Destiny's Children - Coalescent. Part 15

But now here they were, and there was n.o.body after all. It was just another betrayal. As never before the future seemed a blank, black, terrifying emptiness. Regina wrapped her arms over her belly and the growing, hungry life it contained.

Carta sat beside her. "Are you all right?"

"None of us isall right ," Regina said. "What a mess."

"Yes. What a mess," Cartumandua said. "This farm must have been abandoned at least a year. Poor, foolish Carausias."

"There's nothing for us here."

"But there is nowhere else to go, and we have no more money," said Carta grimly. "It doesn't seem such a bad location to me. There is water down there." She pointed to a marshy area at the foot of the gra.s.sy hill, the thread of a sluggish river beyond. "The fields are overgrown but they have been worked before; they should not be difficult to plow. This hillside is a little away from the road. Perhaps we will not be such a target for thebacaudae ."

"What are you talking about? Who is going to plow the fields? How will we pay them?"

"n.o.body will plow them for us," Carta said doggedly. "Wewill plow them."

Regina stared at her. "You are making up stories. We have nothing to eatnow . We'll be lucky to live through the night. And, if you haven't noticed, it is the autumn. What crops will we grow in the winter?

And besides-Carta, I don'twant to be a farmer."

"And I didn't want to be a slave," Carta said. "I survived that, and I will survive this. As will you." She clambered to her feet and pulled Regina's arm. "Come on. Let's go and take a look at the buildings."

Reluctantly Regina followed.

The farm buildings were cl.u.s.tered around a square of churned-up mud. There were three barnlike structures, with neat rectangular plans of the Roman kind, and the remains of a roundhouse, a more primitive building with a great conical roof of blackened thatch, and walls of wattle and daub.

Regina drifted toward the square-built structures, the most familiar. Once they must have been smart, bright buildings; she could see traces of whitewash on the walls and a few bright red tiles still clinging to the wooden slats of the roofs. But one had been burned out altogether, and the roofs of the others, all but stripped of tiles, had rotted through. She stepped through a doorway. The floor was littered with rubble and cracked by a flouris.h.i.+ng community of weeds. Something scuttled away in the gloom.

Carta pointed at the roundhouse. "We'd be better off in this."

Regina wrinkled her nose. "In that mud pie? I can smell it from here. And look at that rotting thatch- there are animalsliving in it !"

"But we have a better chance of repairing it," Carta said. "Face it, Regina-how are we to bake roof tiles?"

"We could get them replaced."

Carta laughed tiredly. "Oh, Regina-by whom? Where are the craftsmen? And how are we to pay them? . . . Regina, I know this is hard. But I don't see anybody standing around waiting to help us, do you? If we don't fix it ourselves-well, it won't get fixed."

Regina rested a hand on her belly. Carta's realism and doggedness somehow made things worse, not better.

There was a call from the lower slopes of the hillside. Severus was returning, with something heavy and limp slung over his shoulder. Regina soon made out the iron stink of blood, and a deeper stench of rot.

Grunting, Severus let his burden fall to the muddy ground. It was the carca.s.s of a young deer. Its head had almost been severed from its body, presumably by Severus's knife. Severus was sweating, and his tunic was stained deep with blood. "Got lucky," he said. "Leg stuck in a trap. Already dying, I think.

See?"

The deer had been very young, Regina saw. Its horns were mere stubs, and its body small and lithe. But one of its legs dangled awkwardly, and a putrid smell rose from blackened flesh.

Severus leaned over the limp corpse. With inefficient but brutal thrusts he dug his knife into the hip joint above the deer's good hind leg. With some noisy sawing of cartilage and bone, he ripped the joint apart, and hung the limb over his shoulder. "We've got neighbors," he said, pointing with his b.l.o.o.d.y knife. "I saw lights. A farmstead over that way, over the ridge. I'm going to see if they'll trade."

"Yes," said Carausias urgently. "There are many things we need-"

"WhatI need is some wheat beer," said Severus. "I've had enough of this for one night."

