But where, Julia thought, does one go when the world begins to tear apart, when the day turns to night and the sky reels with burning rocks and cinders? Where does one hide?
“It’s not like snow anymore,” Julia said.
“What are you talking about?” Sura asked. Her question seemed to break through Julia’s confusion.
“We have to go to the mouth of the Sarnus. We must see the sibyl. She is the one!” Julia said
“The one what?”
“She predicted all of this. She said that it would snow in summer, and look, the falling ash and stone looks like snow but . . .” She didn’t finish the thought. “Come there is no time to waste. We should go by way of the Stabian gate to the Sarnus. That will be closest. We must hurry. “
They hurried as best they could through the procession of ghosts and death masks. Even animals, dogs, cats, donkeys had turned white. Ahead of them an ox foundered and dropped to its knees. It bellowed as it tried rise from the debris. A few steps beyond the ox a chained dog’s eyes rolled back in terror as it began to die in a tangled agony. At the corner of the Via dell’Abbondanza and a smaller street by the shop of Stephanus the fuller, they turned right to follow a road to the gate. Through the open front of the shop they could see stunned workers and Stephanus himself clutching a bag and yelling.
“Thieves, you’re all thieves!” He crushed the bag to his chest.
The two girls rushed on by. Julia stole one look back at Vesuvius. From its mouth an immense fountain of rock and ash blasted even higher than before into darkness. Shrill cries rang out into the night spinning with cinders. The girls passed familiar shops which had been transformed by the blizzard of ash and pumice. The groaning and frantic yelps of trapped animals mixed with the cries of children and babies. But Julia and Sura continued to plow their way through the hail of ash and rock. Lightning and flames fractured the darkness, and Julia nearly laughed as she saw a woman standing stock still up to her waist in ash and clucking madly at the bolts of lightning. Yet another superstition of how to ward off Vulcan! It now seemed completely ridiculous to her. This was beyond a god’s displeasure, beyond his anger. This was the earth committing suicide.
A maniacal mindless mob rushed through the gates. People pushed and shoved. An old lady fell and was trampled. A mother screamed as she dropped her baby and then lay down beside it to die. Julia and Sura clung to each other and were borne by the momentum of this tide as they desperately tried to keep each other afloat. There was one moment when Sura floundered, but through some torrent of sudden energy, Julia wrenched her clear of the debris and stampede of feet.
How they ever survived the surge through the gates Julia did not know but when they reached the port they encountered a strange sight. The sea had begun to retreat drastically. And where there was still water, the harbor was clogged with floating pieces of rock. Every boat was locked in, their hulls scraping noisily against the floating rocks. It was a low painful creaking and moaning as if boats were protesting their stone prison. Several boats appeared half sunk from the load of rocks on their decks.
The girls followed the port road. Flames tore at the night like scimitars. And as Julia looked back through the hail of falling rock she saw gaping wounds on the flanks of Vesuvius. It reminded her of the pig that had been sacrificed hours ago. The earth’s entrails spilled from the mountainside, writhing and bulging as if still pumping blood. As they walked, lightning bolts wove the night into an electric cloth of eerie brightness. The air was shaking with unceasing thunder now. But on the edge of this sound there was a peculiar hissing murmur. It threaded through the clamor of the thunder, and a noxious smell began to fill the air. Julia looked back. Flames were advancing toward the city. For one instant she was tempted to turn around, to flee back—to Marcus, to the only love she would know, could know. Marcus her only hope. Ubi tu Marcus ego Marcia. The words rang in her head, battered her brain. I never got to make the most sacred of vows. She wheeled about. Sura was horrified. She grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go back for Marcus.”
Sura’s eyes opened wide. A green fiery glint sprung from them. She raised her hand and slapped Julia’s face, hard. “I did not go back for my brother. You will not got back for Marcus. Look, we are almost to the mouth of the river.”
Indeed they were. And there was water! Not a lot but some flowed from the river to meet the retreating sea. Even the sea is fleeing, Julia thought, even the sea!
