Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Pina linked her arm through Lucia’s. “Come on. When we get to the Villa Borghese I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  Lucia remained unhappy. As usual when out of the Crypt, she longed for its calm and order, where every direction she looked she would see a face like her own. But she knew that even back in the Crypt, even in her dormitory, she would have trouble finding peace. She was layered with secrets now — the painful mystery of her menstruation, Rosa’s peculiar pursuit of her with her hints of an assignment to come — secrets, huge painful bewildering secrets, in a place where you weren’t supposed to hold any secrets from those around you, not even the smallest.

  Still, she was relieved when they reached the river, and the crowd thinned a little.

  They crossed over the Vittorio Emanuele bridge and walked northeast, following the great curve of the Tiber. There were houseboats moored to the banks; Lucia saw people sunbathing, laid out over the boats’ decks like drying fish.

  The Villa Borghese was in an area where wealthy Romans had built their country estates since imperial times. It had been saved from the twentieth-century property developers when the state had bought it, and preserved it as a park. Lucia had always liked these gardens, with their winding paths and half- hidden flower beds; she and her sisters had been brought here when they were small. It was best to avoid the weekends, when the population of Rome moved in here en masse, overwhelming the place with yelling children, chatting mothers, fathers with radios clamped to their ears for soccer scores. Today, though there were plenty of children, brought here by their mothers after school, their shouting seemed remote and scattered.

  Lucia and Pina found their way down to a little circular lake, bounded by a path. On the edge of the water stood a small temple, dedicated to the Greek god Aesculapius. They sat on a wooden bench that had seen better days. People were rowing on the lake, sending shimmering bow waves across the dense green water and disturbing the reflection of the god’s statue. It was always a calming place, Lucia thought; she had been disappointed to find that the temple was only a reproduction. Pina fulfilled her promise by buying an ice cream cone from a cart — not very reputable looking, but drawn by a patient horse, irresistible in his battered straw hat.

  While they ate their ice cream, they watched a young woman in Lycra jogging gear sitting near them, earnestly peering into the tiny screen of her cell phone. She had a dog with her, a big, aged, slow- moving Labrador. He meandered happily through the dappled shade. But when he walked behind a set of railings he couldn’t figure out his way back, and peered through the bars at his owner, whining theatrically. His owner retrieved him, comforting him with strokes and tugging at his collar. But then, as she returned to her earnest texting, the dog would wander off into his conceptual prison and begin his whining once more, making Lucia and Pina laugh.

  Lucia renewed the sunblock cream on her face, hands, and arms. It had been less than an hour since her last application, but even in the weak December afternoon sunlight her skin prickled. Pina, however -

  cradling her phone in one hand — took off her sunglasses, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the dipping sun. It was unusual for a woman of the Order to have a skin able to tan. Lucia wondered how it would feel to relax, to enjoy the sunlight on her face, without the need to block it out.

  Pina’s face showed no signs of aging, no wrinkles or lines. Her skin might have belonged to a seventeen- year-old. This would baffle the contadino males, she knew; she had heard young men whistle, or mutter, “Ciao, bella,” or “Bella figura,” after sisters of the Order old enough to be their mothers, and yet looking younger than they were. It was strange, Lucia supposed. But she had never thought about it before. There was much about life in the Order she hadn’t questioned, hadn’t even noticed, until the last few disruptive weeks. Perhaps it wasn’t the outsiders who were strange, but the Order. After all, she thought, there are very many more of them than us. Perhaps she had become a kind of outsider herself, and was learning to look back at the Order through the eyes of a contadino -

  “Excuse me.”

  She turned, peering into the sun. Pina snapped her sunglasses into place like a mask.

