Nobody greeted her at the door, as everyone was at the main worktable, hammering away at a perplexing gridiron of metal bars. A smaller table near her held a collection of gears and a clock face, so there was little doubt about today’s project. Remnants of earlier work stood on shelves along the walls: a crank and boiling chamber for the steam-driven mill that ground out his fire-powders, pots of binding glue, and a few discarded hand molds for printing type. In the far corner, a pendulum clock marked the time, unheard over the din.
She took a step closer and finally caught one laborer’s eye. He lowered the hammer he had been about to swing, and leaned toward the older man nearby who had still not noticed. “Quintus Julius, you have a visitor.”
“You mean a customer? Then—aah.”
Quintus Julius Americus did not look like an extraordinary man. He wore a smudged tunic and sandals, like his hired workmen. He stood something over medium height, but his shoulders slumped and his gray hair was starting to thin. A rustic beard covered his chin, its gray fading toward white. He had shaved for his recent trip to Roma, where fashion only abided a bare chin, but began regrowing his beard the day he returned home. He did not look like anyone who would appear on a marble bust, even if some people—including Marcia—thought he might deserve it.
“Marcia, salve,” Americus said with a smile. “What brings you here today?”
“I came into town with Alastor,” Marcia said. “He’s collecting our new plough. There won’t be room in the cart for me on his return, so I thought you could see me home.”
The workers, used to such obvious pretenses, all encouraged Americus with their usual familiarity to help his lady. “Nice try, boys,” Americus said, “but we still have work. It’s not tenth hour yet, and you’re not getting—”
A chime interrupted him. The clock in the corner, pendulum swinging in its stately arc, had just rung the hour. The laborers all laughed, Marcia nearly joining. Americus could only yield with good humor. “That’s why we’re building this one: better accuracy. Very well, let’s clean up the shop, then we can all go home.”
Soon after, he and Marcia were out of town, walking south on the footpath along the down-sloping Via Flaminia toward her farm. His gait was still stiff, maybe slower than usual. She made no comment, as always, merely adjusting her own pace and drawing her mantle over her head against the sun.
Marcia talked briefly of her day’s work, mostly preparing for sowing of the winter wheat, then asked about his day. Americus spoke of a few curious customers and a funny story one of his workers had told, but stuck largely with the new clock project. He always had new ideas.
He went on smoothly, few promptings needed to encourage the flow. That gave Marcia a chance to listen close, hoping to catch some clues to the puzzles that still surrounded this man after more than two years.
The greatest mystery was why this man, of all people, was so terribly sad.
He hid it, of course. He hid many things, most concealed better than his misery. Some of them hidden very well indeed.
He arrived in the spring of 726 ab urbe condita: a northbound wanderer on the Via Flaminia, past middle age, weary beneath a heavy pack, and obviously not from these parts. His dusty tunic was of excellent material, better than someone who needed to walk would usually wear. It wasn’t local linen. Might it be Egyptian?
He spied her watching him from the garden and approached with an upraised hand. “Domina, salve. I am a traveler, named Americus. Might I speak to the lord of the house?”
His name was strange, his Latin peculiar, and his accent barbarian. His assumption was also mistaken. “The house is mine, viator,” she said, standing and brushing dirt off her hands. “My husband is dead.”
“Oh, my apologies, lady. May I ask if you are willing to take on a boarder?” His lips gave a curious curl. “I have come as far as I need to.”
Marcia didn’t have much to offer a boarder. The farm had been just adequate to support the household when Aulus had been alive. After he joined Caesar Octavianus’s army—and perished of disease at Actium—she had struggled terribly to support herself, the two children, and their slave.
That was all the more reason to get some money while she could. It might preserve her a while from needing to sell out to the big local landholders—or to accept one of the opportunistic suitors she had had. That might be worth admitting a stranger into the household, with all its unknowable risks.
But she did not fear this man. Something about his fancy tunic ... before she had married, Marcia’s family cognomen had been Ralla. This literally meant a tunic of fine fabric, just like his. She didn’t believe strongly in omens, having seen so few in her life, but this one ...
She named a price as high as she dared, three sestertii a day, and prepared to haggle. Instead, Americus rummaged through his pack and produced a small, shining ingot, stamped with unfamiliar characters.
“Will this suffice for the first four months?” he asked. Stunned, Marcia quickly said yes and held out her hands. The ingot was genuine silver, and if later she learned he had underpaid about a tenth, she still thought herself far ahead in the bargain.
Despite his oddness, Americus adapted himself to the household. Granted, he seemed unaccustomed to rising at dawn or earlier, to the limited variety of the food, or even to having his main meal properly at midday. He was used to an easier, richer life. Yet he humbly adjusted himself to their ways, not something Marcia would expect of most rich folk.
After two days of settling in, he finally made his first excursion into town early one morning. “Well, I’m off to Narnia,” he told her with that curious smile of his. The name of the town was always an unspoken joke with him, and Marcia had never learned the secret.
