Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“What are you talking about? Who is going to plow the fields? How will we pay them?”

“Nobody will plow them for us,” Carta said doggedly. “ We will plow them.”

Regina stared at her. “You are making up stories. We have nothing to eat now . We’ll be lucky to live through the night. And, if you haven’t noticed, it is the autumn. What crops will we grow in the winter? And besides — Carta, I don’t want to be a farmer.”

“And I didn’t want to be a slave,” Carta said. “I survived that, and I will survive this. As will you.” She clambered to her feet and pulled Regina’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go and take a look at the buildings.”

Reluctantly Regina followed.

The farm buildings were clustered around a square of churned-up mud. There were three barnlike structures, with neat rectangular plans of the Roman kind, and the remains of a roundhouse, a more primitive building with a great conical roof of blackened thatch, and walls of wattle and daub.

Regina drifted toward the square-built structures, the most familiar. Once they must have been smart, bright buildings; she could see traces of whitewash on the walls and a few bright red tiles still clinging to the wooden slats of the roofs. But one had been burned out altogether, and the roofs of the others, all but stripped of tiles, had rotted through. She stepped through a doorway. The floor was littered with rubble and cracked by a flourishing community of weeds. Something scuttled away in the gloom.

Carta pointed at the roundhouse. “We’d be better off in this.”

Regina wrinkled her nose. “In that mud pie? I can smell it from here. And look at that rotting thatch — there are animals living in it !”

“But we have a better chance of repairing it,” Carta said. “Face it, Regina — how are we to bake roof tiles?”

“We could get them replaced.”

Carta laughed tiredly. “Oh, Regina — by whom? Where are the craftsmen? And how are we to pay them? … Regina, I know this is hard. But I don’t see anybody standing around waiting to help us, do you? If we don’t fix it ourselves — well, it won’t get fixed.”

Regina rested a hand on her belly. Carta’s realism and doggedness somehow made things worse, not better.

There was a call from the lower slopes of the hillside. Severus was returning, with something heavy and limp slung over his shoulder. Regina soon made out the iron stink of blood, and a deeper stench of rot. Grunting, Severus let his burden fall to the muddy ground. It was the carcass of a young deer. Its head had almost been severed from its body, presumably by Severus’s knife. Severus was sweating, and his tunic was stained deep with blood. “Got lucky,” he said. “Leg stuck in a trap. Already dying, I think. See?”

The deer had been very young, Regina saw. Its horns were mere stubs, and its body small and lithe. But one of its legs dangled awkwardly, and a putrid smell rose from blackened flesh.

Severus leaned over the limp corpse. With inefficient but brutal thrusts he dug his knife into the hip joint above the deer’s good hind leg. With some noisy sawing of cartilage and bone, he ripped the joint apart, and hung the limb over his shoulder. “We’ve got neighbors,” he said, pointing with his bloody knife. “I saw lights. A farmstead over that way, over the ridge. I’m going to see if they’ll trade.”

“Yes,” said Carausias urgently. “There are many things we need—”

“What I need is some wheat beer,” said Severus. “I’ve had enough of this for one night.”

Carausias called, “You can’t be so selfish, man!”

But Carta only said, “Come back alive.”

When he had gone, the others stood over the carcass. Blood slowly leaked out of its throat and into the mud.

Carausias whispered, as if he might wake the deer, “What do we do?”

At length Regina sighed. “I used to watch the butchers at the villa. We need rope …”

They dug through the garbage in the buildings until Marina found a mouse-chewed length of rope. To Regina’s horror the deer’s flesh was warm and soft; she had never touched anything so recently dead. But she got the rope tied around the deer’s remaining hind leg. She slung the rope over the branch of a tree. With the three of them hauling, they managed to drag the carcass into the branches.

The deer dangled like a huge, gruesome fruit. Blood, and darker fluids, flowed sluggishly from its neck and pooled on the ground.

Carta watched dubiously. “We should collect that blood.”

“Why?”

“You can cook it — mix it with herbs — stuff the intestines with it. I’ve seen it done. We shouldn’t waste anything.”

Regina felt her gorge rise. But she said, “We don’t have a bowl to catch it. Next time.”

“Yes.”

Regina stepped forward with Carausias’s knife. Calling on grisly memories from childhood, she reached up, plunged the knife into the deer’s skin under its belly, and with all her strength hauled the blade down the length of the carcass. Intestines slipped out, tangles of dark rope. She flinched back, trembling. Her tunic and flesh were splashed with dark blood, and her hands were already crimson to the wrists. She stepped behind the carcass and began to tug at the flaps of skin. “Help me,” she said. “After this we should cut off the other legs.”

Carausias built a fire in the ruins of the roundhouse. The wood they gathered was young and damp with dew, and they had trouble getting it burning. But when it was fully alight, and bits of the meat were cooking on an improvised spit, they huddled together around the light and warmth. The meat was tough, lean, almost impossible to bite into, and its bloody, smoky stink was repellent. But Regina was always aware of the speck of life inside her, and so she forced the meat into her mouth, and chewed it until it was soft, and swallowed it down.

“We are like savages,” Carausias said. “Barbarians. This is no way to live.”

“But barbarians have their arts,” Carta said. “Your butchery, Regina—”

“I was clumsy.”

“You will do better. There are older skills we must try to recall. For instance, we should keep the hide, cure it if we can. And preserve the meat. We have been lucky, but we are not hunters; it may be a while before we have another windfall like this one. We could smoke it, dry it in the sun, perhaps pack it in salt …”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But we will learn. And in future we should save the fat, too. Perhaps we could make tallow — candles—”

Carausias placed a hand on her shoulder. “Enough for tonight, niece.”

When the eating was done, Regina shrank into the deepest shade of the roundhouse roof she could find. With a corner of her cloak she tried to wipe the animal blood from her hands and face. Soon her skin was sore, and the cloth was starting to shred, but still the blood wouldn’t come off her skin.

Carausias came to her in the dark. He sat beside her and rested his hands on hers, stopping her obsessive scrubbing. “In the morning we will find water,” he said. “And then we will all get clean.”

“I don’t want this,” Regina hissed. “I don’t want to live like a, like a dog . Carta is so strong.”

“Yes. And that makes it worse, doesn’t it? Because by accepting it, she makes it real. But you are strong, too, Regina. The way you handled the deer—”

“I don’t want to be strong. Not like this.” She looked up at his kindly face, blood-streaked and obscure in the dark. “Things will get back to normal, won’t they, Carausias?”

He shrugged. “Even now, Rome spans a continent, a thousand-year-old imperium just a day’s sailing away, over the ocean. This has been a dreadful interval for us all. But why should we believe we live in special times, the end times? How arrogant of us, how foolish.”