Sarum (47 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
“If you despise Rome, it’s a pity that you married a Roman,” he once said bitterly.
“Are you sorry you married me?” she demanded in reply, and began to take off her robe. And as he saw her marvellous young body, and felt, as he always did, a rush of excitement, he stretched out his arms to her eagerly.
“I’m not sorry,” he laughed. But he knew it was not enough.
Maeve never fully understood her husband’s disappointment. Surely in choosing her, he had chosen Sarum? She loved him passionately, wildly; and in her imagination, he was a new and exciting part of the world that was her home. When he spoke of Rome, it seemed to her that he was trying to get away from her, so she tried to bind him to her all the more closely, tempting him with her body to force him to put such unwelcome thoughts out of his mind. As the months went by, if he still spoke of Rome too often, she would close her mind, refuse to think about the subject at all, and tell herself that it was a temporary obsession that would pass.
“You belong to Sarum now. Make it your home,” she said as they made love together.
Sometimes however, as he lay spent afterwards, she would take a candle and hold it near his face as he dozed, anxiously looking at him to make sure that the ugly thoughts had not returned.
Eighteen months after their marriage, Maeve announced that she was pregnant. For the time being, Rome was forgotten. And Tosutigus said to his son-in-law: “Now there’s a child, it’s time we made some improvements and built a house. I have the money. Build a house we can be proud of – a Roman house.”
“I agree,” said Porteus, “a villa.”
The site he chose was half a mile up the valley to the north of the chief’s farmstead and occupied by a deserted farmhouse, then only used as a place for storage. It was well situated however, on a flat shelf of ground half way up the eastern slope and overlooking the river; the views to the south west were open and to the north it was protected by a screen of trees further up the slope. Below, the ground fell away to the rich, marshy flats along the river.
Behind the site, the ground rose in a gentle, handsome sweep to the ridges above. The slope was partly open, partly wooded; some small fields had been laid out there; on the top of the ridges, sheep usually grazed.
There were two other features that recommended the place. One was shown him by Maeve.
It was a small hill, a short distance along the ridge, little more than a hump on the edge of the high ground, and he would never have paid it any attention if Maeve had not led him solemnly to inspect it. It seemed to be quite overgrown with trees, but in the centre they found a little clearing, and as he inspected the ground carefully, he saw that it formed a concave dish, about thirty-five paces across; he had seen similar shapes on the high ground.
“It’s an old tomb,” he remarked.
She nodded. Though neither of them knew it, this round barrow had already been there many centuries.
“This is a sacred place,” she whispered. “The Druid priests used to come here and worship the forest gods.”
He grimaced at the mention of the Druids, but she went on eagerly: “It is good such a place should be near to our home. I shall make a shrine here and it will bring us luck.”
He looked around. It was true that the little circular clearing had a certain quietness about it that was pleasing.
“Do as you wish,” he told her.
The second feature lay in the valley: for under the river Afon at the point just below the site there was a broad bank which made the stream so shallow that it could be forded. It was the best crossing for a mile in either direction, useful for men and cattle alike.
“Does it have a name?” he asked Tosutigus.
“Not really,” the chief replied. “We just call it the ford.”
And so, above the Afon’s ford, Porteus began to build.
With the help of Numex, Balba and a small team of men, he converted the single rectangular shell of the old farm into a new home for his family. To the main room he added wings of two rooms each, to form a narrow house with a south west aspect. Then along the back of the house he added a broad corridor, in the centre of which he built out a little paved courtyard with small chambers leading off it. The walls of the house were made of clay and stone, the upper part being faced with wattle. Inside, the walls were plastered and painted white. The roof was tiled, the tiles being brought at some expense down the road from the north.
It was a crude, rectangular farmhouse, nothing in the least like the magnificent palace of King Cogidubnus which Tosutigus had so admired years before. But with its long, low façade, its plastered walls and tiled roof, it was still unmistakably Roman. Tosutigus inspected it each day, and as he saw it take shape he became excited.
“We need mosaics on the floor,” he said, “and a fountain. Windows with green glass in them too.” Each day he thought of a new luxury that he had either seen or heard about; and now that at last Roman civilisation had come to his estate he was anxious to achieve the most impressive results as quickly as possible. But Porteus was less ambitious.
When Maeve became pregnant, he had taken a hard decision. “For the time being,” he thought, “I am going to have to stay at Sarum. So if I cannot take my wife to Rome, I’ll have to bring Rome to Sarum.” And to the impatient Celtic chief he said:
“A fine house can come later. We’ll need more money, and skilled workmen. But first, I’m going to transform the estate.”
Tosutigus was puzzled.
“The estate works very well,” he said.
But Porteus only shook his head.
“It’s a good Celtic estate,” he said. “But it’s nothing to what a Roman can do.”
The changes that Porteus made at Sarum were to have long-term consequences, but they were not achieved without difficulty.
He began with the land in the valley.
“Look at the fields on the lower slopes and the lands beside the river,” he said to Tosutigus. “It’s all rich land. But you use the lower slopes only for grazing cattle and pigs, and half the land by the river is marsh.”
“The earth on the lower slopes is too heavy for our ploughs,” the chief replied. “As for the marsh . . .” he made a gesture to imply that it had always been so.
“We can do better,” Porteus told him. “Firstly, we could use a heavy plough – drawn by oxen, with an iron blade and a coulter that will turn a heavy soil: grow grain there and the yields would be enormous.”
“And the marsh?”
