Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  Ahead two men were dragging another from out of the mine-shaft. The injured lay all around, caked with dust and dirt, moaning and begging for water. They seemed out of place in this lovely countryside, and reminded me of the scattered wounded left by a battle.

  Three legionaries hurried out of a stone hut. They would be with the 7th Gemina, I thought, posted to guard the mine and keep order among the slaves. One brought a jug of water to the injured. I approached him.

  “What happened?”

  “A collapse of some kind.”

  “Anyone killed?” I turned to see a make-shift litter carried past, with another mangled miner.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are any still in there?” I accepted a drink. The water was sweet and refreshing.

  “I don’t think so. We heard a great roar. Apparently the timbers gave way, far back.”

  From the depths of the hill came another roar; another cave-in in the shaft. A cloud of dust billowed out of the mine’s entrance.

  “Cinnabar?” I asked and bent to pick up a piece of the tailings, stained red with the ore of mercury. Fine grade cinnabar was purified into minium, the red pigment so popular in wall-paintings in the empire’s more opulent houses.

  “Mostly. And some silver.”

  Bodies were lined up now along the hillside. I counted seven, already swarming with small clouds of flies. The fastidious ladies dangling their silver earrings and armbands in the crimson-walled mansions of Rome should be forced to see this, I thought.

  “Celtibari?”

  “Yes, they were farthest back, and some Cantabri. Some prisoners, some hired on locally. I don’t think we lost any of ours.”

  Now a half dozen women came running up the road and hurried to the bodies. Several started wailing, consoled by the others, all anxiously watching as other bodies were brought out.

  I took another drink of water, handed the jug back and walked uphill toward the mine. A half-dozen men covered with dust and dirt limped past to sprawl among the maquis.

  The dust had settled by the time I got to the mine’s opening, though I could feel it clinging to my face and on my tongue taste its sour, metallic tang. I could see only a little way into the mine. Suddenly from within a spectral figure appeared with a torch, coughing and stumbling towards me.

  He grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t go in there,” he warned. He stopped to cough, spat dark spit into the dust. “A hundred feet in, less, is all you’ll get. There’s nobody on this side. I’m the last out.”

  As he stumbled out into the sunshine and down the path I stared again into the dark hole which would likely be abandoned and left as a tomb for those it had caught.

  There was nothing I could do. I threaded my way down the slippery tailings and started back for the city. The landscape remained seductively beautiful, but now overlain with the tang of pain and death which clung to it like the red dust on my skin. A good hot bath would wash the dust away, but not touch the pang of pain and waste of nature brought by the evils of luxuria.

  After two years in Spain Augustus left it a nascent colony. Now Latin was rapidly overtaking the local dialects and a solid infrastructure of roads, aqueducts, irrigation canals, baths, temples and busy cities were sprouting in all three provinces. The smallest and most romanized was Baetica, a senatorial province to the south. But because in Lusitania and Tarraconensis the locals chafed at provincial rule, these were imperial provinces, administered by a military government.

  Vespasian appointed Tiberius Plautius Aelianus, who came from an ancient and respected family, the Plautii, to be governor of Hispania Tarroconensis and I agreed to serve under him as the province's financial officer, the same position I’d held in Syria under Licinius Mucianus. Spain was one of our richest provinces. From it we reaped cereals, olives, wines, dyes, and most profitably metals. The Spanish earth is rich with iron, lead, silver, copper and cinnabar. The locals, Iberians, Celts, Cantabri, Celtibari and a smattering of others, mined these lands long before we arrived. The Phoenicians came her to mine too, and the Greeks. By now the countryside is dotted with abandoned and working mines.

  But the natives were still mired in the bronze age when we arrived. From us they learned how to recognize and dig from the earth the rich iron-bearing ores, then extract the iron in clay chambers set over charcoal heated to high temperatures with air forced from fans or bellows. It is a fascinating process to watch, scooping the glowing chunks of ore out of the fire and hammering them until they crack, allowing the molten iron to puddle together before heating it again and hammering it into swords, chains, plows, nails and all the other tools, utensils and weapons we make from iron. It is iron axes which allow the forests to be cut at unprecedented rates, producing more charcoal for more iron. Iron-shod plows and hoes slice the dry Spanish soil faster than wooden ones ever could, domesticating the Spanish landscape. Life here is changing faster than ever before, faster than many welcome.

