Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [163]
The Roman turned the little stone figure over in his hand. It was crudely carved, he thought, yet there was something very appealing about the thick, big-breasted torso it so well represented. He wondered what the figure was.
“I think it’s a statue of the goddess Sulis,” Numex said.
Porteus examined it again. It might be so.
“Keep it,” he suggested. But Numex shook his head.
“If the statue is the goddess Sulis,” he stated, “it is sacred and it must have a shrine. Let me build one beside the bathhouse.”
Porteus smiled. It amused him that the Celt should think this crude little figure might be a god. “Very well,” he laughed, “let the goddess Sulis Minerva have her temple by our bath.”
The following day, Numex built a small shrine on the western side of the bathhouse. It was made of stone and was only four feet square; but inside it was a small altar on which he carefully placed the new goddess.
And so, after resting in the earth for nearly two thousand years, the little figure of Akun, the hunter’s woman, with her thick thighs and heavy, fertile breasts was once again given a home, this time as a local goddess which, in a sense, it might be said that she was.
By the next summer, the work on the villa was completed.
When Porteus led Tosutigus to see the finished result, the chief glowed with pride. At each end of the house, new wings jutted forward. One of these contained the bathhouse. Behind, there was a large cobbled courtyard, enclosed on all four sides by an elegant colonnade. The floors of the house were now made of stone; and the principal room was paved with marble; underneath them all ran Numex’s warm air ducts that conveyed heat from a furnace at the rear of the property. In the bathhouse, as the enthusiastic craftsman had wanted, there was a passable mosaic, around the borders of which Porteus had told him to depict the stately brown pheasants he had introduced on to the estate. And to Tosutigus’s delight, in the principal room, there was a window fitted with thick green glass through which the sunlight dimly filtered. By the standards of Rome it was a farmhouse; by the standards of Sarum, it was a palace.
The chief clapped his son-in-law on the shoulder, and kissed old Numex on both cheeks.
“My dear friends,” he beamed, “now this family has something to be truly proud of.”
All these improvements were watched by Maeve without comment. She had no objection to the house; but she had no enthusiasm for it either. She was indifferent. Porteus did not mind: now that he had his sons to educate, he no longer even wished to teach her better Latin or encourage her to adopt more Roman ways. He had grown used to his wife as she was; and Maeve was content: she was still proud of her clever husband’s talents and of his important position at Aquae Sulis; she was glad if the villa gave her husband and her father pleasure. But these were all part of her husband’s separate interests, such as a man should have, and they need not interfere very much with his life with her.
For as their two sons grew older, their own relationship had fallen into a comfortable pattern. While she spent much of the day with her daughter, instructing her in her own Celtic ways and sometimes riding with her up to the little shrine to the forest gods that she kept in the clearing on the hill, she had more time on her hands than before. At nights, if Porteus were not too tired, she found that