Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

Their destination proved not to be the town itself but a graveyard that sprawled over a hillside nearby.

It was vast, so densely packed with tombs it was like a pavement of tile, sandstone, and marble; there must be thousands buried here. People were already working: they were prizing up gravestones, slabs of sandstone or marble, with picks of wood and iron. The work was under the direction of a couple of Artorius’s soldiers. They did not hang back from the labor but joined in themselves, stripped to the waist in the summer heat.

“So this is our ‘quarry,’ “ Regina said. “A graveyard, which we are desecrating for bits of stone.”

Brica shrugged. “What does it matter? The dead are dead. We need the stones.”

Regina felt a sense of shock. If at age seven, or even age seventeen, she could have seen herself now and learned what she must do to stay alive, she would have been horrified. And she felt a pang of sadness that Brica, still so young, saw nothing difficult about it. How we are fallen, she thought.

Strangely, a small farmstead had been established at the center of the graveyard, complete with a barn and a couple of granary pits. A woman was selling food to the workers in return for nails and other bits of iron. Perhaps the bones of the dead had made the ground rich for vegetables, Regina thought morbidly.

Neither Regina nor Brica had the muscle for digging up gravestones, so they were put to work fetching pails of water from a stream for the workers to drink and wash off their dust. They moved among the opened graves, stepping over smashed-up stones.

Regina stopped by one grave whose stone was intact enough for its Latin inscription to be read. “DIS MANIBUS LUCIUS MATELLUS ROMULUS… ‘May the underworld spirits take Lucius, born in Spain, served in the Vettones cavalry regiment, became a citizen, and died here aged forty-six.’ And here is the grave of his daughter — Simplicia — died aged ten months, ‘a most innocent soul.’ I wonder what poor Lucius would think if he could see what we are doing today.”

Brica shrugged, hot, dirty, not much caring. “Who are all these people? Were they to do with the town?”

“Of course they were. These were the citizens — there are the dead of centuries here, perhaps.”

“Why weren’t they buried inside the town?”

“Because it wasn’t allowed. Unless you were a very young baby, in which case you didn’t count as a person anyhow … That was the law.”

“The Emperor’s law. Now we make up our own laws,” Brica said.

“Or some thug like Artorius makes them up for us.”

“He isn’t so bad,” Brica said.

Regina read another gravestone. “ ‘A sweetest child, torn away no less suddenly than the partner of Dis.’ “

“What does that mean?”

Regina frowned, trying to remember her lessons with Aetius. “I think it’s a quotation from Virgil.” But the poet’s name meant nothing to Brica, and Regina let it pass.

Some of the graves had evidently once held wooden coffins, now long rotted away, and these graves were filled only with a scatter of bones. But in some of the grander tombs coffins of lead-lined stone had been used. These were prized out of the ground, roughly opened, and the grisly contents dumped back into the yawning ground so that the lead could be salvaged. Occasionally there were grave goods: bits of jewelry, perfume bottles, even tools — and, in one small and pathetic grave, a wooden doll. The workers would snatch these up, inspect them briefly, and pocket them if they looked like they were worth anything. There was no great stench, save for the scent of moist open earth. These bodies were decades old at least, and — except for those corpses tipped out of the more robust lead coffins — the worms had done their work.

Toward the end of the day the broken gravestones were loaded into carts, or set on people’s backs, for the haul back to Artorius’s capital.

On their return to the dunon, Artorius again came to seek out Regina. He insisted that she not spend another day at the gruesome cemetery-quarry, but come with him to inspect his developing capital.

“I value your opinion,” he said, his grin confident and disarming. “Intellect and spirit are all too rare these sorry days. You are wasted digging up bones.”

“I am no soldier.”

“I have plenty of soldiers, who are all trained to tell me what I want to hear. But you, as I know very well, have no fear of me. I know, above all, that you are a survivor. And survival is what I am intent on: the first priority.”

So she agreed. After all, she had no real choice.

They walked around the dunon. The hill was flat-topped, a plug of landscape. To the east was a ridge of high ground, but from the hill’s upper slopes there was a long view to be had of the plains to the west.

The plateau itself rose up to a summit, where a beacon bonfire had been built. Some of the flatter ground had been given over to cultivation, but there would be little farmland up here. Artorius’s capital would be fed by farmsteads on the plain outside the fort. Part of the bargain behind this was that the farmers would be able to huddle inside the walls in times of danger. In a lower part of the plateau a wooden hall was being built to house Artorius himself. The burned-out remains of a much older building had been cleared — perhaps the home of some chieftain of pre-Roman times.

They walked around the edge of the plateau. A perimeter wall was being constructed — or rather reconstructed, she saw, based on the foundations of some ancient predecessor. It would be five paces thick, a framework of wooden beams filled with stones, most of them coming from the Durnovaria cemetery. Already the framework skirted most of the plateau, and work had begun on a large, complex gate in the southwest corner. Regina was impressed with the scale of all this, and the efficiency of Artorius’s organization.

“You are able to command the work of hundreds.”

Artorius shrugged. “They tell me that the emperors once commanded a hundred million . But one must start somewhere.”

There had been rain, and the grass-coated slopes of the hill were intensely green. The slopes were surrounded by lines of banks and ditches. Men were working their way over the forested banks, cutting down trees with their iron axes and saws and hauling the trunks to the summit of the hill.

They were making the rings of ditches into a defense system. Artorius pointed. “There are four lines. See how we look down on the earthworks? The Saxons will have to run up that slope, arriving exhausted, and then down this face below us, where they will offer an easy target to our arrows or spears. The banks are overgrown with trees — three or four centuries’ growth, I suppose, quite mature — and the slopes need to be cleared to avoid giving cover to any assailants, but we can deal with that.”

“It is a lucky arrangement of ditches and ridges to be so useful.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Luck has nothing to do with it. I thought you understood — Regina, there is nothing natural about those ditches. Everything you see was dug out by hand — by our ancestors, in fact, in the days before the Caesars.”

She could scarcely believe it. “This is a made place?”

“It certainly is. It looks crude, but is well thought out. The fort is a machine, a killing machine made of earth and rock.” He scratched his chin. “The work required to assemble even our paltry new wall is enormous. To have sculpted the hill itself — to have built those banks and ditches — defies the imagination. But, once built, it lasts forever.”

“And yet the Caesars cleared out this place, as mice are cleared from a nest.”