On a rise beyond the town they turned to look at the scene behind them. The cone of Vesuvius was almost hidden by a dense mass of gas and pulverized rock. A blizzard of grey ash was falling on Pompeii and a great darkness was moving across the land.
Cy urged the horses on. ‘Faster! Faster!’ he cried.
‘Here!’ shouted Rhea Silvia. ‘We turn here!’
Cy saw an unpaved road branching to the right and dragged the horses to a standstill. With Linus’s help he managed to turn their heads and they set off down the lane at a fast trot. Soon the road disappeared into rough hilly terrain and he realized that they would have to get out and walk.
A hot sulphurous wind was howling through the olive trees scattered about the hillside. Wrapped in their cloaks with the wet cloths against their mouths, the refugees were almost doubled up against it.
‘Can we rest?’ asked Rhea Silvia.
‘No,’ said Cy. ‘It will get worse. In a few hours there will be a hurricane which will destroy everything before it.’
In the distance, through the murk they could see the mountain of Vesuvius. From the centre of an enormous red and black cloud lightning arced, flashing silver and blinding white. The appearance of the boiling column of smoke was changing. It was condensing, beginning to drop . . .
‘Hurry! Hurry!’ cried Cy. ‘You must get into a boat. Then the wind will blow you to safety.’
‘I need to stop for a minute,’ puffed the Dream Master.
Rhea Silvia and Linus stopped.
‘Go on! Go on!’ Cy cried to them.
They turned and kept climbing.
Cy took a few deep breaths and went to help the Dream Master. He grabbed the little man by both arms, hauled him to his feet and began to push him up the hill ahead of him. As he did so Cy looked up. Against the skyline he could just make out two figures. They were there! With her arm around her brother, Rhea Silvia had reached the top of the cliffs!
CHAPTER XIX
‘EXCUSE ME! CAN I talk to you?’
Cy turned round. A small bespectacled figure in a pointed hat was running to catch him up.
‘Wait!’ Cy called after the Dream Master.
‘What is it now?’ the little man asked wearily.
Cy pointed at the boy, whose round glasses were falling off the end of his nose. ‘He says his name is Larry Trotter and he knows the secret of Marzipan.’
The Dream Master reached up and rapped Cy on the top of his head. ‘You do get things confused in there, don’t you?’
Cy turned back but the boy had disappeared and a large owl was sitting where he had been.
‘Concentrate!’ gasped the Dream Master. ‘Don’t lose this Storyline. Save that one for another Time.’
Cy thought really hard. The owl winked and was gone.
‘When we get back I will take a long rest,’ said the Dream Master. ‘A very long rest.’
Cy thought for a minute. He held out his hand. ‘If it would help at all, you can have my piece of dreamsilk,’ he said.
‘It has a force of its own,’ said the Dream Master. ‘I cannot control it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t you understand?’
There was a look on the Dream Master’s face that Cy had not seen before. Regret? Pride?
‘It is yours, Cy. It belongs to you.’
Linus and Rhea Silvia were waiting for them at the top of the cliff.
‘I never thought that the sight of the sea would be so welcome,’ said Rhea Silvia.
Cy looked down in the direction she was pointing. Below and to the left he could see the Mediterranean. The water was troubled and moved in moody swirls at the base of the cliffs. But it was clear enough to make out, and . . .
Cy gripped Linus’s arm. ‘Do you see it?’ he cried out. ‘There is a boat!’
They squinted through the drifting fog. On the sand at the water’s edge was a small boat of the kind used by the shell fishermen. Small enough for Linus and Rhea Silvia to sail, but large enough to take them far away from the shore and any danger.
Linus lay flat on the cliff edge. ‘There is a path,’ he said. ‘A rough way worn down by goats, no doubt, but we will follow it.’
‘I need to leave you here,’ said Cy.
‘We understand,’ said Rhea Silvia. ‘You must go and look for your sister.’
‘Sister?’ said Cy. ‘Oh, yes.’ He remembered that Linus and Rhea Silvia believed Lauren to be a slave in a villa outside the town.
‘We will go to your country, to Britain.’ Rhea Silvia put her arm around her brother. ‘I would like to live in a land where there are no volcanoes.’
