Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 18

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 haveyou . 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 likethat ," 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 superst.i.tious dread for Regina, a thick green-black tangle within which lurked boar, wolves, and even a bear, a shambling, ma.s.sive 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.

Still, she and the others had persisted. They would not be driven from this place-after all, they had nowhere else to go. And slowly, they had managed to improve things.

After a time, as their numbers had grown, they had plucked up the courage to try to build another roundhouse-but its roof had blown off in the winter's first storm. There was a trick to the angle of the thatch, it turned out; a perfect one-in-one slope would wash away the rain and resist the wind, and if you didn't allow the lip to dangle too close to the ground it remained safe from the mice.

And now, by Jupiter's beard, there werethree roundhouses. It was a little village, a busy place. They had dug pits in the ground for surplus grain, and every day you could hear the steady grinding of quern stones.

In the spring and autumn there was the plowing to be done-twice a year, for in the autumn they would seed the fields with winter wheat and other seasonal crops. They cultivated emmer wheat, spelt wheat, hulled six-row barley, kale, and beans. Wild garlic and parsnips could often be found, and in summer blackberries, elderberries, and crab apples. They kept a few chickens, sheep for their wool and milk, and pigs, useful creatures that could be turned out into the fields to root in the stubble, or driven into the forest for forage in the winter. Only old animals were butchered. Most of their meat came from hunted deer and occasionally boar, and they still used the simple traps for hares they had made from their very earliest days.

And then there were all the other essentials of life. It still startled Regina sometimes that you really couldn'tbuy anything anymore. Anything you couldn't barter for, from shoes to clothes to tools to new roofing for your house, you had tomake .

Take clothing, for instance. As their few garments had quickly worn out, Regina had had to find out how to pluck wool off their sheep with combs of wood or bone, and to spin it into yarn, and even to weave it with simple looms. The clothes they made were simple-just tubes of cloth, made into tunics and undershirts andbraecci , trousers for the men, and apeplum , a sleeveless dress for the women-but they did the job.

Shoes were more of a challenge. When their old town-bought shoes had worn out, their first attempts at making leather replacements had been disasters, ill-fitting lash-ups that had rubbed and burned and caused blisters. Even now they were only beginning to learn the knack of cobbling a good serviceable boot. It amazed her how much time she spent thinking about her feet.

They had even tried their hand at pottery, to replace their cups and bowls of carved wood. They experimented with pit clamps. You would line a shallow pit with hot embers overlaid with green wood.

The pots would be carefully placed on top, and the whole thing covered with dry wood, damp straw, and soil to make an airtight mound. If you left it for a full day, making sure the covering of soil was intact, you might be lucky to have a quarter or a third of your pots come out whole-blackened, coa.r.s.e, but intact.

Carausias and Marina seemed to find great satisfaction in making such things, while Brica and the children were used to nothing better. But Regina remembered her mother's precious Samian ware, and she wondered how long it would be before the trade routes were restored and the markets opened again, and she would once again be able to buy such treasures as easily as breathing.

But all that was lazy thinking, she told herself sternly, pointless longing, a distraction from the business of simply staying alive that occupied nearly all their time, from dawn to dusk. After all she had an example to set.

As the years had gone by, somebody had to lead. It would never be Marina, who, despite her own two children and three grandchildren, had never thrown off her self-denigrating cast of mind as a servant. As he aged, poor Carausias, who after all had led them all here in the first place, became less and less effectual, often sinking into the state of unhappy confusion from which he had never really recovered since his betrayal by Arcadius.

And so it had become Regina who led, more or less by default. It was Regina who welcomed newcomers or turned them away, Regina who took the floor at their regular meetings, Regina who sat in judgment like a Verulamium magistrate to resolve disputes over share-outs of chickens' eggs, Regina who traveled the area to keep up their tentative contacts with their neighbors-Regina who had discovered in herself the leadership without which, all seemed to agree, the farmstead would long since have failed and they would all have becomebacaudae , if they had survived at all.

It wasn't a situation she liked. She always promised herself that the whole thing was just temporary. But in the meantime there was n.o.body better to do it.

To her frustration they were out of touch with the great events of the world here. There was still no news of the Emperor's return. The old road still bore some traffic, and the travelers or refugees sometimes brought news of kings: there was one Cunedda in Wales, for instance, and a Coel in the north, rumored to be the last of the Roman commanders there, now styling himself the Old King. From the east came rumors of one Vitalinus, who called himself Vortigern-a name that meant "high king"-who, it was said, had taken on the job of uniting the old province and keeping it safe from the marauding Saxons and Picts and Irish. The farmsteaders heard nothing from these grand men. "We'll know they mean business," Carausias would say, "when the taxman comes to call."

n.o.body ever did call. And, almost unnoticed, while Regina built her farmstead into a place of prosperity and safety, more than twenty years pa.s.sed by.

