Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  Marina did, though. The servant came to embrace her, patting her back, making sure she didn't make a mess of the few gritty handfuls of flour she had managed to produce.

  • • •

  The next day Carausias took Regina for a walk through the town. They were to go shopping in the Forum.

  They set off in bright midmorning — it was a cold, clear, crisp October day — but Carausias warned Regina she had to be alert. "You were protected in your villa, and even on the Wall. But in the town it's different. People don't behave very nicely. There are plenty who'll slit your purse — or slit your throat for their trouble..."

  Regina listened. But she had found her way around the Thin Town, and had endured similar warnings from Aetius since the age of seven.

  The town, surrounded by its walls, was shaped like a lozenge. It was crisscrossed by a grid pattern of streets, dominated by the road from the north that passed through the town toward Londinium in the south. A great arch spanned the Londinium road. Regina stared at this monument of carved marble, more ornate than any single structure she had seen in her young life. But ivy and lichen clung to its face, obliterating the inscription on the lintel, and a bored-looking crow hopped about on its guano-streaked carapace.

  Near the arch the road passed close by a very strange building. It was an open space bounded by a semicircular wall several times her height, with steps leading up to its parapet. It was, said Carausias, the theater. When she asked if she could climb the steps, he agreed, smiling indulgently.

  The steps were wooden, and were old and broken. At the parapet she found herself looking down into a bowl. Sloping terraces were covered by semicircular rows of wooden seats, now broken and stained. At the front was a stage like a little temple, fronted by four slim columns. The only performers on the stage right now were mice, a pair of which scuttled from pillar to pillar.

  Carausias followed, wheezing a little with the exertion. "You could seat four hundred people in here. And the plays — some of them went over my head, but I liked the fabula togata, the comedies, like The Accusation and What You Will. And then there were the farces — my late wife was especially fond of The Vine Gatherers — how we laughed at that one, where the fellow with the grape basket falls over, and..."

  None of this meant much to Regina. She only knew what a play was through her readings with her grandfather. The theater was full of rubbish, a compost of rotting food waste and rubble and smashed pottery and even what looked like the bloated corpse of a donkey, all littered by the dead leaves of autumn. The garbage was rising like a slow tide up the bank of seats, and when the wind turned, a stench of rot hit her.

  Carausias sighed, plucked her sleeve, and led her down the stairs.

  They cut down a side street, heading for the Forum. This street was lined with shops. They were long, narrow buildings, set very close together, with workshops and dwellings in the rear sections. Peering inside, Regina recognized a butcher's store, a carpenter, and a metalworker; the butcher's was doing the briskest business. But several of the shops were closed up.

  Carausias said regretfully, "Here, only a few years back, you could buy the finest pottery — imported if you want, even Samian, but the stuff from the west country and the north was just as good and a lot more affordable. Now you can't get new pots no matter what you pay; we just have to make do and mend, until the Emperor sorts himself out." He eyed her. "What about you, Regina? Have you thought how you'd like to occupy yourself when you're older? Perhaps you could learn pottery. I bet this shop could be bought for a song..."

  Regina had no idea how pottery was made, but imagined it must involve sticky messes of clay and a lot of hard work. She said politely, "I don't think I'd be enough of an artist for that, Carausias."

  They reached the Forum. It was an open square, crowded with stalls of canvas and wood. People thronged, buying and selling, immersed in a cloudy stink of spices, meat, vegetables, and animal dung. Chickens ran clucking, chased by grimy-faced children.

  But around this melee the Forum was surrounded on three sides by small temples and colonnaded walkways. And on the fourth side was a great hall, constructed of brick, flint, and mortar, and roofed with red tile. It loomed over the rest of the town. Regina gaped. Aside from the Wall itself she had never seen anything built on such a scale.

  Carausias gently tucked his finger under her chin and closed her mouth. "Now, you must be careful, for if the villains see you are distracted—"

  "Is it a temple?"

  "No — although the Basilica does host a shrine to the Aedes, the tribal god, as well as shrines to the Christ and the Emperor. Look — can you read the inscription up there?"

