Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 16

"An offering," said Marina unexpectedly. "To the river. When you die-you give it your armor, your weapons, your treasure. It's what they always did, away from the towns. Like they did before . . . We probably pulled it up when we tugged on the reeds."

A dead man's h.o.a.rd. It was an eerie thought, and Regina glanced around uneasily at the mist-laden, murky landscape.

In many parts of the countryside the touch of Roman rule had always been light. As long as folk kept the peace and paid their taxes, the Emperor had never very much cared what they got up to in their private lives. Perhaps a community in this remote farmstead had kept up the rituals of their distant forebears, and thrown their personal goods into the marsh as propitiations to the G.o.ddesses of the water and the earth. The rational corner of her mind wondered if it might have been better for these vanished warriors to hold on to their weapons, to keep their money and spend it on trade or defenses, rather than hurl it into this marsh so extravagantly. Then they might have resisted the Romans better.

Probably there were bodies here, too, hurled into the water. They would be the dead, not of her time, but of the strange times of the deeper past, before the legionaries and census keepers and tax collectors: nother dead, but the dead of other, alien folk, whose spirits might, somehow, still linger in the mists of this ancient, endlessly reworked landscape.

She was shivering. She tucked the little weapon into her belt.

Back at the roundhouse Carta poured urine over Regina's hand to clean out her wound, and rubbed in honey, expensively bought from Exsuperius, to stop any infection. The next day it was brighter, and Regina's odd superst.i.tious fears were banished. But the brightness brought a deeper cold, and the marsh was frozen over, hiding its strange trove.

As winter turned to spring, Regina's heavy belly slowed her down. But this was a community of three women, one old man, and the unreliable, lazy Severus, and there was no room for pa.s.sengers.

Still, it wasn't so bad. One way or another they never ran short of food, even during the worst of the winter. And as the days grew longer and warmer, despite the load in her belly, she felt stronger, oddly, than she ever had before.

And it seemed that as Carta had gradually weakened, the others had come to look to Regina for leadership. So she was the first off her pallet of reeds each morning, the first to take her turns with the water fetching, the first to check the traps, always setting an example with her own efforts.

She was poor at bending and lifting, and couldn't climb onto the roof of the roundhouse. But she could work a foot plow. One morning she set to hauling it across one of the fields on the slope behind the farmstead. She had to dig its iron point into the soil, push it in with her foot, and then haul back on the handle, which was nearly as tall as she was, to break open the soil.

The iron plow with its bowed wooden handle had been a precious find, left under a heap of decaying sacking by the vanished Arcadius and his workers. They had used more of their hunted meat to buy seed stock for wheat, kale, and cabbages from Exsuperius. Now the time was coming-as she dimly recalled from her memories of life in the villa-to plow and plant.

With the foot plow, however, it was only possible to scratch a shallow groove in the ground. It was galling to remember how her father's tenants had used ox teams to break the soil over vast areas, while she was reduced to this pitiful sc.r.a.ping. But Exsuperius, in one of his bits of taciturn advice, had told them to plow their fields twice, in a crisscross pattern, to break up the ground better. And she found that when she came to the second set of furrows the plow fairly slid into the already broken soil.

By midday, her muscles had thoroughly warmed up, and the sun shed a little warmth on her face.

After so many months she no longer felt quite so obsessively bitter about Aetius, and Marcus and Julia, and Amator-especially Amator-all the people who had, one way or another, abandoned her. As for her companions here on the farm, they had been thrown together by chance, and they were none of them perfect: Carausias an overtrusting old fool, Severus lazy, selfish, and sullen, Marina timid and lacking initiative, and Carta-dear Carta, now terribly weakened. These werenot the people with whom Regina would have chosen to be spending the eighteenth year of her life. But they wereher people, she was coming to see: they were the people who had taken her in after her grandfather's death, who had sheltered her as best they could . . .

It was at that moment, just as she had reached the nearest thing to contentment she had enjoyed since that night with Amator, that the first contraction came. She fell to the ground, yelling for Carta, as waves of pain rippled over her belly.

What followed was a blur. Here were Marina and old Carausias, their faces looming over her like moons. They were too weak to carry her, so she had to get to her feet and, leaning heavily on their shoulders, limp to the house.

