A Day of Fire: a novel of Pompeii

by Stephanie Dray

  If I’d been looking for a sign of good fortune, it wouldn’t be you. Of all the people to be thrown together with in a disaster, he would never have chosen Diana of the Cornelii. Not merely because she was a woman—Marcus knew women of tremendous gravitas and good sense, and he also knew women of lethal determination and resourcefulness. But Diana was something of a joke. All through Rome she was known as a girl whose face was eagerly gazed upon and whose conversation (unless one was a Reds follower or a lover of horseflesh) speedily avoided.

  But she was slanting her brows at him in inquiry, and she had stopped to come to his aid, which was more than a great many panicky people in a crisis would have done, so he gave a nod of thanks and said “A good sign, indeed.”

  She ended up hauling him into the brothel. “Better get you out of the street and sitting down so we can look at that leg. Besides, I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a whorehouse …”

  “Does it live up to your expectations?” A narrow hall with five curtained nooks leading off to the side; a staircase leading upward; a door at the end wafting the stench of a latrine. Marcus did not see how any man could find himself in the mood for intimacy in such surroundings, but men of sufficient youth could find the mood more or less anywhere—he remembered that much about being young.

  “It seems a little depressing.” Diana swept back the curtain of the first nook. The stone ledge with its straw-stuffed pallet had a mussed blanket, but the little space was empty. She assisted him through, turning him to sit on the pallet, and Marcus grimaced as his knee sent a jolt of agony up to his hip. “Rest here and let me see what I can find in the way of help.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said, but she was already gone in a whirl of white-gold hair. So much energy, galloping through life as though it was the last lap of a race—Marcus found it a little tiring. There was a good deal of speculation among the men of Rome as to just what it would take to exhaust her in bed. So far as Marcus knew, very few had had the chance to put their theories to the test. Diana of the Cornelii belonged to the colts she bred and trained on her little villa just outside Rome—not to any particular suitor.

  Footsteps ran lightly down the stairs in the hall, and she was back. “There are two whores huddled in a corner upstairs moaning in a language I’ve never heard. Absolutely useless—they refuse to budge from beneath their blankets. Everyone else appears to have fled.”

  Something occurred to Marcus. “Why don’t you have slaves with you?” Diana’s father was far too absent-minded to impose any suitable control on his daughter, but even he would have insisted on attendants if she went traveling.

  “I had a good pair of guards, but they fled when the awning at the amphitheater collapsed. Maybe they weren’t as good as all that.” Diana dropped to her knees. “Let’s see that leg …”

  Marcus caught his breath as she straightened his knee. He didn’t need to pull back the folds of his toga to know it was swollen the size of a trigon ball.

  “Strained,” Diana announced, fingers seeking out the painful points. “Not broken. A bit of strapping should see you able to walk.” She looked around, and tore the curtain down from the doorway.

  “Since when are you a medicus?”

  “I train my colts to run races, Marcus. You know how many times I’ve been thrown out of a chariot?” She began ripping the curtain into strips. “If it can be banged, bruised, or broken, I’ve banged it, bruised it, or broken it.”

  “You are the most bizarre girl I have ever known,” Marcus observed.

  “Aren’t you lucky you ran across me when the sky fell, then?” She went to her knees again, examining his leg. “This is going to hurt. Do you need something to bite down on?”

  He looked at the little cell, empty except for the bed and an obscene wall-mural in flaking paint. “Bite down on what?”

  Diana rummaged under the pallet and came up with a carved wooden phallus.

  Marcus gave her a look.

  “It does seem a bit big to get one’s teeth around,” she agreed, hefting the thing. “I don’t think real ones come in this size. None I’ve seen, anyway…”

  “I assure you,” Marcus said dryly, “that I can choke back a scream without needing to insert a wooden phallus between my teeth.”

  She tossed the thing aside, taking hold of his knee. “Then shut your eyes and pretend I’m a proper physician.”

  “Likely a physician wouldn’t do any more good than you.” Marcus shut his eyes. “‘Medicine is the art of guessing.’”