  Tarraco, founded by the Phoenicians a thousand years or more ago, is the capital of Tarraconensis. Augustus erected a palace and forum in the oldest part of the city, down by the harbor. This is where I work, among the complex of offices which keep this western edge of the empire running smoothly. Farther from the harbor Tarraco sprawls up the slopes of the hills to the west and reaches with the tentacles of its roads into the villages beyond.

  Spain has turned out to be as beautiful as Italy, though of course stamped with its own insignia of loveliness. I don’t much mind the administrative work. It doesn’t ask that much of me. Taxes, tributes, and money from the sale of imperial properties flow into the governor’s treasury faster than Plautius, as fiscally conservative as I, can spend them. Ships bearing the difference make their way to the capitol’s treasury, and return with heartfelt thanks from Vespasian.

  Normally I've been bathing in the private baths attached to the governor’s palace, where Plautius and I can go over fine points of contracts or disputes. But the governor’s baths are being remodeled, and I despise the noise of construction, so I wandered over to the public thermae, something I’d never done before. I was four steps into the caldarium, its floor heated by the flames from a wood-fire below, before I heard my feet shouting out in pain. I wheeled around to light-foot, as much as an overweight, asthmatic middle-aged man could, back out to the changing room where I’d left my sandals. As I turned I almost ran down someone just coming in. I excused myself, smiled sheepishly.

  I sat in the changing room and examined my feet. Though they stung they weren’t burned. I slipped a pair of sandals on and stepped lightly through the tepidarium then back into the caldarium. For the life of me I couldn’t explain how it had happened. There it was plain as day as I stepped into the caldarium, the iconic two sandals reminding us to ALWAYS WEAR YOUR SANDALS! I must be losing my mind, I thought.

  Naked but for the sandals I stepped gingerly onto the warm marble. Even with the sandals on as the floor heated the bottom of my feet they stung again. The man I’d almost run over sat down next to me. Though older than I, I envied his athlete’s physique.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “It’s happened to me, too.”

  I smiled lightly but didn't reply, preferring to ignore the odd slip of my celebrated memory. The warm air relaxed my lungs, the heat given off by the walls and the bench I sat on seeped deliciously into my body. I closed my eyes, in a few moments was half-way to a brief nap.

  “You haven’t been here before,” my bath-mate said.

  My eyes fluttered open.

  “You’re Gaius Plinius, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “The new fiscal procurator?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Cornelius Valerius Tampius.” A moment of silence as this Tampius waited for my response. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

  I hadn’t. I closed my eyes again.

  “I was comptroller of weights and measures. Twenty-five years. At the harbor.” I heard someone else pad into the room.
My friend the comptroller of weights and measures went on. “You probably saw the plaque, on the harbor-wall, with my name?”

  Actually I had. “Yes, I did, now that you mention it. It’s very nice.”

  “Never once accepted a bribe. All those years.”

  I’d rather have drifted into a nap. Another reason to not use the public baths.

  “City boxing champion, too, eight years straight. Still boxing, you know. Yesterday I trounced a man twenty years younger.”

  The newcomer to the bath, who I’d heard enter, let out a deep relaxing sigh and with it a flatulence which, to my dismay, grew to impressive strength. The guy ought to see a doctor. Another reason.

  The odor lingered over long moments of silence.

  “Domitian, they say, has had a son,” Tampius remarked.

  “Well, that’s good,” I offered. Vespasian had mentioned in a letter that Domitia was pregnant. I opened my eyes. The gas factory had slipped into the pool at the center of the room. He was, to my surprise, quite a handsome young man, who looked away the moment our eyes met.

  “They say he’s not well. Not expected to live.”

