Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 24

This would be subject to repeated hammering and heating until the last of the slag was gone. It took several blooms for Myrddin to produce one of his ingots, a flat bar about the size of a sword blade, ready for further work. All this had baffled Regina-it seemed an awful lot of work for a small piece of iron- until Artorius had gently explained that even charcoal ovens were not hot enough actually to melt iron, and Myrddin's elaborate practices were necessary to coax the iron out of its ore.

Though she despised the way Myrddin used his secret knowledge as a source of power, she could not deny the reality of that knowledge. Watching his careful, almost delicate work as he constantly inspected and a.s.sessed his furnaces and clamps, she thought she could see something of the centuries, or millennia, of trial and error and constant study that had led to the development of such techniques.

And the end product was iron, the most precious resource of all, pieces of iron that, remarkably, had not existed before. Piled up in Myrddin's workshops were some of the final products of all this industry: carpenters' tools like adzes and saws, tools for the farmers like harness buckles and sickles and reaping knives, weapons for warriors like swords and knives-and even tools for Myrddin's own use, like tongs and an anvil. It was Myrddin's proudest boast that he was the only craftsman who produced all his own tools.

But Myrddin was Regina's enemy.

When he spotted her, he greeted her with a kind of snarling smile. "Here to check up again, Regina?

Tap, tap, tap with your stylus . . . a shame we can't eat your words, or nail our soles to our shoes with your letters, eh? But at least we can wipe our a.r.s.es on your scrolls . . ." And so on. She endured it, as always, and walked on.

A young apprentice called Galba was working at a forge, and Regina paused.

He wore a sleeveless tunic, and his bare arms were pocked with hot-metal scars, already a little like Myrddin's. He was working a piece of iron-a short blade, perhaps for a knife-in the forge, while an unfree toiled at the bellows. Galba would thrust the blade into the furnace until it became red hot, beat it into shape while still heated, and then quench it quickly with water. It seemed that the fire didn't just make the iron soft enough to work; something about the charcoal in the furnace made the iron stronger.

And sometimes the iron, beaten flat, would be folded over and beaten again, the invisible layers adding strength. There were many subtleties to Myrddin's art, which Galba and other apprentices were learning slowly.

The blade appeared to be done. Galba quenched it once more and set it aside. Then he noticed Regina.

"Madam-good day-would you like me to call your daughter?"

"If you please," she said stiffly.

He went into the back of the workshop, calling Brica's name. Regina sat on a low wooden bench and waited.

As Artorius's kingdom had grown, so it had become necessary to find efficient ways to shape it, and to run it.

Despite Regina's own inclinations the order that was emerging had little to do with imperial forms, but was based on older Celtae structures. The center of it all was the dunon itself. The hill fort provided facilities for trade and exchange, a religious center, a resident population of craftsmen with growing expertise-and, most importantly, administrative control.

Artorius's nation was divided into three cla.s.ses. The n.o.bles included the soldiers, but also jurists, doctors, carpenters, bards and priests, and metalworkers like Myrddin. Artorius's rule was moderated by a meeting on every feast day of theoenach , an a.s.sembly of the n.o.bles. Below the n.o.bles were the free commoners, the lesser craftsmen and the farmers, who were actually the productive level of society. It was their rents, taxes, and t.i.thes that sustained Artorius's nascent government, and paid for his army and their campaigns. Finally, the lowest level were the unfree: former criminals, slaves, and late-arriving refugees who found no free land to farm. Their fate was simply to serve, and they provided the bulk of the labor.

The basis of society was the family. According to the old tradition the property and other rights of a man extended to hisderbfine , his descendants as far as his great-grandchildren, through four generations.

Basic rights were a.s.sured by each person having an "honor price," a level of compensation to be paid in case of injury, insult, or death. But the system extended only to the free; the unfree had no rights, and no views that were listened to at higher levels.

It was a crude system, of course, a barbaric structure to regulate the relations.h.i.+ps of a warrior people, with nothing like the sophistication of Roman law. But any attempts Regina made to reform the ancient code were resisted, especially by Myrddin, who seemed to have appointed himself a kind of keeper of the truth here in Artorius's kingdom. Perhaps more civilized forms would emerge with time.

Still, in this great project, Regina had found a place.

She had never forgotten the lessons Aetius had taught her. Aetius would say that it was information as much as sword blades that had enabled the emperors to take and hold such a vast territory: not just military knowledge, but records of wealth and taxes, payments and savings, gathered by the officials in the towns and transmitted by thecursus publicus along the great network of roads, which had been built as much to carry facts as soldiers' feet.