  “Who said that?”

  “Aulus Cornelius Celsus, ignorant child. Don’t you know anything?” She was winding his knee in strips of cloth, by the feel of it. Yes; it hurt.

  “I know how to drive a four-horse chariot, subdue any unruly stallion in the empire, and calculate betting odds for four factions in sixteen heats simultaneously. And I know how to strap a knee. Hold still, now—”

  “Why go to so much trouble?” Marcus opened his eyes as she tied the bandage off. He knew he should be more afraid than he was, but he could not summon it. Not fear, not panic—he felt nothing but a certain mild interest. “I don’t really require a working knee at the moment.”

  “Are you mad? We have to get out of Pompeii, and I may be nicknamed after Diana the Huntress, but I don’t really see her swooping down on her moon-chariot to give us a ride to safety. If we’re to get out of the city, we’ll have to walk every step of the way.”

  “What if I don’t mean to flee?”

  “This isn’t some ridiculous display of stoicism, is it?”

  “Pliny’s nephew thought I was a Stoic,” Marcus mused, “but no, I cannot really subscribe to that philosophy. Its precepts demand a control over emotion that can be impractical in times of—”

  “Marcus.” Diana looked up at him through the fringes of her hair. “I don’t know if the gods are tipping Rome into Tartarus, or if Vulcan simply stripped the top off the mountain to air out his forge, but Pompeii is no longer safe. I saw people trampling each other underfoot at the amphitheater. I saw a man’s head crushed against a stone step. When I finally got free, I saw people running from their houses with arm-loads of belongings, and then thugs clubbing them to the ground for a chance to steal whatever they were carrying. By the time the sky went dark, the main thoroughfare was so well lit by buildings that had caught fire from fallen lamps, I could see my own shadow running behind me. We are getting out, Marcus.”

  “No,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  Until now, he had not been certain. He looked around this fetid, windowless little cell that stank of male seed and female despair; he heard pounding feet and the rising mindless note of a shriek from the streets where a city was tearing itself to pieces, and he felt … he felt …

  Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus exhaled a long breath. “I intend to die.”

  He felt relief.

  WHEN did it start, the bleak, creeping tide of hopelessness? At yet another interminable meeting in the Senate House where he listened to the spite, the pride, the petty jealousies that rippled along under all the unctuous profundity, and realized that nothing he worked for mattered? During yet another banquet where a woman’s shrill laughter reminded him of the wife who had deserted him for a young Cornelii? Or was it the pain in his crooked shoulder stabbing him dawn after gray and meaningless dawn, the pain of an arm badly wrenched out of place when he was arrested and tossed in a cell during the Year of Four Emperors?

  Maybe the hopelessness had been seeded in that cell, ten years ago. A cell no bigger than this one; smelling not of semen and sweat but of stark, brassy terror; enduring the pain in his shoulder and wondering if he was to be dragged out and torn apart by a mob—all because the current claimant to the purple felt uneasy of Marcus’ illustrious family name. If they’d left me a knife, I’d have opened my veins in that stinking straw and spared myself the next decade. A decade of bitter senatorial back-stabbing and even more bitter boredom, knowing that no matter how m
any laws he helped to pass, they helped nobody—the lowborn and the luckless like young Prima with her empty stomach and eyes full of scorn would still be ground to nothing. A decade of ignoring the snickers that came when he stood at the Rostra with his crooked shoulder. And he was so often tired, because his last decade was all days as black as the afternoon had turned outside, and nights that were utterly unspeakable.

  “I intend to die,” he said again, and the relief was violent. How many times had he thought that, awake and sleepless in his quiet domus in Rome, working on another treatise whose advice would never be heard? How many times had he put down his stylus and taken up his knife instead, pressing it almost idly against the blue line of the vein in his arm?

