Robert Harris: Pompeii

All manner of fish were kept, at vast expense, along the shoreline of the house—sea bass, with their woolly-white flesh; gray mullet, which required high walls around their pond to prevent them leaping to freedom; flatfish and parrot fish and giltheads; lampreys and congers and hake.

But by far the most expensive of Ampliatus’s aquatic treasures—he trembled to think how much he had paid for them, and he did not even much like fish—were the red mullet, the delicate and whiskered goatfish, notoriously difficult to keep, whose colors ran from pale pink to orange. And it was these that the slave had killed—whether by malice or incompetence, Ampliatus did not know, nor care, but there they were: clustered together in death as they had been in life, a multihued carpet floating on the surface of their pond, discovered earlier that afternoon. A few had still been alive when Ampliatus was shown the scene, but they had died even as he watched, turning like leaves in the depths of the pool and rising to join the others. Poisoned, every one. They would have fetched six thousand apiece at current market prices—one mullet being worth five times as much as the miserable slave who was supposed to look after them—and now they were fit only for the fire. Ampliatus had pronounced sentence immediately: “Throw him to the eels!”

The slave was screaming as they dragged and prodded him toward the edge of the pool. It was not his fault, he was shouting. It was not the food. It was the water. They should fetch the aquarius.

The aquarius!

Ampliatus screwed up his eyes against the glare of the sea. It was hard to make out the shapes of the writhing slave and of the two others holding him, or of the fourth, who held a boat hook like a lance and was jabbing it into the doomed man’s back—mere stick figures, all of them, in the haze of the heat and the sparkling waves. He raised his arm in the manner of an emperor, his fist clenched, his thumb parallel with the ground. He felt godlike in his power, yet full of simple human curiosity. For a moment he waited, tasting the sensation, then abruptly he twisted his wrist and jammed his thumb upward. Let him have it!

The piercing cries of the slave teetering on the side of the eel pond carried up from the seafront, across the terraces, over the swimming pool, and into the silent house where the women were hiding.

Corelia Ampliata had run to her bedroom, thrown herself down on the mattress, and pulled her pillow over her head, but there was no escaping the sound. Unlike her father, she knew the slave’s name—Hipponax, a Greek—and also the name of his mother, Atia, who worked in the kitchens, and whose lamentations, once they started, were even more terrible than his. Unable to bear the screams for more than a few moments, she sprang up again and ran through the deserted villa to find the wailing woman, who had sunk against a column in the cloistered garden.

Seeing Corelia, Atia clutched at her young mistress’s hem and began weeping at her slippered feet, repeating over and over that her son was innocent, that he had shouted to her as he was being carried away—it was the water, the water, there was something wrong with the water. Why would nobody listen to him?

Corelia stroked Atia’s gray hair and tried to make such soothing noises as she could. There was little else that she could do. Useless to appeal to her father for clemency—she knew that. He listened to nobody, least of all to a woman, and least of all women to his daughter, from whom he expected an unquestioning obedience—an intervention from her would only make the death of the slave doubly certain. To Atia’s pleas she could only reply that there was nothing she could do.

At this, the old woman—in truth she was in her forties, but Corelia thought of slave years as being like dog years, and she appeared at least sixty—suddenly broke away and roughly dried her eyes on her arm.

“I must find help.”

“Atia, Atia,” said Corelia gently, “who will give it?”

“He shouted for the aquarius. Didn’t you hear him? I shall fetch the aquarius.”

“And where is he?”

“He may be at the aqueduct down the hill, where the watermen work.”

She was on her feet now, trembling but determined, staring around her wildly. Her eyes were red, her dress and hair disordered. She looked like a madwoman and Corelia saw at once that no one would pay her any attention. They would laugh at her, or drive her off with stones.

“I’ll come with you,” she said, and as another terrible scream rose from the waterfront Corelia gathered up her skirts with one hand, grabbed the old woman’s wrist with the other, and together they fled through the garden, past the empty porter’s stool, out of the side door, and into the dazzling heat of the public road.

The terminus of the Aqua Augusta was a vast underground reservoir, a few hundred paces south of the Villa Hortensia, hewn into the slope overlooking the port and known, for as long as anyone could remember, as the Piscina Mirabilis—the Pool of Wonders.

Viewed from the outside, there was nothing particularly wonderful about her and most of the citizens of Misenum passed her without a second glance. She appeared on the surface as a low, flat-roofed building of red brick, festooned with pale-green ivy, a city block long and half a block wide, surrounded by shops and storerooms, bars and apartments, hidden away in the dusty back streets above the naval base.

Only at night, when the noise of the traffic and the shouts of the tradesmen had fallen silent, was it possible to hear the low, subterranean thunder of falling water, and only if you went into the yard, unlocked the narrow wooden door, and descended a few steps into the piscina itself was it possible to appreciate the reservoir’s full glory. The vaulted roof was supported by forty-eight pillars, each more than fifty feet high—although most of their length was submerged by the waters of the reservoir—and the echo of the aqueduct hammering into the surface was enough to shake your bones.

The engineer could stand here, listening and lost in thought, for hours. The percussion of the Augusta sounded in his ears not as a dull and continuous roar but as the notes of a gigantic water organ: the music of civilization. There were air shafts in the piscina’s roof, and in the afternoons, when the foaming spray leaped in the sunlight and rainbows danced between the pillars—or in the evenings, when he locked up for the night and the flame of his torch shone across the smooth black surface like gold splashed on ebony—in those moments, he felt himself to be not in a reservoir at all, but in a temple dedicated to the only god worth believing in.

Attilius’s first impulse on coming down from the hills and into the yard at the end of that afternoon was to check the level of the reservoir. It had become his obsession. But when he tried the door he found it was locked and then he remembered that Corax was carrying the key on his belt. He was so tired that for once he thought no more about it. He could hear the distant rumble of the Augusta—she was running: that was all that counted—and later, when he came to analyze his actions, he decided he could not really reproach himself for any dereliction of duty. There was nothing he could have done. Events would have worked out differently for him personally, that was true—but that hardly mattered in the larger context of the crisis.

So he turned away from the piscina and glanced around the deserted yard. The previous evening he had ordered that the space be tidied and swept while he was away, and he was pleased to see that this had been done. There was something reassuring to him about a well-ordered yard. The neat stacks of lead sheets, the amphorae of lime, the sacks of puteolanum, the ruddy lengths of terra-cotta pipe—these were the sights of his childhood. The smells, too—the sharpness of the lime; the dustiness of fired clay left out all day in the sun.