Twenty
JULIA STOOD AT THE OPENING of the cave. For the first time the shadows were welcoming. They almost seemed to beckon her. She took Sura’s hand and together they stepped inside. Julia squinted into the gray light of the cave. It felt safe and cool and at last they were free from the constant bombardment of ash and pumice.
“You have come.” The melting voice from far back in the cave drifted toward them. Julia’s chest tightened and she squeezed Sura’s hand. She heard light footsteps. The shadows dissolved. A familiar figure stood in front of them.
Julia gasped. “Mother!”
“No dear. I am your aunt, your mother’s twin. My name is Aurelia.” She raised her right hand in greeting. Her left arm hung limp and withered by her side.
Julia tilted her head in stunned disbelief. “I . . . I . . .” she hesitated. “Don’t understand.
“I know dear, I know.”
“But I never knew my mother had a sister.”
“No one in Pompeii knew, not even your father, not for a very long time. In those days such things were a dark secret. And even today, as I am sure you are aware, females with deformities, well, I needn’t tell you. I think you know.”
“But why didn’t mother tell me that there was someone like me? I would have felt better.”
“I am sure your parents would have told you eventually, but they were fearful, for several reasons. People prefer to think of sibyls as being without families, or at least families nearby and known. Somehow that an ordinary family would have a seer or a sibyl almost seems to diminish the power of that person’s prophecy. Secondly, I imagine that they were afraid that if you knew too young you might let it slip sometime to a friend or family member. Since your grandparents died, only your mother and father knew. You have to remember, Julia, that your father had ambitions. He is a successful businessman and now a magistrate and a member of the ordo.”
“What you are saying is that it could have destroyed his career,” Julia replied bitterly.
“Julia, it is not as if you have not benefited from your father’s success.” She paused and turned toward Sura “And who is this young woman?”
“Oh this is Sura, my slave, no, I don’t think she is my slave anymore.” She glanced first at Sura then at her aunt. “Nothing is really the same as it was.” She hesitated, then turned and looked out the cave opening toward Vesuvius.
“What has happened? I thought it was just a mountain.”
“We all did,” her aunt replied. “But it was a volcano.”
Julia squeezed her eyes shut. She was a welter of confusing emotions.
One second she was trying to comprehend how a mountain had turned into a roaring fiery beast, and the next how her parents had hidden the secret of her aunt, the Sibyl of Sarnus from her for so long. It crossed her mind suddenly that perhaps her own withered arm was not the curse of Venus but a curse of a different sort—punishment to a family for hiding away another human being, denying the existence of Aurelia—daughter, aunt, sister. And now they had been ready to do the same thing again—hide Julia, not in a cave but in the Temple of Damia.
“They were going to hide me away just as you have been hidden.” Julia blurted out.
“What? What are you saying?” The sibyl leaned closer to her. It was so strange seeing this face that was identical to her mother’s but not her mother.
“They had planned to send me to that awful place,” Julia whispered hoarsely.
“What awful place?�
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“The Temple of Damia.”
Aurelia shut her eyes. Her breath caught in her throat. Her voice sounded raw when she spoke now. “I was fearful of this. So they were really going to do it.” Julia was not sure if it was a question or a statement, but once more she felt a bitterness like bile rising within her.
“Yes they were really going to do it!” She looked sharply at her aunt now. “Why didn’t they send you to the temple when you were younger?”
“Well, for one thing the Temple of Damia was not yet as widespread. It was just one more new religion imported from the east. It had no status. But most important, it was my mother, your grandmother, who sensed that I had second sight. When I turned six I was taken to a seer far from here. And then when I grew older I came here.”
“Why here?”
“I know the river. I read the river.”
“Not fish eyes? You don’t read fish’s eyeballs?”
The sybil laughed. “No not ever. That is just an old tale. It was the river that told me that something like this might happen. Odd things were occurring. Being a seer is not about seeing into the future but being aware of the present and the changes.” It was almost too much for Julia to take in.
“You have lived alone all these years? Studying the river?”
“All alone. But your mother would come to visit me often.”
