Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Still, in this great project, Regina had found a place.

  She had never forgotten the lessons Aetius had taught her. Aetius would say that it was information as much as sword blades that had enabled the emperors to take and hold such a vast territory: not just military knowledge, but records of wealth and taxes, payments and savings, gathered by the officials in the towns and transmitted by the cursus publicus along the great network of roads, which had been built as much to carry facts as soldiers’ feet.

  It had not been hard for her to convince Artorius of the truth of this. Her very first attempts at record keeping rapidly bore fruit in exposing unpaid tithes and unjust levies. He had since granted her all the time and resources she needed.

  She had pupils in her work — she, at least, was not jealous of her knowledge. She taught her pupils to read and write, and to argue and analyze in the forensic tradition of the Roman system. Literacy was very important to her. It was a peculiar horror to her that most Saxons couldn’t read. Records and literature were the memory of humanity: if the Saxons were ever to overrun this place her past would truly be lost, lost forever.

  Aside from her moments of solitude with the calendar, this brief tour of inventory compiling was the most pleasurable part of her daily routine. She never forgot that all the dunon’s busywork was primitive compared to what had been available in the poorest of the towns in the old days, when the old continentwide trading routes had still worked, and there was little here that hadn’t been made on the spot. But they had come a long way since the time, only a few years ago, when she had scoured the rubble of abandoned villas in search of iron nails for her shoes. She felt she was in an island, a haven where civilization was slowly recovering, in the midst of the country’s devastation and collapse.

  * * *

  Brica came running out to her mother and kissed her on the cheek. They sat together on the bench.

  “I heard you talk to Myrddin,” Brica said. “That old monster gives you a roasting every day.”

  Regina shrugged. “I can’t take him seriously, not with a beard like that.”

  Brica snorted laughter. “But he does know his craft. I think he just resents being watched over.”

  To Regina, Brica showed an alarming lack of interest in the subtleties of human interaction. “It isn’t that,” Regina said slowly, massaging her daughter’s hands. “Not really. Myrddin is no fool, whatever else he is. He knows the value of record keeping as well as I do. His problem is not the record keeping but who’s keeping the records.”

  “You?”

  “Myrddin sees me as a rival for Artorius’s attention. He whispers in one ear about the glory of the Celtae and the magic of the old ways; I whisper in the other about record keeping and tax revenues. We are like two poles, like past and future.”

  Brica grinned. “But you are the one who sleeps with the riothamus.”

  “Yes. Though I think that if Myrddin thought he could lure Artorius to his bed he would cut himself a new hole—”

  Brica’s mouth gaped. “Mother!”

  Regina patted her hand. “Reassuring to know I can still shock you, dear. Anyhow, I think the riothamus likes having us both around, even having us fight, so he can take in contrasting opinions. The mark of a wise leader …”

  Artorius still called her his queen, his Morrigan. But their relationship nowadays had little to do with the fierce love of gods — little to do with passion, in fact, for he rarely visited her bed, even in the rare intervals he broke off from his campaigning and alliance building to return to the fort by the Caml.

  Artorius’s bold early notions of stepping down and submitting himself to election had long been quietly dropped. But he and Regina had privately spoken of his own eventual succession, and the need for him to find male descendants. It was unspoken between them, but it was obvious that she would not be the source of his children and the derbfine that would follow. She suspected he was also talking to other advisers, such as Myrddin — and perhaps he was already taking other women to his bed. But she cared nothing for that; her liaison with Artorius, in ensuring her own survival and Brica’s, was serving her purposes.

  As Regina mused, Brica’s attention was drifting. Galba was moving about at the back of the manufactory, wiping his hands on a rag and joking with another worker.

  Galba was short, stocky, with broad heavyset features; he had a pale complexion and thick red hair, which betrayed his people’s probable origin among the Picts north of the Wall. He was young — younger than Brica, who was now a venerable twenty-eight. He had come down from the north with his family, en route to Armorica. They had fallen afoul of Saxons, but a chance encounter with a party of Artorius’s soldiers had saved their lives. Galba’s family had taken over an abandoned farm only half a day’s a ride from here, and had become commoners in the new kingdom. Brica had met Galba at a feast on one of the farmsteads. She had prevailed upon Regina to bring the man into the dunon for a trial at the forge. Galba had acquitted himself so well that Myrddin had taken him on at the manufactory permanently.

  And Galba’s move into the dunon had made Brica more than happy, too, to Regina’s chagrin. Galba was cheerful, sturdy, competent, and obviously attractive — but, to Regina, crushingly dull. In that way he was astonishingly like Bran, Brica’s farmboy first love, a relationship Regina had crushed long ago.

  Now Galba came out of the workshop, softly calling Brica. Somehow he had managed to scorch a lank of soot-filled red hair at the side of his head. Brica took a knife and carefully began to saw at the blackened ends. Galba crouched a little so she could reach, and as she worked her body moved closer to his, her cheek resting on the side of his head.

  They belonged together. It was a sudden, unwelcome truth, and yet it could not be denied. But Regina found jealousy gathering inside her. I can’t allow this, she thought suddenly.

