A Day of Fire: a novel of Pompeii

by Stephanie Dray

  More importantly, she had never seen Gaius Cuspius Pansa alone before. As a junior magistrate, an entourage of attendants and slaves always trailed him. But more importantly, he’d been born into a wealthy and influential family; the Cuspii Pansae could count upon a small army of clients in any crisis. Which is why Prima could make no sense of finding this one alone—completely alone—the press of humanity having already passed through.

  He ought to have been fleeing. Instead, he was looking back at the city in flames. Rooftops burning. Sparks lighting the dark air. Watching it, he murmured to himself, repeating the words in numb shock as if the devastating news had only just been told to him. “Pompeii is ruined …”

  She’d never known Pansa to feel a moment’s sentiment for any living person. It almost made her laugh that he could feel it for a city. He didn’t see her. He didn’t seem to see anything but his wealth and power burning up before his eyes. If she had only turned back in that moment to return to Capella—if only she had not taken that twelfth step …

  Twelve.

  Pansa blinked those long lashes of his. Then he blinked again, shuddering with recognition. “My skinny little slut,” he said, which was what he always called her. But there was a strangeness to the way he said it now, without any of the usual contempt. And a curious emotion twisted the features of his face just before he reached for her, his hand closing around her wrist like a manacle.

  She was caught. Prima’s heart couldn’t hammer any harder in her chest than it already was, but it leaped to her throat at the realization. She was a runaway slave and a murderer, and she’d been caught by the aedile who would not have mercy on her even though she had killed on one of his errands.

  To her surprise, Pansa only said, “Get away from the mountain. Do not stop. Go now to get to safety.”

  So he didn’t know what she’d done. A delicious hope was born in her breast. How many bodies had Prima stumbled over in the streets, felled by falling roof tiles or the rain of stones? Could not a Roman senator perish the same way? She might get away with it. Perhaps she and Capella really could escape the city and find a patch of sunlight. She had, after all, just been given a command by the aedile to do so. And as a lowly slave, who was she to disobey?

  “Yes,” Prima said, trying to pull free of his iron grip. “I’ll get my sister and go.”

  Pansa didn’t release her. Instead, his eyes narrowed in a most unsettling way, lit up in half-mad zeal by the distant fires. “Didn’t you hear me? We have to leave Pompeii.”

  He shoved her forward, forcefully, with such strength she might have been flung into the air if he had not had such a tight hold on her wrist. And she protested, “My sister! Just let me get my sister.”

  “We go now,” Pansa said, striding forward with such purposeful steps that Prima was forced into a stumbling run.

  Suddenly it didn’t matter to her that he was an aedile. That he could have her killed. It only mattered that he was carrying her off. “What are you doing?” Prima howled, trying to wrench herself away. But he was too big, too strong. “Let go of me.”

  Pansa did not answer or so much as look at her. Instead, his eyes fixed in the direction of the gate with a fierce determination. He dragged her toward the archway ahead, even as she beat on his arm with her fist. In the distance, she thought she heard someone call her name, and she was seized with a terror darker than the shadow of Vesuvius. Trying to make her body dead weight, she shrieked in answer, “Capella!”

  Prima was too small to escape the aedile. After a lifetime of trying to sate her hunger, she was still of no weight, no substance. So when she dragged her legs and went down to the ground, Pansa simply hefted her under his arm like sack of grain and carried her out the Stabian Gate.

  CAPELLA

  “PRIMA!” I scream again into the now empty street.

  Never did I believe she would go. Not truly. I do not even believe it now. It was only a few steps to the purgatorium, down the stairway and into the sacred cistern. Then back again. Now I stand by the doorway to the street with a jug full of water and a heart full of despair.

  How could she go? How could I have let her? I thought she was bluffing—trying to scare me into coming with her. And now I have let Prima go off by herself into the world, frightened and alone. Just like the nameless boy who spent himself inside me when the mountain exploded. And a daughter whose name I will never know.

