Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 8

Regina stared; she had never seen such defiance. She was uneasily reminded of how that farmer had stood up to her father.

But Aetius was not Marcus.

Aetius took a single step forward and slammed his gloved hand against the man's temple. To the clang of bone on metal, the man fell sideways into the dirt. Grunting, he rolled on his back-and, Regina saw, he actually touched the hilt of the short sword at his waist. But Aetius stood over him, fists bunched, until he dropped his hand and looked away.

The rest of the troop stood utterly silent.

Aetius pointed at two of them. "You and you. Take him. A hundred strokes for drinking on guard, and a hundred more for what he has had to say today."

The men didn't move. Even from here Regina could feel the tension. If they were to disobey Aetius's order now . . . She felt a hot flush in her belly, and wondered if that was fear.

The two troopers, with every show of insolent reluctance, moved to their fallen colleague. But move they did. Aetius stepped back to let the man stand. His arms held behind his back, he was walked toward the whipping post. The tension bled out of the scene. But Regina still felt that odd warmth at her center.

One of the troopers, glancing up, pointed at her. "Look! Septimius-look at that! The red rain has begun . . ." The other troopers looked up at Regina, and began to point and laugh. Aetius railed at them, but their discipline was gone now.

She felt heat burn in her cheeks. She had no idea what she had done.

Magnus was at her side. He put an arm around her and tried to pull her away. "Come now. Put my cloak around you. It's all right."

"I don't understand," she said. And then she felt warmth on her legs. She looked down and saw blood, dripping out from beneath her tunic. She looked up in horror. "Magnus! What's happening to me? Am I dying?"

For all his strength he looked as uncertain and as weak as a child; he couldn't meet her eyes."Women's matters," he gasped.

Now the soldiers were catcalling. "I've waited all these years for you to blossom, little flower!" "Come sit on me, your old friend Septimius!" "No, me! Me first!" One of them had lifted his tunic to pull out his p.e.n.i.s, like a floppy piece of rope that he shook at her.

Regina grabbed Magnus's heavy, musty-smelling woolen cloak and wrapped it around her. Then she clambered down the ladder to the ground and ran over thevallum toward the settlement, hiding her face.

For all Aetius raged at them, the soldiers kept up the baffling, terrifying barrage.

In their five years together at the Wall, Aetius had tried to tell Regina something of the world beyond the Wall. "There's been an awful lot of trouble for everybody. It all started the night the Rhine froze over, and the barbarians just walked into Gaul. But for Britain that wretch Constantius was the one who nailed down the coffin lid . . ."

The problems went Empire-wide, said Aetius. When the Empire had been expanding, new wealth had always been generated, from booty and taxation. But those days were long gone. And with the new, better-equipped, more powerful barbarian enemies, just as economic pressure increased, so did pressure on the borders, and more money had had to be found to pay for the defense of the realm. For a generation there had been problems and instability throughout the western provinces. Sometimes Aetius talked nostalgically about the great Stilicho, military commander in the western provinces, who had protected Britain. Aetius seemed to worship this Stilicho, even though, it turned out, he was a barbarian, Vandal-born. Barbarian or not, he had been the effective ruler of the west, under the ineffectual Emperor Honorius. But even the greatest generals grow feeble-and make lethal enemies at court.

And in Britain, since Constantius's adventure, the problems had been particularly acute.

After Constantius's subjects had thrown out his hierarchy of officials and tax collectors and inspectors, the cycle of taxation and state spending had broken down. Not only that, there was no mint in Britain, and after the expulsion of the moneymen there was no way to import coins from the rest of the Empire.

Suddenly there weren't even any coins to circulate.

As everybody h.o.a.rded what they had left, people returned to barter. But with its lifeblood of coinage cut off, the economy was rapidly withering.

"There's just no money to pay the troops. You know, I heard that before I was posted here the soldiers even sent a deputation across the ocean to try to get the back pay they were owed. They never returned."

"They must have found some other place to live."