When they reached the villa Regina and Brica separated and began a systematic search through the ruined buildings.

The villa had been sited in a natural bowl of green landscape, with a fine view of the western hills. Once it must have been grand indeed, Regina thought-grander even than her parents' villa-a complex of seven or eight stone buildings set around a courtyard, with barns and other smaller wooden buildings nearby.

But it had been abandoned long before she had first discovered it. Its tile-stripped roofs had already decayed, and weeds had choked the courtyard and had started pushing their way up through the floors.

Since then things had only gotten worse, as nature had followed its inexorable cycle. The floor of what must once have been the bathhouse had been broken open from below by the spreading roots of an ash, and the rooms were strewn with dead leaves. Since her last visit, last autumn, fire had burned out one of the stone buildings, removing the last vestiges of the roof and leaving its interior a shattered and smoky mess.

Despite all the damage, though, she could still see the grand plan of the villa in the great rectangular pattern of its walls, and the stumps of the broken columns that had once formed a colonnade around the courtyard. But she wondered how long it would be before the mortar crumbled and the stones rotted, and nothing was left but hummocks in the green. It was as if the world itself were a constant foe, with its million fingers of plants and insects, frost, sunlight, and fire, a relentless destroyer of all human ambition.

Regina made for the largest building in the complex. Probably it had once been a reception room. The roof was long gone, save for a few stumps of rotting beams. The floor was covered by a litter of soil and leaves, and after years of exposure to the weather the painted plasterwork had crumbled off the wall in great sheets. The walls themselves were intact, and still the room impressed by its sheer size. But the room had long since been stripped of furniture, and even the little sockets on the walls were empty of the oil lanterns they had once held.

Regina got down on her hands and knees and started to comb through the dirt. After so long, anything large enough to be seen easily had long since been smashed or carried off, and the only hope of finding anything was a fingertip search, bit by bit. But in a time when even a shoe nail was precious, it was worth the effort. Last time she had been here, in fact, she had found a small perfume bottle. As she had raised it into the light she had been stunned by its symmetry and perfection compared to the crude bowls and wooden pots she was forced to use at home, as if it had leaked into this world from some better place. She kept the bottle in the little alcove she had built for thematres , and every so often she would hold it, and take it out into the light.

Through the ruined walls she could see Brica. She had settled to a heap of dirt in one corner of what might once have been a kitchen and was exploring it carefully. It was a disconcerting juxtaposition of images, her daughter in her grubby shift rooting under a wall that still bore the marks of shelving, and even a hint of flower-design fresco work. She knew Brica felt uncomfortable in such places as these ruins, as if she believed they were ghost-haunted relics built by giants of the past, as the children's t.i.ttle- tattle had it. Sometimes Regina worried about what would happen if this unsatisfactory situation went on so long that the last of those who remembered died off, leaving only ruins, secondhand memories, and legends.

She thought about Bran. He was a little dull, but he really wasn't a bad young man, Regina thought. And it wasn't as if Brica had much choice.

There was no civic structure here; there was no nearby town or functioning villas. But as time had pa.s.sed Regina and her people had settled into a loose community of neighboring farmsteads. They were somewhat wary-some of these hillfolk were very long established and were suspicious of newcomers- but they would help each other out with harvests or medical emergencies. And they would trade, vegetables for meat, a wooden bowl for a blanket of woven wool. If not for such contacts, Regina mused, it was probable none of them would have survived.

But the population was spa.r.s.e. The land had drained as people fled south, dreaming of Armorica, abandoning even farms on the best land, driven away by the rumored advances of the Saxon raiders in the east and the Picts and Irish in the west and north. And in this empty landscape of ghost towns and abandoned farms, there was a paucity of suitable mates for Brica, that was for sure.

Regina's opposition to Bran didn't make much sense, then. But she was opposed even so. It seemed there was some deep instinct inside her about the destiny of her daughter. Yet when she thought hard about this her mind seemed to skitter away, like a pebble over a frozen pond. No doubt she would eventually figure it out.

Absently Regina brushed at the debris, she exposed a bit of floor, revealing scarlet, a patch of color picked out in tesserae. It was part of a mosaic.

With sudden eagerness she brushed aside the dirt with her forearm, exposing more of the mosaic. It showed a man's face, large-eyed, bearded. The head was surrounded by colors, gold, yellow, orange, bright red, in a sunburst pattern. It might have been Apollo, or perhaps it was some Christian symbol.

Though some of the gold-leaf tiles had been prized out by hopeful robbers, most of the colors still shone as bright as the day they had been laid down. With obsessive motions she began to clear more of the floor. It seemed wrong that such beauty should be wasted under dead leaves and crawling worms, as if the young man in the picture had been buried alive. Suddenly it struck her how the farmstead, much as she was proud of it, was a place of drab gray-green and brown, as if everything had been molded from mud. How she missed color! She had forgotten how bright the world used to be. She was carried back to another time, impossibly warm, bright, and safe, when she had crept into the ruined rooms of her parents' villa and discovered another mosaic . . .