More surprises sprang out of his pack in Narnia. He had a large stash of goods that he began trading for money. Rumors soon began flying that he was a thief, plying stolen wares upon them. The rich folk of Narnia and the surrounding towns he visited didn’t believe it or didn’t care. They gladly bought his cinnamon sticks, his silks, his pearls. They hesitated at the dye—it didn’t have the distinctive smell of true Tyrian purple—but the color was right, and someone finally bought it. Probably Quintus Seius Avitus, parading himself about like a Senator.
Then there were those little blue pills Americus sold to Gnaeus Labienus Flaccus. What a scandal that was—as long as the supply held out. What Gnaeus Labienus then tried in place of the Blue Fives, as he called them, was a worse scandal, and not nearly as enjoyable.
Americus could have lived very well on his proceeds. Instead, he rented that modest workshop on the edge of town, and didn’t even think of leaving Marcia’s farmhouse. He said he liked the peace of the countryside, liked walking to work. Not even now, when his legs labored, did he rethink that.
Soon, he and the skilled freedmen he hired for the workshop began producing things. Remarkable things.
“It’s because metals expand a little as they grow warmer,” Americus was saying, explaining why the new pendulum for his clocks was so complicated. “Clocks will thus run a little slower in summer. But different metals, like iron and lead, expand at different rates. I can use the lead rods, running up, to balance out the iron rods running down, and the pendulum will stay the same length, however hot or cold.”
“I ... see.” Marcia said nothing for a moment, working it out in her head. “Could you use this somehow to make your clocks run properly? Twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, whatever the season?”
Americus grimaced. He had this rigid, almost Greek notion of hours being the same duration year-round, as opposed to the more natural Roman concept. “I couldn’t make that work,” he said, “even with this innovation. But this will keep time much more precisely than any water clock or hour candle ever invented.”
His grimace worsened. Marcia knew it was his legs. She made an exaggerated brush of her forehead, nearly dislodging her mantle. “I’ve gotten warm. Could we sit at the milestone and have a drink?”
/> “Certainly, Marcia.”
Another hundred short paces brought them to the fifty-fifth milestone. He sat on the stone bench left there for travelers, while Marcia got them water from the nearby fountain, fed by Narnia’s local springs. They refreshed themselves in comfortable silence, before Marcia got them walking again. Americus grunted as he stood.
“I’d gladly stay longer,” Marcia said, “but the Sun keeps its own time.”
Americus smirked. “A fair point. Let’s go.”
She might tease him, but she truly respected his mechanical clock. It was one of his earliest inventions, one that sold well to the richer families of Umbria and Tuscania. This new variety might revive that market.
She heard the clop of hooves and the growl of wheels behind them. Knowing those sounds intimately, she was calling out “You have the plough, Alastor?” before she had turned her head.
“Certainly, domina.” It sat gently swaying in the back. “There’s even a little space left for the two of you, if you wish.”
“No, go on home. We’ll be there soon.” Americus watched the oxen trudge past with only a hint of regret.
That was another of Americus’ innovations, of course, with both its wheels and the iron sheeting laid over the wood blade. He sold several, for rather low prices, before letting some local carpenters and ironworkers build the design for a share of their takings. Marcia was sure they were cheating him, and just as sure that Americus knew and didn’t care. It was enough, apparently, to endear himself strongly to the local farmers.
He did not endear himself to local scribes with his printing press, but he had anticipated their resistance. He argued to the scribes that they were naturals for typesetting jobs: literate, intelligent, good at fine work and at avoiding mistakes. His calculated flattery didn’t convince them all, but it convinced enough. Many of them even adopted his novel ideas about adding spaces between words and marks after sentences, to simplify reading.
Nobody embraced his notions for new letters, the bottom-curved I and rounded V, but he took that rebuff in good humor.
Thanks to his flourishing printing shops, books were much more plentiful, and cheaper. Marcia had even bought a couple herself, without his prodding. She was not used to reading for pleasure, but she had gotten through Cicero’s Philippics, mainly on her shared detestation of Antony.
His printing method didn’t work properly on scrolls, but Americus had a solution. He was so proud of his codex, flat pages bound together at the margins. Marcia almost hated to show him an old ledger of Aulus’ from the Pharsalus campaign. Julius Caesar had beaten Americus to this idea, though now it could have a wider application.
That hadn’t been Americus’ sole disappointment, or the worst. He had so much faith in his steam engines, and if he had troubles building them on the grand scale he envisioned, they still worked well on smaller scales. His richer customers were glad to use them for curiosities, toys to amuse themselves and impress their friends, but his vision to use them for works on a massive scale went unappreciated.
And why should he have expected otherwise? Why build a hulking, boiling, bashing, scalding machine to do the work a couple of dozen slaves could do, and probably better for their having some measure of intelligence?
Americus threw himself against that pragmatic barrier, railed against it, and could not budge it. The rebuff left him stumped and dismayed—until he decided that if competition against slave muscle demanded more power, he’d produce more power.
Once again, he had planned ahead. He sank much of his early earnings into scouring the countryside to find and buy nitrum, an obscure mineral. Once he had managed to purify it to his liking—he called the result “salt-stone”—he combined his stocks with sulfur and charcoal, mixing them in a bronze mill powered by one of his disdained steam engines.
