Robert Harris: Pompeii

Nola! How was this possible? Nola was a big town, thirty miles to the east of Misenum, and nowhere near the sulfur fields. He used his thumb to mark out the distances. With a cart and oxen it would take them the best part of two days merely to reach it. The map showed him as clearly as a painting how the calamity must have spread, the matrix emptying with mathematical precision. He traced it with his finger, his lips moving silently. Two and a half miles per hour! If Nola had gone down at dawn, then Acerrae and Atella would have followed in the middle of the morning. If Neapolis, twelve miles round the coast from Misenum, had lost its supply at noon, then Puteoli’s must have gone at the eighth hour, Cumae’s at the ninth, Baiae’s at the tenth. And now, at last, inevitably, at the twelfth, it was their turn.

Eight towns down. Only Pompeii, a few miles upstream from Nola, so far unaccounted for. But even without it: more than two hundred thousand people without water.

He was aware of the entrance behind him darkening, of Corax coming up and leaning against the door frame, watching him.

He rolled up the map and tucked it under his arm. “Give me the key to the sluices.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to shut off the reservoir.”

“But that’s the navy’s water. You can’t do that. Not without the authority of the admiral.”

“Then why don’t you get the authority of the admiral? I’m closing those sluices.” For the second time that day, their faces were barely a hand’s breadth apart. “Listen to me, Corax. The Piscina Mirabilis is a strategic reserve. Understand? That’s what it’s there for—to be shut off in an emergency—and every moment we waste arguing we lose more water. Now give me the key, or you’ll answer for it in Rome.”

“Very well. Have it your way, pretty boy.” Without taking his eyes from Attilius’s face, he removed the key from the ring on his belt. “I’ll go and see the admiral all right. I’ll tell him what’s been going on. And then we’ll see who answers for what.”

Attilius grabbed the key and pushed sideways past him, out into the yard. He shouted to the nearest slave, “Close the gates after me, Polites. No one is to be let in without my permission.”

“Yes, aquarius.”

There was still a crowd of curious onlookers in the street but they cleared a path to let him through. He took no notice of their questions. He turned left, then left again, down a steep flight of steps. The water organ was still piping away in the distance. Washing hung above his head, strung between the walls. People turned to stare at him as he jostled them out of his way. A girl prostitute in a saffron dress, ten years old at most, clutched at his arm and wouldn’t let go until he dug into the pouch on his belt and gave her a couple of copper coins. He saw her dart through the crowd and hand them to a fat Cappadocian—her owner, obviously—and as he hurried on he cursed his gullibility.

The building that housed the sluice gate was a small redbrick cube, barely taller than a man. A statue of Egeria, goddess of the water-spring, was set in a niche beside the door. At her feet lay a few stems of withered flowers and some moldy lumps of bread and fruit—offerings left by pregnant women who believed that Egeria, consort of Numa, the Prince of Peace, would ease their delivery when their time came. Another worthless superstition. A waste of food.

He turned the key in the lock and tugged angrily at the heavy wooden door.

He was level now with the floor of the Piscina Mirabilis. Water from the reservoir poured under pressure down a tunnel in the wall, through a bronze grille, swirled in the open conduit at his feet, and then was channeled into three pipes that fanned out and disappeared under the flagstones behind him, carrying the supply down to the port and town of Misenum. The flow was controlled by a sluice gate, set flush with the wall, worked by a wooden handle attached to an iron wheel. It was stiff from lack of use. He had to pound it with the heel of his hand to loosen it, but when he put his back into it, it began to turn. He wound the handle as fast as he could. The gate descended, rattling like a portcullis, gradually choking off the flow of water until at last it ceased altogether, leaving a smell of moist dust.

Only a puddle remained in the stone channel, evaporating so rapidly in the heat he could see it shrinking. He bent down and dabbed his fingers in the wet patch, then touched them to his tongue. No taste of sulfur.

He had done it now, he thought. Deprived the navy of its water, in a drought, without authority, three days into his first command. Men had been stripped of their rank and sent to the treadmills for lesser crimes. It occurred to him that he had been a fool to let Corax be the first to get to the admiral. There was certain to be a court of inquiry. Even now the overseer would be making sure who got the blame.

Locking the door to the sluice chamber, he glanced up and down the busy street. Nobody was paying him any attention. They did not know what was about to happen. He felt himself to be in possession of some immense secret and the knowledge made him furtive. He headed down a narrow alley toward the harbor, keeping close to the wall, eyes on the gutter, avoiding people’s gaze.

The admiral’s villa was on the far side of Misenum and to reach it the engineer had to travel the best part of half a mile—walking, mostly, with occasional panicky bursts of running—across the narrow causeway and over the revolving wooden bridge that separated

the two natural harbors of the naval base.

He had been warned about the admiral before he left Rome. “The commander in chief is Gaius Plinius,” said the Curator Aquarum. “Pliny. You’ll come across him sooner or later. He thinks he knows everything about everything. Perhaps he does. He will need careful stroking. You should take a look at his latest book. The Natural History . Every known fact about Mother Nature in thirty-seven volumes.”

There was a copy in the public library at the Porticus of Octavia. The engineer had time to read no further than the table of contents.

“The world, its shape, its motion. Eclipses, solar and lunar. Thunderbolts. Music from the stars. Sky portents, recorded instances. Sky-beams, sky-yawning, colors of the sky, sky-flames, sky-wreaths, sudden rings. Eclipses. Showers of stones . . .”

There were other books by Pliny in the library. Six volumes on oratory. Eight on grammar. Twenty volumes on the war in Germany, in which he had commanded a cavalry unit. Thirty volumes on the recent history of the empire, which he had served as procurator in Spain and Belgian Gaul. Attilius wondered how he managed to write so much and rise so high in the imperial administration at the same time. The Curator said, “Because he doesn’t have a wife.” He laughed at his own joke. “And he doesn’t sleep, either. You watch he doesn’t catch you out.”

The sky was red with the setting sun and the large lagoon to his right, where the warships were built and repaired, was deserted for the evening; a few seabirds called mournfully among the reeds. To his left, in the outer harbor, a passenger ferry was approaching through the golden glow, her sails furled, a dozen oars on either side dipping slowly in unison as she steered between the anchored triremes of the imperial fleet. She was too late to be the nightly arrival from Ostia, which meant she was probably a local service. The weight of the passengers crammed on her open deck was pressing her low to the surface.

“Showers of milk, of blood, of flesh, of iron, of wool, of bricks. Portents. The earth at the center of the world. Earthquakes. Chasms. Air-holes. Combined marvels of fire and water: mineral pitch; naptha; regions constantly glowing. Harmonic principle of the world . . .”