Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 3

"I'm no callow boy, Marcus Apollinaris," the farmer growled, "and you show me no respect by treating me like one. And we haven't seen a soldier for nearly as long, either. None save that grizzle-haired father of your wife."

"You must not speak to me this way, Trwyth." Regina could see her father was shaking.

Trwyth laughed. "I can speak to you any way I want. Who's to stop me-you?" He had a small sack of coins in his hand; he hefted it and slipped it back into a pocket of his breeches. "I think I'll keep this, rather than let you add it to your h.o.a.rd."

Marcus tried to regain control of the situation. "If you prefer to pay in kind-"

Trwyth shook his head. "I hand over half my yield to you. If I don't have to grow a surplus to pay you and the Emperor, I just have to feed myself, and what a reliefthat is going to be. And if you go hungry, Marcus Apollinaris, you can eat the painted corncobs on your walls. You let me know when the Emperor next comes calling, and I'll pay my respects. In the meantime, good riddance!"

Marcus stood unsteadily. "Trwyth!"

The farmer sneered, deliberately turned his back, and walked out of the room.

Marcus sat down. He tried to work through the lists of figures on his clay tablet, but quickly gave up, letting the tablet fall to the floor. He hunched over and plucked with his fingers at his face, chin and neck, as if for comfort.

Regina couldn't remember any tenant speaking to her father like that,ever . Deeply disturbed, she withdrew. Cartumandua followed her, just as silently, her broad face impa.s.sive.

They walked aimlessly around the courtyard. Still it was unbearably hot; still there was no sign of her mother. More than ever Regina wanted something to take her mind off her parents and their incomprehensible, endlessly disturbing problems. She almost missed her lessons: at least her thin, intense young tutor with his scrolls and slates and tablets would have beencompany .

After completing three futile circuits of the courtyard, still trailed by a pa.s.sive Cartumandua, a strange impulse took hold of Regina. When she came to the doorway to the old bathhouse-instead of pa.s.sing it as before-she just turned and walked through it.

Carta snapped, "Regina! You aren't supposed to be in there . . ."

And so she wasn't. But neither was her mother supposed to be in bed when the sun was so high, neither was a tenant like Trwyth supposed to withhold his taxes from the Emperor, neither were peculiar lights supposed to flare in the sky. So Regina stood her ground, her heart beating fast, looking around.

The roof of the bathhouse had burned off, but the surviving walls, though blackened and their windows unglazed, still stood. They surrounded a small rectangular patch of ground, thick with gra.s.s, weeds, and small blue wildflowers. This forbidden place, out of bounds for her whole life, was like a garden, she realized, a secret garden, hiding in the dark.

"Regina."There was Carta, in the doorway, beckoning her back. "Please. Come back. You're not supposed to be in there. It's not safe. I'll get in trouble."

Regina ignored her. She stepped forward gingerly. The soil and the gra.s.s were cool under her bare feet.

Rubble, broken blocks of stone from the walls, cluttered the floor under the thin covering of soil, but she could see them easily, and if she avoided them she was surely in no danger. She came to a patch of daisies, b.u.t.tercups, and bluebells. She crouched down in the soil, careless of how her knees were getting dirty, and began to pick at the little flowers. She had a vague notion of making a daisy chain for her mother; perhaps it would cheer her up when she eventually awoke.

But when she dug her fingers into the thin layer of earth, she quickly came to hard, textured stone beneath. It must be the floor of the bathhouse. She put her flowers aside and sc.r.a.ped away the soil with her hands. She exposed little tiles, bright colors-a man's face, picked out in bits of stone. She knew what this was; there was another in the living room. It was a mosaic, and these bits of stone, brick red and creamy white and yellow-gold and gray, were tesserae. She kept sc.r.a.ping, shuffling back on her knees, until she had exposed more of the picture. A young man rode a running horse-no, it wasflying , for it had wings-and he chased a beast, a monster with the body of a big cat and the head of a goat.

Eager to see more, she sc.r.a.ped at more of the soil. Some of the picture was damaged, with the little tiles missing or broken, but- "I thought I'd find you here. The one place you aren't meant to be." The deep voice made her jump.

Aetius had come into the bathhouse through a rent in the ruined wall at the back. He stood over her, hands on hips. He wore a grimy tunic; perhaps he had been riding.

Cartumandua said, "Oh, sir, thank the G.o.ds. Get her out of there. She won't listen to me."

He waved a hand, and she fell silent. "You'll be in no trouble, Cartumandua. I'll be responsible." He knelt down beside Regina and she peered into his face; to her relief she saw he wasn't being too stern.

