by AM Kirkby
***
It had taken five days to put the columns of the stoa in place, and now they stood uneasily, insecure, waiting for the beams to be slung across between them and the frames of the roof set up. You felt you could push any of the columns over, weighty as they were; one of them rocked on its base, as a couple of the masons had taken great delight in demonstrating to anyone they thought might be frightened by it, till Egerius told them to stop.
Kallirhoe had planned the work, tracing the figures in a wetted sandpit and supervising the carpenters who squared off the beams with their adzes and fitted up the triangular frames. They regarded her as something of a witch for her ability to tell exactly how long a beam needed to be, just by scratching a few lines in the sand and working out the figures on her fingers, as if she was making a cat's cradle with invisible wool. Simonides, though, said it was the new way, her generation the first to make use of such mathematics. Only once she was wrong, and that was because the main beam had a twist in it, where it had warped while still green.
The stoa was a long, thin building, only one room deep at the back, with an open arcade at the front where, she said, philosophers and poets could walk in the coolness, though Gaius had told her it would probably be colonised by market traders, if she was lucky, and drunks if she wasn't. The huge frames for the roof were ready now, and would be lifted up beam by beam, each mortice and tenon fitted together, and the great ridge beams nested into place.
The first beam was the most difficult to get up there; one of the builders would have to climb up the scaffolding to the top of the back wall, and rope up one end of the timber to haul it up. Once that was in place, they could sling ropes round it to bring up the other beams, and throw planks across from the end wall to the beam to provide a secure footing for the roofers. But the first beam was always a hassle, and a bit of a risk, and no one was surprised when the work was held up for two days "on the say-so of a chicken", as Simonides remarked, Egerius having ordered an augury to be taken.
Gaius had put the labourers to paving the area in front of the stoa for those two (otherwise lost) days, but now he'd brought in every man he could, aiming to get the main frames up as quickly as he could while the weather was good and the labour was available. As for the secondary timbers that ran along the building, those could be tacked on later, and the tiling would only take two men; he could free up the bulk of his men then for the other works Egerius had planned.
That is, if they agreed to work. He'd already had two walk out, not through dissatisfaction with the pay or the work, as they might have done in Rome, but simply because they had drifted away to the shade of the trees by the stream, where Karite had begun teaching with Simonides. They called it teaching, but it looked more like just talking; everyone argued with the teachers, and people came and went as they liked. You couldn't teach carpentry that way, Gaius thought, or accurate surveying.
You couldn't manage a work gang that easily if people were going to wander off, either. He'd had a word with Egerius about that.
"We did decide," Egerius said, "no compulsion."
"But it makes planning impossible."
"Not impossible. Just difficult."
"Someone could just decide they want the stoa over the other side of the agora."
"No, they couldn't. You've started building it now."
"And how did we decide that?"
"You know. You were there. We talked about it. You had a voice in it, Simonides did, Kallirhoe did. We didn't take any decisions till we were all together, here."
"That's not quite true," Simonides said.
"How so?" Egerius was puzzled.
"You'd already razed the old city. That was a decision."
"But that was decided in Rome."
"True, but that doesn't alter the philosophical point."
Egerius frowned; Gaius had grunted, and turned away. Simonides was right, but he didn't care who was right; he wanted the work done. True, both the men had come back to work today; even Simonides had volunteered his services, for what they were worth, though only after asking Gaius who had given him leave to build, which Gaius thought was probably, though not unambiguously, a tease.
Work was slow. Gaius reckoned they should get each cross-beam secure and firmly socketed into the timbers thrown across to the next column before bringing the next beam up; that would ensure there was always a stable platform to work from. But one of the Greeks wanted to sling all the timbers up first, and the men started arguing; the dissenter's Latin wasn't good enough to understand Gaius' explanation, and when Simonides tried to translate for him, one of the Romans objected, on the grounds that they were using a language he didn't know to work out something, he wasn't sure what, that would be to his disadvantage.
"Like what?" Gaius asked, his temper getting shorter by the minute.
"Like they'll give me the hardest work. Or they'll wait till I'm up there and then knock off. I don't know."
"Well if you don't know, shut up, then."
They got started in the end, but the rope slipped a couple of times and had to be thrown up again, and Gaius wondered whether he should have built a proper scaffold instead of simply hauling the timbers up; though that, of course, would have taken another day's work. He'd thought this building was just small enough to get away with the direct approach. By the end of the day, though, the first third of the roof structure was in place, with temporary plans laid across the joists and lashed firmly to provide a secure footing for the builders. It was a start.