Robert Harris - Pompeii

“How deep is it now?”

“Fifteen feet, admiral,” said the slave.

Pliny contemplated his reflection. “ ‘There has never been anything more remarkable in the whole world,’ ” he murmured.

“What was that, uncle?”

“ ‘When we consider the abundant supplies of water in public buildings, baths, pools, open channels, private houses, gardens, and country estates, and when we think of the distances traversed by the water before it arrives, the raising of arches, the tunneling of mountains and the building of level routes across deep valleys, then we shall readily admit that there has never been anything more remarkable than our aqueducts in the whole world.’ I quote myself, I fear. As usual.” He pulled back his head. “Allow half the water to drain away tonight. We shall let the rest go in the morning.”

“And then what?”

“And then, my dear Gaius? And then we must hope for a better day tomorrow.”

In Pompeii, the fire for Vulcan was to be lit as soon as it was dark. Before that, there was to be the usual entertainment in the forum, supposedly paid for by Popidius, but in reality funded by Ampliatus—a bullfight, three pairs of skirmishing gladiators, some boxers in the Greek style. Nothing too elaborate, just an hour or so of diversion for the voters while they waited for the night to arrive, the sort of spectacle an aedile was expected to lay on in return for the privilege of office.

Corelia feigned sickness.

She lay on her bed, watching the lines of light from the closed shutters creep slowly up the wall as the sun sank, thinking about the conversation she had overheard, and about the engineer Attilius. She had noticed the way he looked at her, both in Misenum yesterday, and this morning, when she was bathing. Lover, avenger, rescuer, tragic victim—in her imagination she pictured him briefly in all these parts, but always the fantasy dissolved into the same brutal coupling of facts: she had brought him into the orbit of her father and now her father was planning to kill him. His death would be her fault.

She listened to the sounds of the others preparing to leave. She heard her mother calling for her, and then her footsteps on the stairs. Quickly she felt for the feather she had hidden under her pillow. She opened her mouth and tickled the back of her throat, vomited noisily, and when Celsia appeared she wiped her lips and gestured weakly to the contents of the bowl.

Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress and put her hand on Corelia’s brow. “Oh my poor child. You feel hot. I should send for the doctor.”

“No, don’t trouble him.” A visit from Pumponius Magonianus, with his potions and purges, was enough to make anyone ill. “Sleep is all I need. It was that endless, awful meal. I ate too much.”

“But my dear, you hardly ate a thing!”

“That’s not true—”

“Hush!” Her mother held up a warning finger. Someone else was mounting the steps, with a heavier tread, and Corelia braced herself for a confrontation with her father. He would not be so easy to fool. But it was only her brother, in his long white robes as a priest of Isis. She could smell the incense on him.

“Hurry up, Corelia. He’s shouting for us.”

No need to say who “he” was.

“She’s ill.”

“Is she? Even so, she must still come. He won’t be happy.”

Ampliatus bellowed from downstairs and they both jumped. They glanced toward the door.

“Yes, can’t you make an effort, Corelia?” said her mother. “For his sake?”

Once, the three of them had formed an alliance: had laughed about him behind his back—his moods, his rages, his obsessions. But lately that had stopped. Their domestic triumvirate had broken apart under his relentless fury. Individual strategies for survival had been adopted. Corelia had observed her mother become the perfect Roman matron, with a shrine to Livia in her dressing room, while her brother had subsumed himself in his Egyptian cult. And she? What was she supposed to do? Marry Popidius and take a second master? Become more of a slave in the household than Ampliatus had ever been?

She was too much her father’s daughter not to fight.

“Run along, both of you,” she said, bitterly. “Take my bowl of vomit and show it to him, if you like. But I’m not going to his stupid spectacle.” She rolled onto her side and faced the wall. Another roar came from below.

Her mother breathed her martyr’s sigh. “Oh, very well. I’ll tell him.”

It was exactly as the engineer had suspected. Having led them almost directly north toward the summit for a couple of miles, the aqueduct spur suddenly swung eastward, just as the ground began to rise toward Vesuvivus. The road turned with it and for the first time they had their backs to the sea and were pointing inland, toward the distant foothills of the Apenninus.

The Pompeii spur wandered away from the road more often now, hugging the line of the terrain, weaving back and forth across their path. Attilius relished this subtlety of aqueducts. The great Roman roads went crashing through nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards—any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant—they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view. Sometimes it was only the eagles, soaring in the hot air above some lonely mountainscape, who could appreciate the true majesty of what men had wrought.

They had passed through the gridwork of centuriated fields and were entering into the wine country, owned by the big estates. The ramshackle huts of the smallholders on the plain, with their tethered goats and their half dozen ragged hens pecking in the dust, had given way to handsome farmhouses with red-tile roofs that dotted the lower slopes of the mountain.

Surveying the vineyards from his horse, Attilius felt almost dazed by the vision of such abundance, such astonishing fertility, even in the midst of a drought. He was in the wrong business. He should give up water and go into wine. The vines had escaped from ordinary cultivation and had fastened themselves onto every available wall and tree, reaching to the top of the tallest branches, enveloping them in luxuriant cascades of green and purple. Small white faces of Bacchus, made of marble to ward off evil, with perforated eyes and mouths, hung motionless in the still air, peering from the foliage like ambushers ready to strike. It was harvesttime and the fields were full of slaves—slaves on ladders, slaves bent halfway to the ground by the weight of the baskets of grapes on their backs. But how, he wondered, could they possibly manage to gather it all in before it rotted?

They came to a large villa looking out across the plain to the bay and Brebix asked if they could stop for a rest.

“All right. But not for long.”

Attilius dismounted and stretched his legs. When he wiped his forehead the back of his hand came away gray with dust and when he tried to drink he found that his lips were caked. Polites had bought a couple of loaves and some greasy sausages and he ate hungrily. Astonishing, always, the effects of a bit of food on an empty stomach. He felt his spirits lift with each mouthful. This was always where he preferred to be—not in some filthy town, but out in the country, with the hidden veins of civilization, beneath an honest sky. He noticed that Brebix was sitting alone and he went over and broke off half a loaf for him and held it out, along with a couple of sausages. A peace offering.

Brebix hesitated, nodded, and took them. He was naked to the waist, his sweating torso crisscrossed with scars.