A Day of Fire: a novel of Pompeii

by Stephanie Dray

  “You have the sharpest eyes of any man I know. You can watch my back, and I’ll watch yours.” She swung her feet out of his lap, rising. “Please.”

  He looked at her, and she made his eyes hurt. All that eager pulsing life, sending her bouncing on her toes, plaiting her fingers together, skirts swinging; nothing about her still or soothing. He wanted to shut his eyes; he wanted to turn to stone here in this obscenity of a room and let the walls come tumbling down. He wanted her to go away.

  “I can recite a lot more horse breeding statistics,” she warned. “I can recite them by the mile.”

  He gritted his teeth.

  “Or maybe I’ll seduce you.” She flopped back into his lap, her neat hips landing in his hands instead of her feet this time. “If we’re just going to sit around waiting to die, we may as well pass the hours fucking. There’s a wall-painting outside the privy that shows a man humping a woman upside down; I’ve never tried it that way—”

  “Oh, dear gods!” He stood up, ignoring the shriek of pain from his knee and dumping her onto the squalid floor. “Let us go, by all means, if you will just close that vulgar, fact-spewing mouth!”

  “GODS’ wheels,” Diana whispered in the door of the brothel, at the same time as Marcus said again, “Dear gods.”

  When they first ducked into the brothel, Pompeii had been a strange dark place clouded with flecks of whirling ash, shadows dashing everywhere, shrill screams of panic ruling the air. Now they stood in the doorway looking out over a land of ghosts. The street had whitened strangely, though black clouds still blocked the sky overhead. Something pale and frothy choked the air, blanketing the paving stones, and for a moment Marcus thought of snow. Mountains that exploded; days that turned to night—was snow falling from a hot wind any more strange? But he felt a stinging sensation on his head, and then another, even as Diana swore and clapped a hand to the back of her neck. Stones were falling from the sky, ashy white and ashy gray. Marcus stooped to sift a handful. Rough pebbles of some lightweight stone, porous, almost weightless—but the rain of it on his bowed head still hurt. “Admiral Pliny would know what kind of stone this is,” he heard himself murmuring.

  “Who cares what kind of stone it is, when it’s raining down on our heads!” Diana tugged at the folds of his toga, draped over arm and shoulder in the usual perfect pleats. Just because a man spent his nights wishing to die didn’t mean he dressed carelessly in the morning. “Here, wind this around your head and shoulders to give some protection.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t start about the sacredness of a toga and how it can’t be debased for—”

  “I have no illusions about the sacredness of a toga.” He began unwinding the heavy folds from his shoulders, and looping them about hers. “But I refuse to guard myself from the fall of stone. If a rock from the sky strikes me down, so be it.”

  “Marcus!”

  “That is my price.” He let his voice bite. “You insisted on dragging me with you; very well. I will not have your death on my hands. But my death is still my own privilege. Frankly, the sooner I am hit by a stone and taken from this world, the faster you will be able to get on.” He wreathed her head and shoulders till she looked like a Parthian savage, and her eyes glared at him from under the heavy chalked folds. “Do we have a bargain?”

  “Yes,” she clipped off.

  “Good.” He stretched a little, letting his bad shoulder straighten without its additional weight of expensive cloth. He felt light, steady, still curiously unafraid, and he ignored the sting of the small stones against his bare head.

  “Fortuna go with you,” someone whispered, and they both turned back to the door of the brothel. A hunched figure stood there with a lamp: the boy whore with the painted eyes, the one who had chattered to Marcus when he first paused under the overhanging wall. His eyes were enormous with terror, and he let out a little whimpering moan at the sight of the falling stones.

  “Come with us.” Diana urged, but the boy shook his head. Two dupondii to fuck me up the back, Marcus remembered. Tightest bum in Pompeii!

  “Get out while you can,” he said gently, but the boy’s head kept going back and forth.

  “Don’t you see?” he whispered. “The city’s dead. The gods killed it. We’re all dead now.”

  “Not yet.” Diana raked the hair out of her eyes, pale strands already patched gray with ash. “Not yet!”