"Or had their throats slit by barbarians. We'll never know, will we? The people in the towns actually wrote to the Emperor himself and asked for help. This was only a few years ago. But by then, so it is said, Rome itself had been sacked by the barbarians. Honorius wrote back saying that the British must defend themselves as best they could . . ."

Aetius was worried about Regina's future. That was why he lectured her about politics and history and wars. He thought it was important to equip her for the challenges of her life.

And Aetius was obviously worried about his own future, too. If you completed twenty years' military service you could become one of thehonestiores -the top folk in society. A career as a soldier was a way for a common man to retire to a nice house in the town or even a villa. But there was no obvious successor to Aetius, here in his station on the Wall, and he had no contact with the diocese's central command. If he stepped down, the troops would fall apart; he knew that. And besides there was nowhere for him to retire to. He had to hang on.

"Look," he would say, "this nonsense in Gaul has to stop. Rome is already back on its feet, and when he gets the chance the Emperor will rea.s.sert his authority here."

"And things will get back to normal."

"Britain has been lost to the Empire before-oh, yes, many times-and each time won back. So it will be this time, I'm sure." And when that happened, at last, when the tax collectors returned and the coins started to circulate once more-when the soldiers were properly paid and equipped and there was a secure place for him to retire-Aetius could allow his own career to end.

As it turned out, however, for Aetius it was all going to end much sooner than that. And far from everything returning to normal, Regina would have to suffer another great disruption.

After her humiliation before the soldiers, Regina fled to Cartumandua.

Carta was cooking a haunch of pork wrapped in straw. She had hung a big iron cauldron from a tripod and was using tongs to load in fire-hot rocks from the hearth; they sizzled as they hit the water. Her house was a wooden shack, built in the rectangular Roman way. The "kitchen" was just a s.p.a.ce around a hearth built in a stone-lined pit, around which you would squat on the ground.

When Regina came bursting in, weeping, Carta dropped the tongs and ran to meet her.

"Carta, oh Carta, it was awful!"

Carta held Regina's face to her none-too-clean woolen smock, and let her weep. "Hush, hush, child."

She stroked Regina's hair as she had when Regina was a pampered child of the villa, and Cartumandua a young girl slave.

Carta herself was still only twenty. Aetius had long made her a freedwoman, and allowed her to seek out her own destiny in this little below-the-Wall community, but she still had room in her life for Regina.

When Regina had calmed down enough to show her the blood, Carta clucked disapprovingly. "And n.o.body told you about this? Certainly not that old fool Aetius, I'll bet."

Regina gazed in renewed horror at the dried blood. "Carta-I'm afraid I'm dying. There must be something terribly wrong."

"No. There's nothing wrong-nothing save that you're twelve years old." And Carta patiently explained to her what had happened to her body, and helped her clean herself, and showed her how to pad herself with a loincloth tied with cords.

In the middle of this Severus came in, carrying a bundle of firewood. He was a soldier, a heavyset man, his stubble grimed with dirt. He glared at Regina. She had never seen him performing strictly military duties. He only ever worked around the little village, carrying food, repairing buildings, even working in the fields where oats were grown and cattle fed. In the shadow of the Wall the lines between the soldiers and the rest of the population had gotten very blurred, especially since marriage between the locals and the soldiers had been made legal.

Regina didn't like Severus. She had always hoped that Carta would take up with Macco, the stolid, silent slave who had accompanied them from the villa. But one night Macco had slipped away, apparently gone to seek his freedom in the countryside beyond the Emperor's laws. For Severus's part he seemed somehow jealous of Regina's relationship with Carta, which long predated his own attachment. Regina wasn't even sure what Severus's relationship with Carta was. They certainly weren't married. Regina thought he gave her some measure of protection, in return for companionship. It wasn't an uncommon arrangement.

But Carta was in control. Now she just waited until he dropped the wood and went away.

Carta made them both some nettle tea, and they sat on mats on the ground. Regina tried to describe how the soldiers had taunted her-now she was no longer afraid of dying, that seemed worst of all-and Carta comforted her, but told her such attention was something she was going to have to get used to.

Slowly Regina calmed down.

