Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “And yet the Caesars cleared out this place, as mice are cleared from a nest.”

  He eyed her. “I have had little opportunity to study history.”

  She told him what she remembered of her grandfather’s stories: of how the Durotriges had resisted the Roman occupation long after more wealthy kingdoms had fallen or capitulated, and how the general Vespasian, destined to become Emperor himself, had had to fight his way west, dunon to dunon.

  “Dunon to dunon,” he mused. “I like that. Although one must admire the achievements of Vespasian, who won a huge victory, far from home, indeed having crossed the ocean itself …”

  “But now the Caesars have gone,” she said.

  “Yes. But we endure.”

  Only one new structure had been built on the hill in the Roman days, a small temple. It had been a neat rectangular building with a tiled roof, surrounded by a colonnaded walkway. Artorius and Regina stood and inspected what was left.

  “Now the temple is destroyed, the columns mere stumps, the tiles stolen, even the god’s statue looted,” said Artorius. “But at least that god was here. So in successive ages this was a place of defense, and of worship. Perhaps I have selected an auspicious place for my capital.”

  She let her face reflect her scorn.

  He pursed his lips. “You mock me again. Well, you are entitled to. I have little to show, in the present. But I have past and future on my side.”

  “Past?”

  “My family were kings, based in Eburacum. When the Romans came, yes, they became clients of the Empire. They were equites.” These were the class from whom, in the early days of the Roman occupation, the town council had been elected. “My ancestors ruled their lands well, and contributed to the wealth and order of the province. I myself would have been a soldier — an officer in the cavalry, that was my destiny — but …”

  “But by the time you grew up there was no cavalry.”

  He laughed ruefully. “There was only the limitaneus left, the border army. And in some places it was so long since they had been paid they had eaten all their horses!”

  She smiled. “And the future?”

  “I have three goals, Regina. The first is to make this place safe.” He waved an arm. “Not just the dunon, but the area it will rule. Safe from the Saxons and Picts and bacaudae and whoever else might wish to harm us. I am confident I can achieve that. Next I must restore order — not for just this generation but the next, and the next. We need a civic structure, invisible, yet as strong as these walls of wood and stone.

  For example, I will tie the farmsteads to the central authority by renting them cattle. Perhaps other taxes can be levied.”

  “ The central authority. You mean yourself.”

  He shook his head. “As soon as I can I will submit myself for election as a magistrate.” He used the Latin word, duumvirs. She guffawed, but he insisted, “I am serious. I tell you I am no warlord, Regina — or if I am it will not be forever.

  “With order will come prosperity. We must make pottery — a decent kiln or two. And coins. I will start a mint. I have already begun the process of establishing an ironworks here. It is under the direction of my good friend Myrddin — you must meet him — a crusty old buffoon, but he knows the ancient wisdom that survived beyond the reach of the Romans, to the west of here. A marvelous man — so knowledgeable is he, some call him a wizard — my aim is to empty his head before he dies.”

  “And your third priority—”

  “To return the diocese of Britain, or as much of it as I command, to the Emperor. Only that way can the farthest future be assured. Even if I have to go to Gaul, I will do it.”

  “How laudable,” she said dryly. “But you have chosen to come here, to reoccupy this centuries-old fort, rather than to go back to Durnovaria, say.”

  “The town is dead. Its walls, even if restored, are feeble, its drains and water pipes clogged — and the system on which it relied has vanished. I mean the money, the flow of goods. We cannot buy metalwork from Germany or pottery from Spain anymore, Regina. We must live as our ancestors did.”

  “And so we are abandoning the Romans’ towns and villas, and are creeping back to the old ways, the earthworks of our ancestors. How strange. How — wistful. You know, ever since I was a little girl, bit by bit, I have fallen away from the light, and into the darkness of this new, bleak time, where I recognize nothing.”

  He studied her seriously, his dark eyes grave. “I do understand, you know,” he said gently. “I am no illiterate savage. I want what you want. Order, prosperity, peace. But I accept the times as they are; I accept what I must do to achieve those ends. I have told you my dreams, and my ambitions. Now tell me what you are thinking, Regina — tell me what you think of me.”

  She considered carefully. If anybody could restore order in this confused, collapsed landscape it was surely Artorius — a man full of dreams, but a man with the power and realism, it seemed, to make those dreams come true. For a moment, there on the busy plateau, it seemed to her that in this man, this Artorius, she had found a rock on which she might at last build a safe future for herself and her family — that there might come a time when she could rest.

  “I am — hopeful.” And so she was, tentatively.

  He seemed moved; apparently her good opinion really was of value to him. He grabbed her hand; his palm was dry and warm. “Work with me, Regina. I need your strength.”

  But then there was a cry from the bottom of the slope, where the men had been digging out the clogged- up defense ditches. “ Riothamus! You might want to see this, sir …”

  Artorius clambered quickly down the zigzag path to the base of the ditch.

  The men had found a jumble of bones. Many were broken, some charred. The men picked through this unwelcome trove carefully. There were many skulls — surely more than a hundred.