  A man was standing before them — a young man, half silhouetted in the sun. He wore a blue Italy soccer shirt and jeans that looked as if they had been faded by time, not design. He carried a bundle of books under his arm. He was slim, and not tall, no taller than Lucia was. He had red hair, and his face had a weakish chin and a rounded profile, a smooth curve that proceeded from his long nose to his brow — which was high, she saw, and covered in freckles. He was young, perhaps not yet eighteen …

  She was staring. She recognized him, of course. She dropped her gaze, hot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just—”

  Pina snapped, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Daniel Stannard. I’m a student. I attend an expat college in the Trastevere. I’m studying for my bachelor’s degree. My father is American …” He had an accent, a slightly singsong American intonation to his Italian.

  Pina smiled. “Why should we care, Daniel Stannard? Have you a habit of bothering girls in the park?”

  “No — no. It’s just—” He turned to Lucia. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  Pina laughed. “That’s your best line?”

  Lucia said, “Hush, Pina.”

  Daniel said, “I mean it. At the Pantheon — about a week ago, I think. I remember seeing you — I’m sure it was you — in the colonnade …”

  “I was there,” Lucia said.

  Daniel hesitated. “I kept wondering if I’d see you again.” He turned to Pina defiantly. “Yes, I know it’s corny, but it’s the truth.”

  Pina tried to stay stern, but she laughed. She muffled it with her hand.

  Tentatively Daniel sat on the bench, next to Lucia. “So — you’re sisters, right?”

  “We’re related, yes,” said Pina.

  “The lady you were with last week — who was that, your mother?”

  “An aunt,” said Pina.

  “Kind of,” Lucia said, and she was rewarded with a glare from Pina.

  Pina said, “And you say you’re a student?”

  “Of politics, yes. My father’s a diplomat here, with the American embassy. He’s been stationed here for six years. He brought over the family to continue our schooling. I arrived age eleven …”

  And so you are seventeen, Lucia thought. “Your language is good,” she said.

  “Thank you … My school was international, but most of the classes were in Italian. What do you do?”

  “She’s still at school,” Pina snapped. “After that, the family business.”

  He shrugged. “Which is?”

  “Genealogy. Record keeping. It’s complicated.”

  Complicated, yes, thought Lucia. Complicated like a web in which I’m tangled. And even the little you have just been told about me isn’t true. For I am lined up for a new destiny — not genealogy or record keeping — something dark and heavy.

  She looked at Daniel. He had large, slightly watery blue eyes and a small upturned mouth that looked full of laughter. He has already become at ease in two separate countries, she thought, while I have spent my life in a hole in the ground. She had never thought of it that way before, but it was true. Suddenly she longed to have this boy’s freedom.

  In a silent moment of communication, she felt her inchoate emotions, of confusion and frustration, pulse through her body, and surely into her face, her eyes. Help me, she thought. Help me.

  His blue eyes widened with surprise and dismay.

  “We have to go,” Pina said hurriedly. She got to her feet and grabbed Lucia’s arm, pulling her upright. Before she knew what was happening Lucia was marched off along the circular path around the lake, toward one of the roads that cut through the park. As she walked Pina started texting urgently.

  Daniel, startled, grabbed his books and clambered to his feet. “Your sist
er is kind of ferocious,” he said, stumbling after Lucia.

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “Let me see you again.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just to talk.”

  “I can’t.”

  “The Piazza Navona,” he said. “Tomorrow at three.” Pina’s pace had picked up almost to a run, and Daniel stopped chasing them.

  Lucia looked back.

  “I’ll be there every day,” he called. “At three, every day. Come when you can.”

  When they reached the Piazza le Flaminio, outside the park, a car was waiting for them.

  Pina bundled Lucia inside. “Lucia, what were you thinking? He’s a contadino. What did you want with him?”

  “Something. Nothing,” said Lucia defiantly. “I just wanted to talk to him. Aren’t I supposed to be learning about outsiders?”

  Pina leaned toward her. “You aren’t,” she said heavily, “supposed to be inviting them into your knickers.”

  “But I wasn’t — I didn’t mean—”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Lucia buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Pina, I’m confused. Don’t tell, Pina. Don’t tell!”