“It’s so sad.”
“It was the way it was. I was lucky not to be put out for the wolves.”
“Your father would have done that?”
“No, but he kept me hidden away. Only one slave was ever allowed to attend to me. I was never permitted to go into town and I could only go into the garden late at night.”
“After you went away didn’t you miss your mother, or my mother, your sister?”
“Oh yes, yes indeed. But—” she hesitated. “When I lived with the seer of Sullum, I could live free. I roamed the hills of the countryside. I felt the wind. I grew brown in the sun and at night I felt the tingle of the stars in the sky.”
“Are you really a seer?”
At this Aurelia smiled wryly. “When the snow fell in summer, you came didn’t you?”
Julia nodded her head. “It’s true.” She paused. “But what else did you see? Did you see my parents? Marcus? Are they . . . are they . . .” her voice caught.
“Marcus?” Aurelia asked.
Tears began leaking from Julia’s eyes. Sura came close and put her arm around her shoulders. “Marcus was her cousin. They were in love. They planned to run away and marry.”
“I saw none of that. I do not know if your will parents live or die, but I did—how should I explain it? I saw, or I felt deep within me that you might live through this.”
“But how did you know what this was, what was going to happen? How did you know about this terrible . . .” and once more she turned toward Vesuvius in disbelief. “It was just a mountain with green slopes and vineyards and . . .” her voice trailed off.
“I live in a cave. I live close to the earth. I hear its sighs. I feel its odd twitches. I sense the changes in the temperatures of the river that runs its course down from the hills. I know its queer scents. The smell of dust and rock. I feel the variations of its deepest writhings and stirrings of its entrails. The disharmonies, the rhythms. The day you came with your mother almost a month ago the bats left. That morning, in the broad light of day, they began to drop like flakes of rock, like tiles from a ceiling. I knew . . . I knew . . . Venus is your mother’s goddess, but mine is Gaia, the earth’s mother. She is my goddess and my mother. She taught me well and I learned her ways.”
As her aunt spoke Julia began to realize that Aurelia was not talking nonsense. Her vision had nothing to do with “prophetic chickens,” or pigs. Her insights came from being an attentive listener to the earth’s ways. Her vision was informed by knowledge and not superstition. How Marcus would have loved this explanation, she thought. But at that moment, Julia sensed that she had lost Marcus forever. She took Sura’s hand and held it tightly.
“Aunt Aurelia where should we go?’
“We shall walk away until we meet the sea. The river and us, we all seek the same thing—the sea.”
Julia and Sura looked in the direction Aurelia was now gazing. They could just make out the shape of sails on the horizon. I’ve seen this before, Julia thought suddenly, and then remembered the baths and how three weeks before she had tipped her head against the edge of the pool and imagined herself on one of the painted boats, sailing straight out across the bay to a distant horizon, away on a boundless blue sea.
“Yes, away,” she whispered. “Away.”
Through a screen of falling ash, three figures could be seen wading toward the sea, where boats bobbed against the sky. Julia and Sura, holding hands, turned back one last time. They looked at their city through scrims of tears. Time had stopped for Pompeii, but for two young girls it was just beginning.
Epilogue
IN THE VILLA OF CORNELIUS Petreius, only one body was found, that of Marcus Cornelius Drusus. He clutched in his fist a pouch that contained a wedding band. At the corner of Via dell’Abbondanza, the body of Stephanus the fuller was uncovered still grasping a key in one hand and a bag of gold coins in another. Just outside the Stabian Gate, a group of people were found that included a young woman whose hair had been divided into six locks and arranged over pads of artificial hair in the traditional style of brides on their wedding day. It was Cornelia. And atop her head, inscribed in ash, was a wreath of myrtle and orange blossom. Embracing the bride was her husband, Cassius.
A few feet away was Herminia Petreia. Her husband, who had fallen near her, was trying to protect her head with a pillow. Her fingers had been cemented to an amber pendant of a cupid that hung around her neck. Cornelius’s brother Marcus lay next to him, and nearby Flavia had fallen face down with a piece of woven cloth over her mouth. The family group had fled from the villa of Petreius on via di Mercurio and had barely time to escape the house before the gusting winds of poisonous gas overtook them.