‘What about your parents?’ asked Cy.
‘We will find them and tell them,’ said Rhea Silvia.
Linus nodded.
It seemed that the parents of ancient Rome had little to do with their children, thought Cy. Or was it that the children grew up much more quickly?
Rhea Silvia spoke again. ‘Cyrus, I declare that you are a free man.’
The three friends looked at each other. Cy felt his dream waver and was aware that the landscape was drifting. His piece of dreamsilk must be fading.
I have to leave them, Cy thought, and quickly. He knew that he should hurry if he was to take the Dream Master safely back to the twenty-first century to be reunited with his dreamcloak.
‘We must say farewell,’ said Cy sadly.
‘We have a saying,’ said Linus. ‘Ave. It means both “hail” and “farewell”. I hope that, though we say farewell now, sometime we may again say hail to each other.’
‘We too have a saying,’ said Cy, ‘which is almost the same. “See you later.”’
‘Ave.’ Linus reached out until his fingers touched Cy’s own. ‘See you later.’
‘Ave, Cyrus.’ Rhea Silvia too stretched out her hand to Cy.
‘Ave,’ replied Cy.
CHAPTER XX
‘NOT BAD,’ SAID the Dream Master. ‘Not bad at all.’
The Dream Master sat cross-legged on Cy’s bed. He nodded in approval. ‘You’ve brought us both back safely to your own TimeSpace. Everything is correct Day. Date. Year. Place.’
With a feeling of great relief Cy sat down on the end of his bed. He unfurled his fingers from around his piece of dreamsilk. It lay quietly on the palm of his hand. ‘Look,’ he said to the Dream Master. ‘See how it has changed again. The edges are less ragged, it seems more, more . . . concentrated and complete.’
The Dream Master examined the dreamsilk without touching it. He raised his head and held Cy’s gaze for a long moment. ‘You have a powerful Imagination. You must learn to use it well.’
‘The energy seems to flow through it,’ said Cy. He held the dreamsilk up, and watched it ripple like waves on flat sand. ‘But you cannot see where it goes, or where it comes from.’
The Dream Master shrugged. ‘There are things that it is not given to us to understand.’
‘Yet there must be a focus,’ Cy persisted. ‘A centre for this power.’
The Dream Master looked at Cy with eyes as wise as Time. ‘For this piece of dreamsilk, it is you, Cy. You are the centre.’
Mrs Chalmers was really pleased with the class work on the volcano project. Basra had made a model using raspberry jam to show lava flowing down the hillside. Innis had researched more recent volcanic activity with scanned images of eruptions in Africa and Sicily. Vicky had decided she wanted to be a volcanologist. She had put together a career profile as part of her work, showing equipment used and fieldwork undertaken by men and women who worked right beside active volcanoes. Mrs Chalmers had commended Cy’s work, his vivid ‘eye-witness’ description of a volcano exploding and his drawings of scientific experiments showing how volcanic eruptions take place. She had been particularly impressed with his collection of dinarii. When she asked him where he had obtained the little silver coins which showed the head of an ancient Roman emperor, Cy told her that his grampa had found them in Italy during the Second World War.
He didn’t think she’d believe him if he told her the truth, which was that he had picked them up from the sand in the Amphitheatre at Pompeii just before Vesuvius erupted.
School might just be a bit less boring than being at home, Cy decided as he walked home on the first day of the new term. Not that home was exactly boring at the moment . . .
To say that the Dream Master was upset when Cy unwrapped the dreamcloak was (and here Cy felt quite proud that he could use just as much alliteration as the little man) Undeniably an Understatement of an Utterance.
‘I think I rescued it in time,’ said Cy. ‘It had only got as far as the water filling the drum of the washing machine.’ Cy didn’t mention that his mum had set the machine to ‘boil wash’.
The Dream Master surveyed the gloppy mess. ‘My dreamcloak,’ he moaned. ‘My beautiful dreamcloak.’
Cy held his breath, waiting for the explosion of bad temper, but it didn’t happen. The little man seemed more dejected than angry.
‘It will be all right, won’t it?’ Cy asked anxiously.
‘It will take aeons before I can regenerate this again,’ said the Dream Master. ‘Is your mother mad?’
