Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  The three days after the incident passed without further accidents. Two of the men hadn't turned up the next day; work went on without them. In silence, that first day, but as the men's confidence returned, the whistling and singing of odd fragments of song returned, and eventually they were yelling at each other and ribbing Gaius with shouts of 'butterfingers' and 'splash' as if nothing had happened.

  They were still behind. Lucius put on a brave face; he lied to his foreman, he lied to Gaius, he pretended he was pleased with the half a day they'd pulled back by working over the midday break. But when he came in and found the newly carved tenons of the three beams that were to be placed that day wrecked, even he couldn't keep his temper.

  “He says” - that was Gaius, sweating with rage and pointing at one of the ox handlers - “he says he didn't back the oxen into it, he says he didn't drag one of the other beams against it, he says it's nothing to do with him, he...”

  “I didn't! I don't know anything about it! I came down this morning with a load of lumber for the ramps, and this guy starts yelling at me.”

  “Knows nothing! Knows nothing!” Gaius spat in the dirt.

  Lucius bent to look more closely at the tenons. The ends were furred, spread, as if something large and blunt had hit them. They were unusable; he didn't know if Gaius would be able to trim them down again, but he doubted it. Looking at the damage, he saw how it was more severe on one side, tapering off towards the far tenon; as if a huge weight had swung into all three beams together. Not the work of a man with a hammer, then, which is what he'd feared at first. No harm in checking; he walked to the other end of the beams. He dreaded seeing the same damage. It would be clear, if he did, that it was sabotage.

  But the tenons on the other end were crisp and square as they'd been made.

  “Come here, Gaius.” The carpenter scowled. He added, “Please.”

  Showing Gaius the undamaged tenons, he asked whether the other end could be repaired. To his credit, Gaius thought before answering. But the answer was still no.

  “How quickly can we get another set of beams made for the next span?”

  “We can take the ones we were going to use for the day after next, and use them instead. And so on. There'll be a bit of cutting down involved, not much, a bit. Then when we get to the last span we have a problem.”

  “Hm.” Still, that shifted the problem to the end of next week. Enough time to get more beams out of store. “So we'll need another three beams made ready.”

  “There aren't no more.”

  “What? There must be.”

  “Not ready, not dry. Remember, we ordered these six months ago.”

  “I remember. But surely...”

  “Someone's bought up all the spare timber. Work on the Palatine is what the men say.”

  Odd, Lucius thought; he'd not heard of any building work going on. Ancus Marcius would surely have told him; in fact he would have thought the king would have had him in to consult on it, if his estimation of Lucius was anything like as good as his offer of work on the saltings had implied.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing the size we want.” Gaius fell silent for a moment, but his lips were still moving; Lucius made out nothing except a couple of numbers. Then Gaius looked up, his eyes peculiarly bright. “We could run two pieces out and meet in the middle, there's some smaller stuff we could use, but.”

  Lucius waited for him to complete that thought.

  “But. It's not going to be very strong. The joint in the middle will give, after a while.”

  Lucius's breath hissed out between his teeth. That wouldn't work. Any weakness in the bridge, and he knew it would fail, in time. His future depended on the solidity of his work. If the bridge fell, he fell with it. He couldn't afford the risk. And he trusted Gaius, this ill-tempered, blunt man; what Gaius said had always been right, so far.

  It would be doubly annoying if the bridge failed because of that last span. In the whole bridge, the central span was the widest, across the deepest and fastest part of the flow; the others were all equal, except for this, the shortest of the spans.

  While he was trying to puzzle out what to do next, he was also thinking what this told him about the saboteur's identity. It could only be one of the men on the team, surely; only they knew how the whole thing fitted together, only one of the carpenters or labourers would have known exactly how to achieve the maximum possible damage for the least effort. Only one of the them would have known how to ruin the entire beam by damaging just the tenons. But then he remembered the day of the king's visit, and he realised he'd taken the three men over to the piling in the smaller of the two boats, and shown them the way the beam had been inserted, the way the socket and tenon fitted each other exactly. Gods help him, he'd been proud of his design, he'd boasted to them about how the wedges used the timbers' own weight to pull them together. It was exactly as Tanaquil had said; either Manius or Faustus, and only those two, knew enough to have done this damage. Yet again, he had no way of guessing which of the two it was. He wondered if he ever would have.

  And even if he did know which it was, that wouldn't help him with the immediate problem; the need to locate three more huge oak beams. Seasoned, trimmed square, and carved ready. He realised he was scraping a line in the soil with his heel, and stopped.

  In front of him, Gaius was staring over at the ruined beams, and hitting his big fist on his forehead again and again. “Stupid, stupid, fucking stupid,” he was saying to himself; “stupid, stupid...”