It had not been hard for her to convince Artorius of the truth of this. Her very first attempts at record keeping rapidly bore fruit in exposing unpaid t.i.thes and unjust levies. He had since granted her all the time and resources she needed.

She had pupils in her work-she, at least, was not jealous of her knowledge. She taught her pupils to read and write, and to argue and a.n.a.lyze in the forensic tradition of the Roman system. Literacy was very important to her. It was a peculiar horror to her that most Saxons couldn't read. Records and literature were the memory of humanity: if the Saxons were ever to overrun this place her past would truly be lost, lost forever.

Aside from her moments of solitude with the calendar, this brief tour of inventory compiling was the most pleasurable part of her daily routine. She never forgot that all the dunon's busywork was primitive compared to what had been available in the poorest of the towns in the old days, when the old continentwide trading routes had still worked, and there was little here that hadn't been made on the spot. But they had come a long way since the time, only a few years ago, when she had scoured the rubble of abandoned villas in search of iron nails for her shoes. She felt she was in an island, a haven where civilization was slowly recovering, in the midst of the country's devastation and collapse.

Brica came running out to her mother and kissed her on the cheek. They sat together on the bench.

"I heard you talk to Myrddin," Brica said. "That old monster gives you a roasting every day."

Regina shrugged. "I can't take him seriously, not with a beard like that."

Brica snorted laughter. "But he does know his craft. I think he just resents being watched over."

To Regina, Brica showed an alarming lack of interest in the subtleties of human interaction. "It isn't that," Regina said slowly, ma.s.saging her daughter's hands. "Not really. Myrddin is no fool, whatever else he is. He knows the value of record keeping as well as I do. His problem is not the record keeping but who's keeping the records."

"You?"

"Myrddin sees me as a rival for Artorius's attention. He whispers in one ear about the glory of the Celtae and the magic of the old ways; I whisper in the other about record keeping and tax revenues. We are like two poles, like past and future."

Brica grinned. "But you are the one who sleeps with theriothamus ."

"Yes. Though I think that if Myrddin thought he could lure Artorius to his bed he would cut himself a new hole-"

Brica's mouth gaped. "Mother!"

Regina patted her hand. "Rea.s.suring to know I can still shock you, dear. Anyhow, I think theriothamus likes having us both around, even having us fight, so he can take in contrasting opinions. The mark of a wise leader . . ."

Artorius still called her his queen, his Morrigan. But their relations.h.i.+p nowadays had little to do with the fierce love of G.o.ds-little to do with pa.s.sion, in fact, for he rarely visited her bed, even in the rare intervals he broke off from his campaigning and alliance building to return to the fort by the Caml.

Artorius's bold early notions of stepping down and submitting himself to election had long been quietly dropped. But he and Regina had privately spoken of his own eventual succession, and the need for him to find male descendants. It was unspoken between them, but it was obvious that she would not be the source of his children and thederbfine that would follow. She suspected he was also talking to other advisers, such as Myrddin-and perhaps he was already taking other women to his bed. But she cared nothing for that; her liaison with Artorius, in ensuring her own survival and Brica's, was serving her purposes.

As Regina mused, Brica's attention was drifting. Galba was moving about at the back of the manufactory, wiping his hands on a rag and joking with another worker.

Galba was short, stocky, with broad heavyset features; he had a pale complexion and thick red hair, which betrayed his people's probable origin among the Picts north of the Wall. He was young-younger than Brica, who was now a venerable twenty-eight. He had come down from the north with his family, en route to Armorica. They had fallen afoul of Saxons, but a chance encounter with a party of Artorius's soldiers had saved their lives. Galba's family had taken over an abandoned farm only half a day's a ride from here, and had become commoners in the new kingdom. Brica had met Galba at a feast on one of the farmsteads. She had prevailed upon Regina to bring the man into the dunon for a trial at the forge.

Galba had acquitted himself so well that Myrddin had taken him on at the manufactory permanently.

And Galba's move into the dunon had made Brica more than happy, too, to Regina's chagrin. Galba was cheerful, st.u.r.dy, competent, and obviously attractive-but, to Regina, crus.h.i.+ngly dull. In that way he was astonis.h.i.+ngly like Bran, Brica's farmboy first love, a relations.h.i.+p Regina had crushed long ago.

