Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “Yes,” said Carausias urgently. “There are many things we need—”

  “What I need is some wheat beer,” said Severus. “I’ve had enough of this for one night.”

  Carausias called, “You can’t be so selfish, man!”

  But Carta only said, “Come back alive.”

  When he had gone, the others stood over the carcass. Blood slowly leaked out of its throat and into the mud.

  Carausias whispered, as if he might wake the deer, “What do we do?”

  At length Regina sighed. “I used to watch the butchers at the villa. We need rope …”

  They dug through the garbage in the buildings until Marina found a mouse-chewed length of rope. To Regina’s horror the deer’s flesh was warm and soft; she had never touched anything so recently dead. But she got the rope tied around the deer’s remaining hind leg. She slung the rope over the branch of a tree. With the three of them hauling, they managed to drag the carcass into the branches.

  The deer dangled like a huge, gruesome fruit. Blood, and darker fluids, flowed sluggishly from its neck and pooled on the ground.

  Carta watched dubiously. “We should collect that blood.”

  “Why?”

  “You can cook it — mix it with herbs — stuff the intestines with it. I’ve seen it done. We shouldn’t waste anything.”

  Regina felt her gorge rise. But she said, “We don’t have a bowl to catch it. Next time.”

  “Yes.”

  Regina stepped forward with Carausias’s knife. Calling on grisly memories from childhood, she reached up, plunged the knife into the deer’s skin under its belly, and with all her strength hauled the blade down the length of the carcass. Intestines slipped out, tangles of dark rope. She flinched back, trembling. Her tunic and flesh were splashed with dark blood, and her hands were already crimson to the wrists. She stepped behind the carcass and began to tug at the flaps of skin. “Help me,” she said. “After this we should cut off the other legs.”

  Carausias built a fire in the ruins of the roundhouse. The wood they gathered was young and damp with dew, and they had trouble getting it burning. But when it was fully alight, and bits of the meat were cooking on an improvised spit, they huddled together around the light and warmth. The meat was tough, lean, almost impossible to bite into, and its bloody, smoky stink was repellent. But Regina was always aware of the speck of life inside her, and so she forced the meat into her mouth, and chewed it until it was soft, and swallowed it down.

  “We are like savages,” Carausias said. “Barbarians. This is no way to live.”

  “But barbarians have their arts,” Carta said. “Your butchery, Regina—”

  “I was clumsy.”

  “You will do better. There are older skills we must try to recall. For instance, we should keep the hide, cure it if we can. And preserve the meat. We have been lucky, but we are not hunters; it may be a while before we have another windfall like this one. We could smoke it, dry it in the sun, perhaps pack it in salt …”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But we will learn. And in future we should save the fat, too. Perhaps we could make tallow — candles—”

  Carausias placed a hand on her shoulder. “Enough for tonight, niece.”

  When the eating was done, Regina shrank into the deepest shade of the roundhouse roof she could find. With a corner of her cloak she tried to wipe the animal blood from her hands and face. Soon her skin was sore, and the cloth was starting to shred, but still the blood wouldn’t come off her skin.

  Carausias came to her in the dark. He sat beside her and rested his hands on hers, stopping her obsessive scrubbing. “In the morning we will find water,” he said. “And then we will all get clean.”

  “I don’t want this,” Regina hissed. “I don’t want to live like a, like a dog. Carta is so strong.”

  “Yes. And that makes it worse, doesn’t it? Because by accepting it, she makes it real. But you are strong, too, Regina. The way you handled the deer—”

  “I don’t want to be strong. Not like this.” She looked up at his kindly face, blood-streaked and obscure in the dark. “Things will get back to normal, won’t they, Carausias?”

  He shrugged. “Even now, Rome spans a continent, a thousand-year-old imperium just a day’s sailing away, over the ocean. This has been a dreadful interval for us all. But why should we believe we live in special times, the end times? How arrogant of us, how foolish.”

  “Yes. But in the meantime—”

  “It will surely only be a few weeks before we see the post messengers clattering along the roads again. Until then, we must just get by.”

  “Just a few weeks. Yes.”

  * * *

  The deer fed them for the first few days. They were able to supplement the meat with late-blooming berries. For water they had to trek several times a day to the marsh at the bottom of the hill; they carried the water home in a wooden bucket salvaged from the ruins of the farm.

  But the first rains nearly doused their fire, and turned the floor of the roundhouse into a quagmire. Despite his attempts at bravery Carausias wept that night, bedraggled, cold, humiliated at how far he had let his family fall.

  They had to repair the roof, Regina realized.

  Severus said he could handle this. He clambered onto the roof, hauling branches of oak and hazel over the gaping hole. Regina felt optimistic: surely such a crude structure as this required only the crudest repairs. But when Severus shifted his weight unwisely, his heaping gave way, and he fell to the muddy floor in a shower of snapped branches. He got to his feet and kicked at the mess, swearing oaths to the gods of the Christians, the British, and the Romans, and stalked off in a sulk.

  So Regina decided she would have to do it.