Carausias called, "You can't be so selfish, man!"

But Carta only said, "Come back alive."

When he had gone, the others stood over the carca.s.s. Blood slowly leaked out of its throat and into the mud.

Carausias whispered, as if he might wake the deer, "What do we do?"

At length Regina sighed. "I used to watch the butchers at the villa. We need rope . . ."

They dug through the garbage in the buildings until Marina found a mouse-chewed length of rope. To Regina's horror the deer's flesh was warm and soft; she had never touched anything so recently dead.

But she got the rope tied around the deer's remaining hind leg. She slung the rope over the branch of a tree. With the three of them hauling, they managed to drag the carca.s.s into the branches.

The deer dangled like a huge, gruesome fruit. Blood, and darker fluids, flowed sluggishly from its neck and pooled on the ground.

Carta watched dubiously. "We should collect that blood."

"Why?"

"You can cook it-mix it with herbs-stuff the intestines with it. I've seen it done. We shouldn't waste anything."

Regina felt her gorge rise. But she said, "We don't have a bowl to catch it. Next time."

"Yes."

Regina stepped forward with Carausias's knife. Calling on grisly memories from childhood, she reached up, plunged the knife into the deer's skin under its belly, and with all her strength hauled the blade down the length of the carca.s.s. Intestines slipped out, tangles of dark rope. She flinched back, trembling. Her tunic and flesh were splashed with dark blood, and her hands were already crimson to the wrists. She stepped behind the carca.s.s and began to tug at the flaps of skin. "Help me," she said. "After this we should cut off the other legs."

Carausias built a fire in the ruins of the roundhouse. The wood they gathered was young and damp with dew, and they had trouble getting it burning. But when it was fully alight, and bits of the meat were cooking on an improvised spit, they huddled together around the light and warmth. The meat was tough, lean, almost impossible to bite into, and its b.l.o.o.d.y, smoky stink was repellent. But Regina was always aware of the speck of life inside her, and so she forced the meat into her mouth, and chewed it until it was soft, and swallowed it down.

"We are like savages," Carausias said. "Barbarians. This is no way to live."

"But barbarians have their arts," Carta said. "Your butchery, Regina-"

"I was clumsy."

"You will do better. There are older skills we must try to recall. For instance, we should keep the hide, cure it if we can. And preserve the meat. We have been lucky, but we are not hunters; it may be a while before we have another windfall like this one. We could smoke it, dry it in the sun, perhaps pack it in salt . . ."

"How?"

"I don't know. But we will learn. And in future we should save the fat, too. Perhaps we could make tallow-candles-"

Carausias placed a hand on her shoulder. "Enough for tonight, niece."

When the eating was done, Regina shrank into the deepest shade of the roundhouse roof she could find.

With a corner of her cloak she tried to wipe the animal blood from her hands and face. Soon her skin was sore, and the cloth was starting to shred, but still the blood wouldn't come off her skin.

Carausias came to her in the dark. He sat beside her and rested his hands on hers, stopping her obsessive scrubbing. "In the morning we will find water," he said. "And then we will all get clean."

"I don't want this," Regina hissed. "I don't want to live like a, like adog . Carta is so strong."

"Yes. And that makes it worse, doesn't it? Because by accepting it, she makes it real. But you are strong, too, Regina. The way you handled the deer-"

"I don't want to be strong. Not like this." She looked up at his kindly face, blood-streaked and obscure in the dark. "Things will get back to normal, won't they, Carausias?"

He shrugged. "Even now, Rome spans a continent, a thousand-year-old imperium just a day's sailing away, over the ocean. This has been a dreadful interval for us all. But why should we believe we live in special times, the end times? How arrogant of us, how foolish."

"Yes. But in the meantime-"

"It will surely only be a few weeks before we see the post messengers clattering along the roads again.

Until then, we must just get by."

"Just a few weeks. Yes."