Now Galba came out of the workshop, softly calling Brica. Somehow he had managed to scorch a lank of soot-filled red hair at the side of his head. Brica took a knife and carefully began to saw at the blackened ends. Galba crouched a little so she could reach, and as she worked her body moved closer to his, her cheek resting on the side of his head.

They belonged together. It was a sudden, unwelcome truth, and yet it could not be denied. But Regina found jealousy gathering inside her.I can't allow this, she thought suddenly.

Not for the first time, she found she had come to a decision intuitively, and had to unravel it retrospectively. She felt as hostile to Galba as she had once to Bran. Why?

Galba was now a larger part of Brica's life than Regina was. So he should be. There were women younger than Brica who were alreadygrandmothers . It was the way of things. A daughter matters more to a mother than a mother can ever matter to the daughter, for the daughter represents the future, and the future must predominate over the past. Regina should simply-let go.

And yet the past contained everything Regina valued in her life: the villa, her own mother, the towns, the fine things. Peace and order, richness and beauty. If she were to let Brica go into the arms of this cloddish boy, this apprentice smith who thought better with his muscles than with his head, then Brica's future would count for everything, and Regina's past for nothing. It was a tension between past and future-and it was a tension that resolved in her head, as suddenly as clouds might clear from the face of the sun, and a warm determination filled her.

I will stop this liaison,she thought,just as I got rid of Bran. I don't know how yet, but I will find a way. I have to, for the sake of the past, which is more precious than the future, and which must therefore be preserved.

A braying of trumpets drifted from the west: it was a peal that announced the return of theriothamus and his army. All over the dunon work was abandoned, and everybody ran to the gate.

In the six years since Regina and Brica had been brought here, the predations of the rebellious Saxons from their fastnesses on the east coast had become a severe problem across southern Britain.

In her long conversations with Artorius about his diffuse foe, she had learned much about the Saxons.

For a start they weren't really "Saxons," even though that was what everybody called them. After they had erupted from their homeland in the north of Germany, the Saxons had become sea pirates, traversing the Mare Germanicus, which facilitated links among Jutland, Frisia, and Francia. Now n.o.body could precisely say who or what they were-they were all kinds of Germanics-not that that mattered if you were on the receiving end of a Saxon blade.

The Saxons were not savages. Some of the booty Artorius had brought home from his wars, particularly the fine metalwork, was as beautiful and complex as anything she had ever seen. But they were not remotely civilized in the Roman sense. They were not even like the Vandals and Goths and Franks who were moving through Gaul. Those barbarians often tried to ape the rulers they displaced, and even tried to maintain the forms of society that had prevailed there, with more or less degrees of incompetence.

But the Saxons were adventurers, wanderers, marauders, pirates. They were certainly not capable of running anything like the old imperial administration-and besides, Regina thought ruefully, in Britain there really wasn't much left of the old system to run anyhow, for it had all collapsed even before the Saxons got here. The Saxons actually seemed to hate the towns and other relics of the Empire. They were intent not just on plunder but also on ma.s.sacre, conquest, and destruction.

The only choices for the natives were to serve the new rulers, to flee-or to die. Many people had indeed fled, it was said, either to the west and north, the harsher mountainous lands beyond the effective reach of the old diocese, or else they had gone overseas to the growing British colonies in Armorica. Great stretches of the countryside were depopulated altogether.

But Artorius and his growing armies had formed one of the few foci of resistance to the marauding Saxons.

With a mixture of Roman discipline and Celtae ferocity, even before the present campaigning season Artorius had scored nine significant victories. People had come flocking to his hill fort capital, and the petty warlords and rulers who had emerged from the collapse of the old diocese had been keen to vow their allegiance to him-Vortimer, for instance, son of Vortigern, who had tried to avenge his father's destruction by Hengest. As Artorius's power, influence, and reputation grew, he was slowly earning his self-anointed t.i.tle ofriothamus , king of kings. Not that Regina trusted many of the bandits he dealt with, many of whom she suspected of making equally vivid declarations of loyalty to the Saxon warlords.

Despite such doubts, she had no choice but to cling to Artorius, for he was a beacon of hope in a terrible time. And despite all his efforts the Saxon advance was a wall of slow-burning fire that left nothing but a cleansed emptiness behind it: Roman Britain was suffering a slow, terminal catastrophe.

