Chapter 14 — The Shrine at the Head of the Water

On the morning the pagus went up to the water, Aunia woke in the dark out of habit and began to count, out of habit, and stopped.

She lay a moment listening to the house — the elder's breathing through the wall, slow and dry, like a broom on a floor; the boy dead asleep; Boutius already gone from beside her, which on this one morning of the year meant nothing worse than the channel — and she let the numbers go. They would keep. The seed debt would keep, and the mill's fee, and the vine-money quietly growing its tenth in the dark of a strong-room over the ridge the way leaven grows in a covered bowl; debts kept beautifully; they were the best-kept things in the valley. Today the pagus went up to the head of the water, and whatever the year meant to do to them it would have to begin tomorrow.

She got up and baked.

The cakes for the water were the flat ones, barley and wheat mixed, a thumbprint of oil in the middle of each, done on the stone the way her mother-in-law had shown her the first spring of her marriage — no honey; the water liked its bread plain, the old woman had said, being itself the sweetness — and while they baked she filled the little jug from the household's own jar, their own oil of their own trees, which went up the hill with them once a year in the good years and in the bad ones alike, because it was the one thing on that table with nobody else's name in it. The jar answered to no one. That was its work, more than lamps.

Boutius and the boy came in wet to the knees at sunrise, and ate standing, and were pleased with themselves in the identical way, which always made her look from the one to the other until the boy noticed and grew dignified. They had been down since first light doing what the head-house did before the water day: walking the channel from the sluice to the second turning with rake and bar, seating the loosened stones, clearing the winter's silt from the throat of it — their own length and two lengths beyond, past their own gate, down to where the next holding's care began. No writing anywhere said to. Aunia's mother-in-law had said it the way she said all her law: the water knows the house that keeps its bed. If the town had ever asked — the town had never asked — the pagus would have said only that the Attenes held at the head, and the head keeps for the tail, and that was what holding at the head was; you might as well ask why the roof keeps the rain off the door.

The elder would walk. They had the neighbor's donkey for him, brushed and led up to the yard gate with a sheepskin on its back, and he looked at it the way he looked at prices in the town, and took his stick. He had put on his good tunic, and Aunia had brushed his cloak although the day would be warm, and he stood in the yard in the early sun waiting for the pagus to come up the path, upright, both hands on the stick, the way he stood in the doorway all the working days of the year; but dressed, and waiting, and — she saw it and said nothing, the way you did not remark a shy thing for fear it would go — glad.

The pagus came up with the sun, house by house joining the path, and by the sluice-gate corner where everyone's boundaries had always agreed they were the pagus entire, children running ahead of the whole of it like spray ahead of a cart through water. The way to the head ran up past the top terraces, past their own upper field where the boundary stone stood half in the plow-line — the stone got its look from her, as it got one every time; it stood there sunning itself, old and lettered and lied about, no more Fulvius's than the fig tree was, and this spring, at last, men from the town had stood in front of it in the proper way and written down on oath that no one living had ever fed it — and then the path left the fields and went up with the water, narrow, the channel talking on the left hand, to the place where the valley pinched and the rock stood out grey from the hillside with the green line under it, and the spring came out of the mountain's mouth into its worn basin, and had done, said the elder, since before the river had its name.

The water was small this year. Everyone saw it and no one said it first; and then the old woman of the shrine village, who kept the place — swept the basin's lip, renewed the wool on the thorn bush, remembered the words — said it for the pagus the way it wanted saying: that she had seen it smaller. Twice in her years, smaller than this, and both times the spring had held when the river below went to pools you could walk between, because the spring came from under the weather, from the mountain's own keeping, where years did not reach. A thumb's width of water, she said, holding up her thumb, all crook and knuckle, is a family alive. The pagus looked at the thumb and at the water, wider than a thumb by plenty, and was comforted; and Aunia was comforted too, and noted, somewhere under the comfort, where her counting lived even on the days she let it sleep, that the old woman had not said the spring never shrank. She had said it never failed. The pagus's words were always exact, and the exactness had a shape, like a jar's: it held just so much, and meant you to see the brim.

Beside the basin stood the altar. It was a small square stone, older than any house standing in the pagus, its top hollowed by hands and weather, and on its face there were letters — Roman letters, cut deep once and worn soft now, lichen in the grooves like the stone at their terrace — and no one in the pagus could read them but Reburrus, and Reburrus had read them long ago and given the pagus the reading, and the reading had passed into the pagus's keeping like a boundary: some man of the old time, with a Roman name, had asked the water for something — his child's life, the pagus said, though Reburrus admitted the stone did not say — and the water had given it, and the man had paid what he vowed, willingly, as it deserved. That was what the letters said, Reburrus swore: that he paid willingly, and that the water had deserved it. It seemed to Aunia, every year, a great deal to know about a man otherwise gone entirely — better knowledge than the town's rolls kept of the living — and every year she thought the same thought at the same turning of the path, arriving with the cakes: that the stone at the water said one true thing about a real man, and the stone in their field said one false thing about no man at all, and of the two writings, the town and all its racks had chosen, these thirty years, to believe the field's.

