Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “The scale of it, even of their dead, is astounding,” Regina murmured.

  Their driver turned to grin at her. He must have been more than sixty years old, and a single tooth stood like a stump in his mouth. He spoke a coarse country Latin she found it hard to make out.

  Brica said, “What was that?”

  “He welcomed us to the caput mundi. To the head of the world …”

  They fell silent, each locked into her own thoughts, as the carriage wound its way along the crowded road.

  * * *

  Rome was dominated by mud brick and red tiles. But at its heart were the Capitoline and Palatine Hills with their great palaces and temples, like a floating island of gleaming marble. Regina thought she glimpsed the curving wall of the Flavian Amphitheater, astoundingly huge, like a house for giants.

  But as the carriage approached the center of the city it entered a maze of streets, and the wider view was lost. The closer they got to the center the more crowded the buildings were, and the taller they seemed to grow; they were rickety heaps of wattle, daub, and crimson-red tiles, two, three, four stories high, like unhealthy plants competing for light. In some places these insulae, islands, were so closely packed together that their balconies touched, shutting out the sky altogether. The stink was overwhelming, of rotting sewage, cooking food. And the noise of the city seemed to engulf Regina, a constant clamorous racket. It was the noise of a million people, she thought, a million voices joining into one great unending roar, and as they penetrated deeper into this crowded, unplanned maze, Regina felt as if she were becoming lost in a great formless sea of people.

  Brica grew even quieter, receding into herself. Probably, Regina thought, in the last hour her daughter had seen more strangers’ faces than she had seen before in her entire life.

  On the driver’s recommendation they were brought to a restaurant. The owner, who happened to be the driver’s brother-in-law, also owned some of the apartments in the block above the restaurant, and the driver had promised he would rent the women a room.

  Set on a street crowded with shops, the restaurant occupied the block’s ground floor. It was a low-roofed, well-lit place: people sat on benches at the front, eating snacks and drinking wine as they watched the bustle of the street. Regina glimpsed marble counters on which samples of dishes were displayed, and behind them was a green-lit central atrium, set with more tables.

  From the outside the insula actually had an attractive appearance, with its roof of terra-cotta tiles, its stucco facade decorated with tiles and small mosaic images. Balconies of wood and brick projected from each story, and potted plants were set on each one. But the apartments were small and cramped, and got steadily worse as you climbed the stairs. And Regina’s and Brica’s, on the topmost floor, must have been the worst of all.

  The windows were covered with sheets of bark. The only furniture was two beds fixed to the wall, some shelving and cupboards, and a few stools and low tables. There was a brazier for heating and an open stove for cooking, appliances Regina immediately vowed she would use sparingly, for she was convinced that they would set the insula and the whole district on fire, and would be the death of them both. Even in this cramped setting their few belongings, homemade at the dunon, looked pathetic and provincial. But Regina unpacked the three matres and set up an improvised lararium in one corner of the room.

  Even up here the smells from the restaurant reached them, and soon they were both very hungry. Regina ventured back down the stairs. The menu food was predominantly cooked meat, highly spiced with pepper and fish sauce and garlic — but she didn’t have the money to spare. She went out to the street stalls and bought a little bread and salted meat, and a small pitcher of wine.

  While she was gone Brica waited for her, curled up on her couch with her knees tucked into her chest. When Regina returned, Brica didn’t seem to have moved at all.

  In their cramped room they ate their bread, trying to ignore the enticing smells from below. Regina left a little of their poor bread and wine for the goddesses of the family, who sat squat in their corner of this strange, unpleasant little room.

  In the days that followed, they tried to settle in.

  The restaurant had connections to the water supply from the aquifers and to the main sewers. The apartments above did not. Every day you had to fetch your water from a fountain a couple of streets away, where there was always a queue. And every morning you had to carry down your buckets to a cesspit in the insula ’s basement — that was, if you could be troubled to. Some of the insula ’s less sociable inhabitants would store up their waste for days without removing it, until protests from their neighbors about the smell forced them to. And others, lazier still, just threw it out the window, with a cry to warn any hapless passersby below.

  As an alternative to the pots in their room, there was a public latrine a block away. The latrine turned out to be a long, dark building with two walls lined with scores of people squatting over holes that fed directly into the sewer system. The stink was astonishing. Though she had scarcely been used to privacy — there was no separate latrine in a roundhouse — Regina found it difficult to let her bowels move in front of so many strangers, all talking and laughing, walking and shouting, and the children, who ran around half naked at the feet of the adults, were even more off-putting. But it was an oddly jolly place, she thought, full of gossip and laughter: obviously a center of the community, a palace of shit and piss.

  Rome, Regina quickly learned, was all about divisions. There were rigid barriers among social classes, from the ancient senatorial families down to the slaves. And the gulf between rich and poor was vast.

