Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

“How could any parent give up a child to a bunch of strangers?”

Lou’s gaze slid away from mine. “You don’t get it. The Order aren’t strangers. They’re family .” Again that heavy hand on my arm. “I knew I could trust them, and so did the Casellas in Rome, and so did your parents.”

I said nothing, but he could read my expression.

“Look, kid, you’re obviously mixed up about this. If you’ve come to me for some kind of absolution, you’re not going to get it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Or is blame the game? Your father isn’t around anymore, so you’re looking to come take a shot at me. Is that it?”

“I’m not here to blame you.”

“Nor should you. Or your parents, God rest them.” He jabbed a nicotine-stained forefinger at my chest and glared up at me. “We all did the best we could, according to the circumstances, and our judgment at the time. If you’re a decent person, that’s exactly what you do. We’re human. We try.”

“I accept that. I just want to know.”

He shook his head. “I suppose I’d be the same if I was in your shoes. But I warn you, you might be disappointed.”

I watched him, baffled. I was reminded of the headmistress. What was it about the Order that made people thousands of miles away want to defend it like this?

I gazed toward the setting sun. Anyhow, I knew now that this Order had taken my sister, as it had the little girl in 1944, and no doubt many other girls and maybe boys, relatives, over the decades — or centuries, I wondered coldly. But what I needed to know now was what they took them for . Lou was wrong. Trust wasn’t enough. Even being family wasn’t enough. I needed to know.

I asked him, “Do you send the Order money?”

“Of course I do.” He eyed me. “I guess your father did, but that must have stopped now. I guess it’s your turn. Do you want some bank account details? …” He searched for numbers in his billfold.

In the dense, moist heat of noon, Brica’s gentle, lilting voice carried easily through the trees. “… The sidhe live in hollow hills,” Brica was saying. “They are invisible. They can be seen when they choose, but even then they are hard to spot, for they always wear green. They are harmless if you are friendly to them, which is why we drop bits of bread in the furrow when plowing, and pour wine on the ground at harvesttime …”

Not wishing to disturb her daughter, Regina approached as silently as she could. Not that that was so easy now she was forty-one years old, and already an old woman, and anyhow her forest skills would never match those of the younger folk.

“… But you must never eat sidhe food, for they will lead you into their hollow hills, which are entrances to the Otherworld, and you may never find your way out — or if you do, you might find a hundred years have passed, and all your family, even your brothers and sisters, have grown old and died, while you have aged only a day. But if a sidhe frightens you, you can always chase her away with the sound of a bell — but it must be made of iron, for the sidhe fear iron above all …”

Her daughter sat at the center of a ring of children, their faces raised intently. Nearby a fire flickered. Brica saw Regina, and held up a hand in apology. She had been due to meet her mother at the farmstead.

Regina was content to wait in the cool of the shade and let her heart stop thumping from the climb up the hillside from the farmstead. The sun was almost overhead now, and its light, scattered into green dapples by the tall canopy of trees, lit up the curl of white smoke that rose from the fire. Regina recognized the rich, strong scent of burning oak, stronger than beech or ash. She sometimes wondered what Julia would have thought if she could have known that one day her daughter would become an expert on the scents of burning firewood. But they had all had to adapt.

Brica, given an old British name after Regina’s own grandmother, shared Regina’s features — the pale, freckled skin, the somewhat broad nose, lips bright as cherries, the eyes of smoke gray. But at twenty- one years old she was more beautiful than Regina had ever been. Her face had a symmetry that Regina’s lacked, and there was a kind of exquisite perfection in the oyster-shell curl of her ears, the fine lines of her eyebrows. Even her one undeniable gift from her never-seen-again father Amator, her black hair, was thick and lustrous.

And she was very good at holding the children’s attention. This morning she had shown them how to start a fire, with a bit of flint and a scrap of char-cloth. It was their most essential skill of all, and one that the children were shown over and over again, just as Brica had been taught as she had grown up. And buried in the fables Brica told the children were warnings that might ensure their safety: even this tale of the sidhe, the fairies.

Few adults believed in supernatural beings moving among them. But you would sometimes glimpse strangers: a very odd kind of stranger, moving over the sparely populated hills, often wearing green — just as in the stories. These were humans, no doubt about that, and they carried tools of stone or bronze. And they were robbers. Rather like foxes, they would take chickens and the odd sheep, or even — if they could get it — bread or cake. It was said they were dangerous when cornered, but they would flee when challenged. And it was true that they were terrified of iron — especially iron weapons, Regina thought dryly, against which their flimsy bronze was little protection.

Nobody was sure where they came from. Her own theory was that the sidhe came from the west, perhaps the southwestern peninsula or Wales, or even the far north beyond the Wall. Perhaps in those distant valleys an old sort of folk had persisted — older even than the barbarian culture that had preceded the arrival of the Romans — so old they didn’t even have the skills to make iron. Now that the legions were gone, and the land was emptying, they were, perhaps, slowly creeping back.

If they seemed to Regina’s folk as furtive, creeping, uncanny spirits, she wondered how her folk must seem to them. And after all, she thought wistfully, nowadays we can’t make iron, either.

The children all wore simple shifts of colorless wool. Some of them wore daisy chains around their heads or necks, and one small boy had a broad black stripe of birch-bark oil on his cheek, a lotion applied by Marina to a deep graze. Sitting there they looked like creatures of the forest, Regina thought suddenly, quite alien from the little girl she had once been.

At length Brica’s fable was done. The children scattered through the woods in twos and threes, to find mushrooms and other fruits of the forest for that evening’s meal, and then to make their way home.

Brica approached her mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Regina tried to be stern. But she cupped her daughter’s cheek and smiled. “Let’s just get on.”

Brica briskly stamped out the little fire, and the two of them walked out of the belt of forest and into the sunshine. They looked down the broad breast of hillside at the farmstead’s three roundhouses, and beyond that to the valley where the silver-gray thread of the river glistened like a dropped necklace. But they turned away and began to walk along the crest of the hill, making for the ruined villa. Brica was always busy, always alert. She would run away to inspect a trap, or pick a handful of berries from a cane, or dig mushroom flesh from a fallen tree trunk. She was like fire, Regina thought, filled with a blazing energy Regina herself couldn’t even envy anymore.

“So,” she said carefully, “have you seen Bran again?”