Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  He was a solid character, intense, engaged, vividly real. In his anecdotes I glimpsed a postwar America growing fast, confident and rich, a time of technological growth and economic expansion — and I liked the idea that a relative of mine had been there at the fall of Rome, and had worked on Apollo. But I wasn’t enjoying the encounter. Beside him I felt pale, diminished, uncertain, maybe a bit intimidated. And young.

  We turned off Worth onto Lake Drive South, which ran north along the coast of Lake Worth. Here the road was part of a bicycle trail, and in the low afternoon light there were people cycling, skateboarding, jogging.

  “Here, you can buy me a Popsicle.”

  It turned out he meant an ice lolly; we had come to an ice cream stall. I stumped up for two great gaudy confections, so sugary I couldn’t finish mine. But we sat on a stone bench and gazed out at the ducks paddling on Lake Worth. The flat western light made his face look like a bronze sculpture, all plains and grooves.

  By 1943 the war was going badly for the Italians. Mussolini was removed and arrested, and an armistice signed. When the Allies landed at Salerno, the Germans found out about the deal. Rome quickly fell to the Nazis.

  “The Order was involved in the resistance, in a quiet way,” Lou said. “So Maria Ludovica told me. The Germans tried to call up all the young men for work on factories or farms or mines, or on the defense lines they were building to oppose the Allied advance. And the city was full of escaped POWs. Lots of people to hide. We estimated that at one time, of a city of a million and a half or so, about two hundred thousand were being hidden, in homes, churches, even the Vatican.”

  “And the Order—”

  “They have a big complex there, big and old and deep. Not that I ever saw it.” I wondered, Deep? “Yes, the Order did their share. And it was not without risk. Family, huh — I guess we should be proud.”

  Air raids began, even though Rome was supposed to be an open city, aiming at railway lines but hitting civilians in such customary friendly-fire targets as hospitals. “The gas and electricity went altogether,” said Lou. “They cut up the benches and trees in the parks for wood. The Order started selling meals, hundreds a day, at a lira a head.

  “But then the citizens started to hear the heavy guns.

  “Maria Ludovica came out to the Lungotevere to watch the Germans go. Armed to the teeth but dejected, bedraggled. Everybody was silent. Makes you think,” he said. “A Roman crowd, surrounded by all those ancient monuments, once again seeing the retreat of an occupying army.”

  “And then you arrived.”

  “Yep. I walked in after the tanks that came up the Porta San Giovanni. In the evening everybody lit a little candle in the window. It was, you know, magical.” And he told me how, on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, he had climbed the steps of Michelangelo’s cordonata with General Clark. “Not that the Romans were grateful,” he said with a grin around his Popsicle stick.

  He leaned closer. “Maria never told me all of it, about Mussolini. Far too delicate for that. But I figured it out. He was kind of a brisk lover. He’d just nail you, right there on the floor of his office. He wouldn’t even take his shoes or trousers off. And when he was done he’d just send you right out of the room and get back to work.”

  “What a charmer.”

  “But he was Mussolini. Knew a lot of guys in the army who had similar habits, mind you …”

  I half listened. I was trying to put this together, trying to figure out how old this Maria Ludovica must be. Say she was about twenty during the 1922 march. That would put her in her thirties when she’d become a “prolific woman,” and in her forties during the war. Was it really credible that a forty-year-old mother of so many children would be the selection of Mussolini, who had, I supposed, the whole of Italy outside the convents to choose from? And could such a woman really have been the sex goddess glimpsed by the callow young Sergeant Casella in 1944? Was Lou somehow conflating the memories of more than one woman? — but his stories seemed detailed and sharp.

  “You know, Mussolini was going to build a giant statue of Hercules, as tall as a Saturn Five rocket, with the face of Mussolini and its right hand raised in a fascist salute. All they made was a head and a foot.”

  He laughed. “ Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! What an asshole. But still, if he made a pass at you, you didn’t turn him away. I’m pretty sure that by letting the Duce poke her, Maria Ludovica earned a lot of protection for the Order in those years.”

  “What was Maria’s connection to the Order? Did she start it?”

  “Hell, no. Boy, don’t you know any of the family history?”

  I frowned. “The story of the Roman girl—”

  “Roman British, yes. Regina.”

  “Just a legend. Has to be. The records don’t go back that far.”

  He sucked on his Popsicle. “If you say so. Anyhow, for sure the Order was a lot older than Maria Ludovica.”

  “And when you found the Casellas you turned to Maria.”

  “She, the Order, knew about the Casellas. The Order itself was based not far away. But they hadn’t known about the sickness. When I got in touch, they came — Maria, and three other women. Medically trained, apparently. They wore these simple white robes. I remember cradling one of the boys while they crowded around with their stethoscopes and such. They were all three about the same age. And all similar, all like Maria, like sisters. And the family eyes, smoky gray. It was strange looking from one face to the other. They kind of blurred together, until you couldn’t be sure who was who.”

  “And they helped the children.”

  “They were short of resources, like everybody else. They treated one boy. He recovered. The other boy died. They took the little girl away.”

  “What?”