  She walked around the little house, studying the roof’s structure. Its conical shape was built on several main rafters that had been leaned together and then tied off at the top to a central pole. There was more complicated woodwork, the remains of a ring beam and crisscross rafters. But the main problem was that two or three of the big rafters had gone.

  None of Severus’s hasty gatherings would serve as new rafters, and they had no ax. But in the forest on the upper reaches of the hillside they were able to find long, fallen branches. It took Carausias, Regina, and Carta together to drag the branches down the hill. Then, together, they pushed their improvised rafters into place. Marina, reluctant but the lightest, was sent to climb up the thatch to the hut’s apex, where she tied the new rafters to the old. The complicated cross structure was beyond Regina for now. But she did have Marina tie light hazel branches to her new rafters, and they began expeditions to the marsh to pile up river reeds as thatch, great layers of it.

  It was crude, ugly, but it worked.

  Once the roof was waterproof things got better quickly. There were still whole dynasties of mice inhabiting the old thatch, but a few days of intensive smoking saw to that. The ruined roof had allowed the rain to attack the wattle-and-daub walls, but their basic structure of thin, interwoven hazel branches was still sound. Regina and Carta plugged the holes in the walls with mud and straw, pushing the stuff in from either side and smoothing it off with their fingers.

  When at last they shut out the last of the daylight, they had a small celebration. They sat in a circle around their fire, with smoke curling out through the chimney hole in their new roof, and their deer-fat candles burned smokily. They ate the last of the deer’s liver, cooked with wild garlic Marina had found growing behind the huts. They felt they had done well; it was still only a few days since they had gotten here.

  It was then that Regina felt ready to unwrap her precious matres from the length of cloth in which they had been carried. She set them in a crude alcove, to watch over the heap of dried reeds on which she now slept.

  * * *

  Next time they caught a deer, in a simple trap Severus had set, they were more efficient in using it. They kept the hide intact to cover the roundhouse floor, and ev
en boiled the bones to extract the marrow.

  Most of their food came from traps — mostly smaller game, especially hares. But they established a tentative trading relationship with the farm Severus had found beyond the ridge. The farmer, a tall, ferociously bearded, suspicious man called Exsuperius, was prepared to exchange their meat for winter vegetables like cabbage, and even clothing, worn-out tunics, cloaks, and blankets. The clothing, old and lice-ridden as it might be, was hugely welcome. Regina began to experiment with ways to wash their clothes in the river — wood ash, being slightly caustic, made a good cleansing agent.

  But no matter how Carausias or Carta pleaded, Exsuperius would spare them no pottery, no footwear, and no tools — no saws or hammers or knives — no iron at all, in fact, not so much as a nail for their shoes.

  Severus did his share, if grudgingly. As the strongest of them by far he would haul the heaviest loads, and he experimented with bigger traps and slingshots to bring down more game. But he was unreliable and short-tempered. He would barely speak to the rest of them, and he even seemed to neglect Carta.

  Regina felt she would never understand Carta’s relationship with Severus. They never seemed happy together — there had never been any hint that Carta wished to have a child with Severus — and yet their relationship, now years old, somehow endured. It was as if neither of them hoped for anything better from life.

  When she learned that Severus had kept trying to trade meat for beer from Exsuperius, Regina understood that he could not be depended on.

  The days turned to weeks, and then to months. They watched every day for soldiers or post carriers to come along the road. But things did not get back to normal.

  Little by little they made themselves comfortable. But every day she had to figure out something new: the business of survival was remarkably complicated. And life was relentlessly hard, every hour from dawn to dusk filled with hard physical labor. The frosts of winter came, and life grew harder yet.

  Still, even though the new life in her belly grew relentlessly, Regina felt herself becoming stronger, the skin of her hands and feet and face hardening, the muscles in her legs and shoulders thickening. She ate ravenously, to feed her unborn baby and to keep out the cold. But she did not fall ill. Carausias suffered a good deal, though; his joints and back, already frail, never recovered from the long walk from Verulamium, and though he gamely tried to keep up his share of the work, his weakness was obvious.

  And it was, to Regina’s horror, Cartumandua who became the most seriously ill of all.

  It started with a pain in her belly. It persisted no matter what she ate, and even when she didn’t eat at all. When Regina touched Carta’s belly she found a hard lump, below her rib cage, almost like another, malevolent child.

  None of them had any idea what could be ailing Carta. There was, of course, no doctor to call on. Regina even tried begging medicines from the bearded farmer. Exsuperius offered nothing save advice about letting Carta chew on willow bark. When Carta tried that she found the gathering pain would, if only briefly, be lessened. But gradually, day by day, Carta grew weaker and more sallow, and Regina felt a growing dread.

  * * *

  When the days were shortest, much of the marshy land froze. The daily chore of fetching water could never be skipped, but they had to walk farther to find a place where the water wasn’t frozen, or where the ice was thin enough to break. The water walks came to dominate their lives, the first thing Regina woke up thinking about each morning.

  On one particularly bleak, gray midwinter morning, she and Marina made the first walk down to the marsh. They had dug a cesspit here. Regina squatted over the hole in the ground, her dress lifted up to expose her backside to the raw cold.

