Robert Harris: Pompeii

Torquatus hefted the rock in his hand. “Outside? Into this?”

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Pomponianus started to wail that they were finished, that they should have sacrificed to Jupiter as he had suggested right at the beginning, but that nobody ever listened to him.

“Shut up,” said his wife. “We have cushions, don’t we? And pillows and sheets? We can protect ourselves from rocks.”

Torquatus said, “Where’s the admiral?”

“Asleep.”

“He’s resigned himself to death, hasn’t he? All that nonsense about wine! But I’m not ready to die, are you?”

“No.” Attilius was surprised by the firmness of his answer. After Sabina had died, he had gone on numbly, and if he had been told his existence was about to end, he would not have cared much one way or the other. He didn’t feel that way now.

“Then let’s return to the beach.”

Livia was shouting to the slaves to fetch pillows and linen as Attilius hurried back into the courtyard. He could still hear Pliny’s snores. He banged on the door and tried to open it but even in the short time he had been away the path had filled again with debris. He had to kneel to clear it, then dragged open the door and ran in with his torch. He shook the admiral’s fleshy shoulder and the old man groaned and blinked in the light.

“Let me be.”

He tried to roll back on his side. Attilius did not argue with him. He hooked his elbow under Pliny’s armpit and hauled him to his feet. Staggering under the weight, he pushed the protesting admiral toward the door and they were barely across the threshold when he heard one of the ceiling beams crack behind them and part of the roof came crashing to the floor.

They put the pillows on their heads crossways, so that the ends covered their ears, and tied them in place with strips torn from the sheets, knotting them tightly under their chins. Their bulging white heads gave them the look of blind subterranean insects. Then each collected a torch or a lamp and with one hand on the shoulder of the person in front—apart from Torquatus, who took the lead and who was wearing his helmet rather than a pillow—they set off to walk the gauntlet down to the beach.

All around them was a fury of noise—the heaving sea, the blizzard of rock, the boom of roofs giving way. Occasionally Attilius felt the muffled thump of a missile striking his skull and his ears rang as they had not done since he had been beaten by his teachers as a child. It was like being stoned by a mob—as if the deities had voted Vulcan a triumph and this painful procession, stripped of all human dignity, was how he chose to humiliate his captives. They edged forward slowly, sinking up to their knees in the loose pumice, unable to move any faster than the admiral, whose coughing and wheezing seemed to worsen each time he stumbled forward. He was holding on to Alexion and being held on to by Attilius; behind the engineer came Livia and, behind her, Pomponianus, with the slaves forming a line of torches at the back.

The force of the bombardment had cleared the road of refugees but down on the beach there was a light and it was toward this that Torquatus led them. A few of the citizens of Stabiae and some of the men of the Minerva had broken up one of the useless ships and set it on fire. With ropes, the heavy sail from the liburnian, and a dozen oars they had built themselves a large shelter beside the blaze. People who had been fleeing along the coast had come down from the road, begging for protection, and a crowd of several hundred was jostling for cover. They did not want to let the repulsive-looking newcomers share their makeshift tent and there was some jeering and scuffling around the entrance until Torquatus shouted that he had Admiral Pliny with him and would crucify any marine who refused to obey his orders.

Grudgingly, room was made, and Alexion and Attilius lowered Pliny to the sand just inside the entrance. He asked weakly for some water and Alexion took a gourd from a slave and held it to his lips. He swallowed a little, coughed, and lay down on his side. Alexion gently untied the pillow and placed it under his head. He glanced up at Attilius. The engineer shrugged. He did not know what to say. It seemed to him unlikely that the old man could survive much more of this.

He turned away and peered into the interior of the shelter. People were wedged together, barely able to move. The weight of the pumice was causing the roof to dip and from time to time a couple of the sailors cleared it by lifting it with the ends of their oars, tipping the stones away. Children were crying. One boy sobbed for his mother. Otherwise nobody spoke or shouted. Attilius tried to work out what time it was—he assumed it must be the middle of the night, but then again it would be impossible to tell even if it were dawn—and he wondered how long they could endure. Sooner or later, hunger or thirst, or the pressure of the pumice rising on either side of their tent, would force them to abandon the beach. And then what? Slow suffocation by rock? A death more drawn-out and ingenious than anything man had ever devised in the arena? So much for Pliny’s belief that nature was a merciful deity!

He tugged the pillow from his sweating head and it was as his face was uncovered that he heard someone croaking his name. In the crowded near darkness he could not make out who it was at first, and even when the man thrust his way toward him he did not recognize him, since he seemed to be made of stone, his face chalk-white with dust, his hair raised in spikes, like Medusa’s. Only when he spoke his name—“It’s me, Lucius Popidius”—did he realize that it was one of the aediles of Pompeii.

Attilius seized his arm. “Corelia? Is she with you?”

“My mother—she collapsed on the road.” Popidius was weeping. “I couldn’t carry her any longer. I had to leave her.”

Attilius shook him. “Where’s Corelia?”

Popidius’s eyes were blank holes in the mask of his face. He looked like one of the ancestral effigies on the wall of his house. He swallowed hard.

“You coward,” said Attilius.

“I tried to bring her,” whined Popidius. “But that madman had locked her in her room.”

“So you abandoned her?”

“What else could I do? He wanted to imprison us all!” He clutched at Attilius’s tunic. “Take me with you. That’s Pliny over there, isn’t it? You’ve got a ship? For pity’s sake—I can’t go on alone.”

Attilius pushed him away and stumbled toward the entrance of the tent. The bonfire had been crushed to extinction by the rain of rocks and now that it had gone out the darkness on the beach was not even the darkness of night but of a closed room. He strained his eyes toward Pompeii. Who was to say that the whole world wasn’t in the process of being destroyed? That the very force that held the universe together—the logos, as the philosophers called it—wasn’t disintegrating? He dropped to his knees and dug his hands into the sand and he knew at that moment, even as the grains squeezed through his fingers, that everything would be annihilated—himself, and Pliny, Corelia, the library at Herculaneum, the fleet, the cities around the bay, the aqueduct, Rome, Caesar, everything that had ever lived or ever been built: everything would eventually be reduced to a shoal of rock and an endlessly pounding sea. None of them would leave so much as a footprint behind them; they wouldn’t even leave a memory. He would die here on the beach with the rest and their bones would be crushed to powder.

But the mountain had not done with them yet. He heard a woman scream and raised his eyes. Faint and miraculous, far in the distance and yet growing in intensity, he saw a corona of fire in the sky.

VENUS

25 August