  The boy just offered them his lamp. The handle was a penis; the god Priapus’ enormous phallus jutting up with its usual jaunty air. The kind of thing to bring luck to a brothel. Now it just looked pathetic.

  Diana snatched the lamp with a muttered oath and they plunged out among the ghosts.

  MARCUS wondered if the fields of asphodel would be like this; the lands where shades drifted when they had lived lives neither good enough for blessing, nor wicked enough for punishing: endless, listless, half-lit twilight. Marcus’ feet sank into the piles of weightless shifting stones, his knee letting out a scream with every step. Diana had wedged her shoulder under his, taking as much of his weight as he would allow, and her small, hard arm was around his waist like a band of wire as they made their halting way down the street. Diana kept her head down in its padding of toga, braced against the hail of stones, but Marcus looked about him in numbed wonder. A man dragged an ox along by the halter, the beast heaped with lashed-down bundles, stumbling fetlock-deep in the crunching debris of stones. A mother crept along with three children in tow, two linked by the hand and another clinging to her back, whitened by the fall of ash to a quartet of ghosts. A pair of men blundered ahead with outstretched hands, falling at the same moment over a collapsed roof-beam hidden in rubble—one man rose and stumbled on, blind as an ant; the other lay where he fell and just breathed up at the sky, watching the stones that fell toward his face. A gaunt alley cat darted swift and silent with a half-crushed rat in her mouth, and Marcus’ eyes somehow followed the cat past the fallen man, the lowing ox, even the mother with the desperate children. A cat had no time to wonder if the world was ending around her; she saw dead rats appear in the rubble like meals delivered from the gods, and did not think to ask more. He thought of the whore named Prima; her bottomless stomach; her cynical affection for—a sister, hadn’t it been?

  Did you take your sister and run like that cat with her dinner, little Prima? Or are you dying in this dead city, too?

  He twisted his head over his shoulder, and saw the man who had fallen to the stones was dead, eyes staring up at the black sky and filling with pebbles. Maybe a larger rock had struck him on the head and finished the task. Or maybe he had decided this was the end, and his heart shuddered its last in terror.

  Marcus could still feel no fear. Just an endless, horrified sorrow.

  “Don’t.” From under his arm, Diana sawed the word out through gritted teeth.

  “Don’t what?”

  “You caught your breath like a sob. Don’t weep, Marcus. Don’t you dare weep.”

  “A senator does not weep,” he said automatically. But all around him a city was dying: was that not worthy of grief? No man of Rome wept; that was for women and sentimental slaves. He had drunk that in with his wet-nurse’s milk, with everything else a man of Rome was supposed to be—all those precepts he’d declaimed so pompously to Admiral Pliny’s nephew. But perhaps those precepts were wrong. Marcus had been a man of Rome all his life, doing his best to find dignity and gravitas in all things, and it had brought him to this place of death.

  Diana’s voice was weirdly calm, coming from her swathe of toga. “You know what kills charioteers when they crash?”

  He looked at her. “Being dragged along through scouring sand by four maddened horses.”

  “Despair. There’s a flicker of a moment when you act, and maybe have a chance to live—or you freeze, thinking you’re going to die. The instant that flicker of despair comes in, you’ve lost the chance. It’s out of your hands, and before you get another chance to cut yourself free, the skin wil
l be stripping off your flesh in long curls. Like the peel off an apple.”

  They had reached the corner; Diana paused to scout the choked way ahead. A cart blocked their path, canted on one broken wheel, its mules flinching under the hail of stones. The blind, shuffling hordes parted around it like a stream of water.

  “So,” Diana resumed calmly. “Don’t weep, Marcus. Weeping means despair. Despair means sinking down right here and dying. You may want to die, and maybe you will—maybe I will, too. If death comes, it’ll find you willing and me fighting to the end, but it will find both of us moving. We won’t die just waiting like that cowering he-bitch back in the brothel who couldn’t shift himself out the door to come with us, or that idiot who fell over a roof beam and decided he’d had enough.” She drew the knife at her belt—the dagger charioteers carried to cut themselves loose of the knotted reins in a wreck. “I am Diana of the Cornelii, Marcus Norbanus, and I refuse to die standing still. So, die later—but move now.”