  When Artorius clambered out, his face had a hardness she had not seen before. In one hand he cradled the skull of a child, in the other a handful of coins, just slivers of metal, stuck together from their immersion in the soil. “You see, Regina — from the bones it’s hard to tell men from women, young from old. But you can always tell if it’s a child. And at least this one did not suffer in the fire. See the crater in the back of the skull — inflicted by a legionary’s sword hilt, perhaps …”

  “The fire?”

  “There was some kind of building down there.” He pointed. “We’ve found the stumps of posts. The people were gathered up and crammed inside, and then it was torched.”

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “Who do you imagine?” He held out his handful of coins. One of them bore the name of the Emperor Nero. “Was it not during the reign of Nero that Boudicca led her rebellion against Roman rule? It seems that reprisals were fierce.” He hefted the child’s skull. “This little warrior must truly have terrified the mighty Roman army.”

  “Artorius—”

  “Enough.” Holding the skull, he walked back down the hill and began issuing commands.

  For the rest of that day and most of the next, a large proportion of Artorius’s scarce resource was devoted to digging out a new mass grave and transporting the broken and burned bones to it. The burial was done in the style of the Celtae. Three pigs were slaughtered and their carcasses thrown on the bones, to provide sustenance for the journey to the Otherworld. For each skull a beaker or cup was placed in the grave, so that the dead could drink from the great cauldrons in the Otherworld’s banqueting halls.

  As the grave was filled in, Artorius’s iron-making genius Myrddin led prayers. He was a small, wild- eyed man with a mass of gray-black beard, and his arms were covered with puckered smelting scars. His voice was thin, his western accent heavy: “Death comes at last and lays cold hands upon me …”

  * * *

  For the rest of that year the fields around the dunon were to be prepared for sowing the following spring, and provisions like dried and salted meat were laid up for the winter.
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br />   Life continued to be harsh, with hard labor for all but the very smallest children. But Artorius had insisted they make time for such measures as the digging of proper latrines as one of the first priorities — and so they were spared the plague of fever that swept the countryside in late summer. And long before the season turned it was clear to all that they had amassed enough food to see them through the winter, even if some of it had been taken by force by Artorius’s soldiers. Regina could not deny the energy Artorius brought to his task, the great sense of loyalty and industry he instilled in others — including herself, she admitted — nor the great strides the new community had made by the autumn.

  But Artorius was changing.

  Artorius announced that from henceforth they would follow the old calendar of the Celtae, rather than that of the Romans. This was marked out by four main feasts: Imbolc at the end of the winter, when the ewes lactated for their lambs; Beltane in early summer, when the cattle would be driven between purifying fires to open grazing; Lughnasa at the start of harvesting; and Samhain in early autumn — the start of the new year for the Celtae, a time when the old gave way to the new, and the world could be overrun by the forces of magic. The next full year, beginning that Samhain, would be the first in which Artorius’s new kingdom would begin to find its feet, and Artorius announced that the Samhain would be marked by a mighty feast.

  Regina listened to all this with some disquiet. But she kept her counsel.

  Similarly she said nothing when Artorius began to abandon his old, much-repaired Roman armor and dress for a more traditional costume. He wore brightly colored braccae and cloaks, and when the weather turned colder a birrus, the hooded cloak that had always been associated with Britain. The effect was completed when he began to wear a handsome golden torc around his neck, looted by one of his officers from a Saxon raiding party. Though Regina spent much time in his company discussing practical matters, she never heard him refer back to his talk of starting a mint, or styling himself a magistrate.

  Later, when Regina thought back, it seemed to her that the incident of the mass grave had been a turning point for Artorius: after that something hard and cold and old emerged in him, slowly becoming dominant. Or perhaps it was just the ambience of the ancient place they had come to reinhabit, their return to this old place of earth and blood, as if the age of the Roman peace had been nothing but a glittering dream.

  Certainly, after that day, there had been no more talk of turning his country over to the emperors.

  But none of it mattered, she told herself, so long as she and Brica were safe. The family: that was her only priority. Every night, as she lay down to sleep in the corner of the hilltop roundhouse she shared with Brica and several other senior women, she stared at her matres, carefully preserved across all these years, the three worn little statues perhaps older than this piled-up fortress itself, and said a kind of prayer to them — not to preserve her life, for she knew that was her own responsibility — but to grant her guidance.

  * * *

  On the evening of the Samhain, it felt like autumn for the first time, Regina thought. There was a hint of frost in the air, and her head was filled with the smoky scent of dying leaves. As she prepared to enter Artorius’s hall, she lingered in the open, oddly regretful to leave the last of the daylight behind — the last of another summer, now her forty-first. But it was Artorius’s feast, and she had no time for such reflections. With a sigh she entered his great hall.

  The hall was already crowded, the torches of hay and sheep fat burned brightly on the walls, and she was bombarded by heat and light, smoke and noise.

  Though even now there was much work to be done on it, she had to admit the hall’s magnificence. The centerpiece was a hearth, a great circle of scavenged Roman stone, on which a huge fire was blazing. The fire cast light and heat around the hall’s single vast room, and filled the noisy air with smoke. From an iron tripod twice the height of a man, a cauldron had been suspended, and she could smell the rich scents of stew — pork and mutton flavored with wild garlic, from the smell of it.