Carta's face was yellow and drawn. She looked as if she could barely stand herself. But she placed her hands on Regina's belly, and felt the pulsing muscles, the position of the baby.

Regina yelled, "It's too early! Oh, Carta, make it stop!"

Carta shook her head. "The baby has its own time . . . Get her on the bed, Marina, quickly." She lifted Regina's tunic, grubby with dirt from the fields, and placed a wooden plank, scavenged from one of the other buildings, under Regina's b.u.t.tocks.

"Here. Take this." It was Carausias, looming over her. He had brought her one of her preciousmatres .

They, at least, had never abandoned her; she clutched the lumpy little statue to her chest.

The contractions were coming in waves now.

Carta snapped, "Regina, pull back your knees." Regina reached down and, with a huge effort, hooked her fingers behind her knees and pulled her legs back and apart.

Carta forced a smile. "I knew I shouldn't have let you plow that wretched field."

"And who else was to do it? . . .Ow-w! Carta-"

"Yes?"

"Youhave done this before, haven't you?"

"What, delivered a baby? Haveyou plowed a field before?"

With the next contraction the pain became unbelievably intense, as if she were slowly being torn apart.

Carta leaned closer. Even through her own pain Regina saw how pale she was, her white face glistening with oily sweat. "Regina, listen to me. There's something I have to tell you."

"Can't it wait?"

"No, child," Carta said sadly. "No, I don't think it can. Your father . . . You remember how he died."

It was an awful image to come wafting through her clouds of pain. "I could hardly forget-"

"It was me."

"What?"

"I was the one he was unfaithful with. I was the reason he punished himself."

Regina gasped. "Carta, how could you? You betrayed my mother-"

Carta's bloodless mouth worked. "He gave me no choice."

Marina screamed, "I can see its head!"

Carta pulled back to see. "Marina, help me . . ." She reached down to support Regina's perineum, and cupped her hand around the baby's head. "The cord is around its neck . . . Uncle, give me that knife.

Now, you old fool." Even through her own pain Regina could feel Carta's hands trembling as she worked.

When the cord was cut, the baby's body slid smoothly out, tumbling into Marina's waiting arms with a last gush of fluid. Marina picked mucus from the baby's b.u.t.ton mouth. Carta stayed with Regina until the afterbirth had emerged, and then she packed her v.a.g.i.n.a with moss to stem the bleeding.

Regina, despite her weakness and exhaustion, had eyes only for her baby, which had begun to wail thinly. "Let me see . . ."

"It's a girl," Marina said, her eyes bright. She had wrapped the baby in a clean bit of blanket, and now she leaned down toward Regina so she could see the round pink face.

Carta said, "I think-I think . . ." And she fell back, slumping to the floor. Regina tried to see, but could not raise her head.

Carausias cried, "Cartumandua! Come, oh come, my little niece, we can't have this." He fumbled for a small flask; Regina knew it contained an extract of deadly nightshade, a heart stimulant bought at great expense from Exsuperius. He tried to pour droplets between Carta's lips, but her face was like a wax mask.

Her G.o.ddess heavy on her chest, fear and rage flooded Regina. "No! No, you sow, you b.i.t.c.h, you cow, you wh.o.r.e, Cartumandua! You won't leave me, not you, too, you slave, not now!"

But Carta did not respond, not even to apologize. The baby's crying continued, thin and eerie.

That evening Severus returned from his hunting. He saw the baby, the mess in the hut, Carta's body.

Severus stayed that night and the next. He helped Carausias and Marina prepare the body, and he used the plow to dig a shallow grave in the rocky ground at the top of the hill. But when Carta's body was buried, he walked away, taking nothing but the clothes on his back. Regina knew they would never see him again.

Chapter 14.

"I followed General Clark as we climbed the steps of thecordonata toward the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill. And all around Rome the bells of the campanili rang out . . ."