  Chapter 22

  Early the next spring Artorius traveled to Londinium. He asked Regina to travel with him. She in turn insisted that Brica accompany her.

  At first Brica resisted the trip, even daring to refuse bluntly, for Regina’s opposition to her liaison with Galba was now obvious. With patience and pressure Regina won her over. But the journey to the east along the old roads, with the two of them riding side by side in an open chariot just behind Artorius and his party, was silent and sullen.

  * * *

  The party approached a gateway, near a fort in the northwestern corner of the city’s wall. The wall remained intact, though here and there it had undergone hasty repairs with great blocks of stone, no doubt scavenged from abandoned buildings. The fortress itself was manned, though not by troops answerable to the Emperor. Remarkably, many of the soldiers were Saxon mercenaries. According to Artorius, Saxon defectors from the Londinium garrison had played a big part in sparking the unrest and revolt among the wider Saxon population, once Vortigern had allowed them their toeholds in the east.

  With the payment of a nominal toll, the party passed through the gate, and they were granted their first views of the city itself.

  North of the dock area by the river, the center was a place of monumental buildings, many of which would have put Verulamium’s best to shame. There were temples, bathhouses, triumphal arches, and great statues of copper and bronze set on columns. Once, it was said, the center had been dominated by a basilica greater than any of these survivors, but that had been long demolished. Regina’s eye was drawn by stranger buildings, like nothing in Verulamium: blocks of tenements, some three or four stories high, in which the less splendid inhabitants of the city had once lived, each in a small cubicle. They looked oddly like ships, stranded on the hillsides of Londinium.

  Brica, child of a hillside farm to whom the dunon of Caml was a metropolis, was subdued to wide-eyed silence.

  But as they made their way through the city, Regina saw that most of the public buildings showed signs of neglect. The amphitheater, a bowl of rubble, had been turned into a market. One bathhouse had been systematically demolished, robbed of its stone: a child in a colorless smock clambered over the rubble, and Regina wondered if she had any idea what this strange, alien ruin had once been for. Most of the big tenement blocks had been abandoned, too. Evidently only a fraction of the number of people who had once dwelled in the city remained, and there was no need for them to cram themselves into the little cubicles anymore. Away from the central area, indeed, the city seemed depopulated. The buildings had been demolished or collapsed, and large areas were given over to pasture, even within the walls.

  Still, Regina heard the muttering of Artorius’s men as they peered up at the great buildings, and compared them with the huddled farmers who now raised their cattle in their shade. The city was the work of giants, they said, who must have passed away a hundred generations ago.

  And there was still prosperity here. Among the ruins were town houses of recent construction, well maintained and brightly painted, their red-tiled roofs gleaming in the sunlight. Perhaps these belonged to negotiatores — traders and brokers. The more crowded streets close to the Forum were full of men and women in Roman garb, tunics and cloaks, and Regina stared at these reminders of her own vanished past. But most wore the trousers and woolen cloaks of the Celtae, or had the flowing hair and long mustaches of Germans.

  As the imperial writ had declined over the rest of the diocese, Londinium had drawn in on itself, sheltering like a hedgehog behind its defensive walls. So far it had weathered the Saxon catastrophe that was overwhelming the rest of the country. Even now wealth still flowed through its harbors from trade with the continent; even now you could get rich here. Decayed it may be from its greatest days, but Londinium was still busy, prosperous, bustling, powerful — an arena for the ambitious. And that was why Artorius was here.

  They had come to Londinium because the development of Artorius’s ambitions had continued, despite all Regina’s subtle discouragement. He seemed determined to mount an assault on Gaul, and then, perhaps, to march on Rome itself, to try for the purple as had Constantius and so many other British leaders before him.

