Robert Harris - Pompeii

“Good.” Attilius nodded. He smiled. He bent and grabbed Africanus by his belt again and dragged him out of the door.

“Teenage girls!” said Ampliatus, as the sound of Corelia’s footsteps died away. “It’s all just nerves before her wedding. Frankly, I’ll be glad, Popidius, when she’s your responsibility and not mine.” He saw his wife rise to follow her. “No, woman! Leave her!” Celsia lay down meekly, smiling apologetically to the other guests. Ampliatus frowned at her. He wished she would not do that. Why should she defer to her so-called betters? He could buy and sell them all!

He stuck his knife into the side of the eel and twisted it, then gestured irritably to the nearest slave to take over the carving. The fish stared up at him with blank red eyes. The emperor’s pet, he thought: a prince in its own little pond. Not anymore.

He dunked his bread in a bowl of vinegar and sucked it, watching the dexterous hand of the slave as he piled their plates with lumps of bony gray meat. Nobody wanted to eat it yet nobody wanted to be the first to refuse. An atmosphere of dyspeptic dread descended, as heavy as the air around the table, hot and stale with the smell of food. Ampliatus allowed the silence to hang. Why should he set them at their ease? When he was a slave at table, he had been forbidden to speak in the dining room in the presence of guests.

He was served first but he waited until the others had all had their golden dishes set in front of them before reaching out and breaking off a piece of fish. He raised it to his lips, paused, and glanced around the table, until, one by one, beginning with Popidius, they reluctantly followed his example.

He had been anticipating this moment all day. Vedius Pollio had thrown his slaves to his eels not only to enjoy the novelty of seeing a man torn apart underwater rather than by beasts in the arena, but also because, as a gourmet, he maintained that human flesh gave the morays a more piquant flavor. Ampliatus chewed carefully yet he tasted nothing. The meat was bland and leathery—inedible—and he felt the same sense of disappointment that he had experienced the previous afternoon by the seashore. Once again, he had reached out for the ultimate experience and once more he had grasped—nothing.

He scooped the fish out of his mouth with his fingers and threw it back on his plate in disgust. He tried to make light of it—“So, then! It seems that eels, like women, taste best when young!”—and grabbed for his wine to wash away the taste. But there was no disguising the fact that the pleasure had gone out of the afternoon. His guests were coughing politely into their napkins or picking the tiny bones out of their teeth and he knew they would all be laughing about him for days afterward, just as soon as they could get away, especially Holconius and that fat pederast, Brittius.

“My dear fellow, have you heard the latest about Ampliatus? He thinks that fish, like wine, improves with age!”

He drank more wine, swilling it around in his mouth, and was just contemplating getting up to propose a toast—to the emperor! to the army!—when he noticed his steward approaching the dining room carrying a small box. Scutarius hesitated, clearly not wanting to disturb his master with a business matter during a meal, and Ampliatus would indeed have told him to go to blazes, but there was something about the man’s expression . . .

He screwed up his napkin, got to his feet, nodded curtly to his guests, and beckoned to Scutarius to follow him into the tablinum. Once they were out of sight he flexed his fingers. “What is it? Give it here.”

It was a capsa, a cheap beechwood document case, covered in rawhide, of the sort a schoolboy might use to carry his books around in. The lock had been broken. Ampliatus flipped open the lid. Inside were a dozen small rolls of papyrus. He pulled out one at random. It was covered in columns of figures and for a moment Ampliatus squinted at it, baffled, but then the figures assumed a shape and he understood. “Where is the man who brought this?”

“Waiting in the vestibule, master.”

“Take him into the old garden. Have the kitchen serve dessert and tell my guests I shall return shortly.”

Ampliatus took the back route, behind the dining room and up the wide steps into the courtyard of his old house. This was the place he had bought ten years earlier, deliberately settling himself next door to the ancestral home of the Popidii. What a pleasure it had been to live on an equal footing with his former masters and to bide his time, knowing even then that one day, somehow, he would punch a hole in the thick garden wall and swarm through to the other side, like an avenging army capturing an enemy city.

He sat himself on the circular stone bench in the center of the garden, beneath the shade of a rose-covered pergola. This was where he liked to conduct his most private business. He could always talk here undisturbed. No one could approach him without being seen. He opened the box again and took out each of the papyri, then glanced up at the wide uncorrupted sky. He could hear Corelia’s goldfinches, chirruping in their rooftop aviary and, beyond them, the drone of the city coming back to life after the long siesta. The inns and the eating houses would be raking it in now as people poured into the streets ready for the sacrifice to Vulcan.

Salve lucrum!

Lucrum gaudium!

He did not look up as he heard his visitor approach.

“So,” he said, “it seems we have a problem.”

Corelia had been given the finches not long after the family had moved into the house, on her tenth birthday. She had fed them with scrupulous attention, tended them when they were sick, watched them hatch, mate, flourish, die, and now, whenever she wanted to be alone, it was to the aviary that she came. It occupied half the small balcony outside her room, above the cloistered garden. The top of the cage was sheeted as protection against the sun.

She was sitting, drawn up tightly in the shady corner, her arms clasped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees, when she heard someone come into the courtyard. She edged forward on her bottom and peered over the low balustrade. Her father had settled himself on the circular stone bench, a box beside him, and was reading through some papers. He laid the last one aside and stared at the sky, turning in her direction. She ducked her head back quickly. People said she resembled him: “Oh, she’s the image of her father!” And, since he was a handsome man, it used to make her proud.

She heard him say, “So, it seems we have a problem.”

She had discovered as a child that the cloisters played a peculiar trick. The walls and pillars seemed to capture the sound of voices and funnel them upward, so that even whispers, barely audible at ground level, were as distinct up here as speeches from the rostrum on election day. Naturally, this had only added to the magic of her secret place. Most of what she heard when she was growing up had meant nothing to her—contracts, boundaries, rates of interest—the thrill had simply been to have a private window on the adult world. She had never even told her brother what she knew, since it was only in the past few months that she had begun to decipher the mysterious language of her father’s affairs. And it was here, a month ago, that she had heard her own future being bargained away by her father with Popidius: so much to be discounted on the announcement of the betrothal, the full debt to be discharged once the marriage was transacted, the property to revert in the event of a failure to produce issue, said issue to inherit fully on coming of age . . .

“My little Venus,” he had used to call her. “My little brave Diana.”