  He turned to me. “They took her away. Into the Order.”

  “But they brought her back to her parents.”

  “No.” He seemed puzzled by that. “They just took her in, and that was that.”

  “And the parents didn’t mind? These people they’d never seen before, relatives or not, just turn up and take their kid away—”

  “Hey.” He put a broad, heavy hand on my arm. “You’re raising your voice … You’re thinking about your sister.”

  “There does seem an obvious parallel. Gina said you brokered that deal, too.”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. Your sister wasn’t sick. But she was in need — your whole family was. Your parents just couldn’t afford the two of you. They put out feelers in the family for help—” I could imagine how my father would have felt about that. “It got to me, by a roundabout route. And I thought of the Order.”

  “How could any parent give up a child to a bunch of strangers?”

  Lou’s gaze slid away from mine. “You don’t get it. The Order aren’t strangers. They’re family.” Again that heavy hand on my arm. “I knew I could trust them, and so did the Casellas in Rome, and so did your parents.”

  I said nothing, but he could read my expression.

  “Look, kid, you’re obviously mixed up about this. If you’ve come to me for some kind of absolution, you’re not going to get it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Or is blame the game? Your father isn’t around anymore, so you’re looking to come take a shot at me. Is that it?”

  “I’m not here to blame you.”

  “Nor should you. Or your parents, God rest them.” He jabbed a nicotine-stained forefinger at my chest and glared up at me. “We all did the best we could, according to the circumstances, and our judgment at the time. If you’re a decent person, that’s exactly what you do. We’re human. We try.”

  “I accept that. I just want to know.”

  He shook his head. “I suppose I’d be the same if I was in your shoes. But I warn you, you might be disappointed.”

  I watched him, baffled. I was reminded of the headmistress. What was it about the Order that made people thousands of miles away want to defend it like this? />
  I gazed toward the setting sun. Anyhow, I knew now that this Order had taken my sister, as it had the little girl in 1944, and no doubt many other girls and maybe boys, relatives, over the decades — or centuries, I wondered coldly. But what I needed to know now was what they took them for. Lou was wrong. Trust wasn’t enough. Even being family wasn’t enough. I needed to know.

  I asked him, “Do you send the Order money?”

  “Of course I do.” He eyed me. “I guess your father did, but that must have stopped now. I guess it’s your turn. Do you want some bank account details? …” He searched for numbers in his billfold.

  Chapter 15

  In the dense, moist heat of noon, Brica’s gentle, lilting voice carried easily through the trees. “… The sidhe live in hollow hills,” Brica was saying. “They are invisible. They can be seen when they choose, but even then they are hard to spot, for they always wear green. They are harmless if you are friendly to them, which is why we drop bits of bread in the furrow when plowing, and pour wine on the ground at harvesttime …”

  Not wishing to disturb her daughter, Regina approached as silently as she could. Not that that was so easy now she was forty-one years old, and already an old woman, and anyhow her forest skills would never match those of the younger folk.

  “… But you must never eat sidhe food, for they will lead you into their hollow hills, which are entrances to the Otherworld, and you may never find your way out — or if you do, you might find a hundred years have passed, and all your family, even your brothers and sisters, have grown old and died, while you have aged only a day. But if a sidhe frightens you, you can always chase her away with the sound of a bell — but it must be made of iron, for the sidhe fear iron above all …”

  Her daughter sat at the center of a ring of children, their faces raised intently. Nearby a fire flickered. Brica saw Regina, and held up a hand in apology. She had been due to meet her mother at the farmstead.

  Regina was content to wait in the cool of the shade and let her heart stop thumping from the climb up the hillside from the farmstead. The sun was almost overhead now, and its light, scattered into green dapples by the tall canopy of trees, lit up the curl of white smoke that rose from the fire. Regina recognized the rich, strong scent of burning oak, stronger than beech or ash. She sometimes wondered what Julia would have thought if she could have known that one day her daughter would become an expert on the scents of burning firewood. But they had all had to adapt.

  Brica, given an old British name after Regina’s own grandmother, shared Regina’s features — the pale, freckled skin, the somewhat broad nose, lips bright as cherries, the eyes of smoke gray. But at twenty- one years old she was more beautiful than Regina had ever been. Her face had a symmetry that Regina’s lacked, and there was a kind of exquisite perfection in the oyster-shell curl of her ears, the fine lines of her eyebrows. Even her one undeniable gift from her never-seen-again father Amator, her black hair, was thick and lustrous.

  And she was very good at holding the children’s attention. This morning she had shown them how to start a fire, with a bit of flint and a scrap of char-cloth. It was their most essential skill of all, and one that the children were shown over and over again, just as Brica had been taught as she had grown up. And buried in the fables Brica told the children were warnings that might ensure their safety: even this tale of the sidhe, the fairies.

  Few adults believed in supernatural beings moving among them. But you would sometimes glimpse strangers: a very odd kind of stranger, moving over the sparely populated hills, often wearing green — just as in the stories. These were humans, no doubt about that, and they carried tools of stone or bronze. And they were robbers. Rather like foxes, they would take chickens and the odd sheep, or even — if they could get it — bread or cake. It was said they were dangerous when cornered, but they would flee when challenged. And it was true that they were terrified of iron — especially iron weapons, Regina thought dryly, against which their flimsy bronze was little protection.

