The Childhood of Rome :: BOUNDARY LINES

BOUNDARY LINES

The boy with the pet wolf did not come again to the village where he had first seen a holiday feast and heard what religion was, but he saw a great deal of it for all that. His brother never cared to go back and seemed to take no interest in what he had seen.

Pero, one of the shepherds, while out looking for stray lambs on the hills, met the youngster and his wolf coming down with two of the woolly black-faced truants. They had been hunting, the boy said, and had come across these lambs far up on the heights where lambs had no business to be, and brought them back. When the shepherd asked the lad his name, he said the Cub was as good a name as any. The shepherd was an old man and had seen many queer things in his life and heard of queerer ones. He had found that most frightful stories, when one came to know the truth of them, were some quite nat[pg 69]ural incident made large in the eyes of a frightened man. This boy might, of course, be a wood demon, and his wolf might be another, servants of some evil power, but the shepherd had never seen any such beings and he did not know how they were supposed to look. When he offered the Cub a piece of his bannock, made with salt and water and meal and cooked on a hot stone, it was accepted and eaten, and Pincho the wolf ate some of it also. Pincho would eat almost anything. But that ought to prove that they were no devils, for if they were they would not have eaten the salt.

Pero was a little lame from a fall he had had several years ago, although he got about more nimbly than some younger men. He found the help of this wild youth and his wilder companion very convenient at times. After awhile he began to see that the Cub was very curious about the customs of the Sabine village. He did not ask many questions, but he would listen as long as Pero would talk. Many a long still hour the two spent, on the grass while the sheep grazed, or coming slowly down the slope toward the village at nightfall, but always, when they came near the village gate, Pero would look around presently and find that he was alone.

The first time that Pero noticed this curiosity [pg 70]was one day when they were high above the village so that they could look down on a level stretch of land where the men were marking out a new field. Boundary lines were very important with any people as soon as they stopped wandering from place to place and settled down to work the same land, year after year. Of course, it takes more than one season to make any plot of ground produce all it can, and no man cares to do a year’s work of which he gets none of the benefit; there must be a clear understanding on the subject of the boundary.

In the beginning there were no writings, or deeds, or public records to mark the line of a farm, and the only way to protect property rights was by ceremonies which would make people remember the boundary lines, and the landmarks which it was a horrible crime to move.

Pero began by explaining that every house of the village had to be separated from every other house by at least two and one half feet. As each house was a sort of family temple, the home of the spirits of the ancestors of that family; naturally nobody but these spirits had any right there. Two families could not occupy the same house any more than two persons could occupy the same place. On the same plan, each field was enclosed by a narrow strip of ground never [pg 71]touched by the plow or walked on or otherwise used. This was the property of the god of boundaries, Terminus.

The boundary line of each field was marked by a furrow, drawn at the time the field was marked out for the village or the individual owner. At certain times, this furrow would be plowed again, the owners chanting hymns and offering sacrifices. On this line the men were now placing the landmarks they called the termini. The terminus was a wooden pillar, or the trunk of a small tree, set up firmly in the soil. In its planting certain ceremonies were observed.

First a hole was dug, and the post was set up close by, wreathed with a garland of grasses and flowers. Then a sacrifice of some sort was offered—in this case a lamb—and the blood ran down into the hole. In the hole were placed also grain, cakes, fruits, a little honeycomb and some wine, and burned, live coals from the hearth fire of the home or the sacred fire of the village being ready for this. When it was all consumed the post was planted on the still warm ashes. If any man in plowing the field ran his furrow beyond the proper limit, his plowshare would be likely to strike one of these posts. If he went so far as to overturn it or move it, the penalty was death. There was really no excuse [pg 72]for him, for the line was plainly marked for all to see.

The Cub looked down at the solemnly marching group, the white oxen, and the setting of the posts with bright and interested eyes.

Illustration: “I have seen something like this before,” he said

“I have seen something like this before,” he said. “Everywhere it is death to move a landmark. In some places not posts but stones are used. The dark people across the river say that he who moves his neighbor’s landmark is hated by the gods and his house shall disappear. His land shall not produce fruits, his sons and grandsons shall die without a roof above their heads, and in the end there shall be none left of his [pg 73]blood. Hail, rust and the dog-star shall destroy his harvests, and his limbs shall become sore and waste away.”

Pero stared in astonishment. “Where did you hear all that?” he asked.

“When I was younger I ran away and crossed the river,” said the Cub calmly. “They are strange people over there, not like your people. They go down to the sea in boats. I went in a boat also, but I did not like it. There was a fat trader on the boat, and when we were outside the long white waves along the shore, and the wind came up and rocked our boat, his face turned the color of sick grass. Perhaps my face did also; I do not know. We were both very sick. After that I came back to tend sheep again, for I do not like that place.

“They have a god called Turms there who is the god of traders, and of thieves, and of fortune tellers. They pray to him for good luck, for they believe very much in luck. He is sometimes seen in the shape of a beggar man with a dog and a staff that has snakes twisted about it, and a cap with a feather in it.”

The Cub stood up laughing and slipped away down under the rocks with his wolf; it almost seemed as if he had flown. As Pero stared after him, he remembered that the lad had an eagle [pg 74]feather in his pointed cap, and his staff had a twisted vine around it. But the next time they met the boy was so clearly only a boy in a sheepskin tunic that Pero called himself an old fool too ready to take fancies.

