The Boat of Fate (25 page)

‘Hope so, sir.’

‘Well don’t bloody well hope. Get a tablet or something, write it down.’

‘Can’t write, sir.’

My voice rattled the windows.
‘Then find somebody who can!’

He jerked stiffly to attention. ‘Nobody on the camp, sir.’

‘You’re trying my patience again, Baudio. Nobody? On the entire camp?’

‘Not among the guards, sir.’

‘Then where? Among the prisoners?’

‘The slave Ulfilas, sir. The one you saw. He speaks Latin. Writes a bit as well. God knows where he learned.’

‘Ulfilas? The Christian?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Then fetch him out of there, clean him up and get him a tunic. He’s to be here by suppertime tonight. And, Baudio . . .’

He was turning to leave.

‘The man who’s to go to Massilia. He’s to bring back fruit, any fruit, and some fish. Whatever he likes, as long as it’s fresh from the harbour. Also some wine. Caecuban if he can get it, failing that Alban or Falernian. Anything’s better than that rotgut you drink here. Tell him to look snappy; I want him back by dark.’

I leaned back tiredly, loosening my tunic, listening as Baudio began to roar out orders. My eyes were heavy-lidded from lack of sleep, and I had not yet broken my fast; but at least a start had been made. The Gods willing, my one-man social revolution would rapidly begin to gather force. Human nature being a perverse and curious thing, I felt better than I had for weeks; were a summons to come now, calling me to answer for the killing, I was almost optimistic as to the result.

I sat down that night, for the first time since my arrival, to a decent board. I set to vigorously. The day had been busy, too busy for thought; but already the camp was beginning to show an altered aspect. Most of the rubbish had been cleared; in its place now stood stacks of tiles from the damaged roofs. One of the dormitories I had decided was beyond repair. I had ordered it demolished; the materials from it would be useful for patching up the others. I had nowhere near the accommodation I needed; but I hoped by the end of the week to be sleeping some at least of the mine workers above ground. My first target would be a shift rotation that would give everybody at least one night in three in the open air; later I would work out a system of incentives whereby increased production would be rewarded with extra recreational periods in the compound, perhaps even manumission in exceptional cases. I ate hungrily, my mind full of schemes; I had almost forgotten my instructions of the morning when a scuffling in the corridor outside, followed by a thump at the door, announced the arrival of Ulfilas. He was propelled into the room by Baudio and another guard. I nodded to them curtly, dismissing them; I had no doubt they would stay within call, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else. I rested my elbows on the table and studied the man.

He was thin to the point of emaciation; the tunic they had found for him hung from his shoulders like a sack. His hair and skin were pale; he might once have been handsome, but the strongly boned face had long since set into an expression of brutish distrust. His eyes, grey-green and brilliant, moved restlessly, taking in the stark details of the room; the table set with two chairs, the desk in the corner, the one lamp hanging from a beam. I indicated the vacant place and spoke as gently as I could. ‘Welcome, Ulfilas,’ I said. ‘Sit down with me, and eat.’

His reaction was unexpected. The eyes blazed at me, and deadened; he drew himself erect, fists clenched at his sides, lips compressed into a line. At first I thought he didn’t understand, or that he suspected some trap. ‘Come, man, you won’t be harmed,’ I said. ‘Sit down and eat. You do speak Latin, don’t you?’

For answer he spat deliberately at my feet.

I controlled myself with an effort. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ I said. ‘I’m offering you your freedom, don’t you realise that?
Sit down and eat!
’

Silence.

‘Baudio!’

The door burst open with a suddenness that suggested the overseer had remained immediately outside. He ran in sword in hand, pulled up short and stared.

‘Centurion,’ I said, fuming, ‘if that man does not eat, execute him ...’

A steaming bowl was placed under the slave’s nose; Baudio raised his sword; and the struggle on Ulfilas’ face was extraordinary to see. The silence deepened; then suddenly his determination broke. He sat, grabbing for bread and cramming it into his mouth, feeding like a famished animal; but for all his haste his pale eyes never once left my face.