  The young man in the pool? No, he must mean Titus’ son. “Oh?” An image of Aulus, for a moment. I didn’t know Domitian all that well. But as admirable as Titus and Vespasian were, he seemed that devious. The loss of a grandson, if the rumor was true, would be hard on Vespasian: Titus had only a daughter, so Domitian’s son would be Vespasian’s hope for the dynasty.

  “Terrible thing, that gold shipment,” Tampius remarked.

  “Gold shipment?”

  “Two hundred pounds, they say, in transit. Two days out of Legio, the cart and its half-dozen guards ambushed in broad daylight. Asturians, probably. Well, we don’t know for sure.” He coughed. “Could have been Cantabrians,” clearing phlegm from his throat. “The guards were outnumbered five to one. I warned the governor, just last year, that the shipments weren’t secure. It was only a matter of time.”

  The mention of gold-mining brought my gall up. The wealthier sometimes wore so many rings, armbands, neckbands and earrings they could barely walk. For a while Agrippina, who I’d seen in a dress woven of gold, wore sandals with gold soles. Nero had once shod his mules in gold.

  “Bandits?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Tampius agreed. “After they'd killed the captain of the guard they tied an ichneumon round his neck. The poor animal had nothing else to eat, and by the time we found the body, well, it wasn’t pretty.”

  “An ichneumon?” I was part of a conversation not long ago between the governor and a local official discussing the bandits who lived up in the hills, and this little weasel-like animal’s name came up. I remembered the official’s exact words. “The bandits are a ferocious bunch,” he’d said, “who call themselves harma, which is ichneumons in the local dialect.” I’d never seen one. I’d heard of them in Egypt, and knew they were found here in Spain. About the size of a cat, they're ferocious predators. It’s said their favorite food is snakes and snake-eggs and they have absolutely no fear of the venomous snakes, sometimes seeking out vipers and asps to start a fight. It is said even a cobra won't win against an ichneumon. These terrorists have named themselves well.

  My bath-mate sighed. “We bring them civilization, and this is how they thank us. Can you fathom it?”

  Well, yes, I can. We take their best ore, best olives, spelt, linen, spices, and anything else worthwhile and leave them the dregs, from which they’re expected not only to dredge up a living but pay us taxes. If they rebel, we imprison them and send them into the mines where they grow thin as ghosts and blind from not seeing the light of day for months at end, only to die there.

  We burrow into the sides of their mountains like rats, leaving ugly piles of debris. We go higher up into the mountains to find the purest waters. These we turn aside into channels which carry the water ten, twenty or more miles down the slope where we use it to wash the ore from the hillside, mindless of their need for the water or the wonderful creatures living within them. We cut down entire forests to build sluices, then line the sluices with the ulex plant, whose rough and prickly skin catches the nuggets of gold. Now where once it grew in great abundance the ulex can no longer be found. In doing all this we pollute their rivers, carve up their mountains, dirty their air.

  It was not a fine point. It stared you right in the face, if you cared to look. Mining not only ruins the land, it creates these bands of terrorists.

  From across the years once again I remembered Drusus’ comment. We create a desert, and call it the pax romana.

  “Actually, yes, I can understand it,” I admitted. “Mining’s a dirty business, perpetrated upon the earth so the wealthiest can flaunt their wealth, while in the temples the gods and goddesses shine like the sun and groan under the weight of gold. One can hardly blame them.”

  A silence ensued. Only the sound of the younger man breathing heavily in the pool reached my ears. Surely he too had overheard my reckless comments. Tampius seemed taken aback. At last he said, somewhat sarcastically, “Don’t most of the monies flowing into the fiscus come from mining?”

  I grunted affirmatively.

  “And that is the money you oversee?”

  I repeated the grunt.

  “I’d say, my friend,” Tampius observed, “that you’re in the wrong job.”

  I sighed. “I’m afraid you may be right.”