  There were rich and poor everywhere, of course; even in Artorius’s dunon that had been true. But here in Rome there were families that had spent a thousand years accruing wealth. It was said that at one time just two thousand individuals had owned almost all the cultivated land in the western Empire, from Italy to Britain. Though Rome sprawled over a vast area within its curtain of walls, there were so many public basilicas, circuses, temples, gardens, baths and theaters, and so many privately owned estates from the Emperor’s palaces and gardens on down, that it was really no wonder that most people were forced to live in these tottering apartment blocks, crammed into whatever space was available.

  Rome was never quiet, even during the darkest hours. There were always the shouts of drovers and wagoners, the uproarious noise of the taverns, some of which never closed, and the gull-like cries of the night watchmen. And too soon would come the morning, when her neighbors would start their days with clattering and banging, laughter and shouts and even noisy lovemaking that carried easily through the thin walls. One man in the apartment below had a particularly stentorian way of calling into the street, calling up water carriers first thing in the morning.

  The Romans had a saying — It costs money to sleep here. They were right.

  * * *

  On their first afternoon, Regina sent a boy to take a message to Amator’s home. There was no reply to her note that day, or the second, and Regina began to fret. She had never forgotten how she had waited for Amator’s call after that night in the Verulamium baths, a message that had never come; and she hated to be put in the same position again. Besides, it had taken all but a few bronze scraps of coin from Ceawlin’s money to buy them the room for a few nights. They couldn’t afford to wait long.

  But on the third day a retainer called, and said that Amator was prepared to meet her.

  And so that afternoon she and Brica walked across the city. Regina stepped out boldly, but Brica walked with eyes downcast and a fine cloth mask over her face.

  It was a long and difficult trek. The streets were so crowded they could barely pass. The lower sections of the apartment blocks were given over to shops, taverns, and warehouses, and from stalls set up in the street itself everything from clothing to wine to cooked meats was on sale. Then there were the street entertainers — jugglers, snake charmers, acrobats. In one place a
barber stoically shaved the jowls of a large, prosperous-looking gentleman; he held a spiderweb soaked in vinegar to stanch the bleeding from the frequent cuts he made. All this enterprise made the ways even narrower, and they were crowded with carriages, carts, baggage animals, sedan chairs borne by slaves, horseback riders. The road surface was filthy, littered with garbage and sewage. In the larger streets open trenches bore away the sewage toward deep-buried conduits, ultimately feeding the patient Tiber. And meanwhile dirty children ran around the wheels of the passing carriages, and dogs sniffed at the debris that piled up in any convenient corner.

  But people pressed cheerfully through the crush, babbling away in their fluent, rapid Latin — although there was a surprising peppering of other tongues. Regina had thought these must be barbarian languages, but she learned that amid this torrent she could hear the tongues of some of the founding peoples of Rome, the Etruscans and the Sabines, relics of days long past.

  Amator’s home turned out to be located in a grand complex called Trajan’s Forum.

  They entered the complex through a triumphal arch that towered over them, surmounted by an immense bronze sculpture of a six-horse chariot. A central piazza was dominated by a huge gilded statue of the Emperor Trajan himself, mounted on horseback. At one end of the piazza was an immense basilica, a monstrous marble cliff of offices and courts, fronted by tall columns of gray granite. It could surely have swallowed up the basilica of Verulamium whole. And looming beyond the basilica roof Regina could see a statue mounted on a great column — yet another representation of Trajan, who had evidently been a powerful emperor indeed, still peering loftily down at the citizens of the city he had built, centuries after the trivial detail of his death. The whole complex was too huge, out of scale, as if constructed for gods and set here in the middle of this human city.

  But the roof of the great basilica showed signs of fire damage, and the marble floor of the piazza was crowded with shabby market stalls. Many of the shoppers wore the bold jewelry, skin cloaks, and brightly patterned tunics and trousers of barbarians, of Germans and Vandals, Huns and Goths. Few of them noticed the carved figures of defeated barbarians who peered down from the tops of the columns that ringed the piazza, images of the ancestors of these confident shoppers, symbols of an arrogant past.

  To either side of the piazza were exedrae, huge semicircular courtyards, and Regina led Brica into one of these. They entered a warren of brick-faced concrete built into the terraced slopes of a hill. Regina felt her own nervousness increase. There were offices, shops, and courts here on many levels, all linked by stairs and streets and vaulted corridors. It was bewildering. But again there were signs that this place had seen better days, for there were comparatively few people here, and many boarded-up and even burned- out shops.

  Amator seemed to be doing better than the average, though. His home, set in an upper level of the complex, turned out to be a grand apartment fronted by a bakery. The shop was a busy place, and enticing smells issued from its big stone ovens.

  A retainer came through the shop and led them into the house behind. The retainer was a boy of sixteen or seventeen, with plump, effeminate features. When he walked ahead of them there was a faint whiff of perfume.

  At the heart of the home, a series of rooms crowded around a small tiled atrium, illuminated by a light well cut into the roof above. At the far side of the atrium a narrow passageway led them between larger rooms — an office, and a large, sumptuous-looking dining room — and out to a garden, surrounded on three sides by slender columns, and with a view to the south overlooking the city. The house itself was not large by the standards of Regina’s villa — but then this was Rome, and she understood how much more expensive space was here.

