Robert Harris: Pompeii

“I wish I knew.”

“But surely Exomnius is still the aquarius?”

“No. As I said, I am now the aquarius.” The engineer was in no mood to pay his respects. Contemptible, stupid, cruel—on another occasion, perhaps, he would be delighted to pass on his compliments, but for now he did not have the time. “I must get back to Misenum. We have an emergency on the aqueduct.”

“What sort of emergency? Is it an omen?”

“You could say that.”

He made to go, but Ampliatus moved swiftly to one side, blocking his way. “You insult me,” he said. “On my property. In front of my family. And now you try to leave without offering any apology?” He brought his face so close to Attilius’s that the engineer could see the sweat beading above his thinning hairline. He smelled sweetly of crocus oil, the most expensive unguent. “Who gave you permission to come here?”

“If I have in any way offended you—” began Attilius. But then he remembered the wretched bundle in its shroud of sacking and the apology choked in his throat. “Get out of my way.”

He tried to push his way past, but Ampliatus grabbed his arm and someone drew a knife. Another instant, he realized—a single thrust—and it would all be over.

“He came because of me, father. I invited him.”

“What?”

Ampliatus wheeled around on Corelia. What he might have done, whether he would have struck her, Attilius would never know, for at that instant a terrible screaming started. Advancing along the ramp came the gray-headed woman. She had smeared her face, her arms, her dress, with her son’s blood and her hand was pointing straight ahead, the first and last of her bony brown fingers rigidly extended. She was shouting in a language Attilius did not understand. But then he did not need to: a curse is a curse in any tongue, and this one was directed straight at Ampliatus.

He let go of Attilius’s arm and turned to face her, absorbing the full force of it, with an expression of indifference. And then, as the torrent of words began to slacken, he laughed. There was silence for a moment, then the others began to laugh as well. Attilius glanced at Corelia, who gave an almost imperceptible nod and gestured with her eyes to the villa— I shall be all right, she seemed to be saying, go —and that was the last that he saw or heard, as he turned his back on the scene and started mounting the path up to the house, two steps, three steps at a time, running on legs of lead, like a man escaping in a dream.

HORA DUODECIMA

[18:48 hours]

Immediately before an eruption, there may be a marked increase

in the ratios S/C, SO 2/CO 2, S/Cl, as well as the total amount of

HCl. . . . A marked increase in the proportions of mantle

components is often a sign that magma has risen into a

dormant volcano and that an eruption may be expected.

— VOLCANOLOGY (SECOND EDITION)

An aqueduct was a work of man, but it obeyed the laws of nature. The engineers might trap a spring and divert it from its intended course, but once it had begun to flow, it ran, ineluctable, remorseless, at an average speed of two and a half miles per hour, and Attilius was powerless to prevent it polluting Misenum’s water.

He still carried one faint hope: that somehow the sulfur was confined to the Villa Hortensia; that the leak was in the pipework beneath the house; and that Ampliatus’s property was merely an isolated pocket of foulness on the beautiful curve of the bay.

That hope lasted for as long as it took him to sprint down the hill to the Piscina Mirabilis, to roust Corax from the barracks where he was playing a game of bones with Musa and Becco, to explain what had happened, and to wait impatiently while the overseer unlocked the door to the reservoir—at which moment it evaporated completely, wafted away by the same rank smell that he had detected in the pipe at the fishery.

“Dog’s breath!” Corax blew out his cheeks in disgust. “This must have been building up for hours.”

“Two hours.”

“Two hours?” The overseer could not quite disguise his satisfaction. “When you had us up in the hills on your fool’s errand?”

“And if we had been here? What difference could we have made?”

Attilius descended a couple of the steps, the back of his hand pressed to his nose. The light was fading. Out of sight, beyond the pillars, he could hear the aqueduct disgorging into the reservoir, but with nothing like its normal percussive force. It was as he had suspected at the fishery: the pressure was dropping, fast.

He called up to the Greek slave, Polites, who was waiting at the top of the steps, that he wanted a few things fetched—a torch, plans of the aqueduct’s mainline, and one of the stoppered bottles from the storeroom, which they used for taking water samples. Polites trotted off obediently and Attilius peered into the gloom, glad that the overseer could not see his expression, for a man was his face; the face the man.

“How long have you worked on the Augusta, Corax?”

“Twenty years.”

“Anything like this ever happen before?”

“Never. You’ve brought us all bad luck.”

Keeping one hand on the wall, Attilius made his way cautiously down the remaining steps to the reservoir’s edge. The splash of water falling from the mouth of the Augusta, together with the smell and the melancholy light of the day’s last hour, made him feel as if he were descending into hell. There was even a rowboat moored at his feet: a suitable ferry to carry him across the Styx.

He tried to make a joke of it, to disguise the panic that was fastening hold of him. “You can be my Charon,” he said to Corax, “but I don’t have a coin to pay you.”

“Well, then—you are doomed to wander in hell forever.”

That was funny. Attilius tapped his fist against his chest, his habit when thinking, then shouted back up toward the yard, “Polites! Get a move on!”

“Coming, aquarius!”

The slim outline of the slave appeared in the doorway, holding a taper and a torch. He ran down and handed them to Attilius, who touched the glowing tip to the mass of tow and pitch. It ignited with a wumph and a gust of oily heat. Their shadows danced on the concrete walls.

Attilius stepped carefully into the boat, holding the torch aloft, then turned to collect the rolled-up plans and the glass bottle. The boat was light and shallow-bottomed, used for maintenance work in the reservoir, and when Corax climbed aboard it dipped low in the water.

I must fight my panic, thought Attilius. I must be the master.

“If this had happened when Exomnius was here, what would he have done?”

“I don’t know. But I tell you one thing. He knew this water better than any man alive. He would have seen this coming.”

“Perhaps he did, and that was why he ran away.”

“Exomnius was no coward. He didn’t run anywhere.”

“Then where is he, Corax?”

“I’ve told you, pretty boy, a hundred times: I don’t know.”

The overseer leaned across, untied the rope from its mooring ring, and pushed them away from the steps, then turned to sit facing Attilius and took up the oars. His face in the torchlight was swarthy, guileful, older than his forty years. He had a wife and a brood of children crammed into an apartment across the street from the reservoir. Attilius wondered why Corax hated him so much. Was it simply that he had coveted the post of aquarius for himself and resented the arrival of a younger man from Rome? Or was there something more?

He told Corax to row them toward the center of the piscina and when they reached it he handed him the torch, uncorked the bottle, and rolled up the sleeves of his tunic. How often had he seen his father do this, in the subterranean reservoir of the Claudia and the Anio Novus on the Esquiline Hill? The old man had shown him how each of the matrices had its own flavor, as distinct from one another as different vintages of wine. The Aqua Marcia was the sweetest-tasting, drawn from the three clear springs of the River Anio; the Aqua Alsietina the foulest, a gritty lakewater, fit only for irrigating gardens; the Aqua Julia, soft and tepid; and so on. A good aquarius, his father had said, should know more than just the solid laws of architecture and hydraulics—he should have a taste, a nose, a feel for water, and for the rocks and soils through which it had passed on its journey to the surface. Lives might depend on this skill.