“Drain it of course. Then plough.”
What Porteus was suggesting was not unusual. The heavy plough had already made an appearance on the island a few generations before, and had been especially favoured by some of the Belgic tribes who had been familiar with its use in Gaul. But the farmers at Sarum and other rich chalk areas in the west had seen little need to change their ways: they had been successfully turning the easy soil on the ridges with their light ploughs for several thousand years. The new methods were difficult and they already had plentiful crops. This argument, however, carried no weight with Porteus.
“The empire and the army have a huge need for grain,” he said. “Whatever we produce, we can sell at a handsome profit.”
As for the drainage, this was a Roman speciality. From this time onward, huge tracts of southern and eastern Britain were reclaimed by sea walls, causeways and ditches. Across the eastern fens, Roman engineers brought into cultivation huge tracts of land that were little better than swamps before they came. Porteus’s plan was more modest.
“Those marshes,” he explained to Numex, pointing at the flat expanse of land below the ridges to the north and west of Sorviodunum; “it wouldn’t be so hard to drain them.”
And Numex, who had helped the Roman soldiers build their roads, and learned to admire their skills, was enthusiastic. “It can be done,” he agreed. But his face soon became solemn again. “The trouble is, the farmers won’t work it.”
“Of course they will,” the Roman replied. “They’ll see the sense of it.”
He was wrong.
In the years that followed, Numex constructed a network of small channels that carried water off the low ground and into the river. He also built channels to convey the water draining off the slopes around the area he was reclaiming. He even introduced a series of small wooden sluices so that the flow of water could be regulated. At the same time, Porteus laid out three large fields of several acres on the rich lower slopes, and brought in two large, heavy ploughs.
“Now you’ll see progress,” he assured Tosutigus.
The first year, the spring river ran unusually high and the meadows were flooded. The men who had unwillingly dug the channels and ploughed the ground shook their heads; but Numex and Porteus did not despair, and the solemn craftsman patiently reconstructed his channels, and heightened the river bank. This time the experiment was more successful.
But Numex’s fears were justified. Whenever Porteus ordered the farmhands to take out the heavy ploughs, they would try to find some excuse for not doing so: the traces would mysteriously have broken, or some other urgent problem would arise on another part of the estate. Complaints were made to Tosutigus; there were endless disputes about who should do the work, and by the third year of the experiment Tosutigus begged him to stop.
“They’ve never ploughed the low ground,” he told his son-in-law. “They don’t like your idea. It’s not worth the trouble.”
“But Romans have ploughed the low ground for centuries,” Porteus protested.
“These are Celts,” the chief replied simply. “They’re obstinate.”
“So are Romans,” the younger man replied crossly. And he refused to give up.
For a generation the low ground at Sarum was cultivated; but each year the work was done under protest and done badly, and the yields were disappointing. Even Numex, having built his channels and his little sluices, was disheartened, and in later times the experiment was abandoned and the heavy iron ploughs allowed to rust. For centuries more, it was the higher ground that provided Sarum’s grain.
Porteus’s other improvements were more successful.
Beside the villa he built a walled enclosure, sheltered from the wind and acting as a sun trap. Along one wall he trained peaches, which he imported from Gaul, and apricots. The apricots did not do well, but as the years passed the peaches provided magnificent fruit, which had not been seen before at Sarum. He also questioned Maeve about the honey from which she made the heady mead: where did it come from?
“We find the beehives in the woods,” she told him. “You can hear them buzzing.”
Porteus only shook his head and soon afterwards Numex received orders to have six small pots made and placed in a clearing on the slope beside the walled enclosure. Stranger still, he was told to drill six holes in the side of each pot.
“What are they for?” the puzzled craftsman asked.
“Bees,” Poerteus told him.
At first not even Numex would believe that a swarm of bees could be induced to live in a pot. Nor did Maeve.
“You Romans!” she protested. “You want everything to be ordered, just like your empire and your roads. Well the bees won’t obey you. They fly for miles until they find a place in the woods that they like. They won’t live to order like you.”
But Porteus quietly went on, and under his directions the next year the men trapped swarms of bees and took them to the pot hives. They were astonished when they contentedly stayed there.
Tosutigus was delighted.
“This is Roman progress,” he told Maeve, who was disappointed that the bees had apparently obeyed her husband.
It surprised even Porteus that Balba the dyer volunteered as bee-keeper.
“It’s the dyes I use,” he explained to the Roman. “The bees won’t touch me.” And whether it was the pungent smell, or the chemical content of the dyes, or the fact that his skin was so hardened by the constant working with urine-based bleaches, the squat figure of the clothworker could be seen moving from hive to hive, plunging his stubby little hands into the honeycomb without ever suffering harm.
“Even the bees can’t take the smell of him,” Numex solemnly told Porteus.
Of Porteus’s other improvements, one that especially delighted Tosutigus was his importing of pheasants. The chief inspected the handsome brown birds with their tiny heads and long trailing tail feathers, that had never been seen on the island before.
“You say we can hunt them?” he asked.
“Just let them loose in the woods. They’re excellent game, and you hang them when they’re dead,” Porteus told him. “It gives them a tangy taste.”
He imported two hundred of them, and it was not long before the woods all around Sarum were rich with their graceful, fluttering presence.
“He’s even improved the hunting!” Tosutigus exclaimed with delight.
But all these changes were insignificant compared with the complex work that Porteus carried out on the high ground. It was this work that was to change the face of Sarum for fifteen hundred years.
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