  She squinted, trying to make out the chipped Latin markings: "TO THE EMPEROR TITUS CAESAR VESPASIAN, SON OF THE DEIFIED VESPASIAN..."

  "This is the Basilica. It is here that the town council meets, that the court settles disputes, that offices of tax and census operate — there are schoolrooms, too."

  Under the imperial administration, the towns had been the center of local government. Nowadays, though the tax system had pretty much imploded after the rebellion during Constantius's reign, the local landowners kept up the court system and were discussing ways to raise levies to keep up the town's amenities, like the sewers, the baths, and the Basilica itself, which were slowly falling into disrepair. These would all be temporary measures, of course, Carausias continued to insist, until the Emperor resolved his difficulties.

  "But people ought to show a little more civic responsibility," he complained. "Nowadays people will sink endless amounts of money into their villas or town houses, while they let the sewers of Verulamium go to ruin. There has always been a tension in your Roman between civic responsibility and a veneration of the family, living and dead. In times of hardship he retreats to the family, you see. But how does he think the soldiers who protect him will be paid, if not for taxes, and how will taxes be collected, if not for the towns? Eh, eh? And that's why I pay for keeping up sewers and water pipes and all the rest. I know where my interests lie..."

  Regina wasn't much interested in this.

  Carausias and Regina moved through the Forum, checking the stalls. They were particularly seeking spices, olive oil, and above all pottery. But they found little but local produce. Much of the commerce was conducted in kind — meat for vegetables, a bit of secondhand pottery for some shoe nails — though some people, including Carausias, used handwritten scrips.

  The fruits and vegetables on display looked poor to Regina. She fingered a bunch of spindly, discolored carrots. Carausias said dismissively, "You get folk from the town moving out into fields not tilled since their great-grandfathers were alive. They haven't the first idea. And this is the result..." Regina put down the carrots guiltily. They had come from a stall manned by a thin woman with sallow, dirty skin, and protruding teeth. A swollen-bellied child clung to her leg.

  When they had done their shopping, mostly unsuccessfully, Carausias led her back to the Londinium road, and they walked away from the Forum, heading farther southeast.

  They came to a temple. It was set in a place where the main road forked, and it had been shaped by its location into a V shape, a triangular courtyard before a purple-painted building.

  There was a scent, like wood smoke. Regina sniffed. "That's lovely."

  "Burned pinecones." Carausias watched her carefully. "Do you know what this place is? What about the inscription?" Set over the main entrance to the courtyard, it was a dedication to the dendrophori of the town. "That word means 'branch bearers'..."

  "I don't understand."

  Carausias touched her shoulder. "Child, Cartumandua told me what became of your father."

  She felt her face close up.

  "This is a temple to Cybele, who is popular here. I myself come here to worship... If you would like to come inside—"

  "No," she snapped.

  "You should make your peace with the gods — and with your father's memory — and with yourself."<
br />
  "Not today."

  "Well, perhaps that is wise. But the temple will always be here, waiting for you. Shall we go and see what Marina has prepared for supper? And we still have water to fetch..."

  He took her hand and they walked together, back through the grubby bustle of Verulamium, toward home.

  • • •

  At Carta's insistence she had brought her scrolls and tablets with her from the Wall. Carta said that she should try to keep up her studies, for it was surely what Aetius would have wanted.

  At first she tried. She would study in the courtyard of the house, or in her room when Marina was working. But she had to work alone. There was nobody here who could tutor her. For all his obvious business acumen and firm grasp of people, Carausias was no more educated than his niece, and beyond telling anecdotes of half-remembered plays from a decade before, he could not help her. He certainly couldn't afford to hire a tutor.

  Gradually she got bored with her solitary studying. And as the weeks wore on, the days shortening as winter approached, the work came to seem less and less worthwhile. Who was ever going to care if she remembered lists of emperors and their accession dates or not? Nobody in Verulamium was sure who the current emperor was.

  And then there was Amator to distract her.