  The garden, called a peristylium, despite a small fountain with a statue of some aquatic goddess, was not terribly impressive in itself. But what made it remarkable was that it had been entirely built on the roof of the apartment below. Brica poked at the grass with one sandaled toe, trying to find the concrete base beneath.

  Amator met them in the little garden. “Welcome, Regina …” His voice was as deep and rich as she remembered, and she felt a deep and unwelcome flush work through her belly, as if her body kept its own memories. But she was shocked at the sight of him.

  A few years older than her, he was now in his middle fifties. His thin frame was swathed in a purple- edged toga, no doubt worn to impress her, she thought. But he had grown gaunt. His face had lost its fullness, and his cheeks and chin showed sharp bones. And his head was now completely bald — in fact, she saw with surprise, his eyebrows were gone, too, though two lines of livid flesh showed where they had been.

  His retainer, the perfumed boy, hovered at his elbow, looking uncertain and nervous.

  Regina gave Amator her hand, and he buffed his lips against it. “I am glad to see you are prospering,” she said. “But you have changed.”

  He pursed his lips, and she saw that his eyes were as black and deep as ever. “You’re talking about my hair? I can tell you’ve only just arrived,” he said dryly. “You sound so provincial! Whole-body depilation is quite the fashion now. Of course you can’t find a barber to do the job well these days. But Sulla here is an expert with his poultices of wax, if a little heavy-handed with the tweezers.”

  “And perhaps you enjoy the little pains, do you?”

  He arched his head, and a smile tugged at the corners of his small mouth. “You’ve lost none of your sharpness, little chicken.”

  The retainer’s reaction to this exchange was complex. He had flushed when Amator referred to him personally, but now he was watching Regina with alarmed calculation.

  They are lovers, Regina realized suddenly. And this wretched boy of Amator’s is trying to work out if I am any threat to his position. She eyed the boy without pity. The boy wore a gold bulla around his neck. Like a little pouch, this was a symbol of his free birth, and would normally be worn from infancy to manhood. He looked too old to be wearing such a childish token, and she wondered if Amator preferred to keep his companion young.

  If Amator had chosen men over women, something of his old hunger showed in his eyes as he turned his intense gaze on Brica. Regina felt proud as Brica returned his lascivious stare with contempt.

  “Your companion is lovely,” said Amator smoothly. “Her paleness gives her an exotic look in these warmer climes—”

  “Her name is Brica,” said Regina. “She is my daughter. And yours, Amator.” She heard a gasp from Brica; Regina had not warned her about this. “Although truthfully I cannot be sure if it was you or Athaulf whose restless cock impregnated me that night.”

  Amator’s gaze clouded. But he smiled again at Brica, though with more levels of complexity than before. “Wine, Sulla,” he murmured.

  The boy now stared with open hostility at Regina and Brica, these relics of his master’s complicated past. But he went to get the wine.

  Amator waved his guests to the low couches set out around the fountain. Sulla returned with jugs of wine and water, three fine blue glasses, and plates of figs, olives, and apples. Despite her hunger Regina only sipped a little wine. But Brica, without inhibition and despite the news she had just received, wolfed down the apples; Amator seemed startled by her animal directness.

  Wary, calculating, clearly wondering what she wanted from him, Amator told Regina a little about himself. He had come to Rome in partnership with Athaulf. The German had long since vanished from his life; Regina wondered if their relationship had been deeper than she had suspected on that night when they had used her. Still, they had stayed together long enough to found a successful grain-shipping business.

  “Rome is a relentlessly hungry city, Regina,” he said. “It has been unable to feed itself since the days of Julius Caesar, and it was Augustus who introduced the annona.” This was a dole of free grain, distributed to poorer citizens.

  “We saw the port — the grain fleet.”

  “Yes. And with such mighty flows of
goods, there are plenty of opportunities for a man of intelligence and charm to make a living for himself, even in these complicated times.”

  “And you always had those attributes in plenty.”

  “I’ve done well for the son of a servant from the provinces — don’t you think? I’ve come a long way from there, to this.”

  Brica leaned forward, and spoke around a mouthful of fruit. “Why do you have a purple stripe on your cloak? It looks ridiculous.” It was the first thing she had said to him.

  “I belong to the equestrian order,” he said smoothly. He displayed a big, gaudy gold ring. “It is an ancient order, dating from the times before the wars with Carthage, when the richest citizens were required to fund the cavalry in defense of the Republic. Today it is open to all adult citizens — provided you have enough money, of course — do you know, the Emperor provides me with a horse! But I don’t ride; I keep the beast in a stable in my house in the country. I have various civic responsibilities, and—”

  “You are also a member of three guilds,” said Regina. “You have several patrons, including a senator called Titus Nerva.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about me,” Amator cut in, eyeing her.

  “Before he died, your father Carausias was very informative. Even though you rarely wrote to him unless you needed money or some other favor, he told me enough to follow your career.”

  Amator leaned forward. “So you know me, as one old lover knows another.”