Terminalia

by Albius Tibullus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The rain followed him up the valley all afternoon, and by the time Menophilus reached the last farm on the line it had found the gap between his hood and his neck. The boy Dama walked ahead with the groma on his shoulder. The iron foot of the staff rang on the stones of the track, and the four plumb-lines were tied up in a cloth so that they would not tangle. A dog came out to the gate and barked once. Then, seeing that nobody was afraid of it, it stopped.

The gate stood open. Beyond it was a yard of trodden mud, a fig tree with its leaves down, and a house of rubble and timber with smoke leaking out under the eaves, because there was nowhere else for it to go. A woman stood in the doorway with her arms folded against the cold. She looked at the staff on the boy's shoulder before she looked at Menophilus, and he saw her know what it was.

"The magistrates said there would be lodging," he said.

"There is lodging," she said, and stood aside.

Inside, the smoke hung at the height of a man's chest and the fire was the only light. An old man lay on a bed pulled close to the hearth, his feet wrapped in sheepskin and his hands outside the blanket. A girl of nine or ten was stirring a pot. In a niche above the fire stood two little clay Lares, each a dancing boy with a drinking-horn raised, and in front of them was a dish with a crust of bread and a twist of dried bay.

"Lucius Cominius," said the old man from the bed, as if he were answering a question in court. "My wife, Rufilla. My son's girl, Tertia. Sit where it's warm."

Menophilus sat on the bench. Rufilla gave him beans with oil, and a piece of bread baked that morning and still soft in the middle. Dama ate on the floor by the door with the dog watching him. Nobody asked what he had come to measure. The old man coughed, a long cough that ended in a kind of listening, as if he were waiting to hear whether it had finished with him.

"You've come on a good day," Cominius said at last. "Tomorrow is the Terminalia."

"I know."

"Of course you know. You're a man of stones." He smiled. One of his front teeth was gone, and the smile made a dark place. "Nerius comes up from his side at first light. We've done it together thirty-eight years, and our fathers before us. You'll stand with us."

It was not a question, and Menophilus said that he would.

He slept on the bench under his own damp cloak and a blanket of Rufilla's that smelled of smoke and sheep. Twice in the night he woke. The first time the rain was still falling, and Rufilla was kneeling at the hearth, heaping ash over the embers so that they would keep till morning. She moved the coals with her fingers, as if they could not burn her. The second time the rain had stopped. The old man was awake, his eyes open in the dark, and neither of them said anything.

---

The stone stood at the bottom of the long field, where the land of Cominius ran down to meet the land of Nerius at a hawthorn hedge that had been let go. It came no higher than a man's knee. It was grey and rounded on top, and long ago someone had cut a groove across its crown to show which way the boundary ran. Lichen had grown in the groove, so that the line was now drawn in yellow.

They had carried Cominius down in a chair, Menophilus and Dama at the poles, with Rufilla walking beside him and her hand on his shoulder, as if the wind might take him. They set him down on the uphill side of the stone, his side. He reached out and laid his hand flat on the top of it, on the yellow line, and kept it there.

Nerius came up through a gap in the hedge with his son and a jar of wine. He was twenty years younger than Cominius and walked as if he were older. He nodded to Menophilus without asking who he was. By now everyone in the valley had seen the staff.

There were two garlands. Cominius's was of ivy, and Rufilla held his wrist while he hung it on the stone from above. Nerius's was of bay with a few early violets worked in, bruised from the walk, and he hung it from below. The two went round the stone and did not quite meet.

Nerius's son built a little altar of turf. Cominius could not split the wood this year, so Nerius had split it the evening before, and it was dry, because he had kept it under his own roof. Then Rufilla came down the field with the fire. She carried it in half of a broken pot, the coals she had kept alive under the ash all night, and she walked the whole length of the field with her free hand cupped over them, not hurrying. The wet grass darkened the hem of her tunic to the knee. She tipped the coals onto the kindling and blew, and the fire took.

