Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [187]
She felt a tug on the hem of her robe. The smaller child, a round-eyed cherub of a girl, was looking up at her questioningly. “Are you an angel?” the small voice chirruped.
Joan cupped the child’s dirty chin. “You’re the angel, little one.”
Inside the pot, a small piece of stringy, unidentifiable meat was beginning to brown. A young woman with lank yellow hair came lumbering wearily up from the river hauling a bucket of water. The children’s mother? Joan wondered. She was scarcely more than a child herself—surely no more than sixteen.
The young woman’s eyes lit hopefully as she saw Joan and the other prelates. “Alms, good fathers?” She held out a grimy hand. “A bit of coin for the sake of my little ones?” Joan nodded at Victor, the sacellarius, who placed a silver denarius in the girl’s outstretched palm. With a happy grin, the girl set down the water bucket to pocket the coin.
Raw sewage was floating in the water.
Benedicite! Joan thought. The filth in that water was doubtless what had made the boy sick. But with the aqueduct in ruins, what choice did his mother have? She must use the polluted water of the Tiber or die of thirst.
By now, others had begun to notice Joan and her entourage. People crowded around, eager to greet their new Lord Pope. Joan reached out to them, trying to touch and bless as many as she could. But as the crowd grew, the people packed round so closely she could scarcely move. Gerold gave commands; the guards shouldered the crowd back, opening a path, and the papal entourage retreated back up the Via Lata to the open sunshine and breezy, healthful air of the Capitoline Hill.
“WE MUST rebuild the Marcian aqueduct,” Joan said during a meeting with the optimates the next morning.
The brows of Paschal, the primicerius, lifted with surprise. “The restoration of a Christian edifice would be a more appropriate way to begin your papacy, Holiness.”
“What need do the poor have of more churches?” she replied. “Rome abounds with them. But a working aqueduct could save untold lives.”
“The project is chancy,” Victor, the sacellarius, said. “It may well be that it can’t be done.”
She couldn’t deny this. Rebuilding the aqueduct would be a monumental, perhaps an impossible, undertaking, given the sorry state of engineering of the day. The books which had preserved the accumulated wisdom of the ancients regarding these complicated pieces of construction had been lost or destroyed centuries ago. The parchment pages on which the precious plans were recorded had been scraped clean and written over with Christian homilies and stories of lives of saints and martyrs.
“We have to try,” Joan said firmly. “We cannot allow people to go on living in such appalling conditions.”
The others kept silent, not because they agreed but because it would be impolitic to offer further opposition when the Apostolic One’s mind was so obviously set upon this course.
After a moment Paschal asked, “Who do you have in mind to oversee the building?”
“Gerold,” Joan replied.
“The superista?” Paschal was surprised.
“Who else? He directed the construction of the Leonine Wall. Many believed that could not be done, either.”
In the weeks since her coronation, she had sensed Gerold’s growing unhappiness. It was difficult for them both, being near each other all the time. She, at least, had her work, a clear sense of mission and purpose. But Gerold was bored and restless. Joan knew this without his having to tell her; they had never needed speech between them to know what the other was feeling.
When Gerold came to her, she laid out her idea for the rebuilding of the Marcian aqueduct.
His brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Near Tivoli, the aqueduct runs underground, tunneling