  Please, merciful goddess. Please help me find her. “Prima!”

  I listen for her voice, but I am answered only by thunder on the mountain, and by the stones falling faster and heavier, rolling from the curb into the street so that it’s all level now. A flood swiftly rising to my knees.

  I am bereft. Prima cannot be gone. She cannot be. I don’t know how far she could have gotten, but fear I will never find her in this storm! I start to go after her anyway, though I’m nearly blinded by the ash.

  But from the dark of the alleyway, a man stops me. “Help! Help me, priestess.”

  Priestess? In the dim light, with my shawl tied in the tiet, I suppose even a whore might be mistaken for a priestess. The man moves closer and the fires in the street reveal a child in the cradle of his arms. I cannot guess her age. Two or three? A cloth has been draped over the little girl’s mouth to protect her from the ash, but it is caked and she’s choking for breath.

  “Get her inside for shelter,” I say, nearly twitching with eagerness to run after Prima. “Here is water.”

  But he can’t manage the child and the water jug on his own. I have to help him. And so we stumble back into the temple courtyard, until we are beneath the roof of the portico. Then the man lays the child down, clears the ash from her mouth and makes her drink from my jug.

  That is when I realize that I know him. I know this man with the little girl.

  It’s my friend Sabinus—the one my sister calls the lonely engineer.

  He, too, is surprised. “Capella? Thank the gods. As soon as I could be sure of this little one’s safety, I was coming for you.”

  “For me?” I feel a rush of warm gratitude. Vindication, too, in having proof that he is my friend, no matter what Prima says. But Sabinus is a man of wealth and status; there is a city filled with people he could call friend. “Why would you come for me?”

  “I once told you if the worst happened, the men of the city would do their duty. Gods help us,” he lowers his eyes for a moment. “The things I have seen today …” His voice trails off as he looks at the little girl. “I told you I would look out for you and I meant it.”

  My sister would doubt him. She would look for some hidden motive. But at this moment, in this dark temple courtyard, I don’t hear the voice of Sabinus speaking these words, but the voice of Isis speaking through him. Words of compassion, and kindness, and goodness. And here, where priests have looked after all of us, I believe.

  “Then help me look for my sister,” I say. Before I finish the words, a stream of ash pours onto us from the battered roof over our heads where the tiles have chipped away. “Isis, have Mercy! Is it going to come down?”

  In Pompeii, we know to go out into the open during earthquakes. We’ve been taught to beware buildings shaking apart over our heads. But none of us know what to do in a shower of missiles from the sky. If anyone does know, it would be Sabinus. So I watch him lift the lamp to look, his soulful eyes cutting a path along the colonnade, inspecting the pillars for cracks and weaknesses. “It should hold,” Sabinus says, kneeling beside me over the girl. “It’s the newest roof in Pompeii and Ampliatus paid a fortune for it. It was built to last.”

  The temple was finally rebuilt, seventeen years after Nero’s quake, thanks to the patronage of a freedman, as a legacy to his goddess and to his family, and for the salvation of the city. I pray now that this temple is the salvation of the little girl who struggles for breath. Because I must go; I must leave them to find my sister. But then I am sure my eyes are playing tricks on me. Because when the little girl sips again from the jug
and smiles weakly in gratitude, I see that there is a gap between her teeth.

  She has Prima’s crooked smile. That rarest and most precious of smiles.

  “Who is she?” I ask, thunderstruck by the resemblance.

  “A little friend,” Sabinus replies, offering the child a smile of his own despite the circumstances. Then, lowering his voice. “I found her alone and abandoned in the streets.”

  Could she be my own daughter? Prima would tell me I was a fool for thinking it, even for a moment. And I am a fool for thinking it. It is a desperate, wishful thought; but even that tiny question in my mind changes everything. “You need to take her out of the city. Get her to the harbor. The navy—”

  “The ships can’t come in.” Sabinus replies. “Even the fishing boats can’t go out. The seas are too rough. Most of the falling stones are porous. They’re floating and blocking the rescuers. In any event, your dark rain has come, Capella, and it’s too dangerous to go out until the stones stop falling. My little friend cannot breathe, and if I am struck down who will take her from my arms?”

