by AM Kirkby
***
In the event, their first child was a son; but she gave him a good Etruscan name, Arruns. For once, Lauchme agreed, as if hoping in his son to gain the whole Etruscan blood he had always lacked.
Tarquinius
The bridge was nearly finished. The wooden piles, driven deep into the bed of the Tiber, stood firm, despite the water breaking viciously against them. Between each pair of pilings, the first of the huge split tree trunks had already been laid across, and now men were beginning to run out the long beams of the first span; the ten men standing on the first pair of pilings were hauling on the rope, but the beam was already starting to sag towards the water, and the foreman was screaming at the team to pull, pull harder.
Lucius watched from the bank, where he'd set up his chair on a small hillock, giving him a clear view. He picked at the quick of one thumb; it was bleeding, he noticed, but that didn't stop him picking at it nervously with his other thumbnail. The nearer the bridge came to completion, the more stressful it seemed to become. In the first days, planning the bridge's site, designing the spans, ordering the timber from which it would be built, he'd felt hopeful, confident. He was an able surveyor; that was one of the skills of the Etruscans which he'd been able to learn, from which he hadn't been debarred by his Hellene parentage. And the neat accountancy his father had taught him had stood him in good stead when it came to drawing up the lists of materials, ensuring nothing was missed that was necessary. Progress had been swift. Even driving in the iron-shod piles had gone well; but now, as the superstructure was added, he worried that one of the pilings would slip, carrying the whole structure with it, or that the men's grasp would slip, and lose one of the huge beams to the foaming waters below.
His choice of site had not been popular. Most of the Romans had wanted to build the bridge where the island split the stream in two, so they could build two shorter bridges. But Lucius knew the water ran fast there, breaking on the point of the island; whereas further down, past the island, once the two channels had rejoined, the river was shallower, and the stream ran more slowly, more evenly. A bridge built here would have less angry waters to withstand; and even here, the river surged viciously, and it had been difficult to get the pilings driven in, as the water kept breaching the temporary dam Lucius had had built. When the dam breached in three places just after they'd driven the final piling, he gave up trying to shore it up; they'd just have to reach the pilings by boat, and pull the timbers across.
It hadn't been made easier by Faustus' opposition. He was close to the king of Rome, and a strong advocate of the two-bridge plan. It wasn't his overt opposition that Lucius distrusted - he'd explained carefully to Ancus Marcius all the reasons for building downstream - but the poisonous asides. He'd heard Faustus use the word 'Etruscan' a few times, and he sensed it was not in a purely denotative sense. If anything went wrong in this last phase of the construction, Faustus would make use of it, somehow.
Lucius looked across again to see how the men were getting on. The beam had sunk close to the water before it reached the piling, and the men on the piling were hauling hard, trying to pull it up before the water grabbed the end and swung it out of their grasp. He felt his knuckles crack, he'd fisted his hands so hard.
It was at that moment he heard the horns blare; not far off, but close, and loud.
Turning, he saw the king in his chariot with the two white horses, accompanied by the two trumpeters, by a young aide who handled the reins for him, and by Faustus, who walked beside, with his habitual scowl. The men on the piling had not stopped hauling up the beam, but on the riverbank all work had stopped, and the men were staring at the king. They must be wondering what this visit meant; so was Lucius.
Ancus Marcius was robed in his formal purple, the white diadem binding his brow; but instead of the formal bearing Lucius had expected, he seemed distinctly at his ease, jumping heavily down from the chariot and striding across, the young aide scrambling after him. Faustus lagged behind, deliberately, as so often, staying in the background.
“You seem to have made progress,” the king said, handing his red cloak to his aide, and clambering up the earthen bank to stand besides Lucius. “Are all the pilings driven in soundly?”
“All twenty - ten pairs, driven in and then braced against each other with the cross-beams.”
“Like trestles.”
“Exactly.”
“We wanted a bridge, not a table,” Faustus muttered. The king turned round, and looked at him frowning, but said nothing. He turned back to Lucius.
“And all done without metal?”
“Except for the iron shoes for the spiked ends of the pilings; that we couldn't have done without.”
The king frowned again. “The oracle was specific; no metal to be used.”
“No metal to be used to join the pieces in the making of the bridge, I think you'll find, were the actual words, sir.” That was the young aide; Lucius was grateful for his interruption. The boy's voice was soft, his language hesitant; he knew how to handle a king, Lucius thought, and looked at him with interest. Sharp brown eyes looked back from under floppy blond hair.
“The feet of the pilings don't connect any parts of the structure,” Lucius confirmed. “The iron simply makes it easier to drive them into the bed of the river.”
“And no metal has been used apart from the feet of the pilings?”
“Absolutely not. It's entirely connected with wooden pegs and wedges. No metal at all.” He was quite proud of that; not everyone would have been able to achieve it, but he'd sat down with two of the best woodworkers in Rome and they'd worked out how to do it, using the weight of the beams themselves to tighten up the structure.
“Good. Not that one necessarily believes in oracles, but there's no point opposing them. It wouldn't do if the plebs started mistrusting all the new works, would it?”
Plebs. That was interesting; Lucius had thought Rome was a classless society, and so it was, at least compared to Tarchna, but for Marcius at least it was as stratified and class-ridden as any Etruscan city. He noted the fact; it needed thinking about, but not now.
“I'm quite impressed,” Marcius was saying. “Up till now, everything seems to have gone smoothly. Young Manius was telling me it's down to your good work.” He nodded at his aide. “Well, it's not finished yet, of course. But once it is, I need your surveying skills for another job. The salt workings.”
Too right it's not finished, Lucius thought, and now you've upped the stakes. His eyes flickered to where the men on the piling had just, thank the gods, managed to get the beam pulled up and were levering it into place. It wouldn't be easy; he knew, having been there when the carpenters finished chiselling out the sockets and fitting the tenons to them, how tight a fit it needed to be.
Faustus coughed. “If the bridge is finished.”
Marcius pretended not to have heard, but Lucius saw how his jaw set in anger. Best not to take issue, then. “The salt workings?” he asked.
Manius answered him. “Now that Ancus Marcius has extended the rule of Rome to the Tyrrhenian Sea, we can make our own salt. But the saltings must be extended; we need a man who understands the laying out of land, and the action of the tides.”
“The land I know well. The tides, less so.”
“You appear to have given good advice on the siting of this bridge,” Marcius noted. “Speaking of which: when will it be finished?”
“On the kalends next month,” Lucius said, thinking that it should be ready two weeks before that, but he'd given himself time in hand, in case anything went wrong. Anything, that is, barring absolute disaster.
He looked across again to the pilings. This time the tenon had fitted snugly in the socket; one of the men was already walking gingerly out on the beam, his arms extended to maintain his balance. Disaster avoided, at least for the moment.