Cy didn’t think his mother was mad. But she was certainly bewildered. At the weekend Dad and Lauren had returned from their shopping trip after only one hour.
‘One hour!’ said Cy’s mum. ‘You and Lauren agreed on a school skirt after only one hour?’
‘No trouble at all,’ said Cy’s dad. ‘The thing is not to make too much fuss, I think.’
Cy’s mum stared at them both suspiciously. ‘What exactly does this skirt look like?’
‘It’s absolutely fine,’ said Cy’s dad. ‘I don’t think even you could object to the length.’ He sat down in a chair, picked up the evening newspaper and, with a smug expression on his face, began to read.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ Cy’s dad added, ‘I had to buy her a new tie. She said something about giving the one you bought her to someone who really appreciated it.’
It wasn’t until breakfast on the morning of the first day of school that Cy and his mum saw Lauren in her school uniform. Cy’s mum had just bitten into a slice of toast when Lauren entered the kitchen. The new school skirt hung elegantly from Lauren’s waist in soft pleated folds which reached almost to her ankles.
Cy’s mum choked. Fine drops of marmalade sprayed out across the breakfast table. His dad leaned over and thumped her on the back. ‘All right, dear?’
Eyes streaming, Cy’s mum nodded.
Later, as he walked behind Lauren on his way to the bus stop, Cy noticed that his sister’s skirt was split at the back, almost three quarters of the way up.
CHAPTER XXI
SPQR.
Mrs Chalmers herded her class into the antiquities section of the local museum. ‘SPQR.’ She pointed to the banner just inside the door. ‘Can anyone tell me what that means?’
Basra had his hand up first. ‘It’s Latin, miss. It means the Senate and the People of Rome. They used it when the Roman Empire was a republic.’
‘Well done!’ said Mrs Chalmers. She introduced herself to the museum guide, who was waiting to show them round. ‘I’ve got the best class in the whole school here for you today.’
Cy’s friends smiled at each other. That’s what I like about Mrs Chalmers, thought Cy, she is always so positive and encouraging.
‘There was a Roman settlement here from early times,’ the guide began, ‘and excavations have turned up a wide range of artefacts over quite a wide area. We have sandals, pottery, cooking utensils, jewellery, and just outside the town are remains of a bath house and barracks for soldiers.’
‘But not gladiators?’ asked Innis.
‘You would have to go to Rome to see gladiators,’ said the museum guide.
‘Or Pompeii,’ added Cy.
The museum guide nodded. ‘Yes, I do believe that they had gladiatorial combats at Pompeii.’
‘We have been studying volcanoes,’ explained Mrs Chalmers, ‘so my class know a bit about Pompeii, especially Cy.’
‘The eruption which buried Pompeii was in AD seventy-nine,’ said the guide. ‘Some of these artefacts are from later than that. The Roman armies did not leave Britain until the fourth century, and many people from the Roman Empire never left. They settled and intermarried and could be our ancestors.’
Had Rhea Silvia and Linus managed to find Britain? Cy wondered as he followed after the guide. It would be a long and dangerous journey but one which they had both seemed determined to make. Cy felt sad that he would never know. A dream ended when a dream ended, according to the Dream Master, and Cy couldn’t go back to that one and find out what had become of his friends. In fact he couldn’t dream any of his own dreams until his Dream Master’s dreamcloak had re-energized itself. And the Dream Master had forbidden him to use his own piece of dreamsilk until he’d done some more mind-training exercises.
‘Cy, pay attention.’ Mrs Chalmers nudged him.
‘The soldiers of a legion had a practice of making an altar or erecting a statue wherever they settled. Sometimes these were portable, sometimes more permanent.’ Their guide had stopped in front of an oblong stone carving which had been mounted on the back wall of the museum.
‘This wall plaque was found in a field quite close to your own town. It is carved in relief – that is, the flat piece of stone has had a scene carved out of it. The figures and objects are therefore raised up above the surface.’
Cy and his classmates crowded round and looked to where the guide was pointing.
‘The only information about this particular find is contained within the carving itself. We can find no reference to it nor anything of a similar type anywhere else.’
Cy looked up and blinked.
