Stephen Baxter: Coalescent

Regina gazed into her mother’s gray eyes, so much like her own — the family eyes, eyes filled with smoke, as her grandfather always said. “No. But I want to do it! And Cartumandua says—”

“Well, she’s right.” Julia pulled at Regina’s own unruly mop of blond hair. “She’s trying to fix my hair. I can’t go into my birthday party looking as if I’ve been held upside down by my ankles all day, can I?” That made Regina laugh. “I’ll tell you what,” Julia said. “Let Carta finish my hair, and then you can help with my jewelry. How would that be? You’re always so good at picking out the right rings and brooches—”

“Oh, yes, yes! Wear the dragon.”

“All right.” Julia smiled and kissed her daughter. “Just for you I’ll wear the dragon. Now sit quietly over there …”

So Regina sat, and Julia turned back to her mirror, and Cartumandua resumed her work on her mistress’s hair. It was an elaborate style: the center was braided, drawn back, and wrapped around, while another braided piece rose directly from Julia’s forehead to be pulled back across the head. The silent attendant women anointed the hair with perfume and oils, and Cartumandua inserted jet pins, dark against Julia’s bright golden hair, to keep it all in place.

Regina watched, rapt. It was a complicated style that took time and care to assemble, and needed the focused attention of a whole team of assistants — which was, as Regina had heard her mother say in one of those adult conversations she didn’t really understand, why she wore it in the first place. Other people might be burying their money in the family mausoleum, but she was going to wear the family’s wealth and let everybody know about it. And it was fashionable on the continent, at least according to the images on the most recent coins to reach Britain from the continental mints. Julia was determined to keep up with the latest styles, even if she was stuck out here in the southwestern corner of Britain, about as far from Rome as you could get without falling off the edge of the world.

Regina loved parties, of course. What seven-year-old didn’t? And Julia gave plenty of them, lavish affairs that illuminated the villa here on the outskirts of Durnovaria. But even more than the parties themselves, Regina loved most of all these elaborate preparations: the subtle scents, the soft clinks of the bottles in the hands of the silent slaves, the hissing of the combs through her mother’s hair, and Julia’s instructions, soft or firm as required, as she expertly commanded her little team in their complex task.

As the styling continued Julia smiled at Regina and began to sing, softly — not in her native British tongue, but in Latin, an old, strange song taught her by her own father. Its words, about mysterious vanished gods, were still baffling to Regina, despite her own fitful attempts to learn the language at her grandfather’s insistence.

At last Julia’s hair was finished. Cartumandua allowed the attendants to approach with their bottles of perfume and cream. Some of these little bottles were carved in elaborate shapes; Regina’s favorite was a balsarium in the shape of a bald-headed child. Julia selected a face cream of sandalwood and lavender on a base of animal fat, a little white lead for her cheeks, soot to make her eyebrows contrast strikingly with her blond hair, and one of her most precious perfumes, said to come from a faraway place called Egypt. Regina was under strict instructions never to play with any of this stuff, for it had become so hard to find; until things got back to normal, so her mother said, and the big trade routes that spanned the Empire opened up again, this was all the stock she had of these wonderful things, and they were precious .

Finally it was time to select the jewelry. As Julia slid a selection of rings onto each finger, most of them set with precious stones and intaglios, Regina demanded that she be allowed to bring her mother the dragon brooch herself. It was a very old British design, but rendered in the Roman style, a swirl of silver that was almost too big for Regina to hold in her small hands. She approached Julia with the marvelous brooch held out before her, and her mother smiled, the white lead on her cheeks shining like moonlight.

It was midsummer, and the afternoon was long. The sky was blue as a jackdaw’s egg and free of cloud, and it stayed bright even when the sun had long disappeared.

By the slowly dimming light, the guests arrived, walking, riding, or in their chaises. Most of them came from Durnovaria, the nearest town. Some of them stood in the balmy summer air of the courtyard, around the fountain that had never worked in Regina’s lifetime, while others sat in couches or basket chairs, talking, drinking, laughing. They began to pick at the food set out on the low slate tables. There were round loaves of fresh-baked bread, and bowls of British-grown fruit like raspberries, wood strawberries, and crab apples. In addition to salted meat, there were plenty of oysters, mussels, cockles, snails, and fish sauce — and, obtained at great expense, some figs and olive oil from the continent. The highlights were showy extravagances of culinary labor: dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, sausages with damsons and pomegranates, peahens’ eggs in pastry.

The guests loudly admired Julia’s latest decor. In the main hall the plaster walls were painted with blocks of purple or gray veined with blue, and the dado was an elegant design of small rectangles outlined in green. Regina had learned that the old design — nature-themed, with imitation marbling, garlands, and candelabra all adorned with ears of yellow barley — was now seriously out of fashion on the continent. Her father had complained loud and long about the expense of repainting the walls, and the difficulty of finding workmen these days. Her grandfather had just raised his thick eyebrows and said something about how absurd it was to paint one half of a villa when the other half had burned down and you couldn’t afford to fix it …

But to Regina’s young eyes, the new design looked much better than the old, and that was all that mattered.

The entertainment started soon after the first guests arrived. Julia had hired a storyteller, an old man — perhaps as old as fifty — with a great ferocious gray-black beard. He told a long and complicated story,

entirely from memory, about how the hero Culhwch had sought the hand of the daughter of the giant Ysbadden. It was an ancestral tale of the olden days before the coming of the Caesars. Few people listened to him — even Regina was too excited to stay for long, though she knew it was a good story — but the old man would patiently tell and retell his stories all night, and as the party wore on, and as the drink had its effect, his deep voice would attract more attention. At the start of the evening, though, the musicians were more popular. They played a mixture of instruments from Britain and the Continent, bone flutes and panpipes, harps and citharas and tibias, and their bright music drifted like smoke on the still air.

Julia’s father, Regina’s grandfather, was here. Aetius was a towering soldier who, after adventures abroad, was now stationed at a mysterious, magic-sounding, faraway place called the Wall . And having traveled the length of the diocese of Britain for his only daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday party, he stomped around the villa and grumbled loudly at all the expense — “It’s as if the Rhine never froze over,” he would say mysteriously.

Marcus, Regina’s father, was a thin, clumsy man with severely cut dark hair and a drawn, anxious- looking face. He was dressed in his toga. This formal garment took skill to wear, for it was very heavy and you had to walk correctly to make the drapery fall easily, and Marcus wasn’t used to it. So he walked about slowly and ponderously, as if he were wearing a great suit of lead. No matter how carefully he took each step — and he didn’t dare sit down — the precious toga dragged on the floor, or folded and flapped awkwardly, or fell open to reveal his white tunic underneath.