Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

The fruits and vegetables on display looked poor to Regina. She fingered a bunch of spindly, discolored carrots. Carausias said dismissively, “You get folk from the town moving out into fields not tilled since their great-grandfathers were alive. They haven’t the first idea. And this is the result …” Regina put down the carrots guiltily. They had come from a stall manned by a thin woman with sallow, dirty skin, and protruding teeth. A swollen-bellied child clung to her leg.

When they had done their shopping, mostly unsuccessfully, Carausias led her back to the Londinium road, and they walked away from the Forum, heading farther southeast.

They came to a temple. It was set in a place where the main road forked, and it had been shaped by its location into a V shape, a triangular courtyard before a purple-painted building.

There was a scent, like wood smoke. Regina sniffed. “That’s lovely.”

“Burned pinecones.” Carausias watched her carefully. “Do you know what this place is? What about the inscription?” Set over the main entrance to the courtyard, it was a dedication to the dendrophori of the town. “That word means ‘branch bearers’ …”

“I don’t understand.”

Carausias touched her shoulder. “Child, Cartumandua told me what became of your father.”

She felt her face close up.

“This is a temple to Cybele, who is popular here. I myself come here to worship … If you would like to come inside—”

“No,” she snapped.

“You should make your peace with the gods — and with your father’s memory — and with yourself.”

“Not today.”

“Well, perhaps that is wise. But the temple will always be here, waiting for you. Shall we go and see what Marina has prepared for supper? And we still have water to fetch …”

He took her hand and they walked together, back through the grubby bustle of Verulamium, toward home.

At Carta’s insistence she had brought her scrolls and tablets with her from the Wall. Carta said that she should try to keep up her studies, for it was surely what Aetius would have wanted.

At first she tried. She would study in the courtyard of the house, or in her room when Marina was working. But she had to work alone. There was nobody here who could tutor her. For all his obvious business acumen and firm grasp of people, Carausias was no more educated than his niece, and beyond telling anecdotes of half-remembered plays from a decade before, he could not help her. He certainly couldn’t afford to hire a tutor.

Gradually she got bored with her solitary studying. And as the weeks wore on, the days shortening as winter approached, the work came to seem less and less worthwhile. Who was ever going to care if she remembered lists of emperors and their accession dates or not? Nobody in Verulamium was sure who the current emperor was.

And then there was Amator to distract her.

One day, as she was trying to study in her room, Amator came wandering in. “Study, study, study,” he teased her. “All you ever do. You’re so boring .”

“And you are a lazy clod with nothing better to do than annoy people,” she shot back, repeating one of his father’s taunts.

He strolled to Marina’s bed. Grinning at her, he got to his knees and felt about in the space beneath the pallet. “Aha!” he proclaimed in triumph, and he pulled out a bit of bloody rag. It was one of the loincloths Marina used to pad herself during her periods. He sniffed the dried blood and rubbed it against his cheek. “Ah, the scent of a woman …”

Regina was laughing, and outraged. She put down her papyrus and came after him. “That’s disgusting! Give it back—”

But he wouldn’t, and they chased around the room for a while. They had developed a way of chasing without touching, of coming close but not quite into contact, a game with subtle, unspoken rules.

At length he yielded, threw himself down on Marina’s bed, and tucked the bloody little relic back where it had come from.

“She’ll know,” said Regina.

“So what if she does? It’s only Marina.” He got up again and walked to her lararium , in one corner. “I’ve never taken a proper look at this before.” He picked up one of the matres . “By Cybele’s left nipple, how ugly.”

“Put it down.”

“And how cheap —”

“Put it down.”

He looked up, startled at her tone. “All right, all right.” He put down the little statuette — not in the right place; she promised herself she would fix it later. He said, “So every day you waste good food and wine on these bits of nonsense …” He eyed her. “But have you ever seen a real god?”

“What do you mean?”

For answer he beckoned her, and tiptoed out of the room. Of course, she followed.

Amator had his own chores to complete. Carausias was trying to train him to run the villa, the cause of much conflict between the two of them. But he always seemed to have plenty of spare time, and he seemed happy to spend a lot of it with Regina. When he discovered she liked “soldiers” he proclaimed himself an expert, dug out an old set from some corner of the house, and set it up in the courtyard where they would play. Or he would play ball-catching games with her, or simply chase her through the colonnades, or in the open spaces beyond the town walls. Gradually, almost tentatively, a relationship had built up between them.

But there was an edge to Amator. At eighteen he was so much older than she was. Perhaps she enjoyed the undercurrent of danger that she sensed about him, a boy who knew so much more than she did, had surely done so much more, and yet was so inexplicably interested in her. Amator was mysterious, disturbing, somehow enchanting — but above all he was fun, and he always seemed to dress with color and style, unlike the drab townsfolk.

Cartumandua maintained a frosty silence about all this.

They walked around the courtyard until they came to the head of the stone stairs that led to Carausias’s shrine.

She stepped back. “No. I mustn’t go down there. Carausias wouldn’t like it.”

“Well, Carausias doesn’t like being bald and fat and old, but he’s got to live with it. Come on — unless you’re scared.” He set foot on one step, then another, and was suddenly trotting down and out of sight.

After a heartbeat’s hesitation, she followed.

The shrine was just a pit in the ground. She could hear Amator scratching, and then he held up a candle. His face seemed to hover in the dark.

In the uncertain light she could see that above the stonework of this little underground shrine there was a layer of darker earth. When she probed at it, it crumbled, and left black on her fingers, like soot. Later she would discover that twice during its short history Verulamium had been burned to the ground, and these burned ash layers were relics of those catastrophes.

An arched hollow had been cut into the wall. In it stood a little statuette, apparently bronze, of a man riding a horse. His outsized head bore a crested helmet. Small offerings had been laid out before him, perhaps fragments of food.

“Behold,” said Amator mock-sepulchrally. “Mars Toutatis, the warrior god of the Catuvellauni. Held to be the Mars of Rome, while that was politically convenient. What now — do you think he will become the Christ? Will we have to carve a chi-rho above his head?”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” she whispered.

“Or what? Is his horse going to piss down my leg?”

“We shouldn’t be down here.”

“I daresay you’re right. But nobody is going to know.” He bent forward and blew out the flame. The darkness was complete, save only for the faintest of diffuse daylight glows from the stairwell. She could sense his heavy warmth, less than a hand’s breadth from her, and his breath was hot on her cheek.