Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  Porteus knew the site well. It stood in a deep valley surrounded by a protective crescent of ridges at the southern tip of the Cotswold hills with their rich deposits of grey and honey-coloured stone, only thirty miles north-west of Sarum. There, powerful warm springs burst out of the rocks bringing up with them rich mineral solutions that were well known to have curative powers. For centuries before the Romans came it had been a place of pilgrimage, sacred to the Celtic goddess Sulis; and though the Romans knew this goddess to be one and the same as their own Minerva, it was typical of their wisdom that they chose to give the place a Celtic name so that the natives would think of the Roman spa as their own.

  When the officer briefed him, the instructions were simple. He was to build a large, single bath house – handsome but simple – and situate it in such a way that more elaborate extensions could be added in the future. The budgets were generous.

  “It’s to be a showplace – a spa for our soldiers and a place for the natives to discover the delights of civilisation,” the officer told him. “Nothing like a baths for softening these warlike Celts,” he added with a grin.

  One summer morning, Porteus set out to inspect the place. With him, after the little fellow had pleaded to be included, was Numex.

  “I have learned how to build Roman roads,” the ageless craftsman said, “let me learn more of your Roman arts. I will put them to good use for you at Sarum.”

  The preparations which Porteus found awaiting him were impressive. There were contractors drawn from all over the island; architects from Gaul, surveyors, masons, plumbers, and an army of workmen – it was far larger than anything he had controlled before. But so well organised were they that supervising them was comparatively light work. Already the surveyor had inspected the springs, dug trenches to examine the soil and made plans of the entire site. It was not long before a plan for the baths had been drawn up.

  A massive, rectangular bath hall would be built on a north west axis beside the sacred springs, whose waters would be fed into the pool from one side. On the east side of this main hall, a smaller thermal bath would be constructed, and on the west side a suite of artificially heated rooms including the warm tepidarium chamber and the steaming caldarium, where the bathers could sit and allow the open pores of their skin to sweat profusely. The design of these first buildings would be simple, with plain, bold masonry; but this rather solemn effect would be enlivened by brightly coloured mosaics, and carvings of the Roman and Celtic gods.

  It would take several years to build even the first of the baths, but Porteus set to work cheerfully. Perhaps, after all, life in the province might improve.

  Numex had never been more excited. Years before, when he had helped the legionaries build the great road from Sorviodunum, he had recognised at once that the new rulers of the island, as well as being militarily powerful, were masters of building crafts and skills far beyond anything he had seen before, and when he heard about the new baths, he almost burst with curiosity. At Porteus’s request, the contractors had enrolled him in the craftsmen’s guild, and this meant that once he had taken the craftsmen’s sacred oaths to their protectress, the goddess Minerva, he was free to join the builders and learn their secrets. From early in the morning until late at night the little craftsman waddled about the place, his round red face gleaming with pleasure, as he poked his long nose into every corner, and engaged the workers in friendly conversation. He observed how the plumbers laid their lead pipes through which water could be pumped and how they made channels with bricks to carry the excess away. He learned the painstaking work of the men who planned and laid out the mosaics, and came to admire the exact, geometric precision with which every aspect of the work was done.

  But above all, he studied the intricate system for heating the baths – the hypocaust – the vast network of central heating air ducts which carried the heat from furnaces under the floors. He had never seen anything like this before, and when he thought of the primitive fires that filled the Celtic huts with smoke he laughed. “Compared with these Romans, our Celtic chiefs used to live like cattle,” he said.

  After two years he had mastered many of the arts of the workers he had encountered there.

  The building of the Roman baths was not the only change taking place in southern Britain. Important political developments were occurring as well. Soon after Vespasian assumed the purple, he decided that the Durotriges he had conquered twenty-five years before were ready for the next stage in the process of civilisation, and a new provincial capital was laid out in the south of their territory at Durnovaria. And when King Cogidubnus of the Atrebates died a little later, his territory also was reorganised and the northern half of his kingdom formed into a new administrative area that stretched past Sorviodunum and on to Aquae Sulis; the capital of this being the new city called Venta Belgarum. It was in this way, at the start of the Flavian dynasty, that the ancient towns of Dorchester and Winchester were founded.

  These provincial capitals were important: for each would be run by a native council – the ordo – drawn from the most important local men, and the chief amongst them would be elected magistrates and win the coveted Roman citizenship; so that in this way, too, the former enemies of the empire would be flattered and inveigled into its culture and government.

  It was now, after having been ignored for almost thirty years, that Tosutigus at last received the recognition he had always coveted: one day, when the whole family were together at the villa, a personal emissary from the governor rode up the lane and respectfully requested an audience with the chief. When Tosutigus, flanked by Porteus and Maeve stood before him in surprise, he bowed low.

  “Greetings, chief Tosutigus,” he began solemnly. “The governor sends you his respects. He has received a letter from the Emperor Vespasian, who remembers you.”

  Porteus was astonished. Obviously the imperial secretariat was doing its job brilliantly, and was ensuring that no petty chief in the empire was left out of the huge system of flattery.