"What are you doing, child?"

"Grandfather! Look what I found! It's a picture. It was here all the time, under the soil."

"Yes, it was there all the time." He pointed to the young man in the picture. "Do you know who this is?"

"No . . ."

"He's called Bellerophon. He is riding Pegasus, the winged horse, and he is battling the Chimaera."

"Is there more of it? Will you help me uncover it?"

"I remember what was here," he said. "I saw it before the fire." He pointed to the four corners of the room. "There were dolphins-here, here, here, and here. And more faces, four of them, to represent the seasons. This was a bathhouse, you know."

"I know. It burned down."

"Yes. There was a sunken bath just over there, behind me. Now, don't you go that way; it's full of rubble now, but the bath's still there, and if you fell in you'd hurt yourself and we would all be in trouble. We used to have water piped in here-great pipes underground-our own supply from the spring up on the hill." He rapped at the mosaic. "And under the floor there is a hollow s.p.a.ce, where they used to build fires under the ground, so the floor would be warm."

Regina thought about that. "Is that how it all caught fire?"

He laughed. "Yes, it is. They were lucky to save the villa, actually." He ran his finger over the lines of Bellerophon's face. "Do you know who made this picture?"

"No . . ."

"Your great-grandfather. Not my father-on your father's side." She dimly understood what he meant.

"He made mosaics. Not just for himself. He would make them for rich people, all over the diocese of Britain and sometimes even on the continent, for their bathhouses and living rooms and halls. His father, and his father beforehim , had always done the same kind of work. It's in the family, you see. That was how they got rich, and could afford this grand villa. They were in the Durnovarian school of design, and . . . well, that doesn't matter."

"Why did they let it get all covered over?" She glanced around at the scorched walls. "If this bathhouse burned down all those years ago, why not rebuild it?"

"They couldn't afford to." He rested his chin on his hand, comfortably squatting. "I've told you, Regina.

These are difficult times. It's a long time since anybody in Durnovaria or anywhere near here has wanted to buy a mosaic. In the good days your father's family bought land here and in the town, and they've been living off their tenants' rent ever since. But they really aren't rich anymore."

"My mother says we are."

He smiled. "Well, whatever your mother says, I'm afraid-"

There was a scream, high-pitched, like an animal's howl.

Regina cried out. "Mother!"

Aetius reacted immediately. He picked her up, stepped to the doorway over the scattered dirt, and thrust Regina at the slave girl. "Keep her here." Then he strode away, his hand reaching to his belt, as if seeking a weapon.

Regina struggled against Cartumandua's grip. Carta herself was trembling violently, and it was easy for Regina to wriggle out of her grasp and run away.

Still that dreadful screaming went on. Regina ran from room to room, past knots of agitated servants and slaves. She remembered that her father had been in the living room with his tenant and his figures.

Perhaps he was still there now. She ran that way as fast as she could. Carta pursued her, ineffectually.

So it was that while Aetius was the first to reach Julia, his daughter, Regina found Marcus, her father.

Marcus was still in the living room, on his couch, with his tablets and scrolls around him. But now his hands were clamped over his groin. Red liquid poured out of him and over the couch and tiled floor, unbelievable quant.i.ties of it.It was blood. It looked like spilled wine.

Regina stepped into the room, but she couldn't reach her father, for that would have meant walking into the spreading lake of blood.

Marcus seemed to see her. "Oh, Regina, my little Regina, I'm so sorry . . . It was her, don't you see?"

"Mother?"

"No, no.Her. She tempted me, and I was weak, and now I am like Atys." He lifted his hands from his groin. His tunic was raised, exposing his bare legs, and a meaty, b.l.o.o.d.y mess above them that didn't look real. He was smiling, but his face was very pale. "I did it myself."

"You fool." Aetius stood in the other doorway now, with his strong arm around Julia. Julia was hiding her face in her hands, her head bowed against her father's shoulder. "What have you done?"

Marcus whispered, "I have atoned. And like Atys I will return . . ." His voice broke up as if there were liquid in his throat.

"Mother!" Regina ran forward. She was splashing in the blood, actually splashing in it, and now she could smell its iron stink, but she had to get to her mother. Still she kept on, running across the room, past the couch with the grisly, flopping thing that was her father.

But Julia twisted away and fled.

Aetius grabbed Regina and folded her in his arms, just as he had the night before, and no matter how she struggled and wept, he wouldn't release her to follow her mother.

Chapter 4.

I stayed in Manchester another seventy-two hours.

I retrieved my father's boxes of business material from the loft, and found a few more files downstairs.