Tertia had a basket of spelt. She shook it over the flames three times, very solemn, her lips moving. Then she laid a piece of honeycomb on the fire, and the smell rose thick and sweet over the wet field, and the wax ran and spat. Nerius poured the wine, first onto the stone and then onto the fire. The smoke leaned uphill, towards the house.

"In my father's time there was a lamb," Cominius said. "In mine too, until the bad years. He doesn't mind. He's a stone. In King Numa's day he had no blood at all."

They sat on a cloak spread on the wet ground and ate the cakes Rufilla had made. The men drank, and they sang the old song in low voices, as men sing when they do not want to be heard over the next hedge. Nerius's son sang loudest. He was young enough to think it was still a feast.

"Do you know about the Capitol?" Cominius asked. He did not look at Menophilus, but nobody else there could have been asked.

"Tell it," said Rufilla.

"When King Tarquin was building the great temple, the hill was full of little gods, old ones, a shrine here and a shrine there. So the augurs asked each of them, properly, by the birds, whether it would agree to move. And they all agreed. All except one." He patted the stone, as you pat a dog. "He wouldn't go. So they built Jupiter's temple round him, and left a hole in the roof over him so that he can see the sky. He's in there now, under Jupiter's roof, and Jupiter can't shift him."

Nerius drank and said nothing. Tertia had heard it before. She was feeding the last of the honeycomb to the fire a crumb at a time, so that the smell would last.

---

He began after noon, once the ground had drunk some of the water.

He worked from a stake that the other surveyor had driven at the corner of the valley the autumn before, by an elm that had lost its top. He set the iron foot of the groma in the soft ground beside it and swung the arm out so that the plumb-lines hung clear of the staff. Then he waited for them to settle. In that wind they would not settle. He held his cloak out against it with one arm, the way his master had taught him when he was a boy younger than Dama, and the four lead weights slowed and swung and slowed and hung still.

Dama walked away down the slope with the white pole. Menophilus put his eye close to the near cord, with the far cord behind it, and moved the boy with his hand: left, left, a little back, there. When the pole and the two threads were one line, he dropped his hand and Dama drove the pole in. Then came the measuring rod, ten feet of seasoned ash shod with bronze at both ends, laid down and lifted and laid down again, with Dama counting aloud. The wet grass came up to the boy's knees. His count went down the field and grew faint, and came back clear when the wind turned.

Tertia came to watch. She stood at a distance at first, the way the dog had. Then she came closer.

"What are the strings for?"

"To make a straight line where there isn't one."

"There's one already," she said, and pointed at the hedge.

He let her look. He lifted her by the waist, because she was not tall enough, and she put her eye where his had been and held her breath without being told.

"Now it's all in a line," she said. "The pole and the strings and the tree."

"The tree isn't on the line."

"It is from here."

He put her down and looked, and from there it was.

The line ran across the long field at a slant. It took no notice of the hedge, or of the old furrows, or of the path the cattle had worn going down to the water. It passed forty feet uphill of the stone. Where the next line would cross it, at the corner of the square, a new stone would be set, and the old one would be left in the middle of somebody's lot, marking nothing.

He drove a peg there, and tied a strip of red wool to it so that it could be seen.

---

That evening, by the fire, Cominius asked him.

"Where does it run?"

Rufilla stopped stirring the pot. Menophilus told him: from the elm, across the long field above the stone, to the corner by the spring, and from there up across the hill behind the house.

"And the house?"

"The house is inside the fourth lot."

The old man nodded slowly, as if a price had been named that he had expected. "When?"

"The lots are drawn in the forum on the Kalends of March. The men will come in April, for the ploughing."

"Soldiers."

"Soldiers."

Cominius looked at the fire for a while. His hands lay outside the blanket. The knuckles were large, and the skin over them was as thin and shiny as the inside of a shell.

"When it's time," he said, "I want to be put down there. By the stone. On my side."