  Not for the first time, she found she had come to a decision intuitively, and had to unravel it retrospectively. She felt as hostile to Galba as she had once to Bran. Why?

  Galba was now a larger part of Brica’s life than Regina was. So he should be. There were women younger than Brica who were already grandmothers. It was the way of things. A daughter matters more to a mother than a mother can ever matter to the daughter, for the daughter represents the future, and the future must predominate over the past. Regina should simply — let go.

  And yet the past contained everything Regina valued in her life: the villa, her own mother, the towns, the fine things. Peace and order, richness and beauty. If she were to let Brica go into the arms of this cloddish boy, this apprentice smith who thought better with his muscles than with his head, then Brica’s future would count for everything, and Regina’s past for nothing. It was a tension between past and future — and it was a tension that resolved in her head, as suddenly as clouds might clear from the face of the sun, and a warm determination filled her.

  I will stop this liaison, she thought, just as I got rid of Bran. I don’t know how yet, but I will find a way. I have to, for the sake of the past, which is more precious than the future, and which must therefore be preserved.

  A braying of trumpets drifted from the west: it was a peal that announced the return of the riothamus and his army. All over the dunon work was abandoned, and everybody ran to the gate.

  * * *

  In the six years since Regina and Brica had been brought here, the predations of the rebellious Saxons from their fastnesses on the east coast had become a severe problem across southern Britain.

  In her long conversations with Artorius about his diffuse foe, she had learned much about the Saxons. For a start they weren’t really “Saxons,” even though that was what everybody called them. After they had erupted from their homeland in the north of Germany, the Saxons had become sea pirates, traversing the Mare Germanicus, which facilitated links among Jutland, Frisia, and Francia. Now nobody could precisely say who or what they were — they were all kinds of Germanics — not that that mattered if yo
u were on the receiving end of a Saxon blade.

  The Saxons were not savages. Some of the booty Artorius had brought home from his wars, particularly the fine metalwork, was as beautiful and complex as anything she had ever seen. But they were not remotely civilized in the Roman sense. They were not even like the Vandals and Goths and Franks who were moving through Gaul. Those barbarians often tried to ape the rulers they displaced, and even tried to maintain the forms of society that had prevailed there, with more or less degrees of incompetence.

  But the Saxons were adventurers, wanderers, marauders, pirates. They were certainly not capable of running anything like the old imperial administration — and besides, Regina thought ruefully, in Britain there really wasn’t much left of the old system to run anyhow, for it had all collapsed even before the Saxons got here. The Saxons actually seemed to hate the towns and other relics of the Empire. They were intent not just on plunder but also on massacre, conquest, and destruction.

  The only choices for the natives were to serve the new rulers, to flee — or to die. Many people had indeed fled, it was said, either to the west and north, the harsher mountainous lands beyond the effective reach of the old diocese, or else they had gone overseas to the growing British colonies in Armorica. Great stretches of the countryside were depopulated altogether.

  But Artorius and his growing armies had formed one of the few foci of resistance to the marauding Saxons.

  With a mixture of Roman discipline and Celtae ferocity, even before the present campaigning season Artorius had scored nine significant victories. People had come flocking to his hill fort capital, and the petty warlords and rulers who had emerged from the collapse of the old diocese had been keen to vow their allegiance to him — Vortimer, for instance, son of Vortigern, who had tried to avenge his father’s destruction by Hengest. As Artorius’s power, influence, and reputation grew, he was slowly earning his self-anointed title of riothamus, king of kings. Not that Regina trusted many of the bandits he dealt with, many of whom she suspected of making equally vivid declarations of loyalty to the Saxon warlords.

  Despite such doubts, she had no choice but to cling to Artorius, for he was a beacon of hope in a terrible time. And despite all his efforts the Saxon advance was a wall of slow-burning fire that left nothing but a cleansed emptiness behind it: Roman Britain was suffering a slow, terminal catastrophe.

  * * *

  The army came in a great column of thousands of men and as many horses. The foot soldiers yelled and struck their shields, the cavalry raised their slashing swords so they glinted in the low autumn sun, and the trumpeters blew their great carynx trumpets, slender tubes as tall as a man and adorned with dragons’ mouths.

  As the first of the booty wagons was hauled up the steep path toward the gate, Regina saw that it was piled high with heads — the severed heads of Saxons, complete with long tied-back hair and heavy mustaches, heads piled up like cabbages on a stall, their rolled-up eyes white and their skin yellow-white or even green. Behind the cart a prisoner walked, attached by a length of rope wrapped around his hands. He was a big man with a golden torc around his neck. The skin of his face was broken and caked with blood and dust. He had evidently been dragged all the way from the site of his defeat, for he was staggering.

  Women and children ran down the slope from the dunon, anxious for news of their husbands, brothers, fathers. Regina held her place, just outside the gate. It was like something out of the past, she thought wonderingly, an army from four or five or six centuries ago, the kind of force that must once have met the Caesars.