And in the gladiators’ barracks, the jewel-encrusted body of Livia Octavia was found in the chamber of one gladiator.
Julia and Sura knew none of this. They soon began a new life in the hill country far from Pompeii with the Sibyl of Sarnus, Julia’s aunt Aurelia. They did not live in a cave as sibyl, slave, and mistress, but in a small farm villa as grape growers where, with Aurelia’s guidance, they coaxed life from a south-facing slope. They tried not to think of the city they had left behind in ashes and the people they had loved. Julia and Sura had no way of finding out exactly who had been spared from Vesuvius’s murderous eruption. To them, it was if they were the last girls of Pompeii, and the first to build a new life after the death of their city.
Author’s Note
“IT’S LIKE A CITY FROZEN IN TIME.” My older sister’s description was the first time I had ever heard of Pompeii, and I was instantly fascinated. I was perhaps in the second or third grade. I went to the World Book Encyclopedia and looked it up. Then I went to the library and found as many books as I could, but there were not all that many, at least not ones that I could read. There was, of course, no internet in those days. But what I did read amazed me. I could not quite grasp that life had been brought to such a complete standstill within a period of about twenty-five hours. But perhaps the most intriguing fact was that this city had lain buried, a secret, for over fifteen hundred years.
I would not visit Pompeii for the first time until the spring of 2005, after I had decided to write this book. I really had to see it for myself. Going to Pompeii helped me create the family of Julia Petreia, which is completely fictional but is based on much research.
When I visited Pompeii it seemed like a city that was poised in a delicate state of suspension, a city waiting to have life breathed into it. I walked the streets for hours photographing the architecture and the remnants of the gardens, and studying the casts.
I took a great deal of tim
e when I was visiting Pompeii to find the perfect house for the family of Julia Petreia. The street was easy—the Via di Mercurio in one of the wealthy sections of town. But there were too many perfect houses, and I had to be careful, for some of them—such as the House of the Faun with its beautiful sculpted faun shading an indoor pool and brilliant mosaic showing the battle between Alexander the Great and Darius III—are too famous for a fictional family to live in. I decided to take an atrium of one house, a garden of another, a street that I thought was the right one for my family, and put them all together. My husband, an architect, made me a drawing of a house for my fictional family right down to the yard for raising dormice (and yes, dormice were a favorite food of ancient Romans).
Speaking of food, I found it odd that the Roman culture of this time knew nothing of tomatoes. Tomatoes simply had not arrived in this part of the world yet. Nor had pasta! To imagine Italy without tomatoes and pasta is very difficult. But yes lots of dormice, flamingo tongues and other critters that might give us pause were often on the plate of a Roman household. And everyone, even children, drank wine, although it was usually watered down.
In Pompeii, so many clues were left behind that in a sense my task was an easy one. After the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Pompeii and the neighboring smaller town of Herculaneum were buried and forgotten. Around 1594, workmen digging a tunnel uncovered some stones from Pompeii, but no one realized what they were. It was not until 1709 that serious excavations began in Herculaneum. The area around Pompeii was not excavated until 1748, and the site was not definitely known to be Pompeii until 1763.
The best eyewitness documents recording its destruction are the writings of Pliny the Younger, the nephew of Pliny the Elder, who was then the admiral of the Roman fleet stationed at Misenium. The eruption, which began around midday was visible from Misenium, across the bay from Pompeii. A man of insatiable curiosity, Pliny the Elder wanted a closer look and also hoped to rescue some of Pompeii’s inhabitants. Because the eruption took place over a period of twenty-five hours, he had ample time to sail there with the favorable breezes that were blowing. He could not reach Pompeii itself, but he arrived at nearby Stabiae in the late afternoon to witness the ongoing eruption from the terrace of a friend’s villa. Much later that night, he died, perhaps from a flow of the poisonous gases that the volcano emitted.
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