‘If you look along the bottom you will see letters and the number VIII. You all probably know that the Roman numerals VIII mean the number eight. So we can therefore say that the Eighth Legion were involved here.’
Cy edged closer. There was something familiar about the carving. Had he seen it somewhere before? But the guide had said nothing like it had been found anywhere else. Still keeping his eyes on the carving, Cy turned his head to listen as she began to speak again.
‘What is quite different about this is that there are only two figures represented here, and both are young people, a boy and a young woman. This could be a free Roman woman and her personal slave, or a boy with his nurse.’
Cy’s eyes went from the figure of the boy to the girl and back again. He gasped.
‘What do you think?’ the guide asked him.
‘I think . . .’ Cy said slowly, his heart beginning to beat faster as he took in more details. ‘I think . . . that they look more like brother and sister.’
‘I never thought of that,’ said the guide. She stepped back and put her head to one side. ‘That is a very interesting idea.’
‘Cy always has interesting ideas,’ said Vicky.
‘It could be that the girl represents some kind of minor goddess,’ the guide went on. ‘The Romans worshipped gods, goddesses and spirits of all kinds. They built both huge temples and small shrines to them. Every house would show reverence to the household gods by having their own lararium. It could be that the soldiers stationed here had a particular devotion to this young woman. This sculpture might be a depiction of a woodland sprite, for example.’
By now Cy had worked his way right to the front of the group. His heart was thumping fast in his chest and his eyes were glistening.
‘The boy is drawing, and around his feet are scattered small cubes of stone known as tesserae,’ the guide went on. ‘These were used in different colours and sizes to make mosaics. It may be that he is designing an image of the goddess to decorate a wall or a floor.’
Cy gave a start. What had the guide just said? Cy peered more closely. Yes, those were pieces of mosaic scattered around the feet of the two figures. It must be them! Cy closed his eyelids for a moment in happiness. Rhea Silv
ia and Linus had arrived safely in Britain after all!
‘There are three letters at the top, an R and an S close together and then an L. L is the Roman numeral for fifty—’
‘No,’ Cy interrupted. ‘L is for Linus.’
‘Could be.’ The guide gave Cy a challenging glance. ‘In that case, what would you say R and S stood for?’
‘Rhea Silvia,’ said Cy.
‘Silva means “wood”, so that would fit in quite well with my theory of the woodland sprite.’ The guide looked very pleased.
‘And Rhea Silvia was the mother of Romulus and Remus,’ added Mrs Chalmers. ‘You may just be right, Cy.’
Cy didn’t say anything. His mind was now content. His friends had escaped from Pompeii and arrived in Britain. It looked as though they had become mosaic-makers, so well thought of, in fact, that a sculpture had been made of them. Or perhaps Linus had carved it? Cy remembered Linus’s drawing of the Dream Master and smiled to himself.
‘There are letters and numerals along the base which have been partially decoded.’ The guide traced the inscription with her finger. ‘CUL, and then VIII, which are the Roman numerals for eight, and then the letter R. One could speculate that R stands for Rome. We have yet to decide finally what CUL means.’
‘That could be an exercise for the class,’ said Mrs Chalmers. ‘When we get back to school we could all attempt to draw this carving and make up our own translation of what the letters mean.’
Cy’s eye followed the line of text as Mrs Chalmers spoke. CUL VIIIR. If you did as the museum guide said and changed VIII to the Arabic number 8, then the inscription read CUL8R. Cy mouthed the message out loud, and then his jaw fell open. It was what he had said to Linus and Rhea Silvia as they parted. CUL8R – see you later!
‘You will notice that the girl is wearing a kind of scarf.’ The guide had begun speaking again. ‘That also is uncommon. Boys would not have worn a toga until they were older, and women wore a garment known as the stola which covered them from head to foot. Stola is the origin of the English word “stole”. Nowadays we don’t use the word “stole” so much, we use “scarf” or “shawl” to describe a piece of material draped across the shoulders. In this carving the stola is very narrow and appears to be tapered. It almost looks like a modern tie but that can’t be, as ties were not used until centuries later. I think it gives that appearance because of the way that the sculptor has fashioned the stone to depict the folds of the material.’
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