  She slid out from under his arm, pushed the lamp into his hand, and went crunching off through the stones toward the broken cart. Marcus watched her in astonishment. Have I ever heard her string so many words together without a single reference to a horse? he thought. Has anyone?

  He was, despite his numbed horror, impressed.

  The driver in the stranded cart had abandoned his team and was frantically raking arm-loads of possessions off the back—a silver statuette, a bundled toga, an iron-bound box. “Get away!” he screamed at Diana, seeing the gleam of her knife in the falling ash, but she ignored him and went to the mules. A few slashes and she’d freed them of their leather traces. “Stop!” the driver bawled, and she leveled the dagger at him before he could come any closer.

  “If you’re leaving the cart to save your own fat rump, give your team the same courtesy,” she said, and spat through her white teeth between his feet before turning to give the mules a slap each on the bony rump. They shambled free, and Diana came back to Marcus, re-sheathing her dagger with a competent shove. “Lamp,” she said, and he raised it. She peered through the swirling ash and falling rock, and she pointed. “That way,” she said. “Toward the forum.” She wedged her shoulder under Marcus’ arm again, and he looked down at her, still surprised by his own—well, surprise. This was Diana: a pretty, brainless little thing with a bizarre hobby and a father too foolish to stop her indulging it.

  “What did I say about standing still, Marcus?” she asked, and her voice had the snap of a charioteer’s whip. “Die later. Move now.”

  “Yes, my lady,” he said, and took another step on his screaming knee. And another.

  IF the streets of Pompeii had become the ghostlike fields of asphodel, the forum was Tartarus. The world had gone mad here; the city’s pleasant open space of business and worship had become a pit of muffled cries, flickering torches, and falling rock. Shapes darted wildly from the temple of Jupiter, some muffled by cloaks and cushions against the rock-fall as Diana was, some ignoring the danger to clutch arm-loads of temple treasures—Marcus caught a glimpse of what looked like a silver ewer, an amber figurine, a sackful of coins spilling down the steps. A woman shrieked from somewhere in the colonnades: “Fabia, has anyone seen Fabia? Fabia!” A man howled from somewhere in the forum’s heart, and the sound cut off in a gurgle.

  How many men will die of falling rock? Marcus wondered. And how many will be murdered for loot or for a ride on a cart—or simply because someone sees a chance in the chaos to settle a score? He would have put his coin that murder would see more people dead in Pompeii today than falling stones. When the world was upended, men became desperate—desperate for escape, for loot, for something to cling to. And desperate men would do anything.

  They only caught a glimpse of the forum’s madness, and Diana turned them away past the massive baths and toward the north. “Last time I saw a city tear itself to pieces, I had to hack a path straight through the worst of it to get to safety,” she remarked. “Fortunately, this time we can afford to miss the madness.”

  “What city was that?” Marcus asked, diverted.

  “Rome, of course. Ten years ago, during the Year of Four Emperors when number three got torn to bits. I had to haul all my cousins straight through the Campus Martius to get them to safety, gods’ wheels, but that was a horror—”

  “Ah. I was locked up during that particular riot.”

  “Is that when you started thinking that life wasn’t worth living?”

  Marcus declined to answer. He stumbled and nearly fell as a boy pushing ahead of them tripped in the piling stones; Marcus lifted his arm from Diana’s shoulder and bent to raise the boy. “Careful, the footing is treacherous—” The boy was surely no older than Paulinus; on the cusp of manhood but not yet needing a shave. Pray the gods you live to shave your chin, Marcus thought. The boy had dropped a bundle in his fall, and he scrabbled for it with a cry. Marcus expected to see a bag of clothes or some cherished keepsake, but it was a dog, huge-eyed with fear and swathed in a blanket. Gently he replaced the dog in the boy’s arms.

  “Come with us if you want to be safe,” Diana said, but the boy was already darting off with a gasp of thanks, or perhaps it was fear.

  “A dog,” Marcus said. “For some it’s a child, for some it’s an amber statue and a bag of coins, for some it’s a dog …” Did anyone know what was most precious, until it was threatened and you had to grab it and run?

