Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Lucia remembered what Pina had said, about a disturbance in the Crypt going back years, of more girls like her — more freaks, she thought gloomily — coming into their menarche, instead of staying young, like everybody else, everybody normal. Perhaps the illness of this strange old woman really was having some kind of effect — perhaps it had somehow affected her.

  If so, she resented it.

  Maria Ludovica saw that in her eyes. “By Coventina’s dugs, there is steel in this one, Rosa. If she is your choice she is a good one.” That claw hand shot out again to grab Lucia’s arm. She whispered, “You know, child, I’m old, and shut up in here, but I’m no fool, and I’m not out of touch. Things are changing in the world, faster than ever, faster than I can remember. The new technology — phones and computers, wires and cables and radio waves everywhere — everybody joined up … We have many new opportunities to do business — don’t we, Rosa? You see, Rosa and her rivals know this. But they know that if it is to prosper in a time of change the Order must be based on the firmest of foundations. And I, a foundation stone, am crumbling. And so the rivals maneuver, through looks and glances, visits of their candidates and inquiries after my health, testing their strength against each other as against me—”

  Lucia said, “Rosa, what does she mean?”

  Rosa shook her head. “Nothing. She means nothing. Mamma, you should not say these things. There are no rivalries, no candidates. There is only the Order. That’s all there ever has been.”

  Maria held her gaze for a few seconds, and then subsided. “Very well, Rosa Poole. If you say so.”

  Rosa said, “I think the mamma is tiring, Lucia. I wanted you to meet her before—”

  “Before I die, Rosa Poole?”

  “Not at all, Mamma-nonna, ” Rosa said, gently scolding. “You’ll be giving us all trouble for a long time to come yet. Say good-bye, Lucia … Give Maria a kiss.”

  Lucia could think of few things she would less rather do. Maria watched with her wet, birdlike eyes as Lucia took a step forward, leaned over, and brushed her lips against Maria’s imploded cheek. But despite its off-putting appearance it was just skin, after all, human skin, soft and warm.

  “Good, good,” Rosa murmured. “After all, she is your mother.”

  * * *

  When the interview was over, Rosa took Lucia to one side. “You know, you are honored, the way she spoke to you. But you still don’t understand, do you? Let me ask you something. When you were a child, here in the Order — were you happy?”

  “Yes,” Lucia said honestly. “Immensely happy.”

  “Why?”

  She thought about that. “Because I always knew I was safe. Nothing I needed was denied me. I was surrounded by people who protected me.”

  “What would they have done for you?”

  “They would have given their lives for me,” she said firmly. “Any one of them. There was nobody near me who would have harmed me.”

  Rosa nodded. “Yes. They would have sacrificed themselves for you; they really would. I was brought up in a family — a nuclear family — a family with difficulties. My parents loved me, but they were remote … That is how it is for most people, how it has been for all of human history — how it was for me. But you are one of the lucky few for whom it was different. And that was why you were happy.” Rosa stepped closer to Lucia, her face intent. “But, you must realize, one day you will have to pay for your happiness, your safety. That is the way of things. You have to pay it back. And that time is coming, Lucia.”

  Lucia quailed, baffled, trying not to show her fear.

  Chapter 20

  There was a nervousness about the hill fort today. Artorius was due to return from his latest campaign against the Saxons, and nobody knew how their loved ones had fared.

  But Regina set this aside. After six years in the hill fort she had learned it was best to stick to orderly habits. So, first thing that morning, she went to her small room at the back of Artorius’s roundhouse. With a mug of bark tea at her side, she settled on a wooden stool and spread out her calendar.

  The calendar was a bronze sheet, divided into columns, carefully inscribed by Myrddin with Latin lettering — she had insisted on Latin, despite the barbarian origin of the calendar itself. It had sixteen columns, each representing four months. This sheet covered a five-year cycle. In fact the sheet was one of a set that made up a complete nineteen-year calendar, and it was said that the Druids, who had devised this mighty tabulation, worked on much longer cycles still.

