Robert Harris - Pompeii

Her voice was suddenly as clear in his mind as if she had been standing beside him.

“My name is Corelia Ampliata, daughter of Numerius Popidius Ampliatus, owner of the Villa Hortensia . . .”

The moonlight shone on the smooth black stones of the narrow street and silhouetted the lines of the flat roofs. It felt almost as hot as it had been in the late afternoon; the moon as bright as the sun. As he mounted the steps between the shuttered, silent houses, he could picture her darting before him—the movement of her hips beneath the plain white dress.

“A few hundred paces—yes, but every one of them uphill!”

He came again to the level ground and to the high wall of the great villa. A gray cat ran along it and disappeared over the other side. The glinting metal dolphins leaped and kissed above the chained gate. He could hear the sea in the distance, moving against the shore, and the throb of the cicadas in the garden. He rattled the iron bars and pressed his face to the warm metal. The porter’s room was shuttered and barred. There was not a light to be seen.

He was remembering Ampliatus’s reaction when he turned up on the seashore: “What’s happened to Exomnius? But surely Exomnius is still the aquarius?” There had been surprise in his voice and, now he came to think about it, possibly something more: alarm.

“Corelia!” He called her name softly. “Corelia Ampliata!”

No response. And then a whisper in the darkness, so low he almost missed it: “Gone.”

A woman’s voice. It came from somewhere to his left. He stepped back from the gate and peered into the shadows. He could make out nothing except a small mound of rags piled in a drift against the wall. He moved closer and saw that the shreds of cloth were moving slightly. A skinny foot protruded, like a bone. It was the mother of the dead slave. He went down on one knee and cautiously touched the rough fabric of her dress. She shivered, then groaned and muttered something. He withdrew his hand. His fingers were sticky with blood.

“Can you stand?”

“Gone,” she repeated.

He lifted her carefully until she was sitting, propped against the wall. Her swollen head dropped forward and he saw that her matted hair had left a damp mark on the stone. She had been whipped and badly beaten, and thrown out of the household to die.

N. P. N. l. A: Numerius Popidius Numerii libertus Ampliatus . Granted his freedom by the family Popidii. It was a fact of life that there was no crueler master than an ex-slave.

He pressed his fingers lightly to her neck to make sure she was still alive. Then he threaded one arm under the crook of her knees and with the other he grasped her round her shoulders. It cost him no effort to rise. She was mere rags and bones. Somewhere, in the streets close to the harbor, the night watchman was calling the fifth division of the darkness: “Media noctis inclinatio” —midnight.

The engineer straightened his back and set off down the hill as the day of Mars turned into the day of Mercury.

MERCURY

23 August

The day before the eruption

DILUCULUM

[06:00 hours]

Prior to A.D. 79, a reservoir of magma had accumulated beneath

the volcano. It is not possible to say when this magma chamber began

to form, but it had a volume of at least 3.6 cubic kilometres, was

about 3 km below the surface, and was compositionally stratified,

with volatile-rich alkalic magma (55 percent SiO 2and almost

10 per cent K 2O) overlying slightly denser, more mafic magma.

—PETER FRANCIS, VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

At the top of the great stone lighthouse, hidden beyond the ridge of the southern headland, the slaves were dousing the fires to greet the dawn. It was supposed to be a sacred place. According to Virgil, this was the ground where Misenus, the herald of the Trojans, slain by the sea god Triton, lay buried with his oars and trumpet.

Attilius watched the red glow fade beyond the tree-crested promontory, while in the harbor the outlines of the warships took shape against the pearl-gray sky.

He turned and walked back along the quay to where the others were waiting. He could make out their faces at last—Musa, Becco, Corvinus, Polites—they were becoming as familiar to him as family. No sign yet of Corax.

“Nine brothels!” Musa was saying. “Believe me, if you want to get laid, Pompeii’s the place. Even Becco can give his hand a rest for a change. Hey, aquarius!” he shouted, as Attilius drew closer. “Tell Becco he can get himself laid!”

The dockside stank of shit and gutted fish. Attilius could see a putrid melon and the bloated, whitened carcass of a rat lapping at his feet between the pillars of the wharf. So much for poets! He had a sudden yearning for one of those cold, northern seas he had heard about—the Atlantic, perhaps, or the Germanicum—a land where a deep tide daily swept the sand and rocks; some place healthier than this tepid Roman lake.

He said, “As long as we fix the Augusta, Becco can screw every girl in Italy for all I care.”

“There you go, Becco. Your prick will soon be as long as your nose—”

The ship the admiral had promised was moored before them: the Minerva, named for the goddess of wisdom, with an owl, the symbol of her deity, carved into her prow. A liburnian. Smaller than the big triremes. Built for speed. Her high sternpost reared out behind her, then curled across her low deck like the stinger of a scorpion preparing to strike. She was deserted.

“—Cuculla and Zmyrina. And then there’s this red-haired Jewess, Martha. And a little Greek girl, if you like that kind of thing—her mother’s barely twenty.”

“What use is a ship without a crew?” muttered Attilius. He was fretting already. He could not afford to waste an hour. “Polites—run to the barracks, there’s a good lad, and find out what’s happening.”

“Aegle and Maria . . .”

The young slave got to his feet.

“No need,” said Corvinus, and gestured with his head toward the entrance to the port. “Here they come.”

Attilius said, “Your ears must be sharper than mine,” but then he heard them, too. A hundred pairs of feet, doubling along the road from the military school. As the marchers crossed the wooden bridge of the causeway, the sharp rhythm became a continuous thunder of leather on wood, then a couple of torches appeared and the unit swung into the street leading to the harbor front. They came on, five abreast, three officers wearing body armor and crested helmets in the lead. At a first shout of command the column halted; at a second, it broke and the sailors moved toward the ship. None spoke. Attilius drew back to let them pass. In their sleeveless tunics, the misshapen shoulders and hugely muscled arms of the oarsmen appeared grotesquely out of proportion to their lower bodies.

“Look at them,” drawled the tallest of the officers. “The cream of the navy: human oxen.” He turned to Attilius and raised his fist in salute. “Torquatus, captain of the Minerva .”

“Marcus Attilius. Engineer. Let’s go.”

It did not take long to load the ship. Attilius had seen no point in dragging the heavy amphorae of quicklime and sacks of puteolanum down from the reservoir and ferrying them across the bay. If Pompeii was, as they decribed her, swarming with builders, he would use the admiral’s letter to commandeer what he needed. Tools, though, were a different matter. A man should always use his own tools.

He arranged a chain to pass them on board, handing each in turn to Musa, who threw them on to Corvinus—axes, sledgehammers, saws, picks and shovels, wooden trays to hold the fresh cement, hoes to mix it, and the heavy flatirons they used to pound it into place—until eventually it had all reached Becco, standing on the deck of the Minerva . They worked swiftly, without exchanging a word, and by the time they had finished it was light and the ship was making ready to sail.