"Hush," said Rufilla. She left the pot and came and sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand over both of his. He turned one hand over under hers, so that he was holding it and not only being held.

Menophilus did not say that by then there would be no side. He looked at the Lares in their niche, at the two clay boys dancing with their horns raised over the crust of bread, and he said nothing at all.

---

He lay awake on the bench.

There was a word that every surveyor knew as well as his own name. Subseciva: the leftovers, the scraps that the squares did not take. The steep corner, the stony slope, the strip between a river and a road, land too broken to be ploughed. These were left out of the lots. They went back to the town, or stayed with the men who had always worked them, because nobody else wanted them.

The hill behind the house was steep. Near the top it was stony; he had felt it under his feet. A man could write in his tablets that the slope above the spring was broken ground, unfit to be allotted. He could draw the corner of the lot short, and the house would fall outside it, on a scrap the bronze did not want.

He let himself see it. He came back in the spring to set the last stones, as surveyors did, and the gate was open and the dog knew him. Rufilla set beans in front of him without asking, and bread still soft in the middle. Tertia had learned to count the flock and counted it for him at dusk, touching each ewe on the back as it went through the gap, and she lost count at thirty and began again and was not ashamed. In summer he came for the threshing. He sat in the shade of the fig while she drove the mule round the floor in the white heat and the chaff blew up gold. He did nothing. He was nothing in the house, the way the dog was nothing in it, and it pleased him. He was a man with no Lar but his master's, and that one not his; but here there were two clay boys over the fire, and a crust put before them every day, and in time a crust would be put before them for him. In February he stood at the stone with a garland of violets, on whichever side they gave him. And when it was time, they carried the old man down the long field and laid him by the stone on his own side, and the stone still meant something, and the hole in the roof still let in the sky.

That is what he imagined, lying under Rufilla's blanket, while the dog turned round twice by the door and lay down.

But the map was already made. It had been drawn in the autumn from the other man's measurements and engraved on a bronze tablet, and it hung in the basilica in the town, every lot numbered and every square ruled. He had seen it. The hill behind the house was inside the grid, ruled like the rest, with no scrap marked against it. Where the house stood there was nothing on the bronze at all, only the smooth metal of the fourth lot, as if there had never been a roof there, or a fire. His work was not to decide where the lines ran. His work was to make the ground agree with the bronze. If the ground and the bronze disagreed, they would send another man with another staff, and the line would run where it ran. And the other man would not have eaten the beans.

He listened to the old man breathing. Each breath stopped for a moment at the top, and went on.

---

The new stone came up from the town in the morning on Nerius's cart, because there was no other cart in the valley. It was a squared block of grey stone, dressed smooth, with a cross cut into the top so that the lines could be read from it in four directions. Nerius had brought it without being asked. He and his son and Dama lifted it down beside the red peg, and Nerius went home through the gap in the hedge without a word.

Dama dug the pit. Menophilus had brought what the rite required in his pack: a little incense, a pot of honey, a twist of salt. Before a stone goes into the ground it must be set on a fire, and the offerings burned with it, so that it is a god and not a stone. He knelt with his flint and steel and a bundle of tinder, but the tinder had spent two days under a wet cloak. The sparks fell on it and went out. He tried again, and they went out again.

He heard the grass before he saw her. Rufilla was coming down the long field from the house with half a broken pot in her hand and her other hand cupped over it. She walked the whole length of the field, not hurrying, past the old stone in its two garlands of ivy and bay, to the edge of the pit. She did not look at him. She knelt and tipped the coals in, and blew on them once, and the dry ends of the tinder caught.

Menophilus put in the incense and the honey and the salt. The honey ran and smoked. When the fire was going properly, he and Dama took the stone by its corners and lowered it onto the embers. The wet earth hissed against them, and steam came up all round the stone, so that for a moment it stood in a cloud.

Rufilla got up from her knees. She went back up the long field towards the house, with the empty sherd still warm in her hand.

---

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Albiō Tibullō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Albius Tibullus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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