Baudio presented himself, grumbling, at first light the following morning. He had saddled two horses; he stood by sullenly while I issued my instructions for the day. The first task I set my new assistant was to make copies of all standing orders for distribution through the camp. It seemed certain some of the men could read, whether they admitted it or not; those who couldn’t, as I pointed out to Baudio, had better make shift to learn if they valued their skins. I saw a start made once more on the repairs to the huts; we left then, following the course of the channel that had once fed water to the place.

I was far from displeased with my previous night’s work. Ulfilas, as his name suggested, was a Scythian; I had drawn from him, by degrees, the strange and tragic story of his life. Many years before, when the Gothic nation of the Thervingi had first been ferried to Thrace, they had found that far from entering a land of milk and honey they had been granted a desert to live in. No adequate arrangements had been made for their reception, and the unhappy immigrants had begun to starve by the thousand. Then had come a scandal that had appalled many Romans throughout the Empire. Lupicinus, Count of Thrace, had battened on the creatures’ misery, selling them as food the carcasses of dogs. The price he demanded was horrifying; for each dog delivered, a Goth had been given into bondage. The slaves thus purchased were shipped to many parts of the Empire; one of them had been Ulfilas’ mother. He himself had been born in the household of a rich Pannonian, where he had been given the rudiments of an education; later the family had fallen on hard times and both child and mother had been resold. Ulfilas had finished up where I found him, in the mines; his mother he believed to be dead. Despite the years of deprivation he had clung stubbornly to the faith instilled into him as a child; now, finally, it had been his salvation. His tale as he told it, simply and harshly, affected me strongly; when it was finished I shook my head. Lupicinus had been arraigned finally by the Senate, and dismissed from office, but the irreparable damage had been done. Nothing could ever compensate creatures like this for the shame and agony they had suffered at the hand of Rome.

‘Ulfilas,’ I said, ‘I can see now how much cause you have to hate us. Yet you must bear with me. I cannot put the clock back, undo what is in the past; I cannot restore your mother to you, though if you wish you are free to return to her people. What I can do, and what I have pledged myself to do, is help your folk in the mine, whatever their beliefs. For that I need your help. Will you give it to me, or no?’

He was silent a long time, staring at the floor. Then he raised a face that was an expressionless mask. ‘I do not help you,’ he said in his staccato Latin. ‘Your God is not my God. I do not help Roma, who is the fourth beast to come up from the sea with iron teeth and nails of brass. I help my people, who one day will inherit the earth.’

‘So be it,’ I said, and called an indignant Baudio to show him to his room.

Baudio rode ahead of me now, slumped unhandily across his horse. The sun climbed, beating down strongly; after three hours or more I called a halt in the shade of an outcrop of rock. We shared the food and wine he had brought from camp, rode on again silently. The channel still stretched aggravatingly ahead of us, its bed dry and bare.

We came on the cause of the trouble shortly after midday. Close to the smallish lake that was its source, the channel had crossed a narrow, steep-sided valley on a string of stubby arches. Some idiot in one or other of the armies that had fought across the country had ordered them destroyed. The work had been performed with thoroughness. Nothing remained but broken stumps of stone; they thrust up forlornly, adorned already with a coating of rich green moss. The lining slabs of the aqueduct they had carried lay tumbled in confusion; from the northern rim of the ravine a clear stream fell mockingly, sparkling in the sunlight. A pool had been scooped out among the rocks; from it a rivulet meandered aimlessly, lost itself in a swampy morass a quarter of a mile away.

Baudio climbed from his horse, wiped his face and plumped down on the nearest boulder. ‘As I said,’ he remarked bitterly, ‘it just dried up.’ He nodded at the line of ruined piers. ‘Who’s going to put that lot back up again? And more to the point, who’s going to pay for it?’

I glared up frustratedly, hands on my hips. I had seen plenty of higher arches, but these were high enough. At its centre point I estimated the channel had been some thirty feet above ground, and the total length of the spans couldn’t be less than two hundred. I rubbed my face. It would take a skilled gang a season or more to repair the damage; and as Baudio had said, even if we could find the labour who would finance the job? Certainly not our absent proprietor, if I was any judge. Meanwhile our life-giving water soaked uselessly into the earth. It was a disappointing end to a hot, dusty ride.