  Nobody was sure where they came from. Her own theory was that the sidhe came from the west, perhaps the southwestern peninsula or Wales, or even the far north beyond the Wall. Perhaps in those distant valleys an old sort of folk had persisted — older even than the barbarian culture that had preceded the arrival of the Romans — so old they didn’t even have the skills to make iron. Now that the legions were gone, and the land was emptying, they were, perhaps, slowly creeping back.

  If they seemed to Regina’s folk as furtive, creeping, uncanny spirits, she wondered how her folk must seem to them. And after all, she thought wistfully, nowadays we can’t make iron, either.

  The children all wore simple shifts of colorless wool. Some of them wore daisy chains around their heads or necks, and one small boy had a broad black stripe of birch-bark oil on his cheek, a lotion applied by Marina to a deep graze. Sitting there they looked like creatures of the forest, Regina thought suddenly, quite alien from the little girl she had once been.

  At length Brica’s fable was done. The children scattered through the woods in twos and threes, to find mushrooms and other fruits of the forest for that evening’s meal, and then to make their way home.

  Brica approached her mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Regina tried to be stern. But she cupped her daughter’s cheek and smiled. “Let’s just get on.”

  Brica briskly stamped out the little fire, and the two of them walked out of the belt of forest and into the sunshine. They looked down the broad breast of hillside at the farmstead’s three roundhouses, and beyond that to the valley where the silver-gray thread of the river glistened like a dropped necklace. But they turned away and began to walk along the crest of the hill, making for the ruined villa. Brica was always busy, always alert. She would run away to inspect a trap, or pick a handful of berries from a cane, or dig mushroom flesh from a fallen tree trunk. She was like fire, Regina thought, filled with a blazing energy Regina herself couldn’t even envy anymore.

  “So,” she said carefully, “have you seen Bran again?”

  “Not for a few days.” But Brica turned away, her smoky eyes dancing. Bran was a boy, a little younger than Brica herself, from a farmstead a couple of hills away. He was the grandson of old Exsuperius, in fact, their first grumpy, grudging neighbor, now long dead. Brica said, “He isn’t a bad sort, you know,

  Mother.”

  “Not a bad sort behind a plow, no, but he can read no better than you could at the age of five. And as for his Latin—”

  Brica sighed. “Oh, Mother — nobody reads. What use is it? A papyrus scroll won’t plow a field, or tend the birth of a calf—”

  “Maybe not now. But when things—”

  “ — get back to normal, yes, yes. You know, there are girls five years younger than me who have husbands and children.”

  “You aren’t those girls,” Regina snapped.

  “You don’t think Bran is good enough for me.”

  “I never said that.”

  Brica slipped her hand into her mother’s. “The only reason he’s learning to read at all is to please you.”

  Regina was surprised. “It is?”

  “Doesn’t that show how he cares about me — even about you?”

  “Perhaps.” Regina shook her head. “You must make your own decisions, I suppose. I made many foolish choices — but if I had not, I wouldn’t have you. I just want you to be sure what you want. And in the meantime be careful.”

  Brica snorted. “Mother, I go to Marina every month.”

  Regina knew that Brica was talking about the herbal teas Marina made up as a contraceptive treatment. Marina had, over the years, become something of an expert on remedies gathered from the forests and fields; in the absence of a doctor such wisdom was the best anybody could do.

  “Well, you know what I think of potions like that,” Regina snapped. “If Bran really did care about you he would use a condom. There’s no tea
that’s as effective as a pig’s bladder.”

  Brica flushed red, but she was suppressing a laugh. “Mother, please !”

  “And another thing …”

  Bickering, laughing, gossiping, they made their way along the broken ridge.

  * * *

  There were more than twenty people at the farm now, a community grown from the seed of that panicky flight from Verulamium. Around the old core of Regina and her daughter, Marina and Carausias, others had gathered: refugees from an old town to the south, the second eldest son of an overcrowded farmstead to the west and his family.

  In the beginning, in this dismal ruin on its breast of green hillside, Regina had felt utterly lost. The sense of isolation was the worst. The richer parts of the countryside were inhabited and cultivated as they had always been, but scattered farmsteads like this one on more marginal land, farmed only when it had been necessary to pay Roman taxes, now lay abandoned. Their neighbors were few and far between — there were few lights to be seen on the hills at night. The crown of forest at the top of the hill became a source of almost superstitious dread for Regina, a thick green-black tangle within which lurked boar, wolves, and even a bear, a shambling, massive form she had glimpsed once. She suspected that as the years went by the forest was gradually creeping down the hillside, and wild animals of all kinds were becoming more numerous, as if nature were seeking to reclaim the land it had once ruled.

  The endless labor had been hard on them all. Regina counted herself lucky that she hadn’t been afflicted by the chronic back problems many had suffered, or the worms and other parasites. But it broke her heart that a third of all the children born here had died before their first birthdays.