  It was a challenging ambition. Britain was far from united, the Saxons far from subdued. And for all his successes Artorius commanded only a fraction of the number of troops he would need for such an adventure, and would have to rely on allies. But, fired by a dozen victories over the Saxons, Artorius was determined. And so he was coming to Londinium for a council of British chiefs, magistrates, kings, and warlords, to see if he could shape a common intent. Regina was disturbed by this. The disaster that had followed Constantius’s withdrawal of Britain’s forces, she thought, should be obvious to everybody, and not an adventure to be emulated. But she was here, ostensibly supporting Artorius, in fact wary, uncertain of her own future.

  The party reached the river, close to the site of another fort at the eastern corner of the wall. Londinium had once sprawled across both north and south banks of this great east-flowing river. In latter days, though, the settlement on the south side had declined. Today, to the south of the river there was nothing to be seen but farmsteads, low buildings, meandering cattle, threads of smoke. But a bridge still spanned the river, from north to south. It was an impressive sight, a series of broad semicircular arches, its roadway high enough to allow the passage of oceangoing ships.

  Brica stared at the bridge openmouthed. She was muttering, “Lud, Lud …”

  Regina touched her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  Brica turned, her pretty eyes blank. “It’s the bridge. It’s as if the river has been tamed, the mighty river itself. But this is the dun of Lud, the god of the water …”

  “The Romans took to calling the city Augusta,” said Regina dryly. “It never caught on. But if there are such legends buried in a mere name, perhaps they were wise to try …”

  She was disturbed. She didn’t want her daughter’s soul to be so primitive that she was astonished at the sight of a mere bridge. At least Regina remembered the villas and the towns as they had been. What next — would Brica’s daughter in turn cower from thunderstorms, fearing the anger of the sky gods?

  I must get her away from that place, the dunon, Regina thought with renewed determination. And I must save her from Galba, and his mind like a sink of stupidity and superstition.

  Artorius had negotiated the use of a town house for himself, Regina and her daughter, and others of his party. The town house was the home of a particularly wealthy negotiatore called Ceawlin. A grossly fat man of about fifty, Ceawlin was of Welsh origin, but he spoke fluent Latin and Greek. Having risen to the top of Londinium society, such as it was, he seemed determined to expand his business interests on
the continent, and had become one of Artorius’s most significant backers.

  But he troubled Regina. He clearly dismissed her as unimportant, a mere woman. In her presence he would let slip the mask of smiling beneficence he kept up before Artorius — and Regina saw the greed and calculation in his fat-choked eyes. His motivation was his own wealth and power, she saw immediately, and Artorius, this barbarian soldier-king, was no more than a means to an end.

  While Regina was to be admitted to Artorius’s councils, Brica was expected to stay with Ceawlin and his household. But she was unhappy — and loathed Ceawlin on sight. “They laugh at me,” she groused. “These pretty children and their vapid mother. They laugh at the way I speak, and the clothes I wear, and the way I do my hair. But I bet not one of them could strangle a chicken or gut a pig. And that Ceawlin makes my skin crawl; he stinks of piss, and he stands so close…”

  Once Regina herself had been like Ceawlin’s spoiled daughters, she thought, and would have laughed just as much at a girl from an old hill fort. She embraced her sturdy, bronzed daughter. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “And anyhow it won’t be for long.” She was sure that was true — she was becoming convinced she was nearing an end game with Artorius — though she didn’t yet know how that end game would play out.

  And at the same time she faced another problem.

  It had become obvious to both Brica and Galba that Regina opposed their union. Regina was so powerful that Galba and his family did not dare stand up to her, and Brica herself had so far stopped short of open rebellion. But Regina knew that could not last forever. Just as Artorius’s ambitions were overweening, so Brica’s frustration, as the years flowed steadily by, was becoming overpowering.

  In both areas of Regina’s life a crisis was approaching, then. She had no clear idea how she would handle these twin issues — not yet. But this Londinium trip would surely be useful. It would let her gauge the seriousness of Artorius’s ambitions; and it would buy her a little time by taking Brica away from Galba for a while.