Robert Harris - Pompeii

Corelia was sitting with her knees drawn up, watching him. “Well? What do they mean?”

He took his time answering. He felt tainted: the shame of one man, the shame of them all. And who could tell how high the rot had spread? But then he thought, No, it would not have gone right the way up to Rome , because if Rome had been a part of it, Aviola would never have sent me south to Misenum. “These look like the actual figures for the amount of water consumed in Pompeii.” He showed her the first papyrus. “Three hundred fifty thousand quinariae last year—that would be about right for a town of Pompeii’s size. And this second set of records I presume is the one that my predecessor, Exomnius, officially submitted to Rome. They wouldn’t know the difference, especially after the earthquake, unless they sent an inspector down to check. And this”—he did not try to hide his contempt as he flourished the third document—“is what your father paid him to keep his mouth shut.” She looked at him, bewildered. “Water is expensive,” he explained, “especially if you’re rebuilding half a town. ‘At least as valuable as money’—that’s what your father said to me.” No doubt it would have made the difference between profit and loss. Salve lucrum!

He rolled up the papyri. They must have been stolen from the squalid room above the bar. He wondered why Exomnius would have run the risk of keeping such an incriminating record so close to hand. But then he supposed that incrimination was precisely what Exomnius would have had in mind. They would have given him a powerful hold over Ampliatus: don’t ever think of trying to move against me—of silencing me, or cutting me out of the deal, or threatening me with exposure—because if I am ruined, I can ruin you with me.

Corelia said, “What about those two?”

The final pair of documents were so different from the others that it was as if they didn’t belong with them. They were much newer, for a start, and instead of figures they were covered in writing. The first was in Greek.

The summit itself is mostly flat, and entirely barren. The soil looks like ash, and there are cave-like pits of blackened rock, looking gnawed by fire. This area appears to have been on fire in the past and to have had craters of flame which were subsequently extinguished by a lack of fuel. No doubt this is the reason for the fertility of the surrounding area, as at Caetana, where they say that soil filled with the ash thrown up by Etna’s flames makes the land particularly good for vines. The enriched soil contains both material that burns and material that fosters production. When it is over-charged with the enriching substance it is ready to burn, as is the case with all sulphurous substances, but when this has been exuded and the fire extinguished the soil becomes ash-like and suitable for produce.

Attilius had to read it through twice, holding it to the torchlight, before he was sure he had the sense of it. He passed it to Corelia. “The summit?” The summit of what? Of Vesuvius, presumably—that was the only summit around here. But had Exomnius—lazy, aging, hard-drinking, whore-loving Exomnius—really found the energy to climb all the way up to the top of Vesuvius, in a drought, to record his impressions in Greek? It defied belief. And the language—“cave-like pits of blackened rock . . . fertility of the surrounding area”—didn’t sound like the voice of an engineer. It was too literary, not at all the sort of phrases that would come naturally to a man like Exomnius, who was surely no more fluent in the tongue of the Hellenes than Attilius was himself. He must have copied it from somewhere. Or had it copied for him. By one of the scribes in that public library on Pompeii’s forum, perhaps.

The final papyrus was longer, and in Latin. But the content was equally strange:

Lucilius, my good friend, I have just heard that Pompeii, the famous city in Campania, has been laid low by an earthquake which also disturbed all the adjacent districts. Also, part of the town of Herculaneum is in ruins and even the structures which are left standing are shaky. Neapolis also lost many private dwellings. To these calamities others were added: they say that a flock of hundreds of sheep were killed, statues were cracked, and some people were deranged and afterwards wandered about unable to help themselves.

I have said that a flock of hundreds of sheep were killed in the Pompeian district. There is no reason you should think this happened to those sheep because of fear. For they say that a plague usually occurs after a great earthquake, and this is not surprising. For many death-carrying elements lie hidden in the depths. The very atmosphere there, which is stagnant either from some flaw in the earth or from inactivity and the eternal darkness, is harmful to those breathing it. I am not surprised that sheep have been infected—sheep have a delicate constitution—the closer they carried their heads to the ground, since they received the afflatus of the tainted air near to the ground itself. If the air had come out in greater quantity it would have harmed people too; but the abundance of pure air extinguished it before it rose high enough to be breathed by people.

Again, the language seemed too flowery to be the work of Exomnius, the execution of the script too professional. In any case, why would Exomnius have claimed to have “just heard” about an earthquake that had happened seventeen years earlier? And who was Lucilius? Corelia had leaned across to read the document over his shoulder. He could smell her perfume, feel her breath on his cheek, her breast pressed against his arm. He said, “And you’re sure these were with the other papyri? They couldn’t have come from somewhere else?”

“They were in the same box. What do they mean?”

“And you didn’t see the man who brought the box to your father?”

Corelia shook her head. “I could only hear him. They talked about you. It was what they said that made me decide to find you.” She shifted fractionally closer to him and lowered her voice. “My father said he didn’t want you to come back from this expedition alive.”

“Is that so?” He made an effort to laugh. “And what did the other man say?”

“He said that it would not be a problem.”

Silence. He felt her hand touch his—her cool fingers on his raw cuts and scratches—and then she rested her head against his chest. She was exhausted. For a moment, for the first time in three years, he allowed himself to relish the sensation of having a woman’s body close to his.

So this is what it’s like to be alive, he thought. He had forgotten.

After a while she fell asleep. Carefully, so as not to wake her, he disengaged his arm from hers. He left her and walked back to the aqueduct.

The repair work had reached a decisive point. The slaves had stopped bringing debris up out of the tunnel and had started lowering bricks down into it. Attilius nodded warily to Brebix and Musa, who were standing talking together. Both men fell silent as he approached and glanced beyond him to the place where Corelia was lying, but he ignored their curiosity.

His mind was in a turmoil. That Exomnius was corrupt was no surprise—he had been resigned to that. And he had assumed his dishonesty explained his disappearance. But these other documents, this piece of Greek and this extract from a letter, these cast the mystery in a different light entirely. Now it seemed that Exomnius had been worried about the soil through which the Augusta passed—the sulfurous, tainted soil—at least three weeks before the aqueduct had been contaminated. Worried enough to look up a set of the original plans and to go researching in Pompeii’s library.