Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

Lucia had only ever heard the word matres a few times in her life. Some called those mysterious figures the mamme-nonne — the mother-grandmothers. She had only the dimmest idea about them. Ignorance is strength — another crиche slogan. You weren’t even supposed to talk about subjects like the matres …

She pulled back from Pina. Suddenly it was too much; she was crashing through too many taboo barriers. “I should get back to work,” she said.

“Why don’t you talk to somebody?”

“Who? Nobody would want to know.”

“I don’t mean the girls in your dormitory.” Pina thought briefly. “How about Rosa Poole?”

Lucia knew Rosa, a woman in her forties who had a job in the remoter layers of the Order’s administration. Rosa had lectured Lucia’s classes a few times on aspects of information technology — database design, programming theory.

“Rosa is approachable,” said Pina earnestly. “She would know what you have to do.”

“Do?”

Pina sighed. “Well, to begin with, you’re going to need towels, aren’t you? You have to be practical, dear. And after that … Well, I’m not sure—”

“Because it never happened to you .”

Pina kept her face blank, but Lucia, her nerves taut, nevertheless thought she detected a little smugness in her friend’s face. “No, it never did. Which means I’m not much use to you. Rosa might be, though. She’s approachable, for a member of the cupola .” The Order had no hierarchy in theory, but in practice, at any time there was a rough-and-ready chain of command among the senior women, known informally by everybody as the cupola .

“I don’t know, Pina.”

Pina said a little harshly, “You think if you keep it secret it might all go away. You think if you were to talk to someone like Rosa it will make it real.” She looked closely at Lucia. “You think even talking to me about it makes it real, don’t you?”

“Something like that,” Lucia said reluctantly. “This is very difficult.”

Pina said softly, “We can sort this out, Lucia. Don’t be afraid. You’re not alone.”

Lucia smiled, but it was forced. She longed only to put the clock back a few weeks, back to the time before the bleeding had afflicted her — or better still back two or three or four years to when she had just been another little girl, just one of the crowd, invisible.

As it turned out her secret didn’t last another twenty-four hours. She didn’t approach Rosa Poole of the cupola . Pina did it for her.

For days Artorius marched them along the old roads, far to the west. At night they slept in the open, perhaps sheltered by a hastily constructed lean-to, their only bedding the spare clothing they carried with them. Every day Regina woke to a rough breakfast of salted meat. She was always stiff and cold despite the mildness of the midsummer nights.

Eventually, though, Regina found herself recognizing the countryside. It was a land crowded with hills, green and rounded — a human-scale landscape, very unlike the wastes of the border country around the Wall.

Her geography remained sketchy, little better informed than by Aetius’s map drawn in the dirt. But this was, she realized slowly, home . Blown by the winds of fate, she had sailed in a great circle, and come back to where she had started. Still, she had no idea exactly where the site of the family villa was: she had left at age seven, after all, and there was nobody left alive, Carta or Aetius, who might know. Perhaps it was best not to know; she could not bear to see it a ruin.

And there were changes. Even here the country seemed far from friendly: on every hilltop, walls loomed and the smoke of fires curled into the air. It had become a land that bristled with defenses, like a hedgehog’s quills.

Artorius’s proposed new capital was a fort built on a brooding hill — what he called, in the old language, a “dunon.” Artorius had already assembled a community of a few hundred people, scraped together from across the country, and the place was alive with activity. Regina did not know what the hill might have been called in the days of the Romans; it seemed to have no Latin name. But some of the locals called it by the name of a nearby stream. It was the Caml hill, or the Caml fort.

On their first full day at the dunon Regina’s people were assigned to fetching stone from what was called a “quarry.” Artorius told Regina he would spare her this toil. She had made a good impression on him with her defiance, and she could stay here with him in his capital; perhaps he could find her a different role.

Brica encouraged her to accept. “He seems to like you, Mother, Jove knows why. You need to play on that for all it’s worth.”

“Oh, I will,” Regina said. And she would. From the moment of Brica’s birth she had been determined to do whatever it took to ensure the survival of her family. But she refused Artorius’s offer; she was not yet ready to be separated from those with whom she had spent two decades on the hillside farm.

So they marched out in a group of about thirty, under the command of one of Artorius’s lieutenants. It would be a two-day walk south, and they spent another night in the open.

About midday on the second day, she found herself approaching the wall of a town. It sparked more memories of her childhood: this must be Durnovaria, the center of local civic society. To her childish eyes it had seemed a magical place, clean and bright, surrounded by mighty walls, and full of tremendous buildings fit for giants. But now the town had been abandoned for more than twenty years. The wall had been stripped of its tiles, exposing a core of mortared rubble and red binding bricks. The gate where the road passed through the wall had once been a complex multiple archway, but now the arches had collapsed.

Inside the wall everything was covered in a blanket of green. Most of the buildings had vanished into rubble and vegetation. There was much evidence of fire — perhaps the chance result of lightning strikes on long-abandoned buildings choked by dead leaves. Their plots were covered with a layer of dark, weed-choked earth, the residue of collapsed wattle-and-daub walls, now heavily overgrown. A few of the monumental stone structures survived, still immensely strong, but they were ruined giants, burned out, roofless, overrun with creepers and with shrubs and ivy growing out of cracks in the walls. Even the hard road surface was coated by a mulch of weed debris and dead leaves, and trees were sprouting, ash and alder, their roots cracking open the cobbled surface and exposing the earth once more to the sun. She glimpsed creatures from the forest — voles, field mice — and even the animals that lived off those small colonists, like foxes and kestrels. It was as if, after years of abandonment, the original owners of the land were moving back in. But the place was eerily silent — there wasn’t even birdsong.

As they passed through the town some of the younger people in the party averted their eyes from the monumental ruins and muttered prayers to the god of the Christians and other deities. But Regina quietly mourned. These ivy-covered stones spoke to her about the depth of the generation-long holocaust that was assailing Britain more eloquently than any historian, even Tacitus, could ever have. And how strange it was, she thought, that none of this had been inflicted by the Picts or the Saxons — none of the raiders had yet come this far west, in numbers sufficient to do this kind of damage. The town had collapsed all by itself. It was all as Aetius and Carausias had once foreseen, that once people stopped paying their taxes, the towns had no purpose, and had fallen in on themselves. Or perhaps Amator had been right, that the town was simply a relic of a thousand-year-old dream, from which humankind was now coldly waking.