Etruscan Blood Read online

  ***

  It was a close thing in the end. He'd forgotten the three days of ill luck, the dies nefasti when no work could be done; and Gaius managed to drop his mallet into the Tiber, though unlike the chisel, it floated.

  Gaius's revelation was obvious, of course; to cut the spoiled beams shorter, to fit the final span. The ruined tenons were simply waste, to be cut away with the rest, and then new tenons could be cut on the shortened length.

  “But it won't work,” Lucius had said. “The last span is the shortest. So the beams cut for that span will be shorter. So we can't reuse them for another bay; they won't be long enough.”

  “Ah,” said Gaius. “You can't trust foresters.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Gaius looked surly. “You could talk to me a bit more civil.”

  Lucius took a deep breath. “I could.”

  “I reckoned if I ordered everything exact length it'd come wrong. Wrong length, or wrong order, and if we got the short span first we couldn't do owt with it.”

  “So?” It still wasn't making sense.

  “So I ordered the lot all alike. All except that middle set, that would have cost too much extra. So all the beams fit all the spans.”

  Gaius didn't understand when Lucius grabbed him round the waist and started swinging him round in a frenetic dance. Gaius - like most of the Romans - didn't have much sense of rhythm anyway, but it hadn't stopped Lucius. It hadn't stopped the men from applauding the strange sight, either; a tall, dreadlocked Etruscan leaping about with the stocky, puzzled Roman's head pulled against his chest. (At least the event had given them something to yell at Gaius other than 'butterfingers' and 'splash', to their amusement, though not Gaius'.)