Robert Harris: Pompeii

A man must make such sense of it as he could.

He scratched his ear. “How far away is this villa?”

“Please. A few hundred paces. No distance at all.” She tugged at his arm, and he allowed himself to be pulled along. She was not an easy woman to resist, this Corelia Ampliata. Perhaps he ought at least to walk her back to her family? It was hardly safe for a woman of her age and class to be out in the streets of a naval town. He shouted over his shoulder to Corax to follow, but Corax shrugged—“Don’t interfere!” he repeated—and then Attilius, almost before he realized what was happening, was out of the gate and into the street, and the others were lost from sight.

It was that time of day, an hour or so before dusk, when the people of the Mediterranean begin emerging from their houses. Not that the town had lost much of its heat. The stones were like bricks from a kiln. Old women sat on stools beside their porches, fanning themselves, while the men stood at the bars, drinking and talking. Thickly bearded Bessians and Dalmatians, Egyptians with gold rings in their ears, redheaded Germans, olive-skinned Greeks and Cilicians, great muscled Nubians as black as charcoal and with eyes bloodshot by wine—men from every country of the empire, all of them desperate enough, or ambitious enough, or stupid enough, to be willing to trade twenty-five years of their lives at the oars in return for Roman citizenship. From somewhere down in the town, near the harbor front, came the piping notes of a water organ.

Corelia was mounting the steps quickly, her skirts gathered up in either hand, her slippers soft and soundless on the stone, the slave woman running on ahead. Attilius loped behind them. “ ‘A few hundred paces,’ ” he muttered to himself, “ ‘no distance at all’—yes, but every foot of the way uphill!” His tunic was glued to his back by his sweat.

They came at last to level ground and before them was a long high wall, dun-colored, with an arched gate set into it, surmounted by two wrought-iron dolphins leaping to exchange a kiss. The women hurried through the unguarded entrance, and Attilius, after a glance around, followed—plunging at once from noisy, dusty reality into a silent world of blue that knocked away his breath. Turquoise, lapis lazuli, indigo, sapphire—every jeweled blue that Mother Nature had ever bestowed—rose in layers before him, from crystal shallows, to deep water, to sharp horizon, to sky. The villa itself sprawled below on a series of terraces, its back to the hillside, its face to the bay, built solely for this sublime panorama. Moored to a jetty was a twenty-oared luxury cruiser, painted crimson and gold, with a carpeted deck to match.

He had little time to register much else, apart from this engulfing blueness, before they were off again, Corelia in front now, leading him down, past statues, fountains, watered lawns, across a mosaic floor inlaid with a design of sea creatures and out onto a terrace with a swimming pool, also blue, framed in marble, projecting toward the sea. An inflatable ball turned gently against the tiled surround, as if abandoned in midgame. He was suddenly struck by how deserted the great house seemed and when Corelia gestured to the balustrade, and he laid his hands cautiously on the stone parapet and leaned over, he saw why. Most of the household was gathered along the seashore.

It took a while for his mind to assemble all the elements of the scene. The setting was a fishery, as he had expected, but much bigger than he had imagined—and old, by the look of it, presumably built in the decadent last years of the republic, when keeping fish had first become the fashion—a series of concrete walls, extending out from the rocks, enclosing rectangular pools. Dead fish dappled the surface of one. Around the most distant, a group of men was staring at something in the water, an object that one of them was prodding with a boat hook—Attilius had to shield his eyes to make them out—and as he studied them more closely he felt his stomach hollow. It reminded him of the moment of the kill at the amphitheater—the stillness of it, the erotic complicity between crowd and victim.

Behind him, the old woman started making a noise—a soft ululation of grief and despair. He took a step backward and turned toward Corelia, shaking his head. He wanted to escape from this place. He longed to return to the decent, simple practicalities of his profession. There was nothing he could do here.

But she was in his way, standing very close. “Please,” she said. “Help her.”

Her eyes were blue, bluer even than Sabina’s had been. They seemed to collect the blueness of the bay and fire it back at him. He hesitated, set his jaw, then turned and reluctantly looked out to sea again.

He forced his gaze down from the horizon, deliberately skirting what was happening at the pool, let it travel back toward the shore, tried to appraise the whole thing with a professional eye. He saw wooden sluice gates. Iron handles to raise them. Metal lattices over some of the ponds to keep the fish from escaping. Gangways. Pipes. Pipes.

He paused, then swung around again to squint at the hillside. The rising and falling of the waves would wash through metal grilles, set into the concrete sides of the fish pools, beneath the surface, to prevent the pens becoming stagnant. That much he knew. But pipes —he cocked his head, beginning to understand—the pipes must carry freshwater down from the land, to mix with the seawater, to make it brackish. As in a lagoon. An artificial lagoon. The perfect conditions for rearing fish. And the most sensitive of fish to rear, a delicacy reserved only for the very rich, were red mullet.

He said quietly, “Where does the aqueduct connect to the house?”

Corelia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

It would have to be big, he thought. A place this size . . .

He knelt beside the swimming pool, scooped up a palmful of the warm water, tasted it, frowning, swilled it round in his mouth like a connoisseur of wine. It was clean, as far as he could judge. But then again, that might mean nothing. He tried to remember when he had last checked the outflow of the aqueduct. Not since the previous evening, before he went to bed.

“At what time did the fish die?”

Corelia glanced at the slave woman, but she was lost to their world. “I don’t know. Perhaps two hours ago?”

Two hours!

He vaulted over the balustrade onto the lower terrace beneath and started to stride toward the shore.

Down at the water’s edge, the entertainment had not lived up

to its promise. But then nowadays, what did? Ampliatus felt

increasingly that he had reached some point—age, was it, or wealth?—when the arousal of anticipation was invariably more exquisite than the emptiness of relief. The voice of the victim cries out, the blood spurts, and then—what? Just another death.

The best part had been the beginning: the slow preparation, followed by the long period when the slave had merely floated, his face just above the surface—very quiet now, not wanting to attract any attention from what was beneath him, concentrating, treading water. Amusing. Even so, time had dragged in the heat, and Ampliatus had started to think that this whole business with eels was overrated and that Vedius Pollio was not quite as stylish as he had imagined. But no: you could always rely on the aristocracy! Just as he was preparing to abandon the proceedings, the water had begun to twitch and then—plop!—the face had disappeared, like a fisherman’s plunging float, only to bob up again for an instant, wearing a look of comical surprise, and then vanish altogether. That expression, in retrospect, had been the climax. After that, it had all become rather boring and uncomfortable to watch in the heat of the sinking afternoon sun.