The army came in a great column of thousands of men and as many horses. The foot soldiers yelled and struck their s.h.i.+elds, the cavalry raised their slas.h.i.+ng swords so they glinted in the low autumn sun, and the trumpeters blew their greatcarynx trumpets, slender tubes as tall as a man and adorned with dragons'

mouths.

As the first of the booty wagons was hauled up the steep path toward the gate, Regina saw that it was piled high with heads-the severed heads of Saxons, complete with long tied-back hair and heavy mustaches, heads piled up like cabbages on a stall, their rolled-up eyes white and their skin yellow-white or even green. Behind the cart a prisoner walked, attached by a length of rope wrapped around his hands.

He was a big man with a golden torc around his neck. The skin of his face was broken and caked with blood and dust. He had evidently been dragged all the way from the site of his defeat, for he was staggering.

Women and children ran down the slope from the dunon, anxious for news of their husbands, brothers, fathers. Regina held her place, just outside the gate. It was like something out of the past, she thought wonderingly, an army from four or five or six centuries ago, the kind of force that must once have met the Caesars.

And yet Artorius had made great changes. To those old Celtae forces, fighting had been ritualistic.

Armies would draw up to face each other, would make a racket and an elaborate display, and only small teams of champions would be sent to do battle together. And they couldn't sustain a long campaign: Celtae armies, recruited from local farmers, had been forced to disperse when the crops needed harvesting. All that had had to change when the Romans had come with their propensity for pitched battles with decisive outcomes: The Celtae had quickly learned the techniques of long campaigns and ma.s.sed slaughter.

Now the Romans were gone, but their lessons lingered. Artorius had been a.s.siduous. He had even picked Regina's brains over what she could remember of Aetius's reminiscences of thecomitatenses .

Now Artorius's warriors were an effective and mobile fighting force, just as capable as the Romans' of waging a pitched battle-and of mounting a summer-long campaign.

But Artorius's practices were increasingly laced with a primitive darkness.

Regina knew the old beliefs, spouted by Myrddin and others. To take the head of your enemy was to possess his soul, so when these Saxon heads were mounted on stakes around the walls of the hill fort their souls would keep out danger. Regina wasn't sure how much of this Artorius believed, but she could see how he used its symbolism, working on both friend and foe, to cement his victories.

Regina lived with barbarians, and was the mistress of a warlord. But she could live with that until, as she always promised herself, things got back to normal, and the Emperor returned with his legions to sweep out the Saxon marauders, dissolve the petty native kingdoms-including Artorius's-and restore Roman dignity and order, so that this brief and b.l.o.o.d.y interval would come to seem no more than a bad dream.

Now here came theriothamus himself, at the head of his army.

At the gate, Artorius embraced Regina. He was hot, his armour scuffed, and she could smell the stink of his horse. "We have won great victories, my Morrigan. Everywhere the Saxons lie slain, or they run away at the sound of our trumpets. They are falling back to their fastnesses in the east, but perhaps next season-"

"Your deeds will live on for a thousand years,riothamus ."

He c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "You sound like Myrddin. However I hear a 'but' in your voice . . ."

"But your collection of severed heads would have appalled Vespasian."

His face clouded. "The Caesars aren't here. They abandoned us to the Saxons. I do what I have to do. In fact-" Artorius turned speculatively, looking east, the direction of Europe and the rump of the Empire.

"Perhaps, in fact, now that we are strong, we should be planning what to do about the Caesars and their betrayal of Britain."

She studied his face, alarmed, uncertain; she had never heard him talk of such plans before. But he was lost in his proliferating thoughts of future battlefields.

One of his lieutenants came to him. "We are ready for the show,riothamus ."

The "show" was the execution of the Saxon chieftain. It was a triple murder, a sacrifice to the ancient Celtae veneration of the number three.

Artorius himself raised his axe, and slammed its blade into the back of the Saxon's head. But the man was not killed, and Artorius gave his limp form to his soldiers. Next a cord was tied around the Saxon's neck and tightened, by the twisting of a piece of wood, until the bones snapped. And finally, and most ignominiously, his face was pushed into a vat of water, so that he drowned. Regina couldn't tell how long the Saxon stayed alive, for the crowd of soldiers around him bayed and yelled.

Artorius grinned at Regina. "I wonder what your Caesars would have made ofthis . . ."

Chapter 21.

A week after her encounter with the mother-grandmother, Rosa sent Lucia out for a study day in a library in the Centro Storico area-not far from the Pantheon, in fact. Pina accompanied her.