  I will, I want to say. I will take her from your arms if you are struck down.

  But I have already failed one gap-toothed girl today.

  “My sister is out there,” I cry. “I told her we should leave by the Stabian Gate and make for the water. Now she is out there alone and you say it’s too dangerous.”

  “Your sister will find her way,” Sabinus says, avoiding my eyes just as he did the last time we were together. He was a lovesick groom, eagerly anticipating his wedding, and there was something in his voice that told me that once he’d made love to his new wife, he would not come back to visit me again. “When your sister sees there are no ships, she’ll keep going. You’ve said your sister is wily and strong, and this is a time for both.”

  He meets my gaze at last. So, these last words, at least, are not platitudes. He believes them. And I believe him. Not only because he speaks with the authority of a Roman paterfamilias who knows best and must be obeyed, but because my sister has always known how to survive.

  Prima is simply too hard for the stones to smash.

  Still, I say, “I have to go after her. I have to go with her. But there are people waiting for this water in the ekklesiasterion.” My fingers are still wrapped tight around the handles of the jug. “Will you carry it to them?”

  Before he can answer, a distraught woman in jewels shrieks from the other end of the portico. “There are men chained in the barracks! They can’t get out.”

  Gladiators, she means. Dangerous slaves who must be chained for a reason. Or so many would say. But Sabinus does not. “I would not let a dog die chained in this,” he says. “What can I use to free them? Is there anything in this temple I might wield to break a chain?”

  My mind circles in a panic, trying to remember anything that might help. The only thing I can think of is the sacrificial ax on the slab near the cistern where geese are burned for Isis, and I say so. “But you just said it was too dangerous to go out into the hail of stones!”

  “I did. But you have my little friend now. If I fall, you will look after her.”

  He cannot mean to leave me with a child. To entrust a pure little girl into the arms of a prostitute. But when he dashes into the falling stone, I realize that he does mean it. Alas, I have no idea what to do as I try to balance the jug of water in one arm and the child in the other.

  I have never held a child before today. Not even the one I birthed. I don’t know how to comfort this little one. How to touch her. How to soothe her fears. But somehow she knows what to do, turning onto her side to press her face against my belly. Turning away from the sight of the stones piling higher, rolling over one another like the endless river in my vision.

  And I fear we are all going to drown.

  PRIMA

  “LET me go!” Prima raged, raking her captor’s arms, pummeling his ribs, flailing her legs. “Why won’t you let me go?”

  Her struggling had no effect. Though he was coughing from the ash, Pansa was too strong—able to hold her with one arm while holding up his torch with the other. The aedile trudged on wordlessly, stopping only when they got to the harbor, where he bellowed with pure, frustrated fury. He was charged with regulating the vessels, the water supply, the use of the streets and sewers. But he couldn’t control the navy, and seeing it sail away from Pompeii, not toward it, his bellow became a bitter laugh. “They’re going to Stabiae. Of course they are. It’s wealthier than Pompeii. All that fame and public glory, and Admiral Pliny just sails where the wind blows and worries only for his rich friends.”

  Was it the navy’s fault, though, when the harbor was clogged with debris? Regardless of who was to blame, Prima realized with horror that there would be no escape by sea. Her sister, too, would be stranded, waiting for rescuers who would never come. “Capella!” she screamed again.

  “She can’t hear you,” Pansa said, coldly. “You know she can’t hear you.”

  “I have to go back for her,” Prima insisted, again tugging frantically, wondering how long Pansa could possibly maintain the strength of his grip. “She doesn’t know there won’t be ships. She doesn’t know.”

  With a shrug of his massive shoulder, Pansa said, “Give her up. She is likely already dead. So leave her. Count her a loss. Move on.”

