"No. " I grinned. "It fell in. "
"I see. And now you want to get it out. Is it a big stone?"
"I think so. "
"You think so. "
I could see by his face he thought I had lost my wits, but he was not going to insult me openly to my face by saying so.
"Have you any notion of how much mud there is at the bottom of a lake, Master Varrus?"
I nodded, still smiling. "Quite a lot, I should imagine. "
"It doesn't dismay you?" I shook my head, and his eyes narrowed as he asked, "What are you really after?"
"I told you. A stone. A big stone in the mud at the bottom. Look, Seculus, I know you don't believe me, but it's the truth, and if I told you any more you would really think me sick in the head. I think the stone is really there, and it is valuable to me, and only to me. At least, I think it is valuable. It may not be. But I have to find it first, before I'll know. " Their expressions were wondrous to behold and I laughed aloud. "I swear I'm speaking truth. Come, let's go back down to the villa. By the time we get there it'll be almost dark. Over dinner tonight, I promise you, Caius Britannicus will tell you the whole story. In the meantime, even if you do not believe it, and even if the stone is not there, your trainee engineers will have gained the experience of draining a lake and no harm, will have been done, except to my dreams. "
They accepted this, and later they accepted Britannicus's story of my quest for the stones from heaven, and because they were who they were, they asked intelligent questions that I tried to answer as well as I could. Thereafter, they went about their tasks of planning and organization as if it were the most natural and the most urgent thing in the world that the millions of gallons of water and mud between me and my skystone should be removed with the utmost possible haste.
The three military men returned with an army of engineers and sappers before the end of the following month, and within days of their arrival a military camp was well established in the valley and the work was under way. It proceeded with all necessary caution for, as Erasmus Lecio had pointed out on that first inspection, there was no way of determining how thick the dam was on the lakeward side, or how far the waters had penetrated the rubble of the dam itself. It was dangerous work every foot of the way, but it was not until mid July that the first seepage occurred. From then on, it was merely a matter of time — a little more cautious digging, and then the wait for the water of the lake to find its own way out.
In the small hours of a summer morning, the sappers were awakened by a roar and a rumble, and for the next week the lake poured itself down the hillside, emptying like the broken bowl it resembled.
There can be few things or places less attractive than the newly exposed bottom of a suddenly drained lake — mud and stench and noxious vapour steaming under a hot sun. There was nothing to do but leave it and hope that the sun would dry it quickly.
August came and went, and the sun blazed into September. Strong autumn winds sprang up to help, and I watched, waiting and fretting in a fever of frustration and impatience. October remained dry and clear, and finally, driven to distraction by the waiting, I decided that the time had come.
I had made careful drawings before the lake was breached and had calculated to within ten paces where my treasure had to lie. All summer long, as soon as the mud had become firm enough to bear a man, I had men digging ditches, channelling residual water away from the centre, so that by late autumn the lake bed was a maze of drainage ditches, some of them wide and deep.
I had also kept a team of men and horses busy building mountains of fuel on the lakeside — bushes, dried grass and thistle, dead wood, even whole trees. Now I began to burn it in a monstrous pyre above the spot where I hoped and believed the skystone lay. We burned for two days and then left the ashes to cool, and when we scraped them away, the clay beneath them was baked. We tackled the baked clay then with mattock, pickaxe and spade until we found moisture again. Then we repeated the whole process. It was tiring, hard and dirty work, but the day came, towards the year's end, when a workman's pickaxe struck rock, and a shout of triumph told me we had found what we were looking for. The skystone was there. My guess had been correct. The size of it, however, left me breathless. Caius, I thought, would never believe this.
XXVIII
With the perspective of time, I am tempted to say that I chose the wrong day to bring my skystone home in triumph, but that would be neither true nor accurate.
My homecoming with the skystone was a triumph for me and, in a strange way, for Gaius. By vindicating myself in the finding of the stone, I had also vindicated his faith in my strange obsession. He had wanted me to find a skystone for years; it meant a lot to him. Only occasionally did his fine mind balk at the impossibility of everything involved in the quest. The day I found the stone and brought it back to the villa should have been a day for rejoicing all day long. But it was not to be. The arrival of the skystone at the villa was an event whose light was soon eclipsed by other happenings. That particular day was a day of days for all of us, although our human frailties precluded us from identifying the directions in which we were being steered.
We had had a fruitful and excellent year on the villa, which we had already started to call the Colony. Our crops had prospered, and we had more land under the plough than ever before. Quintus Varo, our neighbour to the north, had worked his fields with ours, as had Terra and Firma, who had bought two villas to the east and south of us. In all, we now held a block of nine contiguous villa farms, forming a solid rhomboid tract of arable land some twelve miles long by five miles deep at its widest, and we were confident of adding to those holdings in the coming year. There were at least three villas that Caius knew of to the south and west, and several more in the north and east, whose owners lived outside of Britain: one on the Emperor's island of Capri, one outside Rome itself and one in southern Gaul. These we knew we could have — by default, if things progressed too quickly. They were maintained and farmed by trusted staff of the finest quality — people of the type our plans called for. Throughout the summer and the autumn months, we had also had a steady trickle of newcomers to the villas — craftsmen and artisans, all with families, selected by various members of our newly formed Council. The first of these to arrive was a family from Verulamium. The father and his two adult sons were tanners; the mother, daughter and the wives of the two sons were highly skilled workers in leather. Caius welcomed them with open arms. They were followed within the month by a family of coopers, sent by Tonius Cicero from Londinium. Domus, the father of the clan, was also a skilled carpenter, and his son Andronicus shared all his father's talents.
In August came a family of brewers from the hop country far to the east, and the next month brought the arrival of another family of carpenters and wagon-builders, and a man from the north who, with his wife and daughters, had taken the art of basket-weaving to new virtuosity. Within a week of their arrival, they were making baskets that would hold water! A potter arrived shortly after them, bringing his wheel with him—a huge device on which he threw amphorae and other large storage jars and pots.
Caius had begun to list all the resources we had at our disposal, and the people in our group who were best able to make use of them, and it was from this task that he was summoned by the commotion of my arrival. He was waiting with Luceiia at the gates as I turned my heavily laden wagon around the last bend in the road, and I could see his teeth gleaming in a grin from a hundred paces. The excitement being generated by my coming might have seemed, to a stranger's eyes, more suited to the arrival of an important visitor than a lump of rock, but everyone in the Colony had been aware for months of the importance I placed on the stone I had been searching for so painstakingly.