  It was a calendar for farmers and warriors. Each year was divided into two halves, with a “good” half — mat — stretching from Beltane in the spring to Samhain in the autumn, and the “bad” half — anm — spanning the winter months. And then each month, of twenty-nine or thirty days, was itself split into good and bad halves. The mat months corresponded not just to the growing season but also to the annual campaigning season: for Celtae a good day was a day for war. But Samhain was approaching once again, and another campaigning season was almost done, to her relief. Regina understood the necessity for war, but hated the waste of life it represented, and every year longed for it to be over.

  Anyhow the calendar was very intricate. But it worked — once she had gotten used to thinking like one of the Celtae rather than trying to translate back to the Roman equivalent; that had been the key. The point of the calendar was that each day, right through the complete nineteen-cycle, had a different divine flavor, which subtly determined the decisions to be taken, the combination of gods to be placated. In a way it was even comforting to believe that the shape of the universe, down to the day and the hour, had been shaped by ancient cosmic decisions. It reminded her of old Aetius, her grandfather, whom she had thought the most superstitious man she had ever met, until coming to Artorius’s capital; when it came to the old gods there had been nothing particularly rational about the Romans.

  She would think like the Celtae, then. She could hardly have refused to use the calendar at all, for it had been the idea of Artorius himself. But she wouldn’t give up her bronze sheets and her Latin. The Druids maintained their centuries-spanning calendar entirely in their heads, but it took a Druid novice twenty years to memorize the oral law that lay at the heart of the old religions. Well, she was already in her late forties, and if she was granted twenty more years she could think of better things to do with her time than that.

  With her scrutiny of the calendar done, her head full of properly regulated auguries and omens, she picked up her wax tablet and stylus and left her office for her daily inspection.

  * * *

  It was midmorning. The sunlit air was clear of mist, though it had a nip that foretold the winter to come.

  The colony on the hilltop plateau had grown: nearly five hundred people lived up here now, and many thousands more in the farmed countryside nearby. This morning fires still burned in the huts and roundhouses, and the air was full of the rich scent of wood smoke, and the greasier scents of cooking. There was a great deal of bustle. People moved among the houses, and a steady column marched out of the compound’s open gate, or returned with such staples as wood, pails of water, and bales of hay. Children ran underfoot as they always did, cheerful, healthy, and muddy from head to toe.

  As well as the great hall of Artorius there were now granaries and storage pits, seven large roundhouses, and simple rectangular buildings used by the craftsmen. Great capital this place may one day be, but there were always chickens and even a few pigs wandering the lanes, and there were still a few areas of green. At the back of Artorius’s own hall a small kitchen garden grew garlic, mint, and other herbs; the riothamus had started a fashion among his nobles for highly spiced food.

  In the manufactories the day’s work had started.

  Regina approached the carpenter’s. On the walls were arrayed hammers, saws, axes, adzes, billhooks, files, awls, and gouges, and wooden boxes of nails were stacked on the floor. Today Oswald — the head of the little manufactory, a great be
ar of a man with huge scarred hands — was working his new toy, a pole lathe. A rope ran from a beam above to a foot pedal, and when he worked the pedal the central spindle ran smoothly. He was still getting the hang of the device, but already the stool legs and wooden bowls he was turning out had a pleasing symmetry.

  Meanwhile, in the pottery, the kiln had been fired up. One worker mixed clay with the crushed flint that helped avoid shrinkage and cracking, another shaped a pot by hand, a third prepared the kiln itself. The kiln was an updraft design, far advanced over the simple pit clamps Regina had used on the farmstead. Firing took a whole day, with the temperature raised and lowered in careful stages. Maybe one in ten of the pots still failed, but the rest was solid red earthenware. The potters were even learning how they could control the color of their product, from black through gray or red, by changing the amount of air available in the kiln. It was still coarse stuff — they had yet to master the technique of using a wheel — but it was solid and useful.