The deer fed them for the first few days. They were able to supplement the meat with late-blooming berries. For water they had to trek several times a day to the marsh at the bottom of the hill; they carried the water home in a wooden bucket salvaged from the ruins of the farm.

But the first rains nearly doused their fire, and turned the floor of the roundhouse into a quagmire.

Despite his attempts at bravery Carausias wept that night, bedraggled, cold, humiliated at how far he had let his family fall.

They had to repair the roof, Regina realized.

Severus said he could handle this. He clambered onto the roof, hauling branches of oak and hazel over the gaping hole. Regina felt optimistic: surely such a crude structure as this required only the crudest repairs. But when Severus s.h.i.+fted his weight unwisely, his heaping gave way, and he fell to the muddy floor in a shower of snapped branches. He got to his feet and kicked at the mess, swearing oaths to the G.o.ds of the Christians, the British, and the Romans, and stalked off in a sulk.

So Regina decided she would have to do it.

She walked around the little house, studying the roof's structure. Its conical shape was built on several main rafters that had been leaned together and then tied off at the top to a central pole. There was more complicated woodwork, the remains of a ring beam and crisscross rafters. But the main problem was that two or three of the big rafters had gone.

None of Severus's hasty gatherings would serve as new rafters, and they had no ax. But in the forest on the upper reaches of the hillside they were able to find long, fallen branches. It took Carausias, Regina, and Carta together to drag the branches down the hill. Then, together, they pushed their improvised rafters into place. Marina, reluctant but the lightest, was sent to climb up the thatch to the hut's apex, where she tied the new rafters to the old. The complicated cross structure was beyond Regina for now.

But she did have Marina tie light hazel branches to her new rafters, and they began expeditions to the marsh to pile up river reeds as thatch, great layers of it.

It was crude, ugly, but it worked.

Once the roof was waterproof things got better quickly. There were still whole dynasties of mice inhabiting the old thatch, but a few days of intensive smoking saw to that. The ruined roof had allowed the rain to attack the wattle-and-daub walls, but their basic structure of thin, interwoven hazel branches was still sound. Regina and Carta plugged the holes in the walls with mud and straw, pus.h.i.+ng the stuff in from either side and smoothing it off with their fingers.

When at last they shut out the last of the daylight, they had a small celebration. They sat in a circle around their fire, with smoke curling out through the chimney hole in their new roof, and their deer-fat candles burned smokily. They ate the last of the deer's liver, cooked with wild garlic Marina had found growing behind the huts. They felt they had done well; it was still only a few days since they had gotten here.

It was then that Regina felt ready to unwrap her preciousmatres from the length of cloth in which they had been carried. She set them in a crude alcove, to watch over the heap of dried reeds on which she now slept.

Next time they caught a deer, in a simple trap Severus had set, they were more efficient in using it. They kept the hide intact to cover the roundhouse floor, and even boiled the bones to extract the marrow.

Most of their food came from traps-mostly smaller game, especially hares. But they established a tentative trading relations.h.i.+p with the farm Severus had found beyond the ridge. The farmer, a tall, ferociously bearded, suspicious man called Exsuperius, was prepared to exchange their meat for winter vegetables like cabbage, and even clothing, worn-out tunics, cloaks, and blankets. The clothing, old and lice-ridden as it might be, was hugely welcome. Regina began to experiment with ways to wash their clothes in the river-wood ash, being slightly caustic, made a good cleansing agent.

But no matter how Carausias or Carta pleaded, Exsuperius would spare them no pottery, no footwear, and no tools-no saws or hammers or knives-no iron at all, in fact, not so much as a nail for their shoes.

Severus did his share, if grudgingly. As the strongest of them by far he would haul the heaviest loads, and he experimented with bigger traps and slingshots to bring down more game. But he was unreliable and short-tempered. He would barely speak to the rest of them, and he even seemed to neglect Carta.

Regina felt she would never understand Carta's relations.h.i.+p with Severus. They never seemed happy together-there had never been any hint that Carta wished to have a child with Severus-and yet their relations.h.i.+p, now years old, somehow endured. It was as if neither of them hoped for anything better from life.