  That habit might have started in the last year. When sensible, even-handed Emperor Vespasian had died and the purple passed to his hot-headed son Titus—Titus, who was not so bad a fit for the purple, but who had no sons of his own. Titus, whose health was inexplicably failing after just a year, and who had no one to succeed him but a wild-eyed and vicious younger brother. I would rather be dead than serve that thug Domitian if he becomes Emperor.

  Or perhaps the explanation for Marcus’ idle games with his knife’s edge did not lie in such a noble reason. Perhaps they began when his own son departed home to finish his education, and there was no longer anyone to smile for. No longer anyone in the house at all, except indifferent slaves who thought their master a crippled fool.

  Well, there was no need for a knife now. No need to walk Pompeii unattended by guards, as he’d done these past few days, because he hoped he’d be robbed and murdered. No need for anything but patience—the patience to wait for a looter come to dash his brains out with a cudgel, or for the roof of this brothel to collapse about his ears. The patience to sit calmly and wait for death.

  Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus had never lacked patience.

  He looked at Diana, still staring up at him with those blue-green eyes of hers, and hoped she was not about to weep.

  “You idiot,” she said.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. She could drive a chariot and a four-horse team, after all—unseemly skills, but not ones generally mastered by hand-wringing weepers.

  “You’re going to die in a whorehouse?” Her voice was hard. “The blood of the divine Augustus is going to make its end on a mattress soaked with the sweat of a thousand Pompeian sailors, under such charming sentiments as—” peering momentarily at an epithet scratched into the wall—“‘Arpocras had a good fuck here with Drauca for a denarius.’ Truly?”

  “Not the most illustrious of surroundings for one’s final moments,” Marcus admitted. “But even the blood of Augustus cannot always choose.”

  She stared at him a while longer, still sitting back on her heels. A good many men in Rome would have given half of what they owned to have Diana of the Cornelii on her knees before them, Marcus thought. Much more than a single denarius.

  She rose, folding her arms across her breasts. “Why are you courting death?”

  He shrugged. They might have been the last two people in Pompeii—the sounds of screams, of shouting, of pounding feet from outside had all faded into the background. “I am done, that is all. I weary of life, and I have nothing to fill it. Let it end. Take yourself to safety. I do not care in the slightest what happens to me.”

  “What about your son?” she snapped.

  “I would have liked to see his manhood ceremony.” It was a father’s purpose and pride to help his firstborn son into his first toga. Tell the truth, Marcus thought harshly. The only reason you haven’t let the blood out of your veins yet is because you thought to wait until Paulinus’ toga virilis ceremony passed. Until you’d draped the folds over his shoulder, and given him some words to ease the pain of losing his father.

  He pushed the thought away. “My son is almost grown. He is near to done with his schooling, and he speaks of becoming a tribune in the Praetorian Guard. He has cousins and relatives aplenty who would aid him in such a career, in advancing the ranks, in finding patrons and clients and even a wife when the time comes. He no longer needs me.”

  “Rubbish,” Diana said. “Get up.”

  “Can you drag me out of Pompeii by force?” Marcus smiled. “I think not.”

  She stared at him a long, speculative moment. “You’re right.”

  “Then—” Marcus picked up her small rein-callused hand and kissed it. “May the gods see you to safety.”

  “No need.” She crawled onto the grubby pallet of straw beside him, sitting cross-legged like a stable boy. “Because I’m not leaving.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not just going to cause your own death, Marcus Norbanus.” She gave him a dazzling smile. “You’re also going to cause mine.”

  IT was perhaps the most frustrating quarter-hour he had ever experienced. “I have had forty-three years, and it is more than enough. You are only twenty-six. Far too young to resign yourself to death.”

  Diana ran her finger along another line of graffiti scrawled into the wall. “‘I fucked many girls here.’”

  “Have you thought of your father? You have never been an obedient daughter to him, and he should have put a rod across your back and forced you to a good husband a decade ago, but he will still be heart-broken to lose you.”

  She twisted her head almost horizontally to look at another set of scratchings. “‘Victor fucked with Attine here.’”