  Regina’s old friend Marina ran the largest of the cloth works, from a big roundhouse she ruled as firmly as Artorius did his kingdom. The looms themselves, three sturdy frames taller than Artorius himself, were set just inside the entrance to the house, so the weavers could get the best light.

  Regina liked to watch the weavers. The most skillful of them was another Marina — a docile sixteen-year- old, one of the old woman’s own grandchildren. Young Marina worked steadily. A warp, threads of spun wool, was suspended from a top bar and kept under tension by small triangular stones. Marina pulled the horizontal heddle bar toward her, opening up a gap between alternating warp threads. She pulled the weft, a horizontal thread, through the shed, and then released the heddle to pull the alternate threads backward, and then passed the weft back through the gaps. Every few passes Marina would pause to push her weaving sword, a flat wooden board, into the gap between the warp threads, and thus compacted the weft. All this was done fluidly and without pause, and her speed of working was remarkable; just standing here, Regina was able to see how the cloth’s crisscross pattern was emerging, row by row.

  Regina had been proud of the success they had had with her own weaving experiments back on her farmstead, but all they had been able to produce was coarse cloth. This loom design had come from another of the experts Artorius had gathered up in his sweeps across the countryside, and the results were far better.

  She passed a little time with old Marina. Marina liked to talk of old times in Verulamium, and Regina knew that the skill and loyalty of her granddaughter had been a great comfort to Marina since the death of poor Carausias a few winters before. But Regina escaped before Marina produced her foul-smelling buckets and asked her to contribute. Marina’s vegetable dyes needed a fixing agent, and the best fixer of all was stale urine: a vintage half a month old was generally thought to be just right.

  Regina made more marks on her wax tablet, and moved on.

  Of all the industries that had sprouted here on the dunon’s plateau, the most significant was iron: fully half the manufactory area of the plateau was given over to its complex production. Myrddin ruled his little empire of iron and fire and charcoal as if he were king of the underworld. As she approached the forges, two of Myrddin’s helpers — unfree, recent arrivals both of them — were working on a charcoal clamp. Myrddin insisted on training up his clamp workers personally, and from the look of the hollow, sleepless eyes of these two men, his training regime had been as brutal and unrelenting as ever.

  This clamp was a few days old and several paces across. A mound of timber had been covered with a thick layer of damp leaves and bracken, turf, and soil. Fire had been started inside with embers poured into a hole in the top, and then the mound was capped off, so that the wood within could only consume itself. Running the clamp was a skilled job. A constant watch had to be kept on it by day and night, for as the wood turned to charcoal it would shrink, and the clamp could collapse on itself — and if air got in the whole thing would go up in an unproductive blaze. When the burning was done the mound had to be dismantled carefully, and the charcoal doused with water, for while hot it had a tendency to erupt into flames spontaneously. There were many such clamps, some much larger, in operation day and night beyond the hill fort, for Myrddin’s works demanded a constant and heavy supply of charcoal. You could smelt some metal ores with wood fires, but only charcoal could provide the high temperatures needed for iron.

  Myrddin himself ran the next stage in his process. His shaft furnace was just a tube of wattle and daub,

  vitrified by repeated firings. By the time Regina arrived the furnace had been running since early morning, and two more unfree were laboring mightily at their animal-skin bellows. They were naked save for loincloths, and their bodies were slick with sweat and soot. Myrddin was supervising the day’s first charge of charcoal and ore.

  He preferred charcoal made from alder, which he said burned hotter than any other sort, and ocher, a relatively easy ore to smelt. The furnace would be worked all day, and then allowed to cool; by tomorrow Myrddin would be able to pull out a bloom, a dense, irregular mass of metal and impurities. This would be subject to repeated hammering and heating until the last of the slag was gone. It took several blooms for Myrddin to produce one of his ingots, a flat bar about the size of a sword blade, ready for further work. All this had baffled Regina — it seemed an awful lot of work for a small piece of iron — until Artorius had gently explained that even charcoal ovens were not hot enough actually to melt iron, and Myrddin’s elaborate practices were necessary to coax the iron out of its ore.