  Like a sausage split open by fire, Prima exploded with an angry hiss, clawing at his hideously handsome face. Trying to make him hurt. Trying to make him bleed. Trying to make him kill her. Because she would sooner die than give her sister up or count her a loss.

  “You harpy!” he cursed, boxing her head until a strange ringing echoed in her ears.

  But he didn’t kill her and he didn’t leave her for dead. Instead, Pansa hauled her up again, trudging through drifts of stone back to the road. He did not seem to tire until they came to the necropolis. There, amidst the half-buried urns and statues and plaques to the dead, he finally stopped and pulled his toga over his head in reverence. The air was hot and foul smelling, filled with sulfur and ash. Prima had been able to cover her own face with her toga, but he’d needed both his hands to hold her and the torch. He’d been gulping in breaths of bad vapors, and it seemed to finally take its toll. He gasped as if something inside him was singed and swelling shut.

  But beneath the roof of a mausoleum, Pansa seemed affected by more than the burden of his exertions. He seemed … to be hovering on the edge of tears. It was unseemly for a Roman man to cry. If Pansa cried, Prima would only have more contempt for him. But what had him so upset here? These were not his ancestors, she knew. The Cuspii Pansae were far too prominent to be buried here. The tombs of his ancestors were sure to be to the north, nearer to the angry mountain. And yet, the aedile’s reddened eyes welled. “Here sleep the fathers of Pompeii.”

  Prima wanted to spit on the fathers of Pompeii. She wanted to spit at the aedile, too. But her mouth was so dry she could not draw any spittle to her lips. “So why don’t you lay down with them and die?”

  His very square chin jerked up. “I should. Rather than abandon the city like so many cowards before me, I should lie down and die here with the ancestors … but I have to save you.”

  “Save me?” Prima asked with an indelicate snort. “Don’t make me your excuse. Because you might as well know I can be of no use to you anymore. There aren’t any pimply-faced boys on the road for me to betray. Or any senators to spy on. And if you don’t let me go, I’ll only slow you down.”

  She waited for him to strike her for her insolence, but he only said, “Nevertheless, I’m going to save you.”

  “You’re a fool, Pansa. Don’t you know I hate you? I’ve never done anything at your bidding that didn’t make me despise you.”

  His grave expression crumbled, his voice thick with emotion. “And I never did anything at my father’s bidding that didn’t make me despise him. I did it anyway because it had to be done. We are just the same, Prima. That’s why I chose you out of all the whores in P
ompeii to work for me. You and I, we do what we must do.”

  It wasn’t possible that one of the great swaggering men of the Cuspii Pansae—an elected official, a man with a statue of himself in the amphitheater—would liken himself to an enslaved tavern whore. The comparison betrayed some manner of dangerous derangement. “Are you a murderer, then?” she asked. “Because I am.” Her crime didn’t matter now. Not if she couldn’t go back for Capella. There was no patch of sunlight in which she might ever be content without her sister. They might as well nail her to a cross. “I killed that senator just before the mountain exploded. I bashed his skull with a wine jug and he fell to the street like a sacrificial ox under the hammer.”

  This finally shook the aedile out of his strangely teary stupor. “I told you to follow him, not kill him!”

  “You didn’t tell me what to do if he caught me. And he did. He told me he could crush you like a flea.”

  Pansa’s jaw clenched. “So you killed him to protect me?”

  “No,” Prima said, slumping against the wall of a tomb, so exhausted she couldn’t even pretend. “I killed him because I’m a rabid dog who bites anyone who passes too near, even to offer the slightest kindness. Senator Norbanus gave me meat and he gave me wine and I attacked him anyway. That’s what I do.”

  Pansa’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “Because he fell to the ground and didn’t get up again.”

  Pansa cuffed her. “Did you stop to listen for his breath?”

  “I stopped for nothing,” she said, her ear ringing from the blow. “I ran. Just as I’m going to run from you when you get too tired to drag me.”