Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

There was a scattering of boos as the Emperor passed.

“My name is Felix,” the strange man said to Totila. “And you look lost.”

“Well …”

As the crowd broke up, Felix took Totila’s arm. Totila let the man lead him away, lacking any better idea; he had to speak to somebody.

Felix was about forty, simply dressed, but he seemed well fed, calm, composed. He spoke a basic Latin, heavily accented but easy to understand. It was hard to resist his air of command. Totila let Felix buy him a cup of wine and some bread.

Felix eyed Totila’s collar. “You are here for a holy purpose,” he said solemnly.

“Yes. I—”

Felix held up his hand. “I’m no bishop to hear your sins. I’m your friend, Totila, a friend of all pilgrims. I want to help you find what you want, here in Rome, for it is a big and confusing place — and full of crooks if you don’t know what you’re doing!”

“I’m sure it is.”

From somewhere Felix produced a scroll. “This is a guide to the most holy sites. It tells you what routes to follow, what to see …” The scroll looked expensively produced, and when Felix told him the price Totila demurred; it would empty his purse in a stroke.

Felix’s eyes narrowed. “Very well. Then I will be your guide, sir pilgrim!”

So, the rest of that day, Felix led Totila through Rome.

Everywhere they went there were reassuring crowds of pilgrims. Totila peered at the arrows that had pierced the body of Saint Sebastian, and the chains that had bound Saint Peter, and the grill on which Saint Laurence had been burned.

It had been the initiative of Pope Gregory some decades before to send appeals throughout Europe to call pilgrims to Rome, the mother of the church; and they had come. The city had quickly organized itself to cater for the new industry, which had brought much-needed revenue.

Totila shook his head when Felix brought him to a stall where he could have bought “martyrs’ bones,” a grisly collection of finger joints and toe bones. But he dropped a few coins in the bowls of half-starved mendicants, and made offerings at various shrines. He noticed that some of the worse-off mendicants were tended to by women — all young, all with pale gray eyes, dressed in distinctive white robes — who gave them food, and cleaned their wounds.

Felix watched all this, and eyed Totila’s purse.

At last, as the evening began to fall, Felix led Totila to the Greek quarter of the city where, he said, Totila would be able to find cheap lodgings.

And in a dark alleyway, between two impossibly tall and crumbling tenement buildings, Felix produced a fine blade with which he slit open Totila’s purse, and pierced Totila’s belly for good measure.

As Totila slumped to the filth-strewn ground, Felix counted the coins in his palm and snorted. “Hardly worth my trouble.”

Totila gasped, “I’m sorry.”

Felix looked down, surprised, and laughed. “Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault.” And he walked away, into the gathering gloom.

Totila lay in the stench of ordure and urine, unable to move. He kept his hands clamped over his belly,

but he could feel the blood seeping through his fingers.

Somebody was here, standing before him. It was a woman in a white, purple-edged robe. She was one of those who tended the poor. She knelt in the dirt, pulled his hands away from his side, and inspected his wound. “Don’t try to move,” she said.

“This is a holy place to die, here in Rome.”

“There is no good place to die,” she murmured. “Not like this.” She had pale gray eyes, he saw, the gray of cloud.

Having bound him up, she managed to get him to his feet and took him to an inn. She left him money, in a new leather purse.

He stayed two nights.

When he was able to walk, he approached the innkeeper with some trepidation, for he wasn’t sure he had the funds to pay for his lodging. But he found that the account had already been settled.

Before he left Rome, Totila tried to find the woman who had helped him. But though everybody knew of the women in white, and of their charitable work for the helpless poor and victims of accident and crime — some called them angels, others virgins — nobody knew where they could be found. They seemed to melt out of the rubble of Rome by day, and disappear by night, like ghosts of a different past.

On the day I was due to meet Rosa I woke early, having passed a nervous, restless night.

Before breakfast I crept downstairs, tiptoed past the concierges, and walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The dawn wasn’t far advanced, and the traffic was light. Around me was the old Roman Forum, nestling in the timeless safety of its valley, and the Palatine and Capitoline Hills bristled with the imperial palaces and other mighty buildings of later antiquity.

In my week in Rome, I’d walked and walked, from the Vatican in the west to the Appian Way in the south, along the banks of the Tiber, and around great stretches of the Aurelian Wall. Like Edinburgh or San Francisco, Rome was a city of hills — that was the first thing that struck you — you really couldn’t walk far without heading either uphill or down, and after a few days my thighs and calves felt as hard as a soccer player’s.

But what was unlike any city I’d visited before was the sense of time here.

This place had been in continuous occupation since the Iron Age. It was as if time were untethered here, and great reefs of history kept sticking up into modern times, mounds of past as enduring as the ancient hills themselves.

Rome was starting to intimidate me, just as Peter had warned. It wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in when meeting my long-lost sister.

I’d arranged to meet Rosa in a little coffee bar off the Appian Way, which was where, in our brief, terse phone call, she’d said she worked. The Way is an ancient road that leads south from a gateway on the Aurelian Wall. It was a fine morning and I decided to walk, to clear my head and get my blood pumping.

But I soon regretted the decision. The road was narrow, in long stretches without pavement at all, and the traffic was as disrespectful here as in the rest of the city. But perhaps it had been so for two thousand years, I thought; I shouldn’t complain.

I survived a terrifying jog through a narrow tunnel beneath a road and rail bridge, and arrived at a junction close to a little church called Domine Quo Vadis. Across the street was a coffee bar.

And there, sitting at a pavement table, was an elegant woman in her forties. She wore a cream trouser suit. She sat easily, with her legs folded, a coffee cup before her, a cell phone in one hand. As I crossed the road she turned off the phone. She left it on the table, though, where it sat throughout our meeting, a mute reminder of her connections to another world.

When I reached the table she smiled — bright, white teeth — and stood up. She had expensive-looking sunglasses pushed up onto her brushed-back mouse-blond hair, not a streak of gray, and her eyes were as pale and smoky as my mother’s had been. “George, George …” It turned out I was a little taller than her, so I had to lean to let her kiss me. She buffed my cheeks, as if we were two London PRs on a routine business meeting.

But this close to her, there was something in her smell — a sweet milkiness under the cosmetics, the smell of home perhaps — that made me, briefly, want to melt. Yes, suddenly I remembered her, a little girl in bright, blurry kid-memory images I’d long lost. I found myself struggling for composure.

She pulled back and regarded me, her face so like my own, her expression cool. “Please.” She waved me to a seat. With effortless ease she called the waiter, and I ordered a cappuccino.