  Already Artorius’s men were lining up to take their share of the meat. Artorius himself served it up, yanking joints out of the simmering broth with iron hooks. There was a constant jockeying for position among the subordinates, and there was nothing subtle about the way Artorius fished for the best cuts of meat to reward his favorites. He fumbled one serving, dropping the meat on the floor, and two of his soldiers began to fight over the honor of whom it had been intended for. The others didn’t try to separate them, but gathered around and roared them on.

  Old Carausias was beside Regina.

  She said, “What a display — grown men, squabbling over bits of meat.”

  He shook his head. “But with such contests his lieutenants are working out their status — who is closer to the sun.”

  “How savage.”

  Carausias shrugged. “It’s a shame your grandfather isn’t here. I’m sure the legionaries in their barracks behaved much the same way. Anyway it’s their night, not ours.”

  When the soldiers had had their share of the food, the other men and the women were allowed to approach the cauldron. Regina herself took only a little of the broth, and drank sparingly of her cup of wheat beer.

  When Artorius took his place on the floor at the center of a circle of his men, the storytelling began. One soldier after another got to his feet, generally unsteadily, to boast how he — or perhaps a dead comrade — had bested two or three or five savage Saxons, each taller than a normal human being and equipped with three swords apiece. They all drank steadily, at first from a communal cup carried by a servant who moved to the right around the circle, and then, as the evening got rowdier, from their own vessels. It had been a heroic labor for the little community to produce the vast vats of wheat beer that would be consumed this night.

  Then the iron maker Myrddin got to his feet and began a long and complex tale about giants who lived in magical islands across the ocean, far to the west of Britain: “There are thrice fifty distant isles / In the ocean to the west of us / Larger than Ireland twice / Is each of them, or thrice …”

  “All true, all true,” murmured Carausias. He belched, and Regina realized that he was getting as drunk as any of Artorius’s soldiers.

  As the beer continued to flow, the talk and horseplay became more raucous, and some of the soldiers and younger men started mock-fighting and wrestling. Regina sat stoically in her corner beside a dozing Carausias, wondering how much of this she could endure.

  There was a touch on her shoulder. Startled, she looked up.

  Artorius was beside her. She could smell the beer on his breath, but unlike his men he was not drunk. “You are quiet,” he said.

  “You should go back to your men.”

  He smiled, glancing back. “I don’t think they need me anymore tonight. But you … I know what you are thinking.”

  “You do?”

  “You are remembering your mother. The parties she gave, in the villa. The glittering folk who would come, the expensive preparations she would make. You’ve told me as much. And now you must put up with this.”

  “I don’t mean to judge.”

  He shook his head. “We are all prisoners of our past. But the present is all we have. Those men wrestling over their beer are as rough as sand — but they will give their lives for me, and for you. We must make the best of the times we live in, what we have, the people around us.”

  “You’re wise.”

  He laughed. “No. Just a survivor, like you.” He took her hand with an odd gentleness. “Listen to me,” he said intensely. “That old fool Myrddin is full of legends … He says I must become Dagda for these people.”

  “Dagda?”

  “The Good God — but the most humble of gods. All that you promise to do, I will do myself alone … But Dagda needs a Morrigan, his great queen. And at Samhain,” he whispered, “the time of reconciliation, the god of the tribe and the goddess of the eart
h come together, so that the opposing forces, of life and death, dark and light, good and evil, are balanced once more.”

  “What are you suggesting, Artorius? … We fight, you and I. We are in constant conflict.”

  “But life itself results from the interplay of opposing forces. That’s the point.”

  “You foolish man. I am old, and no goddess. Find yourself a younger woman.”

  “But none of them has your strength — not even your daughter, beautiful though she is. You, you are my Morrigan, my Regina, my queen.” He cupped her cheek and leaned close to her, his breath flavored with the meat and the beer, his eyes bright.

  She looked into her heart. There was no affection there, not even lust. There was only calculation: If I do this, will it increase my chances of keeping Brica alive another day? Only calculation — but that was enough.

  She stood, and let him lead her out of the hall. She looked back once to see Carausias’s eyes on her, rheumy, but a mirror of her own coldness.

  Chapter 19

  The elevator, having risen up through the nested levels of the Crypt, delivered Lucia and Rosa Poole to a small front office. Rosa nodded to the staff. They walked out to the street, emerging into thin November sunlight. They both squinted at the brightness. Rosa donned small fashionable-looking sunglasses, while Lucia pulled on her heavy blue-tinted spectacles, of the kind issued to every member of the Order.

  This was a modern district of residences, shops, and businesses, just off the Via Cristoforo Colombo, a broad, traffic-heavy avenue that snaked south from the center of Rome, running roughly parallel to the ancient Appian Way. Rosa led Lucia to a small taxi rank; they had to wait a couple of minutes for a cab to arrive. The air was clear, crisp, not very cold.