  One day, as she was trying to study in her room, Amator came wandering in. "Study, study, study," he teased her. "All you ever do. You're so boring."

  "And you are a lazy clod with nothing better to do than annoy people," she shot back, repeating one of his father's taunts.

  He strolled to Marina's bed. Grinning at her, he got to his knees and felt about in the space beneath the pallet. "Aha!" he proclaimed in triumph, and he pulled out a bit of bloody rag. It was one of the loincloths Marina used to pad herself during her periods. He sniffed the dried blood and rubbed it against his cheek. "Ah, the scent of a woman..."

  Regina was laughing, and outraged. She put down her papyrus and came after him. "That's disgusting! Give it back—"

  But he wouldn't, and they chased around the room for a while. They had developed a way of chasing without touching, of coming close but not quite into contact, a game with subtle, unspoken rules.

  At length he yielded, threw himself down on Marina's bed, and tucked the bloody little relic back where it had come from.

  "She'll know," said Regina.

  "So what if she does? It's only Marina." He got up again and walked to her lararium, in one corner. "I've never taken a proper look at this before." He picked up one of the matres. "By Cybele's left nipple, how ugly."

  "Put it down."

  "And how cheap—"

  "Put it down."

  He looked up, startled at her tone. "All right, all right." He put down the little statuette — not in the right place; she promised herself she would fix it later. He said, "So every day you waste good food and wine on these bits of nonsense..." He eyed her. "But have you ever seen a real god?"

  "What do you mean?"

  For answer he beckoned her, and tiptoed out of the room. Of course, she followed.

  Amator had his own chores to complete. Carausias was trying to train him to run the villa, the cause of much conflict between the two of them. But he always seemed to have plenty of spare time, and he seemed happy to spend a lot of it with Regina. When he discovered she liked "soldiers" he proclaimed himself an expert, dug out an old set from some corner of the house, and set it up in the courtyard where they would play. Or he would play ball-catching games with her, or simply chase her through the colonnades, or in the open spaces beyond the town walls. Gradually, almost tentatively, a relationship had built up between them.

  But there was an edge to Amator. At eighteen he was so much older than she was. Perhaps she enjoyed the undercurrent of danger that she sensed about him, a boy who knew so much more than she did, had surely done so much more, and yet was so inexplicably interested in her. Amator was mysterious, disturbing, somehow enchanting — but above all he was fun, and he always seemed to dress with color and style, unlike the drab townsfolk.

  Cartumandua maintained a frosty silence about all this.

  They walked around the courtyard until they came to the head of the stone stairs that led to Carausias's shrine.

  She stepped back. "No. I mustn't go down there. Carausias wouldn't like it."

  "Well, Carausias doesn't like being bald and fat and old, but he's got to live with it. Come on — unless you're scared." He set foot on one step, then another, and was suddenly trotting down and out of sight.

  After a heartbeat's hesitation, she followed.

  The shrine was just a pit in the ground. She could hear Amator scratching, and then he held up a candle. His face seemed to hover in the dark.

  In the uncertain light she could see that above the stonework of this little underground shrine there was a layer of darker earth. When she probed at it, it crumbled, and left black on her fingers, like soot. Later she would discover that twice during its short history Verulamium had been burned to the ground, and these burned ash layers were relics of those catastrophes.

  An arched hollow had been cut into the wall. In it stood a little statuette, apparently bronze, of a man riding a horse. His outsized head bore a crested helmet. Small offerings had been laid out before him, perhaps fragments of food.

  "Behold," said Amator mock-sepulchrally. "Mars Toutatis, the warrior god of the Catuvellauni. Held to be the Mars of Rome, while that was politically convenient. What now — do you think he will become the Christ? Will we have to carve a chi-rho above his head?"

  "You shouldn't talk like that," she whispered.

  "Or what? Is his horse going to piss down my leg?"

  "We shouldn't be down here."

  "I daresay you're right. But nobody is going to know." He bent forward and blew out the flame. The darkness was complete, save only for the faintest of diffuse daylight glows from the stairwell. She could sense his heavy warmth, less than a hand's breadth from her, and his breath was hot on her cheek.