  And yet Artorius had made great changes. To those old Celtae forces, fighting had been ritualistic. Armies would draw up to face each other, would make a racket and an elaborate display, and only small teams of champions would be sent to do battle together. And they couldn’t sustain a long campaign: Celtae armies, recruited from local farmers, had been forced to disperse when the crops needed harvesting. All that had had to change when the Romans had come with their propensity for pitched battles with decisive outcomes: The Celtae had quickly learned the techniques of long campaigns and massed slaughter.

  Now the Romans were gone, but their lessons lingered. Artorius had been assiduous. He had even picked Regina’s brains over what she could remember of Aetius’s reminiscences of the comitatenses. Now Artorius’s warriors were an effective and mobile fighting force, just as capable as the Romans’ of waging a pitched battle — and of mounting a summer-long campaign.

  But Artorius’s practices were increasingly laced with a primitive darkness.

  Regina knew the old beliefs, spouted by Myrddin and others. To take the head of your enemy was to possess his soul, so when these Saxon heads were mounted on stakes around the walls of the hill fort their souls would keep out danger. Regina wasn’t sure how much of this Artorius believed, but she could see how he used its symbolism, working on both friend and foe, to cement his victories.

  Regina lived with barbarians, and was the mistress of a warlord. But she could live with that until, as she always promised herself, things got back to normal, and the Emperor returned with his legions to sweep out the Saxon marauders, dissolve the petty native kingdoms — including Artorius’s — and restore Roman dignity and order, so that this brief and bloody interval would come to seem no more than a bad dream.

  Now here came the riothamus himself, at the head of his army.

  At the gate, Artorius embraced Regina. He was hot, his armour scuffed, and she could smell the stink of his horse. “We have won great victories, my Morrigan. Everywhere the Saxons lie slain, or they run away at the sound of our trumpets. They are falling back to their fastnesses in the east, but perhaps next season—”

  “Your deeds will live on for a thousand years, riothamus.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like Myrddin. However I hear a ‘but’ in your voice …”

  “But your collection of severed heads would have appalled Vespasian.”

  His face clouded. “The Caesars aren’t here. They abandoned us to the Saxons. I do what I have to do. In fact—” Artorius turned speculatively, looking east, the direction of Europe and the rump of the Empire. “Perhaps, in fact, now that we are strong, we should be planning what to do about the Caesars and their betrayal of Britain.”

  She studied his face, alarmed, uncertain; she had never heard him talk of such plans before. But he was lost in his proliferating thoughts of future battlefields.

  One of his lieutenants came to him. “We are ready for the show, riothamus.”

  The “show” was the execution of the Saxon chieftain. It was a triple murder, a sacrifice to the ancient Celtae veneration of the number three.

  Artorius himself raised his axe, and slammed its blade into the back of the Saxon’s head. But the man was not killed, and Artorius gave his limp form to his soldiers. Next a cord was tied around the Saxon’s neck and tightened, by the twisting of a piece of wood, until the bones snapped. And finally, and most ignominiously, his face was pushed into a vat of water, so that he drowned. Regina couldn’t tell how long the Saxon stayed alive, for the crowd of soldiers around him bayed and yelled.

  Artorius grinned at Regina. “I wonder what your Caesars would have made of this…”

  Chapter 21

  A week after her encounter with the mother-grandmother, Rosa sent Lucia out for a study day in a library in the Centro Storico area — not far from the Pantheon, in fact. Pina accompanied her.

  The two of them had finished their day’s work by three. They decided to take a walk toward the Tiber, and perhaps make for the gardens of the Villa Borghese, across the river. They set off along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, heading west. It was a bright December afternoon, and they were walking into the sun.

  The Centro Storico was the medieval heart of the city. It was enclosed by a great eastward bend of the Tiber. Rome’s ancient core had always been the seven hills, where the great forums and palaces had been built. But after the collapse of the Empire, the a
ncient aqueducts had broken down, and the dwindling population of Rome had gravitated toward the river, seeking drinking water. The ruins in the area had provided building materials for houses, churches, and papal complexes. Later, as Renaissance families competed for power and prestige, the area had become cluttered with grandiose monuments, and it grew into a center for craft guilds, filled with botteghe, workshops. To some extent that was still true, Lucia saw as they walked down the Via dei Cestari, filled with shops selling clothes and equipment for the Catholic priesthood.

  In the low, dazzling light, the streets swarmed with cars and the pavement was crowded with chattering schoolchildren, slow-strolling tourists, and office workers yelling into their cell phones. The crowd was purposeful, agitated, and continually noisy, and Lucia felt out of place.

  “You aren’t saying much.” Pina walked beside her, bag swinging at her shoulder, phone in her hand, sunglasses on her nose.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just all these people. It’s the way they talk. Everybody is so intense — see the way their muscles are rigid — as if they are on the point of shouting the whole time. But what is it they are shouting about?”

  Pina laughed. “You know, we’re spoiled in the Crypt. We emerge as helpless as nuns evicted from their convents.”

  “I don’t know.” Lucia pointed to a group of three nuns in simple pale gray vestments. Chatting brightly in a small pavement cafй, they all wore sunglasses and expensive-looking trainers, their cell phones set among the cappuccinos before them. One wore a baseball cap over her wimple. Rome always seemed full of nuns, here to visit the Vatican, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the pope, El Papa. “ They seem all right.”