Robert Harris - Pompeii

She was shaking her head. “And what will you do?”

“Return to Misenum. Report to the admiral. If anyone can make sense of what is happening, he can.”

“Once you’re alone they’ll try to kill you.”

“I don’t think so. If they’d wanted to do that, they had plenty of chances last night. If anything, I’ll be safer. I have a horse. They’re on foot. They couldn’t catch me even if they tried.”

“I also have a horse. Take me with you.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why? I can ride.”

For a moment he played with the image of the two of them turning up in Misenum together. The daughter of the owner of the Villa Hortensia sharing his cramped quarters at the Piscina Mirabilis. Hiding her when Ampliatus came looking for her. How long would they get away with it? A day or two. And then what? The laws of society were as inflexible as the laws of engineering.

“Corelia, listen.” He took her hands. “If I could do anything to help you, in return for what you’ve done for me, I would. But this is madness, to defy your father.”

“You don’t understand.” Her grip on his fingers was ferocious. “I can’t go back. Don’t make me go back. I can’t bear to see him again, or to marry that man.”

“But you know the law. When it comes to marriage, you’re as much your father’s property as any one of those slaves over there.” What could he say? He hated the words even as he uttered them. “It may not turn out to be as bad as you fear.” She groaned, pulled away her hands, and buried her face in them. He blundered on. “We can’t escape our destiny. And, believe me, there are worse ones than marrying a rich man. You could be working in the fields and dead at twenty. Or a whore in the necropolis of Pompeii. Accept what has to happen. Live with it. You’ll survive. You’ll see.”

She gave him a long, slow look—contempt, was it, or hatred? “I swear to you, I sooner would be a whore.”

“And I swear you would not.” He spoke more sharply. “You’re young. What do you know of how people live?”

“I know I could not be married to someone I despised. Could you?” She glared at him. “Perhaps you could.”

He turned away. “No, Corelia.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“But you were married?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I was married. My wife is dead.”

That shut her up for a moment. “And did you despise her?”

“Of course not.”

“Did she despise you?”

“Perhaps she did.”

She was briefly silent again. “How did she die?”

He did not ever talk of it. He did not even think of it. And if, as sometimes happened, especially in the wakeful hours before dawn, his mind ever started off down that miserable road, he had trained himself to haul it back and set it on a different course. But now . . . there was something about her: she had got under his skin. To his astonishment, he found himself telling her.

“She looked something like you. And she had a temper, too, like yours.” He laughed briefly, remembering. “We were married three years.” It was madness; he couldn’t stop himself. “She was in childbirth. But the baby came from the womb feet first, like Agrippa. That’s what the name means—Agrippa, aegre partus, ‘born with difficulty’—did you know that? I thought at first it was a fine omen for a future aquarius, to be born like the great Agrippa. I was sure it was a boy. But the day went on—it was June in Rome, and hot: almost as hot as down here—and even with a doctor and two women in attendance, the baby would not move. And then she began to bleed.” He closed his eyes. “They came to me before nightfall. ‘Marcus Attilius, choose between your wife and your child!’ I said that I chose both. But they told me that was not to be, so I said—of course I said—‘My wife.’ I went into the room to be with her. She was very weak, but she disagreed. Arguing with me, even then! They had a pair of shears, you know—the sort that a gardener might use? And a knife. And a hook. They cut off one foot, and then the other, and used the knife to quarter the body, and then the hook to draw out the skull. But Sabina’s bleeding didn’t stop, and the next morning she also died. So I don’t know. Perhaps at the end she did despise me.”

He sent her back to Pompeii with Polites. Not because the Greek slave was the strongest escort available, or the best horseman, but because he was the only one Attilius trusted. He gave him Corvinus’s mount and told him not to let her out of his sight until she was safely home.

She went meekly in the end, with barely another word, and he felt ashamed of what he had said. He had silenced her well enough, but in a coward’s way—unmanly and self-pitying. Had ever an unctuous lawyer in Rome used a cheaper trick of rhetoric to sway a court than this ghastly parading of the ghosts of a dead wife and child? She swept her cloak around her and then flung her head back, flicking her long dark hair over her collar, and there was something impressive in the gesture: she would do as he asked but she would not accept that he was right. Never a glance in his direction as she swung herself easily into the saddle. She made a clicking sound with her tongue and tugged the reins and set off down the track behind Polites.

It took all his self-control not to run after her. A poor reward, he thought, for all the risks she took for me. But what else did she expect of him? And as for fate—the subject of his pious little lecture—he did believe in fate. One was shackled to it from birth as to a moving wagon. The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it—whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

Still, he felt sick as he watched her go, the sun brightening the landscape as the distance between them increased, so that he was able to watch her for a long time, until at last the horses passed behind a clump of olive trees, and she was gone.

In Misenum, the admiral was lying on his mattress in his windowless bedroom, remembering.

He was remembering the flat, muddy forests of Upper Germany, and the great oak trees that grew along the shore of the northern sea—if one could speak of a shore in a place where the sea and the land barely knew a boundary—and the rain and the wind, and the way that in a storm the trees, with a terrible splintering, would sometimes detach themselves from the bank, vast islands of soil trapped within their roots, and drift upright, their foliage spread like rigging, bearing down on the fragile Roman galleys. He could still see in his mind the sheet lightning and the dark sky and the pale faces of the Chauci warriors amid the trees, the smell of the mud and the rain, the terror of the trees crashing into the ships at anchor, his men drowning in that filthy barbarian sea.

He shuddered and opened his eyes to the dim light, hauled himself up, and demanded to know where he was. His secretary, sitting beside the couch next to a candle, his stylus poised, looked down at his wax tablet.

“We were with Domitius Corbulo, admiral,” said Alexion, “when you were in the cavalry, fighting the Chauci, in eight hundred.”

“Ah yes. Just so. The Chauci. I remember . . .”

But what did he remember? The admiral had been trying for months to write his memoirs—his final book, he was sure—and it was a welcome distraction from the crisis on the aqueduct to return to it. But what he had seen and done and what he had read or been told seemed nowadays to run together, in a kind of seamless dream. Such things he had witnessed! The empresses—Lollia Paulina, Caligula’s wife—sparkling like a fountain in the candlelight at her betrothal banquet, cascading with forty million sesterces’ worth of pearls and emeralds. And the Empress Agrippina, married to the drooling Claudius: he had seen her pass by in a cloak made entirely of gold. And gold mining he had watched, of course, when he was procurator in northern Spain—the miners cutting away at the mountainside, suspended by ropes, so that they looked, from a distance, like a species of giant birds pecking at the rock face. Such work, such danger—and to what end? Poor Agrippina, murdered here, in this very town, by Ancietus, his predecessor as admiral of the Misene Fleet, on the orders of her son, the Emperor Nero, who put his mother to sea in a boat that collapsed and then had her stabbed to death by sailors when she somehow struggled ashore. Stories! That was his problem. He had too many stories to fit into one book.