.

  Aetius sat in his favorite basket chair, sipping beer. “Yes, yes … the same law on an equal footing. The law is above all of us — the landowners, the senators, even the Emperor himself, whoever that is right now. That is the genius of the old system, you see. It doesn’t matter who is in charge. It is the system itself that has spread so far and sustained itself, even though we have had soldiers and administrators and even emperors chosen from among those who would once have been called barbarians. The system persists, while we come and go.”

  Standing there, holding the fragile papyrus in her hand, she said, “Like an anthill. The Empire is like an anthill, and we are all just ants, running around.”

  He slammed his wooden tankard down on the arm of his chair. “Ants? Ants? What are you talking about, girl?”

  “But an anthill organizes itself without anybody telling it what to do. And even when one ant dies another takes her place — even the queen. That’s what the Greeks say, and they studied such things. Isn’t your Empire just like that?”

  “Rome is not an anthill, you foolish child! …”

  So they argued on, both aware of and enjoying their roles, she mischievously provoking, he spluttering and snapping —

  The door was thrown open with a crash.

  In the doorway, framed by darkness, stood a soldier. He staggered into the room, visibly drunk. When he saw Regina he grinned.

  Aetius seemed as shocked as Regina. But he took a step forward. “Septimius,” he said, his voice like thunder. “You’re drunk. And you should be on watch.”

  Septimius just laughed, a single bark. “Nobody’s on watch, you old fool. What does it matter? I haven’t been paid. You haven’t been paid. Nobody cares anymore.” He took a lurching step into the room. He was still staring at Regina, and she could smell the drink on his breath. He was, she remembered, the soldier who had exposed himself to her when she bled on the Wall.

  She backed away, but she found herself pressed against the table and, in the confines of this little chalet, couldn’t retreat any farther.

  Aetius took a measured step forward. “Septimius, get out of here before you make things much worse for yourself.”

  “I don’t think I will be taking any more floggings from you, old man.” He turned to Regina. “You know what I want, don’t you, miss? You’re just ripe for the plucking—” He reached for her. Regina flinched away, but Septimius grabbed her small breast and pinched it hard.

  Aetius barreled into him, shoulder-first. Septimius was slammed against a wall, and the whole chalet shook with the impact. Aetius staggered upright. “You keep away from her, you piece of filth—” He hurled his fist, his mighty fist like a boulder.

  But Septimius, drunk as he was, ducked underneath the punch. And as he rose, Regina saw a flash of steel.

  “Grandfather — no !”

  She actually heard the blade go in. It rasped on the coarse wool of Aetius’s tunic. Aetius stood, staring at Septimius. Then dark blood gushed from his mouth. He shuddered and fell back, rigid, to the floor.

  Septimius’s mouth dropped open, as if he were aware for the first time of where he was, what he had done. He turned and ran into the night. Aetius lay on the floor, breathing in great liquid gurgles.

  There was blood on the floor, blood pooling as it once had from her father’s body. Regina forced herself to move. She ran to Aetius, and lifted his heavy head onto her lap. “Grandfather! Can you hear me? Oh, Grandfather!”

  He tried to speak, coughed, and brought up a great gout of dark blood. “I’m sorry, little one. So sorry.”

  “No—”

  “Fool. Been a fool, fooling myself. It’s over. The Wall. They’ll leave now, the last of them. No pay, you see, no pay. Cilurnum fell, you know. You saw the fire on the horizon. Cilurnum gone …” He coughed again. “Go with Carta.”

  “Cartumandua—”

  “Go with her. Her people. No place for you here. Tell her I said …”

  She asked the question that had burned in her young heart for five years. If he died, he could never answer it, she might never know. “Grandfather — where is my mother ?”

  “Rome,” he gasped. “Her sister is there, Helena. So weak, that one. Wouldn’t even wait for you …” He grabbed her shoulder. His palm was slick with blood. “Forget her. Julia doesn’t matter. You’re the family now. Take the matres.”

  “No! I won’t go. I won’t leave you.”