He'd actually carried on working after his nominal retirement, doing bits of bookkeeping for friends and close contacts. Much of this work concerned small projects in the building trade.

I spent the best part of a day checking through all this material, trying to close down any loose ends.

There were actually some bits of work my father hadn't completed, a few fees he hadn't collected, but they were all for small amounts, and everything was resolved amicably. I came away with a short list of requests for the return of some material. Most of the contacts were his friends-I knew a couple of them myself-and most hadn't heard of the death. The round of calls was painful, and the friends' reactions brought back the immediacy of it all.

I checked through Dad's most recent bank statements. Most of the statement lines were unremarkable.

But I did find a few orders for foreign checks. Some of these were for more than a thousand pounds, and they went out every month, usually in the first week. I had no idea what they were for. I considered calling the bank branch, and wondered if they would tell me what was going on.

But then I came to a month earlier in the year, without the regular foreign payment. It wasn't like Dad to be so untidy as to leave this gap. On an impulse I checked his check stubs. And sure enough, one stub showed how he'd bought a thousand pounds' worth of euros from a travel exchange desk in one of the Manchester stations-that transaction showed up in the statement. On the back of the stub he had written, in his neat hand, "March pmnt. To Mry Qn of Vgns, overdue." I imagined him parceling up the currency and pushing it into the post-an unwise way to handle money, but fast and effective.

"Mry Qn of Vgns." To the eye of a Catholic boy that cryptic note unraveled immediately: Mary Queen of Virgins. But I had no idea who this was-a church, a hospital, a charity?-nor why Dad had been handing over so much money to them for so long. I found nothing else in his correspondence to give me any clues. I put it to the back of my mind, with a vague resolution to follow up the lead and close down the contact.

The personal stuff was more difficult than the financial matters, of course.

There were photographs around the house: the framed family-portrait stuff on the dresser, the big old alb.u.ms in their cupboard in the dining room. I flicked through the alb.u.ms, moving back in time. Soon the big glossy colored rectangles gave way to much smaller black-and-white images, like something prewar rather than early sixties, and then they petered out altogether. There were surprisingly few of them-only one or two of me per year of my childhood, for instance, taken at such key moments as Christmas, and family summer holidays, and first days at new schools. It seemed an odd paucity of images compared to the screeds people produce now. But then, I realized, glimpsing through these portals into sunny sixties afternoons long gone, that my memories of great moments, like the day the training wheels came off my bike, were of my father's face, not of a magnifying lens.

I tried to be brisk. The Catholic tokens went to the parish. I gave most of Dad's personal stuff to the charity shops. I kept back the photographs, and a few books that had some resonance for me-an ancient AA road atlas mapping a vanished Britain, and some of his Churchill biographies-nothing I'd ever read or used, but artifacts that had lodged in my memory. I didn'twant this stuff, but of course I couldn't bear to throw any of it out, and I knew Gina would take none of it.

I swept it all into a trunk and hauled it into the boot of my car. My boxed-upTV21 collection went in there also, thus beginning a migration from one attic to another. I wondered what would happen to all this junk when I died in my turn.

I kept out the little picture of my "sister," though.

I had the phone disconnected, sorted out such details as the TV license, but left the utilities running, billed to my account, to keep the house dry and intact, the better to present it to prospective buyers. On the last morning I cut the gra.s.s, knocked over the anthills, and did a little brisk weeding. It seemed the right thing to do. I was going to miss those big old azaleas. I wondered about taking a cutting, but I didn't know how to. I didn't have a garden to grow it in anyhow.

I engaged a house clearance firm-"friendly and sympathetic service," according to the Yellow Pages.

A surveyor with an undertaker's doggedly glum manner came, glanced efficiently over the furniture and utilities, and made an offer for the lot. It seemed ruinously low. Part of me, loyal to the notion of what my dad's reaction would have been, was inspired to fight back. But I just wanted shut of the business, as the surveyor surely calculated, and the deed was done.

The last step was to place the house with a real estate agent, where a kid with spiky gelled hair and a cheap suit lectured me about "market stress" and how long it would take to get an offer. We were, of course, negotiating over the sale of the home where I'd grown up; I suspected the Gelled a.r.s.ehole sensed my vulnerability. But f.u.c.k it. I signed the forms and walked away.

I left the keys with Peter. He promised to check over the place until it was sold. I felt uncomfortable with this-I didn't like the idea of becoming entangled in some kind of debt to him-but unless I was to house-sit myself I needed somebody to do what he was offering.