  “As you know,” the messenger went on, “a new provincial capital is being founded at Venta Belgarum and you are one of the chiefs whose estates fall within its territory. The governor hopes that you will consent to serve on the ordo,” he paused for effect, “and not only serve, but that you will agree to act as the first of its two magistrates. I need not tell you that this post carries with it a full grant of Roman citizenship.” He was a plump, elderly man and he smiled with self-satisfaction.

  So at last it had come: if not a client king, Tosutigus was to be made a citizen. Porteus was glad for him.

  Then Tosutigus astonished him.

  With a low bow, and a look of mock respect that confused the governor’s messenger completely, he replied:

  “Convey my respects to the governor, but please inform him that, flattered as I would be to receive such an honour, unfortunately I do not think my health will allow me to accept it.” He coughed. “I have recently become unwell,” he explained “and so I must decline.”

  It was afterwards that he explained to his surprised son-in-law.

  “I’ve heard about these councils, my dear Porteus. When you join them, you’re responsible for the upkeep of the town, all its civil and religious ceremonies. It can cost you a fortune!” This was true: the honour of serving on the ordo had been known to ruin men in the provinces. “When I was younger I wanted to be a citizen,” the chief went on, “but since you’re a Roman, my grandchildren will be citizens anyway. Better keep the money – don’t you think?” And although it went against all Roman notions of honour and public service, Porteus could not help laughing in agreement.

  That night Tosutigus opened an amphora of his finest wine:

  “To celebrate an old Celt’s wisdom,” he explained to his son-in-law with a wink.

  It was in the third year of the work at Aquae Sulis that Porteus met the girl. She could not have been more than fifteen.

  He had a small house set on the curving slopes overlooking the wo
rkers’ camp, which he used whenever he was on one of his visits to the spa, and which was run by a cook and two slaves. When one of the slaves fell sick, he told Numex to find him a replacement, and the next day the squat jack-of-all-trades waddled in with a small, dark-haired girl that he had bought from a passing trader. He assured Porteus that the girl was clean and hard-working, and after a quick glance at her, the Roman thought no more about her.

  Three days passed busily after this before he even addressed a word to her, but one evening as he was sitting at his table inspecting some plans for a mosaic that was to adorn the paved entrance to the baths, the girl came in to light the lamps and he glanced up at her. She seemed very small.

  “What is your name?” he asked with a friendly smile.

  “Anenclita,” she replied softly.

  This was a Greek name, meaning blameless. Slaves were often given such names which pleased or amused their owners, but he could see at a glance that she was not Greek.

  “Your real name – before you were a slave,” he persisted.

  “Naomi.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Judaea, sir.”

  “And why were you sold into slavery?”

  “My parents were in the revolt in Palestine. The whole family was sold as slaves by Vespasian.”

  He nodded slowly. It was not an uncommon story. The slave trade in the empire was huge. A girl like this might find herself transported by chance – either by a trader or in the household of some official – to distant places and never see her family again. She might be lucky and spend her life with a fine family, receive manumission if her owner died, perhaps marry a freedman and have children who might in turn serve the empire and even become Roman citizens. Or she could be unlucky and be sold several times, ending up in some distant slave market like the busy one at the port of Londinium, and be worked like a drudge by a succession of masters until she died. Anything could happen. On the island, the Celts were evolving a kinder process, where a poor family might sell a son or daughter into slavery with a local owner for a fixed period only, after which the child would be returned. He preferred this method, and had already engaged several slaves on that basis at Sarum.

  She was young, he noticed, with large brown eyes and a slightly frightened look; but something in her quiet, serious manner made him think she would be reliable.

  “You’ll find you are treated kindly here,” he said, and turned his attention back to the plans.

  Two days later he returned to Sarum and it was nearly a month before he was back at Aquae Sulis. He had forgotten the existence of the slave girl, but when in the evening he saw her again, he remembered their conversation.

  “You are Anenclita, whose real name is Naomi,” he said, and saw that she blushed a little.

  The next evening when she entered he put down his work and talked to her kindly. Was she contented? Did she have enough to eat? She nodded and answered in very passable Latin that she did. She was a pretty, dark little thing, he observed, with a soft skin and a trace of childish down still on her cheeks. But in her large brown eyes there was something sad and reserved.

  He learned that she had been separated from her family almost at once and had been bought by an official who was travelling to northern Gaul. The rest of the story was as he had expected. After a year, the official had returned home and sold her to a merchant who had taken her to Londinium and in turn sold her to the trader who had passed through Aquae Sulis.

  “And do you hope to return to Judaea one day?” he asked idly, not thinking it likely that she would.

  “Oh yes,” she replied, with a new urgency. “That is the land where people worship the true God.”

  He stared at her in surprise, and then remembered that if she came from the province of Judaea, she must be one of the Jews, who unlike the Romans, believed in only one god.

  “You do not worship Apollo, or Minerva, or any of the Roman gods?” he asked curiously.

