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 pass 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 shit. She squatted, strained, and finished her business as quickly as she could, cleaning herself with a handful of grass.
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 shore 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.”
“An offering,” said Marina unexpectedly. “To the river. When you die — you give it your armor, your weapons, your treasure. It’s what they always did, away from the towns. Like they did before … We probably pulled it up when we tugged on the reeds.”
A dead man’s hoard. It was an eerie thought, and Regina glanced around uneasily at the mist-laden, murky landscape.
In many parts of the countryside the touch of Roman rule had always been light. As long as folk kept the peace and paid their taxes, the Emperor had never very much cared what they got up to in their private lives. Perhaps a community in this remote farmstead had kept up the rituals of their distant forebears, and thrown their personal goods into the marsh as propitiations to the goddesses of the water and the earth. The rational corner of her mind wondered if it might have been better for these vanished warriors to hold on to their weapons, to keep their money and spend it on trade or defenses, rather than hurl it into this marsh so extravagantly. Then they might have resisted the Romans better.
Probably there were bodies here, too, hurled into the water. They would be the dead, not of her time, but of the strange times of the deeper past, before the legionaries and census keepers and tax collectors: not her dead, but the dead of other, alien folk, whose spirits might, somehow, still linger in the mists of this ancient, endlessly reworked landscape.
She was shivering. She tucked the little weapon into her belt.
Back at the roundhouse Carta poured urine over Regina’s hand to clean out her wound, and rubbed in honey, expensively bought from Exsuperius, to stop any infection. The next day it was brighter, and Regina’s odd superstitious fears were banished. But the brightness brought a deeper cold, and the marsh was frozen over, hiding its strange trove.
As winter turned to spring, Regina’s heavy belly slowed her down. But this was a community of three women, one old man, and the unreliable, lazy Severus, and there was no room for passengers.
Still, it wasn’t so bad. One way or another they never ran short of food, even during the worst of the winter. And as the days grew longer and warmer, despite the load in her belly, she felt stronger, oddly, than she ever had before.
And it seemed that as Carta had gradually weakened, the others had come to look to Regina for leadership. So she was the first off her pallet of reeds each morning, the first to take her turns with the water fetching, the first to check the traps, always setting an example with her own efforts.
She was poor at bending and lifting, and couldn’t climb onto the roof of the roundhouse. But she could work a foot plow. One morning she set to hauling it across one of the fields on the slope behind the farmstead. She had to dig its iron point into the soil, push it in with her foot, and then haul back on the handle, which was nearly as tall as she was, to break open the soil.
The iron plow with its bowed wooden handle had been a precious find, left under a heap of decaying sacking by the vanished Arcadius and his workers. They had used more of their hunted meat to buy seed stock for wheat, kale, and cabbages from Exsuperius. Now the time was coming — as she dimly recalled from her memories of life in the villa — to plow and plant.
With the foot plow, however, it was only possible to scratch a shallow groove in the ground. It was galling to remember how her father’s tenants had used ox teams to break the soil over vast areas, while she was reduced to this pitiful scraping. But Exsuperius, in one of his bits of taciturn advice, had told them to plow their fields twice, in a crisscross pattern, to break up the ground better. And she found that when she came to the second set of furrows the plow fairly slid into the already broken soil.
By midday, her muscles had thoroughly warmed up, and the sun shed a little warmth on her face.
After so many months she no longer felt quite so obsessively bitter about Aetius, and Marcus and Julia, and Amator — especially Amator — all the people who had, one way or another, abandoned her. As for her companions here on the farm, they had been thrown together by chance, and they were none of them perfect: Carausias an overtrusting old fool, Severus lazy, selfish, and sullen, Marina timid and lacking initiative, and Carta — dear Carta, now terribly weakened. These were not the people with whom Regina would have chosen to be spending the eighteenth year of her life. But they were her people, she was coming to see: they were the people who had taken her in after her grandfather’s death, who had sheltered her as best they could …
It was at that moment, just as she had reached the nearest thing to contentment she had enjoyed since that night with Amator, that the first contraction came. She fell to the ground, yelling for Carta, as waves of pain rippled over her belly.
What followed was a blur. Here were Marina and old Carausias, their faces looming over her like moons. They were too weak to carry her, so she had to get to her feet and, leaning heavily on their shoulders, limp to the house.
Carta’s face was yellow and drawn. She looked as if she could barely stand herself. But she placed her hands on Regina’s belly, and felt the pulsing muscles, the position of the baby.
Regina yelled, “It’s too early! Oh, Carta, make it stop!”