Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  He'd already seen enough from the top of the high dune to guess where the saltings might be laid out, though he'd not thought about it consicously at the time, aware of nothing but the wind and sea and expanse of coast. He took Manius and Aranthur up with him just before sunrise, watching the light gradually chase the shadows; where the land lay lowest, the shadow lay longest. At this hour the apparent level was pockmarked by blemishes of darkness, which slowly shortened and drew themselves in and disappeared as the angle of the sun to the land increased.

  Between them and the river to the north the land was flattest, silvered by dew this morning and glimmering uncertainly in the early light. It was too far to see the water clearly; if there were no white caps, if the water lay sheltered from the wind and the open sea, there might be an anchorage. Nearer the sea, the dunes formed a flimsy barrier; as the breeze began to blow onshore, he could see streamers of sand blown from the top of the nearest dunes.

  “Thinking what I'm thinking?”

  Tarquinius squinted against the glare of the sea. “I don't know what you're thinking.”

  “That area, north of us. Good and flat. A couple of pools there already.”

  Tarquinius hadn't noticed the pools earlier, but now the sun was catching the water, silvering it so it stood out bright against the misty landscape. He nodded. It would do.

  As soon as they were back in the camp, Tarquinius ordered water to be brought, in buckets, and thrown on the bare sand in front of his tent. Manius frowned, but said nothing as the water splashed out, darkening the ground.

  “More!” Tarquinius ordered. The sand crusted up around the darker patch, throwing up little tawny curlicues and crests against the smooth wetness. The water was already drying into the sand, the dark lightening again.

  Aranthur brought a bucket, and threw the water up in the air, where it hung for a moment transfixed by the sun before splashing down on to the ground.

  “You didn't have to join the men,” Tarquinius said.

  “I don't mind.” The youth shrugged. “Besides, I wanted to see what you were doing.”

  “Wait around, then.”

  Aranthur handed the bucket to one of the other men, and came to stand by Tarquinius. “As long as we don't have to fill the whole salting this way,” he muttered.

  “Wait and see,” said Tarquinius.

  The darkened patch gradually spread, till it was ten paces wide, and even longer, a stretch of fine level sand. The men brought more water, till the sand could absorb no more and the water was sloshing around in a great shallow puddle, and Tarquinius nodded gently to the foreman, who yelled “Stop!” Striding forward, Tarquinius held his hand out for the foreman's staff, and drew a huge sweeping line down the side of the patch.

  “This is the shore,” he said. “And the river” - he drew a hook at the top - “comes in just here” - and as he said 'here', he dug the stick in again, and delineated the curve of the river across and down. “So this is the space we have to play with, just here.” He waved a hand across the space, leaving the stick poised where it had ended his last stroke.

  “So we have to plan the ponds. One large one to filter the water from the sea.”

  He pulled the staff towards him, and was about to draw a line when Manius stopped him.

  “Why not from the estuary?”

  “That's fresh water.”

  “Not necessarily. The sea comes into the delta; and though the river flows out, in the shallows, the water washes around, and it's salt.”

  “It is?”

  “You can see it after a flood; the marsh plants are covered with salt.”

  “Salt? Not mud?”

  “I've tasted it.”

  Tarquinius paused, and rested his chin on his hands on the top of the staff. It was a difficult question; and Manius seemed to have done some preparatory research, which was interesting. He wondered again if Manius had been sent to help him or to test him; or, perhaps, both.

  “Look, if it's salt, the estuary is a better place.” Aranthur's sounded unusually confident. “If we let the water in straight from the sea, the wall will be a weakness - a storm will stove it in, and we'll have our saltworks ruined.”

  “And all the salt already in the pans lost,” said Manius.

  “Right. But if we let the water in from the estuary, then we don't run that risk.”

  “There are floods in the river, though,” Tarquinius said. “A tree trunk, a capsized boat - that could easily run up against our embankments. Just as destructive.”

  “So we dig the entrance to our canal against the flow. Or we put up a wooden breakwater. Or both. Whatever the flood brings, it will be swept right past.”

  Manius nodded. Tarquinius fought down the uncomfortable thought that he was being ganged up on. Manius and Aranthur - Egerius, he was now to call him - hadn't met before they started the journey from Rome, and he'd been with one or the other pretty much the whole time. They couldn't have discussed this. And actually, the idea wasn't bad.

  He thought back to the view of the landscape from the top of the dune; there was a little ridge about ten degrees east of north, where the land rose. Not much, but it would do.

  “Well,” he said, slowing his words as if he were still thinking it out, “that rising ground there might help us, too.” He pointed the staff towards the ridge. “If we put our filtration pool behind it, then it's protected from the river.”

  “And dig the canal on the seaward side, back towards the pool...” Aranthur was leaning forwards, nodding. “Yes, that's good.”

  Tarquinius lowered the staff to the sand again. Heavily, he inscribed a line from the river, and then drew a rough freehand circle to represent the pond. Then below that, he etched a series of straight lines, which slowly ordered themselves into a grid.

  “From the filtering pond, we sluice the water into these pools to dry out the salt. Then we leave it. Each pool separate, so we can let fresh water in from the canal as soon as the rakers have finished. Quicker that way, and more salt if you use the pool twice in a year, instead of once.”

  “You sound as if you've done this before,” Manius said coolly.

  “There is a salt works at Graviscae, of course.”

  “How long should the pans be, then?”

  Of course there were no rules; you divided the ground evenly, then when you'd done that, the one thing there were rules for - at least, rules of thumb - was the width of the central dike, so it was strong enough and not too narrow for the saltmen to walk along the top. But there was no reason Manius should know that.

  “Fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long.”

  Manius nodded. (That was a relief; he'd rather wondered whether Manius would ask whether that was Etruscan feet, or Roman feet, or Greek feet. Manius could be difficult like that.)

  “We can start staking them out tomorrow.”

  Tarquinius had finished with the sketched plan; he'd remember it well enough when they started surveying. One of the men who'd come with the horses was yelling at him from the other side of the camp, and quite conscious of the effect it would have on Manius, he strode carelessly across the wet sand, dragging his feet in the soft.

  “Clever, eh?” said Aranthur.

  “What - walking across the bloody map?”

  “No; using the sand to draw on.”

  “Oh,” said Manius; “I had wondered if it was some kind of strange Etruscan sacrifice. Or Greek, maybe, I hadn't heard the Etruscans did anything of the sort, but you never know.. funny people, Etruscans...” He looked down, for once caught out by his own tactlessness.

  “Funny people, those Greeks, too,” Aranthur said, and forgot, as he nearly always did, his quarter-Greek ancestry.