When she learned that Severus had kept trying to trade meat for beer from Exsuperius, Regina understood that he could not be depended on.

The days turned to weeks, and then to months. They watched every day for soldiers or post carriers to come along the road. But things did not get back to normal.

Little by little they made themselves comfortable. But every day she had to figure out something new: the business of survival was remarkably complicated. And life was relentlessly hard, every hour from dawn to dusk filled with hard physical labor. The frosts of winter came, and life grew harder yet.

Still, even though the new life in her belly grew relentlessly, Regina felt herself becoming stronger, the skin of her hands and feet and face hardening, the muscles in her legs and shoulders thickening. She ate ravenously, to feed her unborn baby and to keep out the cold. But she did not fall ill. Carausias suffered a good deal, though; his joints and back, already frail, never recovered from the long walk from Verulamium, and though he gamely tried to keep up his share of the work, his weakness was obvious.

And it was, to Regina's horror, Cartumandua who became the most seriously ill of all.

It started with a pain in her belly. It persisted no matter what she ate, and even when she didn't eat at all.

When Regina touched Carta's belly she found a hard lump, below her rib cage, almost like another, malevolent child.

None of them had any idea what could be ailing Carta. There was, of course, no doctor to call on.

Regina even tried begging medicines from the bearded farmer. Exsuperius offered nothing save advice about letting Carta chew on willow bark. When Carta tried that she found the gathering pain would, if only briefly, be lessened. But gradually, day by day, Carta grew weaker and more sallow, and Regina felt a growing dread.

When the days were shortest, much of the marshy land froze. The daily ch.o.r.e of fetching water could never be skipped, but they had to walk farther to find a place where the water wasn't frozen, or where the ice was thin enough to break. The water walks came to dominate their lives, the first thing Regina woke up thinking about each morning.

On one particularly bleak, gray midwinter morning, she and Marina made the first walk down to the marsh. They had dug a cesspit here. Regina squatted over the hole in the ground, her dress lifted up to expose her backside to the raw cold.

Suddenly she imagined how her younger self might have felt if she could have seen her crouching in this muddy pond. In her mother's villa there had been a latrine close to the kitchen, so water from the kitchen could be used to flush. There were sponge sticks and vials of perfumed water to keep yourself clean, and the little room was always rich with cooking smells. And now,this . She had come to this pa.s.s step by step-and every step downward-she had been so busy staying alive that she had forgotten how far from home she had come.

But you had to s.h.i.+t. She squatted, strained, and finished her business as quickly as she could, cleaning herself with a handful of gra.s.s.

Today was misty but not as ferociously cold as it had been, and the marsh might be unfrozen at the center. So, carefully, she walked down to its rough sh.o.r.e and picked her way over frozen mud and puddles of sheer ice. She came to a patch of open, slushy water, where dead reeds, brown and lank, floated like hair. She bent and reached into the ice-cold water to pull the reeds aside. But she felt a sharp pain.

She pulled back her arm. Her palm had been gashed, and bright red blood, the brightest color in a landscape of gray and green-brown, dripped down her arm, mingling with the water that clung to her skin.

Marina came to her nervously. "What is it?"

"I think I've been bitten. Perhaps a pike-"

Marina inspected her hand. "That looks like no bite to me. You need to wash that off . . ."

"Yes." Regina bent to peer into the water. Through the layer of reeds she could see no fish. But she did make out a bright gleam, like a coin in a well. More cautiously, with her good hand, she reached down and explored. It was hard to judge the depth of the murky water. She quickly found something hard and flat-a blade. Carefully she took hold of it between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it out.

It was a knife. Its iron blade was heavily rusted, but its hilt, of bright yellow metal engraved with swooping circular designs, seemed unmarked. "I think this is gold," she said, wondering.

Marina was unimpressed. "Old Exsuperius would probably give you a bag of beans for the iron, nothing for the gold," she said, businesslike.

"I wonder how it got here."