Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [152]
The first year, the spring river ran unusually high and the meadows were flooded. The men who had unwillingly dug the channels and ploughed the ground shook their heads; but Numex and Porteus did not despair, and the solemn craftsman patiently reconstructed his channels, and heightened the river bank. This time the experiment was more successful.
But Numex’s fears were justified. Whenever Porteus ordered the farmhands to take out the heavy ploughs, they would try to find some excuse for not doing so: the traces would mysteriously have broken, or some other urgent problem would arise on another part of the estate. Complaints were made to Tosutigus; there were endless disputes about who should do the work, and by the third year of the experiment Tosutigus begged him to stop.
“They’ve never ploughed the low ground,” he told his son-in-law. “They don’t like your idea. It’s not worth the trouble.”
“But Romans have ploughed the low ground for centuries,” Porteus protested.
“These are Celts,” the chief replied simply. “They’re obstinate.”
“So are Romans,” the younger man replied crossly. And he refused to give up.
For a generation the low ground at Sarum was cultivated; but each year the work was done under protest and done badly, and the yields were disappointing. Even Numex, having built his channels and his little sluices, was disheartened, and in later times the experiment was abandoned and the heavy iron ploughs allowed to rust. For centuries more, it was the higher ground that provided Sarum’s grain.
Porteus’s other improvements were more successful.
Beside the villa he built a walled enclosure, sheltered from the wind and acting as a sun trap. Along one wall he trained peaches, which he imported from Gaul, and apricots. The apricots did not do well, but as the years passed the peaches provided magnificent fruit, which had not been seen before at Sarum. He also questioned Maeve about the honey from which she made the heady mead: where did it come from?
“We find the beehives in the woods,” she told him. “You can hear them buzzing.”
Porteus only shook his head and soon afterwards Numex received orders to have six small pots made and placed in a clearing on the slope beside the walled enclosure. Stranger still, he was told to drill six holes in the side of each pot.
“What are they for?” the puzzled craftsman asked.
“Bees,” Poerteus told him.
At first not even Numex would believe that a swarm of bees could be induced to live in a pot. Nor did Maeve.
“You Romans!” she protested. “You want everything to be ordered, just like your empire and your roads. Well the bees won’t obey you. They fly for miles until they find a place in the woods that they like. They won’t live to order like you.”
But Porteus quietly went on, and under his directions the next year the men trapped swarms of bees and took them to the pot hives. They were astonished when they contentedly stayed there.
Tosutigus was delighted.
“This is Roman progress,” he told Maeve, who was disappointed that the bees had apparently obeyed her husband.
It surprised even Porteus that Balba the dyer volunteered as bee-keeper.
“It’s the dyes I use,” he explained to the Roman. “The bees won’t touch me.” And whether it was the pungent smell, or the chemical content of the dyes, or the fact that his skin was so hardened by the constant working with urine-based bleaches, the squat figure of the clothworker could be seen moving from hive to hive, plunging his stubby little hands into the honeycomb without ever suffering harm.
“Even the bees can’t take the smell of him,” Numex solemnly told Porteus.
Of Porteus’s other improvements, one that especially delighted Tosutigus was his importing of pheasants. The chief inspected the handsome brown birds with their tiny heads and long trailing tail feathers, that had never been seen on the island before.
“You say we can hunt them?” he asked.
“Just let them loose in the woods. They’re excellent game, and you hang them when they’re dead,” Porteus told him. “It gives them a tangy taste.