Regina glanced around at the smoke-stained walls. The hut was wattle and daub, just mud and straw stuffed into the gaps in a wooden frame.

Carta said, "What are you thinking now?"

Regina smiled. "About my mother's kitchen. It was so different. I think I remember a big oven with a dome on it."

Carta nodded. "That's right. You could put charcoal in it and seal it up. It made perfect bread-that wonderful dry heat. And then there was a raised hearth."

"I could never see over the top of that. I wonder if it's still there."

"Yes," Carta said firmly. "I'm sure of it. You know your grandfather put the villa in the hands of a steward."

"But in these times you can't be sure of anything," said Regina.

Carta giggled girlishly. "Oh, my. You sound like an old woman! You can trust your grandfather to look after your family's property. He's a good man, and family is everything to him.You are everything . . .

Won't he be worried about you? Maybe I should send a message-"

Regina shrugged. "Let him worry. He should have told me about the bleeding."

Carta snorted. "I think he'd rather face a thousand blue-faced Picts than that."

"Anyway he saw which way I came. If he's worried he'll come after me."

Carta sipped her tea. "He doesn't often come here, to the shadow of the Wall."

"Why not?"

"He doesn't fit. For one thing he's older than anybody here."

"What? That can't be true."

"Think about it," Carta said, eyeing her. "You know a good few people here. You're popular here, as you are everywhere! How many men over forty do you know? How many women over thirty-five?"

None, Regina thought, shocked-even though, she was sure, much older people had been commonplace in her parents' circle of friends, with wrinkles and white hair, the badges of age.

"Why is it like this?"

Carta laughed. "Because we don't live in villas. We don't have servants and slaves to clean our teeth.

We have to work hard, all the time. It's the way it is, little Regina. Only the rich grow old."

Regina frowned. Even now, she resented being spoken to like that by a slave-even a former slave- even Carta. "There was no shame in the way we lived," she said hotly. "Our family wascivilized , in the Roman way."

To her surprise Cartumandua gazed at Regina coldly. She said, " 'The allurements of degeneracy: a.s.sembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naivete the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.' "

"What's that?"

"Tacitus. You're not the only one who's learning to read, Regina." She got up and walked to her cauldron, and poked at the haunch of meat with a long iron skewer.

It was evening, a few days after Regina's humiliation on the Wall. By flickering candlelight, she was reading, in halting Latin, from the historian Tacitus. " 'Good fortune and discipline have gone hand in hand over the last eight hundred years to build the Roman state, which destroyed will bring down all together . . .' " She had asked for Tacitus after Carta's mild reprimand. This was a speech said to have been given three centuries earlier to rebelling tribes in Gaul by Petillius Cerialis, soon to be governor of Britain.

She was in Aetius's chalet, one of a row in this little community in the lee of the Wall. It wasn't grand, just a hut of four rooms built of wattle and daub to the rectangular Roman plan. But it had a tiled floor and a deep hearth, and was cozy and warm. It had been erected when long-stay soldiers had first been allowed to marry and raise families. It was here, during an earlier tour of duty with the border troops, that Aetius had brought his bride Brica, and here that Julia, Regina's mother, had been born.

Its centerpiece was thelararium , the family shrine that Aetius and Regina had built together after their flight from the villa. The three crudely carvedmatres in their hooded cloaks sat at the center of a little circle of gifts of wine and food. But this was a soldier's shrine, and there were also tokens to such abstract ent.i.ties as Roma, Victoria, and Disciplina, as well as a coin bearing the head of the latest Emperor anybody had heard of, Honorius.

And it was in his chalet that, at Aetius's insistence, Regina had continued her education. He expected her to become fluent in both her native language and in Latin-and to know the difference; Aetius despised what he called the "muddle," the patois of Latin-flavored British much favored by the ordinary people of the behind-the-Wall community. He had her read Tacitus and Caesar, historians and emperors and playwrights, from his store of fragile, ancient papyrus scrolls. She learned to write with styli on tablets of wax on wood, and with ink made of soot and a pen of metal. Later, he promised, he would train her in the art of rhetoric. But he believed in combining the best of the British and Roman traditions, and he also had her memorize long sagas of heroes and monsters in the old British style.