  That struck him, and he looked down at Diana as she slid her shoulder under his arm again. “You’re empty-handed.”

  “So are you.” She hitched along into motion, past the baths, hauling him despite his bad leg pulling behind. She was small, but sturdy as a rock.

  “I have nothing here to value,” Marcus said in complete truth. “Do you?”

  “I do,” she said. “We’re just not there yet.”

  “And where is there?”

  She raised her lamp as they came to another seething cross of streets, swearing as a stone glanced off her bare wrist. “There,” she pointed over the bent and swathed heads of the people stumbling through the stones. “Straight northwest, toward the Herculaneum Gate.”

  “Why that way?” A baby was screaming somewhere in the crush; Marcus twisted his head, but couldn’t see if it was a child lost from its mother or safe in her arms. He couldn’t see, and he’d never know. “Wouldn’t the Marine Gate be closer?”

  Diana hitched into motion, pulling them into the rush like a current. A slow current: the accumulation of stones underfoot was rising like an inexorable tide. “The person fixed on death does not get to pick the route, Marcus.”

  “But the Marine Gate is closer. If we skirted the forum and made our way past the Temple of Venus—”

  “That’s a senator for you,” Diana complained. “Always knows a better way!”

  “I help build cities for a living, girl. I know how to find my way around a map!” Marcus felt a twinge of irrational irritation. “The only direction you understand is ‘off the starting line and turn left for seven laps!’”

  Her teeth flashed white in her ash-grimed face. “I like you better when you’re not brooding.”

  “We are going the wrong way.”

  “Feel free to keep complaining. This is still the way we’re going.”

  “You will be the death of me.”

  “I thought that was the idea.”

  A shape reared before them, pushing against the current of the crowd, and Diana broke into a shout of alarm. Her dagger flashed free again, but it was a girl, swathed and bulky, and she screamed as she rebounded off Marcus.

  “We mean you no harm, Lady—”

  But she fell on her side into the heaped stones, letting out a gasp. Diana squatted to raise her. “Get to the gate, girl, you have to get out, not go back into the city!”

  “Can’t,” the girl jerked out. Her palla fell back, and Marcus saw her enormous belly. My wife was never that big, even in her last month with Paulinus. He knelt, ignoring the wrench of ago
ny from his strapped knee, and helped Diana raise her. “Th-thank you—” the girl gasped. Fine-boned and pretty; all her body’s weight seemingly coalesced into that giant ball of belly. Her fingers linked around the arc of her stomach like a frail bracelet, and Marcus saw the flash of a betrothal ring. It proclaimed her a woman, but she looked so young he could not think she was anything but a girl.

  “Where is your husband?” he asked gently.

  “Home. I’m trying to reach him—I had a litter, but my bearers ran away. I was on my way to a wedding—” Looking down at herself; giving a laugh that was half sob. She was all finery: an emerald-green stola, gold bracelets and gold rings and gold combs in her ash-clotted hair. Wedding finery, not clothes for walking through Tartarus. “I was arriving early to fix Aemilia’s veil. I’m supposed to be leading her to her husband right now, and I don’t even know if she’s alive—”

  The girl broke off with a gasp, clutching at the huge arc of her own stomach. Her eyes flickered panic, but Diana stretched out a hand and laid it on the swell of green silk. “Just a spasm.” Diana had no ring on her own finger and a slimness that said she’d never given birth in her life, but she spoke with such calm authority that the pregnant girl’s eyes pooled relief, and Marcus’ own apprehension checked in his throat. “You won’t be birthing for another ten days at least; it hasn’t dropped low enough. You could come with us to safety—”

  But the girl couldn’t walk above a waddle; even Marcus could see that. “She needs to get home and wait out the madness,” he said briefly. “I’ll take her.”

  Diana looked at him, and he looked at her. She gave a terse nod, all ash and grime and narrowed eyes that had never, not once since this gruesome disaster descended, filled with tears. He nodded back, and suddenly he wanted to tell her to think well of him after he was dead. If he died helping this young mother-to-be in her jeweled finery to safety, would that at least meet Diana’s standard of moving, of not waiting for death like a dumb beast?