“She thought you should have had it,” I pointed out.
“Only because she wants what’s fair for me.” Vibius marched onward, his stiff back telling me he didn’t like me disparaging his wife.
That wife, Aelia, was the sister of Cloelius, the sour-natured man who had nothing good to say about Vibius. Did she, as Vibius declared, truly want what was best for him? Or was she disappointed in her life on the Aventine after being raised in a fine domus?
Vibius said nothing more, and we soon reached the building site.
“Good morning, Leonidas,” Gallus sang with his usual buoyancy. “I trust you slept without ruffians disturbing you?”
“The night was quiet,” I said.
I’d slept soundly but awakened at any noise. Cassia slept more fitfully, always alert when I sat up to scan the apartment. No one had disturbed us, in any case. Perhaps, as she’d suspected, the would-be thief had known we’d taken the ring elsewhere.
“Good,” Gallus said with relief. “I am removing the old foundation today. If we are fortunate, the stones will be solid enough to reuse. A savings.”
This idea bolstered his spirits. The five men who’d leveled the ground yesterday—four workers and a foreman—surrounded the stones. The foreman was giving instructions about what would be done where and in what order. He spoke slowly and loudly, as all four—two slaves and two freedmen—came from Gallia Transalpina, their hair light shades of brown, one with blue eyes. Many laborers in Rome, slaves and freedmen alike, arrived from all parts of the empire, acquiring only enough Latin to find work or understand commands.
Gallus moved off to his boulder and his plans, Vibius following him.
I decided to remain with the workers. I could lend my muscle to help and also keep an eye out for any clues as to why the ring had been buried nearby.
The men didn’t question my presence. The workers bent their backs to dig, while the foreman in his finer tunic kept a sharp watch on them. He leaned in with a shovel every so often, when a tough piece of earth needed to be dislodged.
When they took up long poles to pry the stones out of the ground, I joined in, adding my strength to one of the levers. Slowly, slowly, a stone rose from its bed and gently toppled onto the crushed grass.
Both Vibius and Gallus had moved to observe. Gallus focused eagerly on the stone as it came free, as though it might tell him the secrets of the gods.
The stone was an ashlar block of tuff, with earth, mud, and a few annoyed snails clinging to it. Gallus bent to examine the slab, his face as serious as Marcianus’s when he looked over a severe wound.
“Can we use them?” Vibius asked, professional interest displacing his irritation with me.
“It is likely.” Gallus brushed a section of the pock-marked stone free of dirt. “Good condition, solid.” He knocked on the slab with his knuckle.
“Is it very old?” I asked.
Gallus shrugged. “Possibly. Who knows, in Rome?”
“Could it be from the time of the Etruscan kings?” I went on.
Gallus straightened, sending me a baffled look. Vibius also stared at me in perplexity, and the foreman’s brows knit.
“From the time of the kings of Rome?” Gallus repeated dubiously. “There’s nowhere near enough wear on them for that. The few bits poking up from the ground would have been exposed to weather, smoke, ash, bird droppings—all manner of things. Five hundred years’ worth would have worn them down much more than this.”
“Ah.” I tried to appear as though I’d been merely curious. Vibius shot another glance at me as if he wondered about my sanity.
The workers paid no attention to our conversation. One of the freedmen looked over at me, but his face was blank, as though he either hadn’t heard or didn’t understand our speech.
The foreman motioned for them to begin on the next stone, and I returned to assist.
I kept an eye out for more rings or pieces of gold as we worked, but saw nothing. I half-hoped to find a slab of baked clay with an inscription that would tell Cassia exactly who had made the ring, for who, why, and when, and what they meant to do with it.
Nothing like that, of course, turned up.
Once a stone was out of the ground, Gallus studied it closely, marking with a charcoal stick the ones he thought could be reused. The others would be ground into rubble and used for fill in the concrete.
The blocks had been quarried well—the sides straight and sharp, with builder’s marks that told the workmen which blocks to put with which. Thanks to Cassia painstakingly teaching me my letters, I could read OI, PI, XII, and so on, chiseled into the stones. I felt a frisson of pride at this.
On one stone, we found a game board etched into its top. Either it had been taken from another building where the board had been visible, or bored workers had carved it for play during lulls in the work. Gallus told us to move that one to a corner of the site, so we could use it for the same purpose when work was slow.
