Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp

assembled these parts — all but the last.
     
                He had not supposed there
was anything so difficult about making an escapement. He could take the back cover
off his wrist-watch and see the escapement-wheel there, jerking its merry way
around. He did not want to take his watch apart for fear of never getting it
together again. Besides, the parts thereof were too small to reproduce
accurately.
     
                But he could see the damned
thing; why couldn't he make a large one? The workmen turned out several wheels,
and the little tongs to go with them. Padway filed and scraped and bent. But
they would not work. The tongs caught the teeth of the wheels and stuck fast.
Or they did not catch at all, so that the shaft on which the rope was wound
unwound itself all at once. Padway at last got one of the contraptions adjusted
so that if you swung the pendulum with your hand, the tongs would let the
escapement-wheel revolve one tooth at a time. Fine. But the clock would not run
under its own power. Take your hand off the pendulum, and it made a couple of
halfhearted swings and stopped.
     
                Padway said to hell with it.
He'd come back to it some day when he had more time and better tools and
instruments. He stowed the mess of cog-wheels in a corner of his cellar.
Perhaps, he thought, this failure had been a good thing, to keep him from
getting an exaggerated idea of his own cleverness.
     
                Nevitta popped in again.
"All over your sickness, Martinus? Fine; I knew you had a sound
constitution. How about coming out to the Flaminian racetrack with me now and
losing a few solidi? Then come on up to the farm overnight."
     
                "I'd like to a lot. But
I have to put the Times to bed this afternoon."
     
                "Put to bed?"
queried Nevitta.
     
                Padway explained.
     
                Nevitta said: "I see.
Ha, ha, I thought you had a girl friend named Tempora. Tomorrow for supper,
then."
     
                "How shall I get
there?"
     
                "You haven't a saddle
horse? I'll send Hermann down with one tomorrow afternoon. But mind, I don't
want to get him back with wings growing out of his shoulders!"
     
                "It might attract
attention," said Padway solemnly. "And you'd have a hell of a time
catching him if he didn't want to be bridled."
     
                So the next afternoon
Padway, in a new pair of rawhide Byzantine jack boots, set out with Hermann up
the Flamian Way. The Roman Campagna, he noted, was still fairly prosperous
farming country. He wondered how long it would take for it to become the
desolate, malarial plain of the Middle Ages.
     
                "How were the
races?" he asked.
     
                Hermann, it seemed, knew
very little Latin, though that little was still better than Padway's Gothic.
"Oh, my boss ... he terrible angry. He talk ... you know ... hot sport.
But hate lose money. Lose fifty sesterces on horse. Make noise like ... you
know ... lion with gutache."
     
                At the farmhouse Padway met
Nevitta's wife, a pleasant, plump woman who spoke no Latin, and his eldest son,
Dagalaif, a Gothic scaio , or marshal, home on vacation. Supper fully
bore out the stories that Padway had heard about Gothic appetites. He was
agreeably surprised to drink some fairly good beer, after the bilgewater that
went by that name in Rome.
     
                "I've got some wine, if
you prefer it," said Nevitta.
     
                "Thanks, but I'm
getting a little tired of Italian wine. The Roman writers talk a lot about
their different kinds, but it all tastes alike to me."
     
                "That's the way I feel.
If you really want some, I have some perfumed Greek wine."
     
                Padway shuddered.
     
                Nevitta grinned.
"That's the