  She looked at the ground, obviously afraid that she might anger him, but still shook her head.

  He shrugged.

  Like all right-thinking Romans, Porteus was comfortable with the official pantheon of gods. There were gods to suit every temperament and every activity. It was a broadly-based, accommodating system. He, for instance, had experienced no difficulty in worshipping at the family shrine of Tosutigus, since it was clear that the family’s god Nodens was none other than Mars in a Celtic guise, and Tosutigus had had no objection to his adding a Roman statue to stand on the little altar beside the shrine’s original occupant. Similarly, at the new spa he had discovered that, as well as Sulis Minerva, the Celtic sun god was worshipped in the surrounding region, and so he had commissioned a fine gorgon’s head to stand in a niche near the main bath – a bearded Celtic head surrounded by a magnificent flaming halo which the Roman workers immediately identified as Apollo. The Roman pantheon of gods seemed to him so eminently reasonable that he had never been able to understand the passion of those in the eastern provinces to limit their own gods to only one.

  As the days went by, he fell into the habit of calling the young slave girl to him in the evening, and questioning her about her life and her religion. After a hard day’s work, it seemed to him a pleasant way to pass the time.

  As a young man and a student, he had of course been aware of some of the mystery religions of the east. There were the Jews, of course. Then there were the followers of the bull-god, Mithras, with their secret cults, and sacrifices. All over the eastern Mediterranean seaboard there were mystery cults. But for him they had only been religions that one read or spoke about, whereas the girl, it soon became plain, cared passionately about this nameless, invisible God whom, she claimed, created the world and was the source of all truth and all justice.

  “The emperor is the source of all justice,” he said with a laugh, “and you’d better remember it.” But he noticed that when he said this, the girl looked at the ground so that he would not see the disbelief in her eyes.

  He found that he enjoyed questioning her more and more – not because he understood the things she told him about her all-powerful God; but because he was fascinated to watch the passion with which she believed them.

  That winter however, a new development began at Sarum which occupied all his thoughts for some time and caused him almost to forget the girl again. It was Numex who started it when he shuffled into his presence one day and suggested: “Why don’t we improve the villa at Sarum – make it a proper Roman villa?” And when Porteus began to explain the problems of bringing in specialised workmen, the Celtic craftsman shook his head and said: “But I can do all those things now.”

  To his astonishment, Porteus discovered that it was true: the Celt had studied the Roman workmen so carefully that he had, without anyone’s knowledge, already designed a simple hypocaust system for the villa that would work perfectly well, and even a small bathhouse which could be supplied from a water tank fed from a stream on the slope above.

  “And we can have a mosaic, with a figure of Neptune, and dolphins,” the little fellow went on excitedly, “just like the one you’re planning at Aquae Sulis. I know how to do that too.”

  Porteus laughed, but he gave the idea serious consideration; and when he discussed it with Tosutigus, the chief could not wait to begin.

  “At last,” he cried, “we’ll have a Roman villa to rival Cogidubnus’s!”

  In fact, Porteus had been thinking along similar lines himself in recent months. There was no shortage of money for such an undertaking: indeed, the estate, together with his new salary was making the family so rich that they could have built a small palace if they chose. Already he had engaged an expensive tutor for his sons; and he had begun negotiations to buy a plot of land within the town of Venta Belgarum so that the family could build a house there and take part in the busy life of the new provincial capital. But more important even than the question of money was something else.

  For the visit of Marcus an
d Lydia had had a profound effect on him and had made him change his attitude to Sarum. Seeing the two Romans had made him realise how far from them he had drifted.

  Everything I have is in Sarum now, he had admitted to himself after they had gone. The estate, his wife, who would never live in Rome, his children, his position. His plan to leave this place was only a delusion. And if this was so, he thought, then it was time to improve the place. We may not be Roman, he decided, we may be half-Celtic provincials, but we can be civilised.

  Now he threw himself into the new work, adding rooms, expanding the courtyard, planning every detail with Numex as carefully as if it had been the great baths at Aquae Sulis itself. To Maeve’s annoyance, whole floors were ripped up, walls pulled down, and for months the villa became so uninhabitable that she and the children decamped to the old Celtic farmstead. But each time Porteus inspected the work, the round red face of Numex, his thin hair coated with chalk and grime, would emerge from some hole in the ground to announce: “We progress. Just give me time.”

  It was during this process of digging that Numex made a discovery. To his surprise, he found that his pick encountered stone under the main room of the house, where he had expected only to find chalk or clay. Again and again as he cut through the soil this happened, until he found that the stones formed a circle about ten feet across, which he would have to dismantle to instal the hypocaust. What he found was a dwelling house, the previous building of some long-forgotten occupant of the site before even the old farmhouse had been built. He made short work of the stone circle, but to one side he found what appeared to be a pile of rubble. And it was in this, encased in a thick envelope of clay and accompanied by three flint arrowheads, that he uncovered a small stone figure no bigger than his fist, that obviously represented a naked woman. To throw away such a thing would be sacrilege, and so he cleaned it and brought it to Porteus.