Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“Yes. But in the meantime—”

“It will surely only be a few weeks before we see the post messengers clattering along the roads again. Until then, we must just get by.”

“Just a few weeks. Yes.”

The deer fed them for the first few days. They were able to supplement the meat with late-blooming berries. For water they had to trek several times a day to the marsh at the bottom of the hill; they carried the water home in a wooden bucket salvaged from the ruins of the farm.

But the first rains nearly doused their fire, and turned the floor of the roundhouse into a quagmire. Despite his attempts at bravery Carausias wept that night, bedraggled, cold, humiliated at how far he had let his family fall.

They had to repair the roof, Regina realized.

Severus said he could handle this. He clambered onto the roof, hauling branches of oak and hazel over the gaping hole. Regina felt optimistic: surely such a crude structure as this required only the crudest repairs. But when Severus shifted his weight unwisely, his heaping gave way, and he fell to the muddy floor in a shower of snapped branches. He got to his feet and kicked at the mess, swearing oaths to the gods of the Christians, the British, and the Romans, and stalked off in a sulk.

So Regina decided she would have to do it.

She walked around the little house, studying the roof’s structure. Its conical shape was built on several main rafters that had been leaned together and then tied off at the top to a central pole. There was more complicated woodwork, the remains of a ring beam and crisscross rafters. But the main problem was that two or three of the big rafters had gone.

None of Severus’s hasty gatherings would serve as new rafters, and they had no ax. But in the forest on the upper reaches of the hillside they were able to find long, fallen branches. It took Carausias, Regina, and Carta together to drag the branches down the hill. Then, together, they pushed their improvised rafters into place. Marina, reluctant but the lightest, was sent to climb up the thatch to the hut’s apex, where she tied the new rafters to the old. The complicated cross structure was beyond Regina for now. But she did have Marina tie light hazel branches to her new rafters, and they began expeditions to the marsh to pile up river reeds as thatch, great layers of it.

It was crude, ugly, but it worked.

Once the roof was waterproof things got better quickly. There were still whole dynasties of mice inhabiting the old thatch, but a few days of intensive smoking saw to that. The ruined roof had allowed the rain to attack the wattle-and-daub walls, but their basic structure of thin, interwoven hazel branches was still sound. Regina and Carta plugged the holes in the walls with mud and straw, pushing the stuff in from either side and smoothing it off with their fingers.

When at last they shut out the last of the daylight, they had a small celebration. They sat in a circle around their fire, with smoke curling out through the chimney hole in their new roof, and their deer-fat candles burned smokily. They ate the last of the deer’s liver, cooked with wild garlic Marina had found growing behind the huts. They felt they had done well; it was still only a few days since they had gotten here.

It was then that Regina felt ready to unwrap her precious matres from the length of cloth in which they had been carried. She set them in a crude alcove, to watch over the heap of dried reeds on which she now slept.

Next time they caught a deer, in a simple trap Severus had set, they were more efficient in using it. They kept the hide intact to cover the roundhouse floor, and even boiled the bones to extract the marrow.

Most of their food came from traps — mostly smaller game, especially hares. But they established a tentative trading relationship with the farm Severus had found beyond the ridge. The farmer, a tall, ferociously bearded, suspicious man called Exsuperius, was prepared to exchange their meat for winter vegetables like cabbage, and even clothing, worn-out tunics, cloaks, and blankets. The clothing, old and lice-ridden as it might be, was hugely welcome. Regina began to experiment with ways to wash their clothes in the river — wood ash, being slightly caustic, made a good cleansing agent.

But no matter how Carausias or Carta pleaded, Exsuperius would spare them no pottery, no footwear, and no tools — no saws or hammers or knives — no iron at all, in fact, not so much as a nail for their shoes.

Severus did his share, if grudgingly. As the strongest of them by far he would haul the heaviest loads, and he experimented with bigger traps and slingshots to bring down more game. But he was unreliable and short-tempered. He would barely speak to the rest of them, and he even seemed to neglect Carta.

Regina felt she would never understand Carta’s relationship with Severus. They never seemed happy together — there had never been any hint that Carta wished to have a child with Severus — and yet their relationship, now years old, somehow endured. It was as if neither of them hoped for anything better from life.

When she learned that Severus had kept trying to trade meat for beer from Exsuperius, Regina understood that he could not be depended on.

The days turned to weeks, and then to months. They watched every day for soldiers or post carriers to come along the road. But things did not get back to normal.

Little by little they made themselves comfortable. But every day she had to figure out something new: the business of survival was remarkably complicated. And life was relentlessly hard, every hour from dawn to dusk filled with hard physical labor. The frosts of winter came, and life grew harder yet.

Still, even though the new life in her belly grew relentlessly, Regina felt herself becoming stronger, the skin of her hands and feet and face hardening, the muscles in her legs and shoulders thickening. She ate ravenously, to feed her unborn baby and to keep out the cold. But she did not fall ill. Carausias suffered a good deal, though; his joints and back, already frail, never recovered from the long walk from Verulamium, and though he gamely tried to keep up his share of the work, his weakness was obvious.

And it was, to Regina’s horror, Cartumandua who became the most seriously ill of all.

It started with a pain in her belly. It persisted no matter what she ate, and even when she didn’t eat at all. When Regina touched Carta’s belly she found a hard lump, below her rib cage, almost like another, malevolent child.

None of them had any idea what could be ailing Carta. There was, of course, no doctor to call on. Regina even tried begging medicines from the bearded farmer. Exsuperius offered nothing save advice about letting Carta chew on willow bark. When Carta tried that she found the gathering pain would, if only briefly, be lessened. But gradually, day by day, Carta grew weaker and more sallow, and Regina felt a growing dread.

When the days were shortest, much of the marshy land froze. The daily chore of fetching water could never be skipped, but they had to walk farther to find a place where the water wasn’t frozen, or where the ice was thin enough to break. The water walks came to dominate their lives, the first thing Regina woke up thinking about each morning.

On one particularly bleak, gray midwinter morning, she and Marina made the first walk down to the marsh. They had dug a cesspit here. Regina squatted over the hole in the ground, her dress lifted up to expose her backside to the raw cold.

Suddenly she imagined how her younger self might have felt if she could have seen her crouching in this muddy pond. In her mother’s villa there had been a latrine close to the kitchen, so water from the kitchen could be used to flush. There were sponge sticks and vials of perfumed water to keep yourself clean, and the little room was always rich with cooking smells. And now, this . She had come to this pass step by step — and every step downward — she had been so busy staying alive that she had forgotten how far from home she had come.