  He backed away, his tunic rustling softly. "Now we share a secret." He laughed, and his feet clattered on the stairs. She followed him into the daylight, but when she reached the ground, he had gone.

  Chapter 10

  Miami Airport was a thoroughly unpleasant place. The queues of grimy adults and unhappy kids before the immigration barriers were as long and slow moving as I could remember in any American airport.

  I'd taken many trips to the States over the years, for work, vacations — and in pursuit of my sister. After going to work in America some fifteen years before, Gina had come home only a handful of times, most recently, and even then grudgingly, for our father's funeral. Her two boys were the only kids in the family — that I knew of, I reminded myself, thinking of Rosa. They had quickly become precious to me, no doubt through some mixture of sentiment and genetic longing. But to get to see them, every time I had to endure these red-eye flights and the ferocity of U.S. immigration controllers.

  Outside the terminal, the weather seemed unseasonably humid and hot for October. Nobody was there to greet me, of course. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Miami Beach. I was only maybe twenty miles from my sister. But taking a hotel room was my habit. I'd long learned not to put unnecessary pressure on Gina by actually having her put me up, despite my having flown around the world to see her.

  I generally stayed at Best Westerns, but for this trip I'd decided to spend a little money, and had used the Internet to find a room at a big spa hotel on the coast. The hotel's air-conditioning was merciless, of course, and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees as I stepped through the sliding doors to reception. But I was pleased with the plush, sweeping interior, the atrium done out in tiles of chrome and purple, the huge sunken bar, the glimpses of chlorine-blue pools beyond wide glass doors. Meeting rooms in bays clustered around the atrium; evidently the hotel relied a lot on corporate business, and I wondered if Gina got much work here.

  My room was o
n the twelfth floor. I turned on the TV and briskly unpacked. The room was big, expansive, with a balcony that gave a view of the sea — at least it did if you crowded right up against the rail, and peered past the flank of the building and across a busy highway. It was late afternoon, but as always after a transatlantic flight it was eerie to see the sun still stranded so high above the horizon. I've always found flying tough.

  I knew I should shower, have a drink, sleep as long as possible. But I felt restless, vaguely disturbed; right now my life seemed to be too complicated to let me relax.

  I put on a fresh shirt, grabbed a handful of dollars, made sure I had pocketed my magnetic room card, and went out to the elevator.

  • • •

  I walked through the bar, through those big picture-window glass doors, and out to the pool area, a complex miniature landscape of white concrete. The heat was heavy, steamy, and my English trousers, shoes, and socks felt ridiculously heavy. For sure I wished I had brought a hat.

  There were only a few people by the pool. A group of thirty-something women, bronzed, in bikinis, a little overweight, had gathered on sun loungers and were cooing over images in a digital camera — housewives attending the hotel's health club, perhaps.

  There was an ungated gap in the rear wall of the pool area. I passed through and walked down a short path edged by long grass. I found myself on a boardwalk, a long wooden walkway standing over the sand and grass on low stilts. It stretched to my left and right, to north and south. Before me, beyond a broad stretch of pale gold sand, was the sea. There was a breeze in my face, hot but blustery. I could see nobody swimming, and a red flag fluttered over a small stilted structure, maybe a Coast Guard station. Hurricane Jonathan was rattling around the west Atlantic; it wasn't expected to touch down on land but was creating swell and wind.

  I wasn't planning to swim anyhow.

  I knew that if I walked south I would approach the town center, so I turned that way and set off. I walked briskly past a series of gargantuan hotels, great art deco confections of concrete in shocking pink or electric blue, like spaceships parked along the Atlantic coast. The boardwalk was easy on the feet, but I seemed to be the only stroller. A few people passed me, or overtook me, joggers or speed-walkers, mostly young professional-looking types, dressed in Lycra or sweat suits, tiny headphones clamped to their heads, their faces closed, unseeing. At regular intervals there were little open kiosks, with big buttons you could press to call for police help.