The result on the day of his first experiment was a thunderclap that, in time, reached the ears of the Princeps himself.
Enough of this fire-powder could blast through earth or even stone, doing the work of hundreds or thousands of laborers in a flash of flame. That people could use, for road-building, quarrying, a host of constructive purposes. Destructive ones as well: It could change the art of siege-craft forever.
Americus could not produce it fast enough, for lack of nitrum. He set up a strange alternative source that involved aging urine and wood ashes, but it needed almost a year to produce anything. Fortunately, someone simplified the matter. Augustus bought up the secrets of fire-powder as a state monopoly, for a rich bounty of money—and what was far more, the citizenship.
Americus went to Roma a few months ago, along with the jumped-up Quintus Seius Avitus as his nominal sponsor, to meet the Princeps and receive the citizenship from those majestic hands. He came home with his new name: Quintus to honor his sponsor, Julius to honor Augustus for granting him the citizenship—and Americus as his cognomen, as that was who he was.
What he didn’t bring home was happiness. He should have been in exaltation on his return to Narnia, but Marcia saw through the mask of his appearance, to the despondency beneath.
Americus’ talk had wound down, much like his clocks if neglected. “What are your next plans,” Marcia asked him, “after you master this problem?”
Such thoughts usually raised his mood, but this time it did little. He had a couple of notions—using glass and silver to make an improved mirror, attaching a steam engine to a cart to drive it without animal power—but they sounded perfunctory. “And we know how nobody likes my steam machines, except for playthings,” he grumbled.
Americus usually brimmed with ideas, and with enthusiasm for them. His joy was in imagining and creating. It was when a project ended that the melancholy asserted itself, no less painful in the wake of success than of failure. As it was taking him now, in the letdown after his day’s work.
None too soon, they were home. She left him at the front door, with a cheerfulness she feared was wasted on him, to do the rounds of the farm. He would probably retreat to his bedroom and work on his plans and diagrams. Maybe that would let him feel better.
She found Alastor and the new plough in the shed, and gave the new implement her inspection and approval. She sent him to the pen to feed their chickens, pigs, and sheep—they could be shorn soon—and went to the olive grove herself.
The old trees wouldn’t need harvesting for more than a month, so she paid attention to the new ones. Alastor had freshly manured them this morning, and they were all growing well. It would be another three years before they began yielding, and when they did, the olives and their oil would bring good prices.
Americus’ rent payments had risen steadily, always on his initiative. The money had first been a buffer against destitution, then a stepping-stone to something akin to prosperity. Marcia used the money cautiously—who could know when Americus might depart?—but made steady improvements on the farm. Better tools, more sheep for wool and cheese, a few other animals for the luxury of meat, and of course the olive saplings added to the four old trees. It took away land for grain, but the days when her family needed to depend on the farm for all its food were fading into the past.
The only trouble came when Marcia bought Eudokia.
A second slave was a great help in the household, but it left Americus disturbed, almost affronted. It was not long before he quietly began offering to buy both Eudokia and Alastor, with the intent of freeing them. His notions about slavery were in some ways admirable, but also shockingly naïve.
Still, both of them had good characters, not unworthy of liberty. She finally reached a quiet compromise with her boarder. Marcia would do the freeing, as was proper for the head of a household, but Americus would provide the money she would pay them as their wages. He overpaid, naturally, but that hadn’t yet made them indolen or insolent. They worked as hard as before, and if Marcia knew anything about men and women, she’d have a marriage to celebrate soon.
She made her way back to the house, with plans to set the child
ren to a few last chores before vespern a. She found them in the atrium playing, to her slight surprise, with Americus. It was his game, of course: using letter tiles to spell words across a demarcated board.
Marcilla pointed at the tiles she and her elder brother were playing together. “It spells ‘volup,’ Aulus. Play it.”
“There’s no place to play it. We need to cross somewhere. And don’t tell him our—oh, Mother.”
Marcia looked down sternly. “Is this how you finish your work, children?”
“They told me they finished their chores before we got home,” Americus said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have played with them.”
“We did, mamma, we really did,” Marcilla said. “I swept the atrium, and Aulus brought in the f irewood and water, and everything.”
Marcia looked along the atrium floor, taking her time. She couldn’t have them think her indulgence came easily. “Very well, but be sure to finish the game before we eat.” Her decision brought cries of thankful joy from the children, and a small nod from Americus.
He had applied his covert persuasion again regarding their education. On most local farms, a boy of nine and a girl of seven would be working most of the day, with maybe a couple hours for someone in the family to give them lessons. Americus thought they should be schooled in town, offering to pay the teacher’s fees—and for Marcilla as much as young Aulus, which was a pleasant surprise to Marcia.
She told him no. And he let the matter drop. He didn’t coerce her; he didn’t use his money as a cudgel. She changed her answer days later, giving the assent she always meant to, once she was convinced that he did not mean to impose himself as the new master of the family. Most men she knew would, in like circumstances, but Americus granted Marcia her control, and her dignity.
He had never even made any kind of advance on her. As she looked back, watching him play his ingenious little teaching game with her children, she regretted that, and not for the first time.
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