Robert Harris - Pompeii

Brebix offered him the rope. Attilius refused it. “No. You go. I’ll stay down and see what else can be done.” He realized Brebix was looking at him as if he were mad. “I’ll fasten the rope around me for safety. When you get to the top, untie it from the wagon and pay out enough for me to reach the end of the tunnel. Keep a firm hold.”

Brebix shrugged. “Your choice.”

As he turned to climb, Attilius caught his arm. “You are strong enough to hold me, Brebix?”

The gladiator grinned briefly. “You—and your fucking mother!”

Despite his weight, Brebix ascended the rope as nimbly as a monkey, and then Attilius was alone. As he knotted the rope around his waist for a second time he thought that perhaps he was mad, but there seemed no alternative, for until the tunnel was drained they could not repair it, and he did not have the time to wait for all the water to seep through the obstruction. He tugged on the rope. “All right, Brebix?”

“Ready!”

He picked up his torch and began moving back along the tunnel, the water above his ankles now, sloshing around his shins as he stepped over the abandoned tools and baskets. He moved slowly, so that Brebix could pay out the rope, and by the time he reached the debris he was sweating, from nerves as much as from the heat. He could sense the weight of the Augusta behind it. He transferred the torch to his left hand and with his right began pulling at the exposed end of a brick that was level with his face, working it up and down and from side to side. A small gap was what he needed: a controlled release of pressure from somewhere near the top. At first the brick wouldn’t budge. Then water started to bubble around it and suddenly it shot through his fingers, propelled by a jet that fired it past his head, so close that it grazed his ear.

He cried out and backed away as the area around the leak bulged then sprang apart, peeling outward and downward in a V—all of this occurring in an instant, yet somehow slowly enough for him to register each individual stage of the collapse—before a wall of water descended over him, smashing him backward, knocking the torch out of his hand and submerging him in darkness. He hurtled underwater very fast—on his back, headfirst—swept along the tunnel, scrabbling for a purchase on the smooth cement render of the matrix, but there was nothing he could grip. The surging current rolled him, flipped him over onto his stomach, and he felt a flash of pain as the rope snapped tight beneath his ribs, folding him and jerking him upward, grazing his back against the roof. For a moment he thought he was saved, only for the rope to go slack again and for him to plunge to the bottom of the tunnel, the current sweeping him on—on like a leaf in a gutter—on into the darkness.

NOCTE CONCUBIA

[22:07 hours]

Many observers have commented on the tendency for eruptions

to be initiated or become stronger at times of full moon

when the tidal stresses in the crust are greatest.

— VOLCANOLOGY (SECOND EDITION)

Ampliatus had never cared much for Vulcanalia. The festival marked that point in the calendar when nights fell noticeably earlier and mornings had to start by candlelight: the end of the promise of summer and the start of the long, melancholy decline into winter. And the ceremony itself was distasteful. Vulcan dwelled in a cave beneath a mountain and spread devouring fire across the earth. All creatures went in fear of him, except for fish, and so—on the principle that gods, like humans, desire most that which is least attainable—he had to be appeased by a sacrifice of fish thrown alive onto a burning pyre.

It was not that Ampliatus was entirely lacking in religious feeling. He always liked to see a good-looking animal slaughtered—the placid manner of a bull, say, as it plodded toward the altar, and the way it stared at the priest so bemusedly; then the stunning and unexpected blow from the assistant’s hammer and the flash of the knife as its throat was cut; the way it fell, as stiff as a table, with its legs sticking out; the crimson gouts of blood congealing in the dust and the yellow sac of guts boiling from its slit belly for inspection by the haruspices. Now that was religious. But to see hundreds of small fish tossed into the flames by the superstitious citizenry as they filed past the sacred fire, to watch the silvery bodies writhing and springing in the heat: there was nothing noble in it as far as he was concerned.

And it was particularly tedious this year because of the record numbers who wished to offer a sacrifice. The endless drought, the failure of springs and the drying of wells, the shaking of the ground, the apparitions seen and heard on the mountain—all this was held to be the work of Vulcan, and there was much apprehension in the town. Ampliatus could see it in the reddened, sweating faces of the crowd as they shuffled around the edge of the forum, staring into the fire. The fear in the air was palpable.

He was not in a good position. The rulers of the town, as tradition demanded, were gathered on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter—the magistrates and the priests at the front, the members of the Ordo, including his own son, grouped behind, whereas Ampliatus, as a freed slave, with no official recognition, was invariably banished by protocol to the back. Not that he minded. On the contrary. He relished the fact that power, real power, should be kept hidden: an invisible force that permitted the people these civic ceremonials while all the time jerking the participants as if they were marionettes. Besides, and this was what was truly exquisite, most people knew that it was actually he—that fellow standing third from the end in the tenth row—who really ran the town. Popidius and Cuspius, Holconius and Brittius—they knew it, and he felt that they squirmed, even as they acknowledged the tribute of the mob. And most of the mob knew it, too, and were all the more respectful toward him as a result. He could see them searching out his face, nudging and pointing.

“That’s Ampliatus,” he imagined them saying, “who rebuilt the town when the others ran away! Hail Ampliatus! Hail Ampliatus! Hail Ampliatus!”

He slipped away before the end.

Once again, he decided he would walk rather than ride in his litter, passing down the steps of the temple between the ranks of the spectators—a nod bestowed here, an elbow squeezed there—along the shadowy side of the building, under the triumphal arch of Tiberius and into the empty street. His slaves carried his litter behind him, acting as a bodyguard, but he was not afraid of Pompeii after dark. He knew every stone of the town, every hump and hollow in the road, every storefront, every drain. The vast full moon and the occasional streetlight—another of his innovations—showed him the way home clearly enough. But it was not just Pompeii’s buildings he knew. It was its people, and the mysterious workings of its soul, especially at elections: five neighborhood wards—Forenses, Campanienses, Salinienses, Urbulanenses, Pagani—in each of which he had an agent; and all the craft guilds—the laundrymen, the bakers, the fishermen, the perfume makers, the goldsmiths, and the rest—again, he had them covered. He could even deliver half the worshippers of Isis, his temple, as a block vote. And in return for easing whichever booby he selected into power he received those licenses and permits, planning permissions and favorable judgments in the basilica that were the invisible currency of power.

He turned down the hill toward his house—his houses, he should say—and stopped for a moment to savor the night air. He loved this town. In the early morning the heat could feel oppressive, but usually, from the direction of Capri, a line of dark-blue rippling waves would soon appear and by the fourth hour a sea breeze would be sweeping over the city, rustling the leaves, and for the rest of the day Pompeii would smell as sweet as spring. True, when it was hot and listless, as it was tonight, the grander people complained that the town stank. But he almost preferred it when the air was heavier—the dung of the horses in the streets, the urine in the laundries, the fish-sauce factories down in the harbor, the sweat of twenty thousand human bodies crammed within the city walls. To Ampliatus this was the smell of life: of activity, money, profit.