Robert Harris - Pompeii

Attilius walked up the gangplank and jumped down to the deck. A line of marines with boat hooks was waiting to push her away from the quay. From his platform beneath the sternpost, next to the helmsman, Torquatus shouted down, “Are you ready, engineer?” and Attilius called back that he was. The sooner they left, the better.

“But Corax isn’t here,” objected Becco.

To hell with him, thought Attilius. It was almost a relief. He would manage the job alone. “That’s Corax’s problem.”

The mooring ropes were cast off. The boat hooks dropped like lances and connected with the dock. Beneath his feet, Attilius felt the deck shake as the oars were unshipped and the Minerva began to move. He looked back toward the shore. A crowd had gathered around the public fountain, waiting for the water to appear. He wondered if he should have stayed at the reservoir long enough to supervise the opening of the sluices. But he had left six slaves behind to run the piscina and the building was ringed by Pliny’s marines.

“There he is!” shouted Becco. “Look! It’s Corax!” He started waving his arms above his head. “Corax! Over here!” He gave Attilius an accusing look. “You see! You should have waited!”

The overseer had been slouching past the fountain, a bag across his shoulder, seemingly deep in thought. But now he looked up, saw them, and started to run. He moved fast for a man in his forties. The gap between the ship and the quay was widening quickly—three feet, four feet—and it seemed to Attilius impossible that he could make it, but when he reached the edge he threw his bag and then leaped after it, and a couple of the marines stretched out and caught his arms and hauled him aboard. He landed upright, close to the stern, glared at Attilius, and jerked his middle finger at him. The engineer turned away.

The Minerva was swinging out from the harbor, prow first, and sprouting oars, two dozen on either side of her narrow hull. A drum sounded below deck, and the blades dipped. It sounded again and they splashed the surface, two men pulling on each shaft. The ship glided forward—imperceptibly to begin with, but picking up speed as the tempo of the drumbeats quickened. The pilot, leaning out above the ramming post and staring straight ahead, pointed to the right, Torquatus called out an order, and the helmsman swung hard on the huge oar that served as a rudder, steering a course between two anchored triremes. For the first time in four days, Attilius felt a slight breeze on his face.

“You have an audience, engineer!” shouted Torquatus, and gestured toward the hill above the port. Attilius recognized the long white terrace of the admiral’s villa set amid the myrtle groves, and, leaning against the balustrade, the corpulent figure of Pliny himself. He wondered what was going through the old man’s mind. Hesitantly, he raised his arm. A moment later Pliny responded. Then the Minerva passed between the two great warships, the Concordia and the Neptune, and when he looked again the terrace was deserted.

In the distance, behind Vesuvius, the sun was starting to appear.

Pliny watched the liburnian gather speed as she headed toward open water. Against the gray, her oars stroked vivid flashes of white, stirring somewhere a long-forgotten memory of the leaden Rhine at daybreak—at Vetera, this must have been, thirty years ago—and the troop ferry of Legion V “The Larks” taking his cavalry to the far bank. Such times! What he would not give to embark again on a voyage at first light, or better still to command the fleet in action, a thing he had never done in his two years as admiral. But the effort of simply coming out of his library and onto the terrace to see the Minerva go—of rising from his chair and taking a few short steps—had left him breathless, and when he lifted his arm to acknowledge the wave of the engineer he felt as if he were hoisting an exercise weight.

“Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, hearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life.”

Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere; less easy when one was fifty-six and the enemy was advancing in full view across the plain.

He leaned his fat belly against the balustrade, hoping that neither of his secretaries had noticed his weakness, then pushed himself away and shuffled back inside.

He had always had a fondness for young men of Attilius’s kind. Not in the filthy Greek way, of course—he had never had time for any of that malarkey, although he had seen plenty of it in the army—but rather spiritually, as the embodiment of the muscular Roman virtues. Senators might dream of empires; soldiers might conquer them; but it was the engineers, the fellows who laid down the roads and dug out the aqueducts, who actually built them, and who gave to Rome her global reach. He promised himself that when the aquarius returned he would summon him to dinner and pick his brains to discover exactly what had happened to the Augusta. And then together they would consult some of the texts in the admiral’s library and he would teach him a few of the mysteries of nature, whose surprises were never-ending. These intermittent, harmonic tremors, for example—what were they? He should record the phenomenon and include it in the next edition of the Natural History . Every month he discovered something new that required explanation.

His two Greek slaves stood waiting patiently beside the table—Alcman for reading aloud, Alexion for dictation. They had been in attendance since soon after midnight, for the admiral had long ago disciplined himself to function without much rest. “To be awake is to be alive,” that was his motto. The only man he had ever known who could get by on less sleep was the late emperor Vespasian. They used to meet in Rome in the middle of the night to transact their official business. That was why Vespasian had put him in charge of the fleet: “my ever-vigilant Pliny,” he had called him, in that country bumpkin’s accent of his, and had pinched his cheek.

He glanced around the room at the treasures accumulated during his journeys across the empire. One hundred sixty notebooks, in which he had recorded every interesting fact he had ever read or heard (Larcius Licinius, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, had offered him four hundred thousand sesterces for the lot, but he had not been tempted). Two pieces of magnetite, mined in Dacia, and locked together by their mysterious magic. A lump of shiny gray rock from Macedonia, reputed to have fallen from the stars. Some German amber with an ancient mosquito imprisoned inside its translucent cell. A piece of concave glass, picked up in Africa, that gathered together the sun’s rays and aimed them to a point of such concentrated heat it would cause the hardest wood to darken and smoulder. And his water clock, the most accurate in Rome, built according to the specifications of Ctesibius of Alexandria, inventor of the water organ, its apertures bored through gold and gems to prevent corrosion and plugging.

The clock was what he needed. It was said that clocks were like philosophers: you could never find two that agreed. But a clock by Ctesibius was the Plato of timepieces.

“Alcman, fetch me a bowl of water. No—” He changed his mind when the slave was halfway to the door, for had not the geographer Strabo described the luxurious Bay of Neapolis as “the wine bowl”? “On second thoughts, wine would be more appropriate. But something cheap. A Surrentum, perhaps.” He sat down heavily. “All right, Alexion—where were we?”