A single scream pierced the air. It was cut off suddenly.

Brica.

Regina's thoughts evaporated, replaced by hard, cold fear. She got to her feet and ran out of the room.

Brica was standing in the kitchen. Her gray eyes were wide with terror.

The man behind her was taller than Brica by a head. He held Brica easily with one hand clamped over her face, and in the other he held a short iron sword with an elaborately cast handle. He wore a cloak of dyed wool. His blond hair was long and tied back from his head, and his drooping mustache was clogged with bits of food. When he saw Regina he smiled, showing yellowed teeth. He said something in a language she did not understand.

He reached down, dug the heft of his sword into the neck of Brica's tunic, and let the corner of the blade cut through the soft wool. When he had exposed her chest he ma.s.saged her breast with the fingers of his sword hand. He seemed to enjoy the way she flinched when his cold metal touched her bare flesh. Again he spoke softly to Regina, as if inviting.

He was a Saxon, of course. She had seen his like before-scattered parties of them, riding west along the old Roman road. They had always kept on past the poor farms of this hillside. But now this Saxon had her daughter; now he cupped her whole life in his hands. It was as if the room expanded around her, as if time itself stretched, so that past and future were banished. There was nothing in the universe, no time or s.p.a.ce, nothing but this moment and the three of them, locked in fear and calculation.

She forced herself to smile. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

Looking at the Saxon, not at Brica, she walked up to him. He eyed her expectantly, as if trying to see her figure through her shapeless, leaf-strewn shift. She pulled at the fabric over her thigh, and parted her lips. She reached out to her daughter, and touched Brica's breast as coa.r.s.ely as had the Saxon.

He laughed out loud. She could smell barley ale in his breath. His huge hand still clamped over Brica's mouth, he dragged the girl sideways, so his body was exposed; he was wearing a torc of tarnished silver around his neck. Regina stepped closer to him, touched his chest, then ran her hand down over his crotch. She could feel the bulge there. She smelled urine, s.e.m.e.n, the stink of horses.h.i.t and the road. He grinned and spoke again, and she pressed her body against his.

The knife slid easily out of her sleeve. Using all her strength she rammed it through layers of coa.r.s.e cloth into his crotch, above the root of his stiff p.e.n.i.s.

His eyes bulged. The Saxon brought down his sword arm. But Regina was standing inside the arc of the stroke and he could do her no harm, not in that first crucial heartbeat. She got both hands on the hilt of the knife and dragged it upward, cutting into flesh and gristle.

And now Brica was at his back, her cut-open tunic flapping. She thrust her own knife into his back and twisted it, seeking his heart. Still the Saxon stood, flailing with his sword arm, as the women ripped and tore with their knives. It was like a dance, Regina thought, a gruesome dance of the three of them, in wordless silence.

Then the Saxon clutched Regina against his torso, and blood dark as birch-bark oil spilled from his mouth into her face. He shuddered and toppled like a felled tree, pulling both women down with him.

With disgust, Regina slithered backward across the dirt-strewn floor. She wiped the blood off her face with her hands. Brica fell on her mother, burying her face in Regina's chest. Regina tried to comfort her daughter, to stroke her hair and soothe her.

Their return to the farmstead created panic. Marina insisted on treating the b.l.o.o.d.y sc.r.a.pes on Brica's chest with her poultices.

Regina longed to get the Saxon's blood off her. But first she instructed the younger men to round up the children and animals, while others checked over their simple weapons-a few iron swords and knives, mostly spears and arrows tipped with wood or stone. Meanwhile, led by limping, ancient Carausias himself, now more than sixty years old, others were to go back to the villa, take what they could from the Saxon's body, and dispose of it. The rest of his raiding party might yet ignore the farmstead, as had others in the past-but they surely would not ignore the murder of one of their own.

When everything was in hand, all Regina wanted was to get to her pallet. In the gloom of her house she curled over on herself, as if trying to escape the world.

She had done many things over the years in order to survive. But she had never killed a human being before. She remembered the little girl who had once run to her mother as she dressed for her birthday party.That child is long dead, she thought,the last vestige of her now gone; and I am like her ghost, or her corpse, kept alive but steadily decaying.

Not without purpose, though. Poor or not, she knew that what they had built here-whatshe had built- was something to be proud of, something worth saving.

But now the Saxons were here. And Regina must decide what to do.

With the dawn she was awake.

After a brief toilet she pulled on an old tunic and cloak. She slipped out of the compound and walked down the hillside to the marshy land at the side of the river.