The rite was the rite. It had no name that she had ever heard; it needed none, any more than bread did; it was what the pagus did at the head of the water in the season when the year showed its hand. The old woman said the words, and the words were as they had always been, the old tongue and the Latin folded together like two hands, the water's names in the one and the asking in the other, and nobody remarked on it because there was nothing to remark: everything old in the valley spoke out of both its mouths at once. Each house gave what it gave. Cakes on the altar, and the birds would have them, and that was as it should be. Wine poured over the stone's hollowed top, into the old darkness there. Wool wound fresh on the thorn. The little bright things into the basin, for the children to give — a pin, a bead, a knuckle-bone rubbed smooth — and the boy, who at seventeen was too old for it and did it anyway, quick, when he thought no one watched, spun in a small copper coin, town money, hard-got; and Aunia watched it go down through the clear water and settle its small light among the years of other small lights on the basin's floor, pins and beads and the coins of emperors nobody living remembered, the pagus's whole treasury, sunk in the one strong-room that had never been robbed; and she did not ask him what he had asked for. She could read him unlettered. He had asked the water for the port.

She poured their oil last, a thin gold thread out of the little jug onto the stone, and asked for what she asked every year, in the space the words left open for the asking: the water to hold to harvest. Nothing else. You did not scatter your asking, her mother-in-law had said; the water was not the town, to be got round with three petitions dressed as one; you asked it the one thing it could do, and you kept the stones of its bed, and between your house and the water there grew up, over the years, an understanding. It was the cleanest debt in all her keeping. It was the only one that had never once been called.

Then the pagus ate its own festival, on the flat grass below the head, out of every household's basket making one table, and the day opened its hand.

She kept no order of it afterward, only pieces, the way you keep a good day — it does not enter, it shines. The men's throwing game, stone to the mark, and Boutius in his shirt beating the smith of the shrine village by a hand's breadth and being carried on the shouting for a moment the way he had been carried when she first knew him, laughing out of his whole face: a man she saw perhaps twice a year now, and had married the whole of. The children's races, and the boy running the young men's course, second, beaten by a longer-legged cousin, and pleased anyway, because the girl from the mill had watched him run it. The elder in the shade of the rock with the other old ones, a jug among them, settling the pagus's history — which flood, whose grandfather, the year the wolf came — with the unhurried finality of men whose court no longer sat but whose law was still cited; and once, when she brought him his portion, he was telling the young ones about the water: that his father's father had seen the river below shrink to a chain of green pools, the fish all taken or dead, and the pagus had carried its jars up here all that summer, and the spring had run a thumb's width — he held up his thumb; it was the same story the old woman kept, the pagus's oldest coin, worn smooth with handing on — and the family had lived; and the proof of it, he said, was sitting in front of him getting the good of his wine.

And there was talk of the town, as there always was, and for once it was light. The measuring men had come and gone all autumn with their rods and their politeness; the oaths at the stones had been taken down this spring in the proper way, Reburrus swearing among the first; and Reburrus's word on the whole matter had gone round the pagus until every house had it by heart, the way his readings always went: they are finding out the writing is wrong. The truth is good for us. He said it again that day, on the grass, to the men around Boutius, and the men nodded slowly, tasting it like the wine; and Aunia, hearing it, let it in at last. All spring she had kept that hope on the doorstep, feeding it but not letting it into the house — hope ate like a guest and worked like a neighbor, her mother had said — but the day was the day; the water had its wool and its oil; her husband was laughing; and she thought: perhaps. Perhaps the writing comes right, and the ghost goes out of the field, and the name over the forty iugera, when all the correcting is done, is the name of the man who broke the terrace out of the thorn, or his son's, or his son's son's. The town had never in her life asked the pagus a question and written down the answer — and this year it had. Something had turned. Let it turn all the way.

They went down in the long gold of the evening, the whole pagus on the narrow path with the channel talking on the right hand now, carrying empty baskets and sleeping children, and the elder walked all of it, slowly, his hand on the boy's shoulder at the steep place by the second turning; and he would not be sorry for it tomorrow, he said, because a man is not sorry for a day like this, he only pays for it, which is different. Below them the vega opened out green in the last light — the wheat filling, the vines in leaf, the channels drawn through it all like the writing the land did about itself, truer than the town's — and their own holding at the head of it, roof and fig and threshing floor, small and whole and theirs, whatever any stone said.

At her own gate, in the last of the light, Aunia counted after all — once, deliberately, the way you rule off a page. What the day had taken: a morning's baking, the jug of oil, one wine jar, a copper coin she had seen go into the water and would not miss until some reckoning missed it, her men's strength spent on games. What the day had given. She stood at the gate with the empty jug light in her hand, and the account would not close, and she was glad of it. There was no sum. It was the one day of the year that came out, every year, unpayable and unowed.

Whatever the summer held, they had had this, entire, and it could not be taken back out of them. She said it to no one. She kept it where she kept everything that mattered, in her head, where no writing reached.