Lou Casella, my mother's uncle, my great-uncle, was over eighty. He was a short, stocky man, bald save for a fringe of snow-white hair, with liver-spotted skin stretched over impressive muscles. His voice was soft, husky, and to my ears, mostly educated by movies and TV, he sounded like a cla.s.sic New York Italian American, something like an old Danny DeVito, maybe. He sat facing Lake Worth, sunset light glimmering in his rheumy familiar eyes-the family eyes, gray as smoke-as he told me how, in June 1944 at age twenty-two, he had entered Rome as an aide to General Mark Clark, commander of the victorious Fifth Army.

"In the place where I stood with Clark, Brutus, fresh from the murder of Caesar, once came to speak to the people. Augustus made sacrificial offerings to Jupiter. Greek monks prayed their way through the Dark Ages. Gibbon was inspired to write his great history. And now herewe were, a bunch of ragged-a.s.s GIs. But we'd made our own piece of history already. All I could see was faces, thousands upon thousands of Roman faces turned up toward us.

"And even then I knew that among those hopeful crowds I would find family . . ."

I had found Lou in a retirement home just off Seaspray Avenue in Palm Beach.

"What the h.e.l.l kind of a coat is that?" he asked of my duffel. It was the first thing he said to me. "Where do you think you are, Alaska? Haven't seen a thing like that since the army."

It had taken me a while to trace him. The address Gina gave me was out of date. She wasn't apologetic.

"I haven't seen him for ten years," she said. "And anyhow you don't think of people that agechanging address , do you?"

Evidently Lou was an exception. His old address had been a rented apartment in Palm Beach. There was no forwarding contact, but Dan advised me to try the American a.s.sociation of Retired Persons, which turned out to be a muscular lobby group. They were reluctant to give me his address, but acted as a third party to put us in touch. In all it took a couple of days before Lou finally called me at my hotel, and invited me over.

Lou showed me around his rest home. It was like a s.p.a.cious hotel, every room sunlit, with dozens of white-coated staff and its own immense grounds. You could get permits for golf courses and private beaches. There was a daily program of exercise. As well as old-folk nostalgic social events like wartime picture shows and big-band dances, I saw notices for guest speakers from universities and other learned organizations on such topics as Florida history, coastal flora and fauna, art deco, even the history of Disney.

When I enthused about all this, Lou slapped me down. He called the place "the departure lounge." He walked me to a dayroom, where rows of citizens sat in elaborate armchairs, propped up before a gigantic, supremely loud wide-screen TV. "They like reality shows," he said. "Like having real live people here in the room with them. We do have a little community here. But every so often one of us just gets plucked out of here, and we all fight over his empty chair. So don't get all nostalgic about being old. You're fine so long as you keep fit, and you don't lose your marbles." He tapped his bare, sun- leathered cranium. "Which is why I walk three miles a day, and swim, and play golf, and do theNew York Times crossword every day."

I was impressed. "You complete the crossword?"

"Did I say complete? . . . So you want to talk about your sister."

I'd told him the story on the phone. I'd brought a copy of the photograph, scanned and cleaned up by Peter McLachlan; Lou had glanced at it but didn't seem much interested. "I want to close the whole business off," I said.

"Or you're picking a scab," he said warningly. "I never met her, your sister. So if you want to know what she'slike -"

"Just tell me the story," I said. I spread my hands, and tried to imitate hisG.o.dfather accent. "Picture the scene. Rome, nineteen forty-four. The liberating army is welcomed by a smiling populace-"

He laughed, and clapped me on the back. "s.h.i.thead. Christ, you are your father's boy; he made the same kind of dumb jokes. All right, I'll tell you the story. And I'll tell you what was told tome by Maria Ludovica."

"Who?"

"Your cousin," he said. "Or whatever."

Maria Ludovica.It was the first time I'd heard the name. It wouldn't be the last.

We sat in a bright dayroom, and began to talk.

"When we had operations established, and we got the electricity back to the hospitals on the second day, and the phones working on the third, and so forth, I had time to look around a little . . . I knew the family had roots in Rome. I knew where my grandparents had come from-near the Appian Way-and it wasn't hard to dig out some Casellas in the area. Whatever you say about those fascists, they kept good records."

So young Sergeant Casella had ventured nervously down the Appian Way, the ancient road that led south out of Rome. In that hot autumn of 1944 the area was crowded with refugees, and everything was shabby, poor, dirty, deprived, despite the liberators' best efforts.

