Etruscan Blood
Page 69
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The works on the drainage of the Velabrum should have started decades before, Tarquinius thought. It was so clear to him that the marsh had to be drained, he couldn't understand how preceding kings had never seen it. As long as there was marsh here, Rome could never grow, could never descend from the slopes of the Capitol or the Palatine to become more than a tiny hill city, like Staties or Arretium.
And so now they were working on the great drain, in the stink and ooze of the marshes, that were only ever clean when the Tiber flooded and the river waters scoured the low lying land. It was tricky work; the land was too flat for the water to run out of it, so they had to calculate a gradient steep enough to pull the water with it, and yet still arrive at the Tiber above the level of the river water. The tolerances were fine, the plan had to be nicely judged; besides falling just the right amount, at the right gradient, the channels had to be planned to follow the contours, to clear every stagnant pond and marshy dip; and that was not so easy, the geometry of the meandering channels would turn back on itself if you weren't careful, or you'd end up leaving a morass in some crease of the landscape undrained. And though you might have thought the easiest way would have been to drive a straight channel right down the middle – and that was the way the Romans' minds worked – that would either have left half the marsh waterlogged, if it was shallow, or if it was deep, would have flooded the whole plain with Tiber water every spring, when the rains and meltwater came down from the Apennines.
Once, Tarquinius would have taken the measurements himself; would have paced the distances, settled the groma, known every wrinkle of the waterchannels and hump of green-slimed mud. Now, he looked at the land from the back of his horse, and saw only an expanse of slime and mud, small channels and pools and the plants that straggled across the greyness; an expanse indeterminate and unchartable, by him. He struggled to follow a particular meandering channel, but as it twisted, he lost sight of it, or his eyes seemed to slip to another channel, so that he couldn't be sure if he was still following the one he'd originally chosen. The marsh seemed flat, and yet as he looked, he saw how streams disappeared into hidden dips, how as his horse moved, the map of the marsh seemed to shift, to well up and ooze out. Only the white painted posts the surveyors had knocked into the ground let them find their way safely, Manius in front and him behind, and he saw the posts were already leaning, crooked, as the ground around them cracked, sank, swelled.
In the mud, the slowly receding water had carved fernlike branching patterns.
The bare, half-dried dirt had a surface like leather; when he rode across it, his horse's hooves split the surface, and water welled in the crescents it had left. He smelt marsh herbs, and the rankness of a stagnant channel where the water was scummed with green decaying weed.
The men were working on the central channel now, hammering in posts and marking each with the ring of of black that showed the point from which they'd measure three feet down, down towards the base of the post now deep in the soft ground. Tarquinius looked over to Manius, who'd ridden a little to the side, and stopped his horse.
"We'll walk from here," he said, swinging himself heavily down to the earth, feeling his feet dig into the dirt. It was hard going; he looked at the soft scuff of his footprints.
They were all Romans, these men working here; Manius ran through their names - Gnaeus, Gaius, Caius.
"My gods! Do they all rhyme?"
They laughed dutifully at that, but he had a feeling they'd laugh at it differently later, when he was gone; the old Etruscan, who didn't understand this new city that he ruled.
"No, they don't," said Manius, literal minded as ever, and introduced Paullus, Tullus and Aulus, Tertius, Sextus and Decimus. That was worse, Tarqunius thought; Third and Sixth and Tenth? What was the sense there? (And who, these days, had ten sons anyway?)
"Don't they have names?" he muttered to Manius, keeping his voice low so the surveyors wouldn't hear it.
"Those are their names," Manius said.
Now he began to understand what Tanaquil meant about Roman girls' names. There was something wrong about calling a man a number. And they had so few names, these Romans; if you were writing an epic, he thought, you'd not have put together enough Argonauts or enough warriors for Troy before you found you had to repeat the names, so you'd have two Publiuses or three Marcuses...
And where were all the men who had worked with him? Gaius - his Gaius, not this new Gaius he'd just met - was long gone by now, into Collatia with Egerius; Manius was here, of course, but where were all the others - Publius and... and... he realised he'd forgotten their names, and when he tried to think of them, he could see them standing there in the saltings, lined up under the burning sun, but he could no longer see their faces clearly. They seemed blurred, smoothed out as a potter smooths out the clay of a pot that collapsed on the wheel, before making it anew. Gods, was he so old? Were those days so far past?
"... facing the walls with stone?"
Tarquinius was unnerved. He's missed what Manius was saying; he'd never used to do that. He frowned, hummed gently to himself, looked as if he was thinking. "With stone?"
"Wickerwork would hold the banks back, but it would need replacing every few years. Stone would be mure durable."
"Stone it is, then."
"But..."
"But what? You want stone, or you don't?"
"But it costs more, of course."
"Stone," he said determinedly. Manius wasn't completely up to date on the plan; he thought it was just a question of draining the marsh. But Tarquinius' plan went further; the stream would run in a great conduit through the centre of markets and wharves, a whole new city below the great peaks of the palace and the Capitol.
It was a strange gift, this ability to coax the landscape into comformity with human desire; it was not pure engineering - you had to be able to look at the landscape as if through half-closed eyes, letting its lineaments sink in, and then superimpose on that the changes you wanted to make. So though all Etruscan temples shared an orientation, between north and east, in the fortunate quadrant of the heavens, none faced exactly one compass point; and though Etruscan towns shared the same plan of two crossing main streets, they adjusted it to the landscape - Staties long and thin on its sharp ridge, Curtun with its sprawling X and roughly squared circle of walls, the sinuous streets of Velathri. It was like dancing with landscape, each partner bending towards the other, interweaving their distinct patterns with a music that, he now realised, few would ever hear, and even he only heard the distant echo.
("You drive a channel straight through the middle," Manius had said, the first time they came out here. A typical Roman; straight down the middle, the simplest, most brutal way to solve any problem. They took the same attitude to landscape, to the Latins, to women; an Etruscan seduced, a Roman raped. He could easily credit the story of the Sabine women, no matter that the more civilised Romans told him it was a myth, or at the very least a gross simplification. "Straight through the middle; there."
"Not quite," he'd said; "you need to come in at an angle, there, from the Palatine, to get the gradient. And you need to turn in the middle, contour that ground there, and meet the Tiber here;" he carved the air with the edge of his hand, showing the curve of the channel.
"It's longer." Manius' voice held an edge of complaint.
"Look where you would put your channel." Tarquinius stood behind Manius' shoulder, forcing the Roman to look in the direction he wanted. "You bring the water in rushing, then stop it dead, then you have to cut through this rise, and " - he turned Manius round, so they faced the river - "then your stream enters the Tiber upstream, against the flow, so that eventually, the whole of this side of the bank will be worn away, and the water will back up whenever the Tiber's high. The land wants it this way."
But he could see Manius was not convinced.)
Well, there was nothing to do out here today. He might as well have taken that decision on
the stone facings sitting in his palace as down here; he'd have had a better view of the marshes from up on the Palatine, too, without the strange foldings and blurrings of the landscape that disorientated you at ground level.
He looked up the valley, such as it was; more of a nick between two hills, a narrower tongue of land between two plains. He dreamt of the water flowing between white marble walls, curving towards the Tiber; of paved squares instead of pathless mud. And at the same time, he knew the retaining banks would be of travertine, porous grey, not marble, and the squares would be cobble, rough and easily torn up. But that dream of a shining city was not completely false; it drove him on. Though he might not build it, he could make the foundations.