" 'At present, victor and vanquished enjoy peace and the imperial civilization under the same law on an equal footing. Let your experience of the alternatives prevent you from preferring the ruin that will follow on revolt to the safety that is conferred by obedience . . .' "

There was some disturbance outside. Shouting, what sounded like singing. No doubt the soldiers were getting drunk again. But Aetius didn't react, and Regina knew she was safe with him.

Aetius sat in his favorite basket chair, sipping beer. "Yes, yes . . .the same law on an equal footing. The law is above all of us-the landowners, the senators, even the Emperor himself, whoever that is right now. That is the genius of the old system, you see. It doesn't matter who is in charge. It is the system itself that has spread so far and sustained itself, even though we have had soldiers and administrators and even emperors chosen from among those who would once have been called barbarians. The system persists, while we come and go."

Standing there, holding the fragile papyrus in her hand, she said, "Like an anthill. The Empire is like an anthill, and we are all just ants, running around."

He slammed his wooden tankard down on the arm of his chair. "Ants? Ants? What are you talking about, girl?"

"But an anthill organizes itself without anybody telling it what to do. And even when one ant dies another takes her place-even the queen. That's what the Greeks say, and they studied such things. Isn't your Empire just like that?"

"Rome is not an anthill, you foolish child! . . ."

So they argued on, both aware of and enjoying their roles, she mischievously provoking, he spluttering and snapping- The door was thrown open with a crash.

In the doorway, framed by darkness, stood a soldier. He staggered into the room, visibly drunk. When he saw Regina he grinned.

Aetius seemed as shocked as Regina. But he took a step forward."Septimius," he said, his voice like thunder. "You're drunk. And you should be on watch."

Septimius just laughed, a single bark. "n.o.body's on watch, you old fool. What does it matter? I haven't been paid.You haven't been paid. n.o.body cares anymore." He took a lurching step into the room. He was still staring at Regina, and she could smell the drink on his breath. He was, she remembered, the soldier who had exposed himself to her when she bled on the Wall.

She backed away, but she found herself pressed against the table and, in the confines of this little chalet, couldn't retreat any farther.

Aetius took a measured step forward. "Septimius, get out of here before you make things much worse for yourself."

"I don't think I will be taking any more floggings from you, old man." He turned to Regina. "You know what I want, don't you, miss? You're just ripe for the plucking-" He reached for her. Regina flinched away, but Septimius grabbed her small breast and pinched it hard.

Aetius barreled into him, shoulder-first. Septimius was slammed against a wall, and the whole chalet shook with the impact. Aetius staggered upright. "You keep away from her, you piece of filth-" He hurled his fist, his mighty fist like a boulder.

But Septimius, drunk as he was, ducked underneath the punch. And as he rose, Regina saw a flash of steel.

"Grandfather-no!"

She actually heard the blade go in. It rasped on the coa.r.s.e wool of Aetius's tunic. Aetius stood, staring at Septimius. Then dark blood gushed from his mouth. He shuddered and fell back, rigid, to the floor.

Septimius's mouth dropped open, as if he were aware for the first time of where he was, what he had done. He turned and ran into the night. Aetius lay on the floor, breathing in great liquid gurgles.

There was blood on the floor, blood pooling as it once had from her father's body. Regina forced herself to move. She ran to Aetius, and lifted his heavy head onto her lap. "Grandfather! Can you hear me? Oh, Grandfather!"

He tried to speak, coughed, and brought up a great gout of dark blood. "I'm sorry, little one. So sorry."

"No-"

"Fool. Been a fool, fooling myself. It's over. The Wall. They'll leave now, the last of them. No pay, you see, no pay. Cilurnum fell, you know. You saw the fire on the horizon. Cilurnum gone . . ." He coughed again. "Go with Carta."

"Cartumandua-"

"Go with her. Her people. No place for you here. Tell her I said . . ."

She asked the question that had burned in her young heart for five years. If he died, he could never answer it, she might never know. "Grandfather-where is my mother?"