The Cub had spent time enough on the other side of the river to know something about the people, and he had interesting things to tell. They enjoyed bargaining and spent much time buying and selling. They could make fine gold work, bright-colored cloth, and brown vases with black pictures painted on them. Their walls were often painted with pictures. When a trader from that country, named Toto, came to the village, Pero remembered some of the things he had been told. The people bought some of his trinkets, but by what they said of them when the brightness was worn off and the color faded, he was not a very honest merchant. Pero remembered then that this people had the same god for trading and for stealing.

The Cub said that he had been to other villages along this mountain slope, and they seemed to be as separate as if they were islands on a sea of waste wilderness. They did not have their feasts on the same day, they did not measure time alike; in some ways they were almost as far apart in their ideas as if they had been [pg 75]different kinds of animals. And yet they all spoke nearly the same language and worshiped in much the same way. If they knew each other better and met oftener they would be all one people, strong enough to drive away their enemies. If he and Pero could meet in this friendly way, surely others could. But this was a new idea to the shepherd, and he was not used to thinking. When the Cub saw that he did not understand he began talking of something else. The invisible boundary lines were too strong to be crossed.

Often, late at night, after Pero had gone home, the Cub would lie on a high rock that overlooked the village, looking down at the twinkling circle of lights that meant altar fires in homes. Then he would look up at the twinkling points of light in the sky, and wonder if the gods lived there, and if the lights were the altar fires of their homes. If he had known that Pero once half believed him to be a god in disguise, he would have been very much surprised. He was only a boy, without father, mother or home, and he wished he knew what lay before him in the life he had to live.

He could keep sheep, he could hunt, he could fight, he could run and swim better than most boys of his age, and there was no beast, fowl, [pg 76]bird, reptile, fruit or tree in the wilderness that he did not know. But there seemed to be no place for him to live among men unless he was a sort of servant. This was not to his liking. He had never seen any man whose orders he would be willing to obey. He had seen some who were wiser, far wiser than he was, who could tell him a great deal that he wished to know. But he had never seen any to whom he would be a servant. A servant had to do what he was told and make himself over into the kind of person some one else thought he ought to be. The old woman who was a witch had told him that he was born to rule, but he did not see how he could, unless it was ruling to command animals. To rule men he must live where they were, and so far as he could see they had no place for him.

His brother never seemed to have such thoughts. Give him enough to eat and drink, a fire to warm him in winter and a stream to bathe in when the summer suns were hot, and his reed pipe to play, and that was enough. He would spend hours playing some tune over and over with first one change and variation and then another. Even the wolf, now grown large and powerful, with his gaunt muzzle and fierce eyes, was more of a companion than that. He was always ready for a wrestle or a race or a swim [pg 77]with his master. The two of them were feared wherever they went, and treated with unqualified respect.

One day the Cub lay on his favorite rock, hidden by a low-sweeping evergreen bough, when he heard shrieks and outcries. Peering over the edge, he saw that in the edge of the woods below, where some women and children were picking up nuts the men had shaken down for them, something was happening. Half a dozen fierce men had rushed upon them and caught up one of the children and run away, so quickly that by the time the fathers and brothers got there no one could say which way they had gone. They joined some others hidden in the woods, and came straight past the rock where the Cub was watching. They were going to keep the child until they got what they wanted. He could hear them talking. The biggest man had the child on his shoulder. Her little face, as he got a glimpse of it, was very white, but she did not cry out.

The boy rose and followed them with his wolf at his heels. He knew a spring some distance above, where he thought they would be likely to stop for a drink. They did. They were far enough away by this time not to fear pursuit, and they had passed a rocky place where they could hold the narrow trail against many times [pg 78]their number. But long before the men could get up there they would have gone on.

The Cub crept up, inch by inch, until he was within a few feet of the savage, careless group by the spring, and behind them, on a bank about six feet high. Only the child was facing him. He showed himself for an instant, and laid a finger on his lips, and beckoned. She struggled free from the man who was holding her, striking at him with her little hands, and he laughed and let her go. Even if she tried to run away, they would catch her. But she only staggered unsteadily toward the bank, as if to gather some bright berries there.

The instant she was clear of the group two figures hurled themselves through the air,—a man and a wolf, or so it seemed in the moment or so before the thing was over. There was a snarling, growling, breathless struggle, and then the two strange figures were gone, and so was the child, and the bandits were nursing half a dozen wolf bites and various cuts on their shoulders and arms. Some they had given each other in the confusion, and some were from the long, keen knife the Cub had ready when he leaped among them.

The lad went straight down the mountainside with his wolf at his heels and the child on his [pg 79]shoulder, and came out on the path that led upward just as the men from the village were coming up. He set down the child, and with a cry of delight she rushed into the arms of her father. A spear hurtled through the air from the hasty hand of one of the men, who had caught a glimpse of a brown shoulder and a sheepskin tunic. The Cub disappeared. He was rather disgusted. If that was the way that the villagers repaid a kindness—

Illustration: The lad went straight down the mountainside with his wolf at his heels

From his rock he watched them returning with the child, all talking at once. It seemed to him a great deal of talk about what could not [pg 80]be helped by talking. He called Pincho, and only silence answered. He slid off the rock and retraced his steps. When he reached the place where he had set down little Emilia, he found the body of his pet, quite dead, with a spear wound straight through the heart. Then he remembered that in the flash of time when the spear was hurled, Pincho had sprung at the man. He had taken the death wound meant for his master.

Pero never saw the boy with the wolf again. When he heard Emilia’s story of her rescue, he was inclined to think that they were gods after all,—Mars himself, for all any one could say. But the Cub, feeling much older, was far away, and it was long before he returned to that countryside.

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