  Suddenly she imagined how her younger self might have felt if she could have seen her crouching in this muddy pond. In her mother’s villa there had been a latrine close to the kitchen, so water from the kitchen could be used to flush. There were sponge sticks and vials of perfumed water to keep yourself clean, and the little room was always rich with cooking smells. And now, this. She had come to this pass step by step — and every step downward — she had been so busy staying alive that she had forgotten how far from home she had come.

  But you had to shit. She squatted, strained, and finished her business as quickly as she could, cleaning herself with a handful of grass.

  Today was misty but not as ferociously cold as it had been, and the marsh might be unfrozen at the center. So, carefully, she walked down to its rough shore and picked her way over frozen mud and puddles of sheer ice. She came to a patch of open, slushy water, where dead reeds, brown and lank, floated like hair. She bent and reached into the ice-cold water to pull the reeds aside. But she felt a sharp pain.

  She pulled back her arm. Her palm had been gashed, and bright red blood, the brightest color in a landscape of gray and green-brown, dripped down her arm, mingling with the water that clung to her skin.

  Marina came to her nervously. “What is it?”

  “I think I’ve been bitten. Perhaps a pike—”

  Marina inspected her hand. “That looks like no bite to me. You need to wash that off …”

  “Yes.” Regina bent to peer into the water. Through the layer of reeds she could see no fish. But she did make out a bright gleam, like a coin in a well. More cautiously, with her good hand, she reached down and explored. It was hard to judge the depth of the murky water. She quickly found something hard and flat — a blade. Carefully she took hold of it between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it out.

  It was a knife. Its iron blade was heavily rusted, but its hilt, of bright yellow metal engraved with swooping circular designs, seemed unmarked. “I think this is gold,” she said, wondering.

  Marina was unimpressed. “Old Exsuperius would probably give you a bag of beans for the iron, nothing for the gold,” she said, businesslike.

  “I wonder how it got here.”

  “An offering,” said Marina unexpectedly. “To the river. When you die — you give it your armor, your weapons, your treasure. It’s what they always did, away from the towns. Like they did before … We probably pulled it up when we tugged on the reeds.”

  A dead man’s hoard. It was an eerie thought, and Regina glanced around uneasily at the mist-laden, murky landscape.

  In many parts of the countryside the touch of Roman rule had always been light. As long as folk kept the peace and paid their taxes, the Emperor had never very much cared what they got up to in their private lives. Perhaps a community in this remote farmstead had kept up the rituals of their distant forebears, and thrown their personal goods into the marsh as propitiations to the goddesses of the water and the earth. The rational corner of her mind wondered if it might have been better for these vanished warriors to hold on to their weapons, to keep their money and spend it on trade or defenses, rather than hurl it into this marsh so extravagantly. Then they might have resisted the Romans better.

  Probably there were bodies here, too, hurled into the water. They would be the dead, not of her time, but of the strange times of the deeper past, before the legionaries and census keepers and tax collectors: not her dead, but the dead of other, alien folk, whose spirits might, somehow, still linger in the mists of this ancient, endlessly reworked landscape.

  She was shivering. She tucked the little weapon into her belt.

  Back at the roundhouse Carta poured urine over Regina’s hand to clean out her wound, and rubbed in honey, expensively bought from Exsuperius, to stop any infection. The next day it was brighter, and Regina’s odd superstitious fears were banished. But the brightness brought a deeper cold, and the marsh was frozen over, hiding its strange trove.

  * * *

  As winter turned to spring, Regina’s heavy belly slowed her down. But this was a community of three women, one old man, and the unreliable, lazy Severus, and there was no room for passengers.

  Still, it wasn’t so bad. One way or another they never ran short of food, even during the wo
rst of the winter. And as the days grew longer and warmer, despite the load in her belly, she felt stronger, oddly, than she ever had before.

  And it seemed that as Carta had gradually weakened, the others had come to look to Regina for leadership. So she was the first off her pallet of reeds each morning, the first to take her turns with the water fetching, the first to check the traps, always setting an example with her own efforts.

  She was poor at bending and lifting, and couldn’t climb onto the roof of the roundhouse. But she could work a foot plow. One morning she set to hauling it across one of the fields on the slope behind the farmstead. She had to dig its iron point into the soil, push it in with her foot, and then haul back on the handle, which was nearly as tall as she was, to break open the soil.

  The iron plow with its bowed wooden handle had been a precious find, left under a heap of decaying sacking by the vanished Arcadius and his workers. They had used more of their hunted meat to buy seed stock for wheat, kale, and cabbages from Exsuperius. Now the time was coming — as she dimly recalled from her memories of life in the villa — to plow and plant.

  With the foot plow, however, it was only possible to scratch a shallow groove in the ground. It was galling to remember how her father’s tenants had used ox teams to break the soil over vast areas, while she was reduced to this pitiful scraping. But Exsuperius, in one of his bits of taciturn advice, had told them to plow their fields twice, in a crisscross pattern, to break up the ground better. And she found that when she came to the second set of furrows the plow fairly slid into the already broken soil.

  By midday, her muscles had thoroughly warmed up, and the sun shed a little warmth on her face.