He had found a "nest of Casellas," as he put it, an extended family living under the stern eye of a black- wrapped widow who turned out to be a cousin of his father. "It was a small house in a kind of down-at- the-heel suburb. I mean it had been down-at-the-heel even before the d.a.m.n occupation. And now there were, h.e.l.l, twenty people living in there, stacked up. Refugees, even a wounded soldier-"

"All relatives."

"Yep. And with no place to go. They made me welcome. I was a liberating hero,and family. They made me a vast meal, even though they had so little themselves. Aunt Cara produced this tub of risotto with mushrooms-dense and thick and b.u.t.tery, though G.o.d knows where she got the b.u.t.ter from . . ." He closed his eyes. "I can taste it to this day. They asked me to help, of course. I couldn't bend the rules, but I did what I could. I had my own salary, my own rations; I diverted some of that.

"They had some sick kids in there. Two boys and a girl. They were pale, hollow-eyed, coughing . . . I couldn't tell what was wrong, but it looked bad. They had to wait in line for the civilian docs, and in those days medical supplies were scarcer than anything else, as you can imagine. I tried to get an army medic to come out, but of course he wouldn't."

"And so you turned to Maria Ludovica?"

"It was all I could think of."

By this time Maria Ludovica had come looking forhim . In an inverse of the family search Lou had performed, Maria, or others from the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, had inspected the new invaders of Rome for any family connections, and they had found Lou.

"Maria was really your cousin?"

"No. Something farther away than that. Remember it was my grandparents-your, uh, great-great- grandparents, I guess-who left Rome for the States in the first place. h.e.l.l, I don't know what you'd call our relationship. But she was a Casella all right. Those gray eyes, you know-you have them," he said, looking at me. "But she had black hair tied up around her head, cheekbones you could have eaten a meal off, and an a.s.s-well, I guess I shouldn't say stuff like that to a kid like you. But she was s.e.xy like you wouldn't believe. No wonder Mussolini couldn't keep his hands off her."

"Mussolini?"

"She was never a fascist-that's what she told me, and of course she would say that to an American soldier in nineteen forty-four-but I believed her. It turns out she'd known the Duce since the thirties.

She first saw him in October nineteen twenty-two, when he first came to power, and she joined in the March on Rome: four columns, twenty-six thousand strong, closing on the city. The army and the police just stood aside as all those blackshirts marched in. Maria was sort of swept up; where she came from, in Ravenna to the north, it was politic just to go along with it."

"And she became-what, his mistress?"

"You might call it that. She met him face to face the first time on Christmas Eve in 'thirty-three, when she was brought to Rome as one of the ninety-three most prolific women in the country."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Ninety-three women in black shawls, mothers of thirteen hundred little Italians, soldiers for fascism."

I did the math quickly."Thirteen each?"

He grinned. "They were heroes. But we've always been a fecund family, George. Our women stay fertile late, too." That was true, I reflected, thinking of Gina. "The heroic mothers were taken on a tour of the city, and they saw theExhibition of the Fascist Revolution , where Maria kissed a gla.s.s case that contained a bloodstained handkerchief-the Duce had held it to a bullet wound in his nose after he survived an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt." He winked at me. "But that wasn't all she kissed."

I spluttered.

"Come on, kid. I think we need a walk."

And walk we did, at an impressively brisk pace, trotting around town on what I took to be one of his regular three-mile routes.

Palm Beach is set on a narrow tongue of land between the Atlantic, to the east, and Lake Worth, to the west. The city itself is set out according to a cla.s.sic American grid layout, a neat tracing no more than four blocks wide from coast to coast. We tramped south down the County Road, peering dutifully at landmarks like the town hall and the Memorial Park fountain, a water feature fringed by swaying palm trees under a powder-blue sky. Then we turned onto Worth Avenue, four blocks of overpriced shops: Cartier, Saks, Tiffany, Ungaro's, stocking everything from Armani clothes to antique Russian icons, anything you wanted, nothing with a price tag. One of the shops boasted the world's largest stock of antique Meissen porcelain. Outside the shops limousine engines idled.

Lou said, "So what do you think? A little different from Manchester?"