  Just days later Fate handed me an escape from this moral dilemma. I’d come down with a fever which clung to me like fine mine-dust. Some days I felt well enough to leave the apartment and go to work, others I spent in bed sweating, eating almost nothing, sweating again. The day blurred into the night, night into day. I've always thought sleep was a waste of time, so for me this was especially hard. In lucid moments I gave orders to Lucius to pass on to my assistants. Though I preferred not to admit it, the fiscus ran quite well without me.

  When I felt good enough to open the official mail which came by courier from the capitol, I'd pass any that needed attention on to one of my assistants. One day, sweating with my fever, I found a letter from Comum, in Plinia’s hand. This was a surprise. It was her first letter since I’d come to Spain.

  Dear brother, she wrote, I have lost my husband Gaius.

  The letter nearly fell from my hand. Lucius Caecilius Cilo was a strong and healthy man, younger than me. We were good friends. It was a comfort to me to know how fortunate Little Sparrow had been in finding her nest-mate.

  Cilo dead? Cilo!

  The morning air was already hot, holding over me the threat of a sweltering afternoon. For several days I’d soaked my bedclothes and linen wet with a feverish sweat. I drank in the sea-breeze which came, in fits and starts, from the east window, and with it the only relief I could find from the lingering heat. The fever seemed to have a mind of its own. At its height, when I seemed to be burning from within with an unquenchable fire, I had real trouble breathing. Then I longed, as I had never longed before, for real laser to quench the fever and to unblock the passageways of my lungs.

  I closed my eyes, trying to recall the last time I'd seen Cilo. It had been my last night in Comum, about a year and a half ago, before I returned to Rome. I remembered the two of us sitting outside, as the sun sank behind the hills across the lake. We talked politics. My brother-in-law, to my surprise, had supported Vitellius. But like so many others he came readily over to Vespasian. We agreed that Vespasian's principate would be good for Rome. My star was naturally due to rise higher than Cilo's. But there was no ill will between us; he seemed honestly happy for my sake.

  The fire of life, at its core, is fragile and tenuous; the fierce wind of politics blows heartlessly, and even the closest friends of the emperor might of an afternoon find themselves dragged to their death. Vespasian’s accession was bloodless and only a few had been tried for treason, yet death was never far away. Saying farewell to a friend as I did that time to Cilo, it is always good to keep in mind that every farewell m
ight be the last.

  I often suffered from driving headaches as well as trouble breathing. I found some relief in tying a woman's bra around my head. The pressure exerted by the tightly-wound cloth somehow relieved the pain. Wherever I went I was sure to pack a half-dozen of the fine, soft cloths. The bra I now untied from my head was damp with sweat. I reached up to the clothesline Lucius had strung by the window to pull down a dry one. I smiled to myself as I recalled how often someone would pass by my room and seeing my head wrapped in a bra, in a moment pass by again, in the opposite direction, for another look. I picked up Plinia's letter. It was dated two weeks before. Her husband’s funeral would already be over; there was no chance of being part of it.

  He died suddenly, in his sleep. There seems no reason for it at all.

  Already I miss him. You know as I do how good a man he was.

  It hurt me, in my eyes, in my head, and in my heart, to read.

  He admired you greatly, and in his will has appointed you our son’s guardian. Two months ago we sent the boy to get his education in the capitol. I had him brought back for the funeral.

  Caecilius is suffering greatly, and from my love for him, which I know you share, I ask if you might return to Rome to assume his guardianship and ease his pain. If you cannot do this, I will understand.

  She signed the letter: From inside this pain might we find love, Plinia.

  Again I set the letter aside, closed my eyes. Outside I could hear the busy street sounds which seemed now to come from some far-off world of which I was no longer a part.

  Already before my illness I’d begun to distance myself from my work. The earth, I’d often written, gives us all we need to live, from the fruit of the orchard to the grain in the field and the wild game of her woods. Yet in thanks we dig within her bowels, where the very dead take their abode, then afterward are surprised when she complains, with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other marvels. The discovery of gold and silver, and the precious stones, has brought more misery onto mankind than any other discovery. How much better if we'd never found them.