  He thrashed in his spreading pool of blood, and more crimson fluid gushed from the ripped wound in his chest. “Take them …”

  She reached out and grabbed the little statues from their shelf in the lararium. At last he seemed to relax. She thought he wanted to say more, but his voice was a gurgle and she could make out no words.

  Suddenly something broke in her. She pushed away his head, letting it fall to the floor, and ran to the broken doorway, clutching the statues. She looked back once. His eyes were still open, looking at her. She fled into the night.

  Chapter 8

  Somewhat to my surprise, the head of Saint Bridget’s, the school Gina had attended, was welcoming, initially anyhow. She listened to my tale of the photograph, though she was obviously skeptical about my story of a missing sister.

  She had me sit in her office, on an armchair before her big polished desk. Ms. Gisborne was a slim, elegant woman of maybe fifty-five, with severely cut silver-gray hair. Over a business suit she wore a black academic gown lined with blue — the school colors, as I vaguely remembered from my sister’s day. The office was well appointed, with a lush blue carpet, ornate plasterwork around the ceiling, a trophy cabinet, a large painting of the school on the wall opposite big windows, lots of expensive-looking desk furniture. It had the feel of a corporate boardroom; perhaps this sanctum was used to impress prospective parents and the local sponsors that seem essential to the running of any school these days. But an immense and disturbingly detailed Crucified Christ hung from one wall.

  My chair, comically, was too low. I sat there sunk in the thing with my knees halfway up my chest, while the head loomed over me.

  She didn’t remember Gina — in fact, Ms. Gisborne was actually about the same age as my older sister — but she had taken the trouble to find some of her reports. “She came over well: a bright, pretty girl, natural leader …” The kind of thing people had always said of Gina. But she held out little hope of tracing any record of any younger sister, and clearly thought it odd that I should even be asking. “There was a preschool department here in those days — for the under-fives, you understand — but it has long since closed down. The school’s gone through a lot of changes since then. I’ll see if Milly can find the records, but I’m not optimistic. It’s all so long ago — no offense!”

  “None taken.”

  While we were waiting for the secretary to go down into the dungeons, Ms. Gisborne offered me the choice of a coffee, or a quick tour of the school. I felt restless, embarrassed, foolish, and I knew I would quickly run out of conversation with the headmistress of a Catholic school. I chose the tour. I had a little trouble hauling my bulk out of the tiny chair.

  Out we walked.

  The school was a place of layered history. A frame of two-story Victorian-era buildings enclosed a small grassy quadrangle. “We e
ncourage the students to play croquet in the summer,” said Ms. Gisborne lightly. “Impresses the Oxbridge interviewers.” The corridors were narrow, the floor hardwood with dirt deeply ground in. There were immense, heroic radiators; huge heating pipes ran beneath the ceiling. We walked past classrooms. Behind thick windows rows of students, some in blue blazers, labored at unidentifiable tasks.

  “It all reminds me of my own school,” I said uncomfortably.

  “I know how you feel; many parents of your generation feel the same. Narrow corridors. Oppressive ceilings.” She sighed. “Doesn’t create the right atmosphere, but not much we can do short of pulling it all down.”

  We passed out of the central block. The peripheral buildings were newer, dating from the fifties through to more recent times. I was shown a custom-built library constructed in the eighties, a bright and attractive building within which there seemed to be as many computer terminals as bookshelves. The students worked steadily enough, so far as I could see, though no doubt the presence of the head was an encouragement.

  Ms. Gisborne kept up a kind of sales patter. Once the school had been run by a teaching order of nuns. During the comprehensivization of Britain’s schools they had left, or been driven out, depending on your point of view. “Although we still have contacts with them,” Ms. Gisborne said. “And with a number of other Catholic groupings. Since Gina’s time, as I said, we have closed down our preschool section, and merged administratively with a large boys’ school half a mile away. We now provide what would have been called sixth-form support in your day — sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Our academic record is good, and …”

  I suspected she was as bored with me as I was of her, and that half her mind was elsewhere, engaged with the endless, complex task of running the place.