  “No one of the Cornelii will soil themselves with horse-breeding. If you die, your family will sell all your precious horses—”

  “My father shall send them to the Reds.” Diana uncurled her slender legs and stood up on the mattress, craning her neck at another bit of filth high on the wall. “‘Anyone who wants to fuck should ask Attice for sixteen asses.’ Really, just sixteen?”

  “A woman who looked like you could charge a great deal more,” Marcus snapped.

  She batted her pale lashes at him. “You flatter me.”

  “You are a foolish child.”

  “Do you want this foolish child’s death on your head?”

  He tried silence after that. She will lose her nerve, he thought, listening to the distant noise of shouting and thumping feet, curses and screams. She will break and bolt for safety. All I need do is out-wait her.

  She fell back on her elbows—cool as though she were reclining at a banquet. He remained silent. She smiled at him. He did not smile back. The silence stretched.

  The young want to live, he thought. It is the strongest urge they know. Nerve or not, it will drive her away in the end.

  “Did I tell you why I came to Pompeii?” Diana tilted her head, looking at Marcus down the length of the pallet. “A horse.”

  Naturally.

  “Splendid beast; a chestnut as tall at the shoulder as my eyes. Plenty of muscle; might anchor a quadriga as an inside runner. A season to race him for the Reds and then I’ll put him to stud.” She extended her legs, crossing her feet comfortably in his lap. “I’m naming him Boreas, after my old stallion that just died. Decent lineage out of Spain, sired by Aquila who was sired by Hannibal, who in turn was sired by Bubalus, and before him Hibernus—”

  No one can know more than four generations of a horse’s lineage, Marcus thought in horror, but she rattled off a full fifteen generations on both sides of the wretched animal’s bloodlines, then mentioned the mare she had just brought to foal before coming to Pompeii. “Now, she was sired by Ajax, who came from Gemmula and Nereus”—on and on in that cheerful drone, listing horse after horse as her feet flexed and unflexed in his lap; it was her only sign of restlessness—“Polynices out of Pertinax, Sagitta out of Speudosa—”

  Marcus reconsidered whether or not he did, in fact, have endless patience. “Will you not leave a man to die in quiet?”

  “—and then there’s Pegasus who just retired from the Greens; not the most original name, but that horse really could fly—”

  He squeezed the bridge of his
nose. “Please.”

  Her eyes twinkled evilly through her fringe of hair. “—and Valens wasn’t much in the way of stamina, but they crossed him with a line of chariot ponies out of Britannia and got Volucer, who won more heats for the Whites than any stallion since the Republic—”

  “What will it take,” Marcus interrupted, “to quiet you?”

  “Come with me out of Pompeii,” she said promptly.

  “I will only slow your escape. Believe me, I am not being noble. You will never get to safety towing me and my wretched knee.”

  “It’s a chance I will have to take,” Diana said, “because I will not leave you behind. You are family, Marcus, however distantly. I’ve known you since I was a child, and I cannot—”

  “I am family, your senior in family status as well as age, and I order you—”

  “I’ve got a lovely little mare named Callisto, she gave me twin colts last spring so of course I had to name them Castor and Pollux—”

  “You may be the most beautiful girl in Rome, but you are also the most boring!” Marcus knew he was not being polite, but really, even his calm had limits. This was enough. “Even when you are not trying to annoy me as you are now, your conversation has always quite literally sent me sprinting from the room after a quarter hour!”

  “I could say the same for you, Marcus Norbanus. You may be brilliant, but whenever you drone on about grain laws or the declining birth rate, my eyes start crossing. Takes far less than a quarter hour, too.” Diana’s wicked sparkle faded to seriousness as she looked at him. “Please—come with me. For my safety, if no other reason. You think a lone woman will be able to make it through the streets as they are now?”

  “A woman of your rank—”

  “Rank means nothing in chaos. I’ll be robbed, raped, and left for dead if I don’t have a man with me.”

  Marcus refused to give way for the logic of such damp sentiment. “I am an aging senator with a limp and a bad shoulder. I will be no protection, so don’t use my arm’s questionable prowess as your excuse.”