  Though she despised the way Myrddin used his secret knowledge as a source of power, she could not deny the reality of that knowledge. Watching his careful, almost delicate work as he constantly inspected and assessed his furnaces and clamps, she thought she could see something of the centuries, or millennia, of trial and error and constant study that had led to the development of such techniques.

  And the end product was iron, the most precious resource of all, pieces of iron that, remarkably, had not existed before. Piled up in Myrddin’s workshops were some of the final products of all this industry: carpenters’ tools like adzes and saws, tools for the farmers like harness buckles and sickles and reaping knives, weapons for warriors like swords and knives — and even tools for Myrddin’s own use, like tongs and an anvil. It was Myrddin’s proudest boast that he was the only craftsman who produced all his own tools.

  But Myrddin was Regina’s enemy.

  When he spotted her, he greeted her with a kind of snarling smile. “Here to check up again, Regina? Tap, tap, tap with your stylus … a shame we can’t eat your words, or nail our soles to our shoes with your letters, eh? But at least we can wipe our arses on your scrolls …” And so on. She endured it, as always, and walked on.

  A young apprentice called Galba was working at a forge, and Regina paused.

  He wore a sleeveless tunic, and his bare arms were pocked with hot-metal scars, already a little like Myrddin’s. He was working a piece of iron — a short blade, perhaps for a knife — in the forge, while an unfree toiled at the bellows. Galba would thrust the blade into the furnace until it became red hot, beat it into shape while still heated, and then quench it quickly with water. It seemed that the fire didn’t just make the iron soft enough to work; something about the charcoal in the furnace made the iron stronger. And sometimes the iron, beaten flat, would be folded over and beaten again, the invisible layers adding strength. There were many subtleties to Myrddin’s art, which Galba and other apprentices were learning slowly.

  The blade appeared to be done. Galba quenched it once more and set it aside. Then he noticed Regina. “Madam — good day — would you like me to call your daughter?”

  “If you please,” she said stiffly.

  He went into the back of the workshop, calling Brica’s name. Regina sat on a low wooden bench and waited.

  * * *

  As Artorius’s kingdom had grown, so it had become necess
ary to find efficient ways to shape it, and to run it.

  Despite Regina’s own inclinations the order that was emerging had little to do with imperial forms, but was based on older Celtae structures. The center of it all was the dunon itself. The hill fort provided facilities for trade and exchange, a religious center, a resident population of craftsmen with growing expertise — and, most importantly, administrative control.

  Artorius’s nation was divided into three classes. The nobles included the soldiers, but also jurists, doctors, carpenters, bards and priests, and metalworkers like Myrddin. Artorius’s rule was moderated by a meeting on every feast day of the oenach, an assembly of the nobles. Below the nobles were the free commoners, the lesser craftsmen and the farmers, who were actually the productive level of society. It was their rents, taxes, and tithes that sustained Artorius’s nascent government, and paid for his army and their campaigns. Finally, the lowest level were the unfree: former criminals, slaves, and late-arriving refugees who found no free land to farm. Their fate was simply to serve, and they provided the bulk of the labor.

  The basis of society was the family. According to the old tradition the property and other rights of a man extended to his derbfine, his descendants as far as his great-grandchildren, through four generations. Basic rights were assured by each person having an “honor price,” a level of compensation to be paid in case of injury, insult, or death. But the system extended only to the free; the unfree had no rights, and no views that were listened to at higher levels.

  It was a crude system, of course, a barbaric structure to regulate the relationships of a warrior people, with nothing like the sophistication of Roman law. But any attempts Regina made to reform the ancient code were resisted, especially by Myrddin, who seemed to have appointed himself a kind of keeper of the truth here in Artorius’s kingdom. Perhaps more civilized forms would emerge with time.