I frowned, thinking back to something my father had once said. ‘If you want to conduct water between two points,’ he told me in the course of one of those interminable lectures, ‘all that’s really necessary is a pipe. As long as the outlet is lower than the source, the water will flow regardless of the gradients in between.’ It had seemed impossible, and I had said as much. Water flowed over arches; it was an established fact. But he had had an answer for that as well. ‘Since time immemorial,’ he said in his clipped, sardonic voice, ‘the dignity of the Empire has been sustained by arches. Therefore they continue to be built. It would be a tragic thing if the populace ever got the idea that the Roman monumental mason was losing his grip … ‘

I walked back thoughtfully to the southern lip of the valley. There looked to be no fall between the ends of the channel. But there must be; common sense told me that. So if I built a cistern, here, dug deeply into the rock . . . introduced my pipeline, which would lead from a similar pit to the north ... I stood frowning, lost in thought. The thing would work. It had to.

Baudio called up grumpily from his rock. ‘Seen enough, sir?’

I nodded and walked down to the horses. On the ride back to camp I was abstracted, turning the whole scheme over in my mind. I could find no flaw in it; if my father’s reasoning was right, I had my solution. By the time we reached the mine, the resolve was fully formed.

I would build a pipeline.

Materials were obviously the first problem. I sketched out on a wax pad a cross-section of what I thought I would need. Each pipe would end in a flange, which would fit neatly into the next; the joints could be packed easily enough, and rendered watertight. I frowned over the drawing, and squeezed my lip. One thing was plain: if I wanted that pipeline, which I did, I was going to have to pay for it myself.

I rode to Massilia the following day, spent the afternoon going round the tileworks and potteries. Everywhere I was met with blank stares or knowing shakes of the head. Eventually I found a place willing, for a price, to supply what I wanted. The price seemed exorbitant and I said so, but there was no choice: I made a down payment on the spot, arranged to come back and examine the pipes before they were fired. A month later the first batch was completed; I rode back to the gully at the head of the motley labour force I had managed to recruit, eager to begin the work at once.

I had no experience of engineering on this scale, and no real idea how to set about the job. As a first stage I decided to cut a channel on a line between the broken ends of the aqueduct, wide and deep enough to lay my pipes. The work progressed slowly; waggon after waggon rolled to the valley edge, shed its load of piping and trundled away. By the time the last consignment was delivered the line had crept to the valley floor. I left the work to supervise the construction of the cisterns. To line them I had stone hauled from the valley bottom. Later I would roof them with slabs of stone or timber; they would serve as useful filters, trapping any sediment from the lake.

Meanwhile the pipeline was nearing completion. Its appearance did little to improve my confidence. The straight trench I had intended had proved impracticable due to the rocky nature of the ground; the thing straggled across the valley floor like a broken-backed snake. Over the last few yards the pipe climbed with increasing steepness. I caught the grins on the faces of the workers as they went stolidly on with their task. If this mad young Roman was prepared to pay good silver for their services they were willing to accommodate him, but the day water flowed uphill, I gathered, the sun could also be expected to reverse its motion in the sky.

Baudio presented himself bright and early on the morning the channels were finally due to be linked, to ensure himself a good vantage point at the fiasco that would doubtless follow. The aqueduct had been dammed where it left the lake; I stationed a party there with orders to remove the plug as and when I was ready. To communicate with them I set up a chain of signallers; when all was finally prepared I waved to the first, saw him pass the message on. At the lake they would be digging out the last of the clay that held the water back; I waited anxiously till a signal told me the flow had reached the northern cistern, which was filling. Tension grew as the level climbed towards the lip of the pipe. It reached it finally, and poured down.

At my end the supply announced its imminence by a curious hissing and roaring. Air sighed from the pipe; the workmen craned their necks; but it took a Baudio to leap into the sump, apply his eye to the orifice in an attempt to divine the source of the noise. The resulting jet bowled him completely off his feet; he was hauled from the pit half-drowned as the water rose rapidly to the sill. Within minutes it was gurgling off to the south, and I signalled anxiously for the channel to be blocked again. Until it had cleansed itself, the aqueduct must be diverted at the mine; I had no intention of letting the dirt and filth from ten miles of channel swirl into my baths.