On some level she had always known this day would come. She had put it out of her mind, hoping, she supposed, that things would return to normal before she had to face it. But now the day of trial was here, and she had woken with shame that in her denial she had left her people, her own daughter, woefully undefended. They hadn't even built a palisade around the compound.

She waded out into the water and began to rummage in the black, reed-choked mud. The weather had been dry since spring and the water level was low. She had not forgotten the rusted iron dagger she had once found here, and she had always wondered if any more of that long-dead warrior's h.o.a.rd might have survived. If so, it might provide better weaponry than their own poor wooden sticks and stone-tipped arrows. It was a poor idea, but she could think of none better.

She had found nothing but a shield, so corroded it was no more protection than a papyrus toy, when Brica came running down the hillside.

"Regina! Oh, Regina! Mother, why are you here? You must come!"

Regina straightened up, startled. There was smoke in the air. It came from the west. "Exsuperius's farm," she said grimly. "The Saxons-"

Brica reached her and grabbed her arm. "We have visitors," she said.

"Who?"

"I don't know-you'll see-you have to come-" She grabbed her mother's hand and dragged her from the marsh. Together they hurried up the hillside to the farmstead.

A group of soldiers stood before the largest roundhouse, their hands resting casually on the hilts of their swords. They wore leather body armor, short tunics, and woolen trousers. The people of the farmstead stood in a sullen row before the soldiers. With them was the boy Bran, grandson of Exsuperius. His face was blackened by soot, perhaps from the burning of his home, and he stood in subdued silence, a mute testament to the power of these new arrivals.

"There are more of them down on the road," Brica whispered. "A few carts, too, and a sort of trail of people behind them. Their leader came up and demanded to be let in-we didn't know what to do-you weren't here-"

"It's all right," Regina said.

"Are they Saxons?"

"I don't think so."

One of the soldiers was taller than the rest, obviously the commander. He wore a red cloak and an elaborate leather cuira.s.s, inset with metal buckles. He was perhaps thirty, but his face was lined with the dirt of the road. Regina's first impression was of strength, competence, but fatigue. And his short brown hair was brushed forward, in the Roman style-even his garb was almost Roman. For a brief moment her heart beat a little faster. Was it possible that thecomitatensis had returned?

She stood between her people and the interlopers. She drew herself to her full height, disregarding the dirt on her face and legs, her disheveled clothes, the people in their mud-colored clothes behind her.

The leader hadn't even noticed her."Riothamus-" One of the soldiers tapped his shoulder, indicating Regina. He seemed surprised to find himself facing a woman. He asked, "Are you the leader here?"

"If you wish it. And what rank are you,riothamus ?" She p.r.o.nounced the word mockingly, masking disappointment. It was Latin, but a version of a British word-'high king.' This was no soldier, no officer of the imperial army, but a mere warlord.

He nodded. "That is the only rank I have, and not one I wished for."

"Oh, really?"

He spread his hands. "I am not here to harm you."

"Oh," she said. "And you did not harm this boy, Bran, by burning down his home."

"I did him the least harm that way."

"Your definition ofharm is interesting."

He grinned, his eyebrows raised. "Defiance! We have found a new Boudicca, boys." He won a ripple of laughter from his troops.

She drew herself up. "You will not mock us. We are living poorly here; I can't deny that. But if you think we are illiterate Saxons-"

"Oh, I can see you are no Saxons." He waved a hand. "Your grain pit, for instance . . . I have seen some Saxon farmers. There are many in this country already, you know, off to the east. The way they do things is sometimes better, sometimes worse than what you have worked out here. But they do not do things quite like this. And it is the threat of the Saxons that has brought me here. Listen to me," he said, raising his voice to address the rest of the people. "Things have changed.The Saxons are coming. "

"We know that," Regina said.

He growled, "Perhaps you have heard of Vortigern. That foolish kinglet was much troubled by Pict raiders from the north. So he invited in the Saxons, to help keep the Picts at bay." It had been an old trick of the Romans, Regina knew, to allow in one set of enemies as allies to oppose another lot. "I will not deny that the Saxons did a good job. They are sea pirates after all, and fared well against the Picts in their clumsy coracles.

"But," said theriothamus , "the Saxons, under their brute of a leader Hengest, who is already notorious on the continent, betrayed Vortigern. They brought in more and more of their cousins, and demanded more and more in tribute from Vortigern. But the more they took from him, the less he could pay them, and the weaker he became.

"Now Vortigern is dead, his council slain. And now that they have a foothold in the east, the Saxons are becoming greedy.

"You may have heard of their cruelty. They are not the Romans! They hate towns and villas and roads, all things of the Empire. And they hate the British. They are spreading across the countryside like a plague. They will burn these flimsy huts, they will drive you out of here, and if you resist they will kill you."

"The Emperor will help us," somebody called.