The two of them had finished their day's work by three. They decided to take a walk toward the Tiber, and perhaps make for the gardens of the Villa Borghese, across the river. They set off along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, heading west. It was a bright December afternoon, and they were walking into the sun.

The Centro Storico was the medieval heart of the city. It was enclosed by a great eastward bend of the Tiber. Rome's ancient core had always been the seven hills, where the great forums and palaces had been built. But after the collapse of the Empire, the ancient aqueducts had broken down, and the dwindling population of Rome had gravitated toward the river, seeking drinking water. The ruins in the area had provided building materials for houses, churches, and papal complexes. Later, as Renaissance families competed for power and prestige, the area had become cluttered with grandiose monuments, and it grew into a center for craft guilds, filled withbotteghe , workshops. To some extent that was still true, Lucia saw as they walked down the Via dei Cestari, filled with shops selling clothes and equipment for the Catholic priesthood.

In the low, dazzling light, the streets swarmed with cars and the pavement was crowded with chattering schoolchildren, slow-strolling tourists, and office workers yelling into their cell phones. The crowd was purposeful, agitated, and continually noisy, and Lucia felt out of place.

"You aren't saying much." Pina walked beside her, bag swinging at her shoulder, phone in her hand, sungla.s.ses on her nose.

"I'm sorry. It's just all thesepeople . It's the way they talk. Everybody is so intense-see the way their muscles are rigid-as if they are on the point of shouting the whole time. But what is it they are shouting about?"

Pina laughed. "You know, we're spoiled in the Crypt. We emerge as helpless as nuns evicted from their convents."

"I don't know." Lucia pointed to a group of three nuns in simple pale gray vestments. Chatting brightly in a small pavement cafe, they all wore sungla.s.ses and expensive-looking trainers, their cell phones set among the cappuccinos before them. One wore a baseball cap over her wimple. Rome always seemed full of nuns, here to visit the Vatican, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the pope,El Papa. "Theyseem all right."

Pina linked her arm through Lucia's. "Come on. When we get to the Villa Borghese I'll buy you an ice cream."

Lucia remained unhappy. As usual when out of the Crypt, she longed for its calm and order, where every direction she looked she would see a face like her own. But she knew that even back in the Crypt, even in her dormitory, she would have trouble finding peace. She was layered with secrets now-the painful mystery of her menstruation, Rosa's peculiar pursuit of her with her hints of an a.s.signment to come- secrets,huge painful bewildering secrets, in a place where you weren't supposed to hold any secrets from those around you, not even the smallest.

Still, she was relieved when they reached the river, and the crowd thinned a little.

They crossed over the Vittorio Emanuele bridge and walked northeast, following the great curve of the Tiber. There were houseboats moored to the banks; Lucia saw people sunbathing, laid out over the boats' decks like drying fish.

The Villa Borghese was in an area where wealthy Romans had built their country estates since imperial times. It had been saved from the twentieth-century property developers when the state had bought it, and preserved it as a park. Lucia had always liked these gardens, with their winding paths and half- hidden flower beds; she and her sisters had been brought here when they were small. It was best to avoid the weekends, when the population of Rome moved in here en ma.s.se, overwhelming the place with yelling children, chatting mothers, fathers with radios clamped to their ears for soccer scores. Today, though there were plenty of children, brought here by their mothers after school, their shouting seemed remote and scattered.

Lucia and Pina found their way down to a little circular lake, bounded by a path. On the edge of the water stood a small temple, dedicated to the Greek G.o.d Aesculapius. They sat on a wooden bench that had seen better days. People were rowing on the lake, sending s.h.i.+mmering bow waves across the dense green water and disturbing the reflection of the G.o.d's statue. It was always a calming place, Lucia thought; she had been disappointed to find that the temple was only a reproduction. Pina fulfilled her promise by buying an ice cream cone from a cart-not very reputable looking, but drawn by a patient horse, irresistible in his battered straw hat.

While they ate their ice cream, they watched a young woman in Lycra jogging gear sitting near them, earnestly peering into the tiny screen of her cell phone. She had a dog with her, a big, aged, slow- moving Labrador. He meandered happily through the dappled shade. But when he walked behind a set of railings he couldn't figure out his way back, and peered through the bars at his owner, whining theatrically. His owner retrieved him, comforting him with strokes and tugging at his collar. But then, as she returned to her earnest texting, the dog would wander off into his conceptual prison and begin his whining once more, making Lucia and Pina laugh.