I didn't quite know why I was uncomfortable about Peter. There had always been somethingneedy about him. And if Peter wanted to work his way back into my life, he had found an angle to do it. Perhaps, I thought, he imagined we would become Internet pen pals, swapping reminiscences aboutTV21 .

Perhaps, like the Gelled a.r.s.ehole, Peter had spotted my vulnerability and was exploiting it for his own ends.

Or maybe I was just being uncharitable. Whichever, as I set off back to London, I drove away watching him waving with a handful of keys.

When I got back to work, there was nothing for me to do, literally. Which tells you all you need to know about my career.

I worked for a smallish software development company called Hyf-a bit of Anglo-Saxon that is apparently the root ofhive , for we were all supposed to be busy busy bees. We were based near Liverpool Street, in the upper floor of what used to be a small rail station, long disused. The office was open-plan, save for a small hardware section where minis hummed away in blue-lit air-conditioning. It was an environment of neck-high part.i.tions, trendy curved desks that made it impossible to get close to your PC without stretching out your arms like a gibbon, and everywhere a flurry of polystyrene Starbucks containers, yellow stickies, postcards from skiing holidays, and the occasional bit of "comedy" Internet p.o.r.n.

Walking down the central aisle under the pleasing architecture of the Victorian-era curved roof, I hurried along. I found I didn't want much to speak to anybody-and nor did they to me; most had probably already forgotten the reason I had been away. As usual there was a whole series of scents as I walked down that aisle. The combative mix of cigarette smoke and air-freshener sprays was overlaid with a strong coffee stink and the stale scents of yesterday's lunch. Sometimes, when I worked in there late at night, I could swear I picked up a subtle and unmistakable almond whiff.

I was privileged enough to have an office, one of a set arrayed along the side walls of the office, for I was a manager, in charge of "test coordination," as we called it. I hung up my jacket and dug a bottle of Evian water from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I booted up my PC and waited for it to download my intranet mails. I riffled through the snail mail: just a few flyers from software utilities vendors.

Vivian Cave walked into the office next to mine. She was late thirties, perhaps forty, a midheight graying blonde. She spotted me through the gla.s.s walls that separated us, gave me a half smile, and raised an invisible gla.s.s to her lips.Drink later? I waved back.Sure.

The PC screen speckled with icons. I found a total of thirty-two mails, after four working days away.

Just eight a day? And most of them were routine stuff about Internet viruses, an offer to sell an unused snorkel set, and a mighty eleven mails with soccer score updates sent to the rest of the office by one diligent observer working late during a European Champions League match. But nothing from my line manager, or the software development project managers whom I was supposed to work with.

No work for George today. I knew I should launch myself into the online reports, or storm around the office setting up meetings. With a role like mine, fighting for work was part of the job.

I kicked the door closed, sat down, and sipped slowly at my Evian.

I'd been here three years. It wasn't the first job of its kind I'd taken. I'd drifted into positions like this much as I'd drifted into my career in software development in the first place.

Leaving school, fairly bright but hopelessly unfit, I'd had vagueTV21 dreams of becoming a scientist- an astrophysicist maybe, probing the far reaches of the universe, or a s.p.a.ce engineer, building and controlling rockets and s.p.a.cecraft. I was bright enough for college, but a few "down-to-Earth"

harangues from my dad the accountant had made me see the wisdom of keeping my options open.

I got a place at Warwick University, where I read math. It was a bright, friendly place, the math faculty at the time was sparky and innovative-the home of then-trendy catastrophe theory-and I soon found myself forgetting the ostensible reasons I'd gone there. Working my way tidily through the groves of axioms, postulates, and corollaries, I quickly hit my intellectual limits, but I discovered in myself a deep appreciation of logic and order.

In my last year I traipsed around the milk round of potential employers, trying to find something that would plug into that interest in mathematical logic. I found it in software development-which brings a wry smile to the lips of all my acquaintances who have ever found themselves staring at a blue screen with a baffling error message.

But softwareought to be logical. The math underlying relational databases, for instance, accessed by virtually every Internet user every day, is pure and beautiful. There is a whole discipline called "formal methods" in which you set out what you want to achieve and write a program that is aself-proof that it will do exactly what it's supposed to do.

That was the dream, as I began my career-first in Manchester, and then, inevitably, in London, the center of everything in Britain. When I could afford it I took a small flat in Hackney, and started a gruesome daily traveling routine by bus and Tube. But as I started work, first in the software development departments of large corporations and then in independent development houses, I soon found that rigor was expensive-less so than the cost of fixing all the bugs later, but an upfront cost virtually n.o.body was willing to pay.