A Day of Fire: a novel of Pompeii

by Stephanie Dray

  Sabinus shakes his head. “I don’t have my tools with me, but an hour ago I marked the height of the debris on the stairs with the haft of the ax—”

  “An hour ago?” I ask, confused. Like immortal Isis, I have lost all sense of time. Without the sun, I don’t know if we have been in this temple an hour or a day. “What time is it now?”

  “I don’t know,” he admits. “But this oil lamp is marked by the half hour. So I noted where the oil stood when I returned. When it burned down another line, I checked outside. A half hour ago, I checked again. And here is the mark I just made,” he says, showing me the series of marks he scraped on the stick. “The last two are much closer together. That means that either the debris is settling or … we’ve weathered the worst of it. Perhaps I am a fool to think so, but I am still a man of hope.”

  In my vision, I saw the swell of a river followed by the crashing waves of a dark and violent sea. I fear the worst is yet to come. But I do not say so, because his hope is a contagion. It leaps from Sabinus to the others, who crowd near the door holding lamps and torches to watch as the storm loses its power. The flood of rock and ash is mounded up high enough that it would have buried even a tall man, but Sabinus says, “We can go now. The debris will hold us. It’s like snow on the alpine mountains. It will be unsteady beneath our feet, but we can walk on it.”

  I have never seen snow on the alpine mountains. But the merchant—who once served in the legions—nods his head. They want to go now. They want to run from the city. And I nearly laugh at myself for wanting to stay. All my life I have been running. And yet, now when everyone else wants to run, I want to remain still.

  Yes, inside this temple, there is a stillness in me. An understanding that from the darkness, I have already been reborn.

  They all look to me. Even Sabinus, whose arms and legs nearly twitch with restless energy. He wants to get back to his Aemilia, the girl he means to make his wife. Or perhaps, if he dies, he wants to die on his feet. They all do. They want to use their limbs. Push and strain and struggle with every breath.

  Because that, too, is how we are born.

  Only Sabinus’ little friend wishes to remain, as I do. She whimpers in protest when he picks her up and settles her on his hip to go. “Ah, little one,” he says, kissing her ash-covered brow, “I have something for you if you are a good girl and a brave one.” The small object emerges again from his purse. It is a small doll made of scraps of linen and blue silk. He hands it to the child who hugs it to herself, delighted. “That belonged to another good girl. A brave one, too.”

  Sabinus and I take turns carrying the child and her prize.

  It is slow going and not only because the earth is hot and shaking beneath our feet. Illuminated by the burning city, we are cautious. With every step we sink into the rubble and we must wait for it to settle enough for us to take another. We climb over fallen bricks and splintered beams of wood. Over the bodies of the dead, human and animal, in a grotesque rictus, all covered in ash.

  The children who follow me walk until they fall. Then they crawl, until I help them up again. Their arms and legs are shaking. They are thirsty enough to lick the sweat from each other’s brows. But they keep going. Sabinus is tired, too, yet he is grimly determined. I see him fall a hundred times—always careful not to land on our little charge if he has her in his arms. And always he props himself back up, straining to rise again. I think he has turned his ankle, but he will not admit it. His eyes are glassy and distant. “Are we beyond the walls, yet?” he finally asks. It’s startling proof that he’s disoriented, for if Sabinus does not know Pompeii then no man does. “I have promised to go to Nuceria,” he murmurs, as if he were explaining himself to a servant. “Are we still in Pompeii?”

  None of us know.

  PRIMA

  PRIMA was crying.

  For the first time that she could remember, she was crying real tears. In truth, she felt herself choked with sobs. With despair. And despair hurt. It hurt more than anger. It hurt more than her sore muscles and aching feet … feet that somehow kept moving, as if on their own accord, shuffling along behind the aedile.

  He was right. He didn’t have to drag her anymore. And because he was right, Prima sobbed inconsolably into her hands, “I left her. I left her …”

  “I gave you no choice,” Pansa said. “That’s the advantage of being a slave. You don’t have choices. You don’t have—”

  “What would you know about what slaves have?” Prima asked, hating the way her voice no longer held its sharp edge. She sounded weak. Distraught. But he was wrong about slaves having no choices. She could’ve gone with Capella to get the water from the cistern. She could’ve stayed with her sister—and in truth, she’d never intended to leave her. If she had, she wouldn’t have told such a venomous lie. She’d told her sister that she hated her. Now that lie might be the last thing she ever said to Capella.

  And what had her sister said in return?

  I love you. I have loved you from my first breath; I will love you to my last.

  The memory drove Prima to her knees.

  Prima didn’t remember falling. For a moment she couldn’t even make sense of the sharp edges cutting into her shins and her palms, as anguish howled through the hollow and empty place where a soul ought to be.

  “Come now,” the aedile said, softly. “Get up.”

  Just as her voice had lost its sharp edge, his had lost its sense of command. He was having trouble breathing, she could tell, as if something was swelling closed inside him. But extending his hand, he offered a tiny morsel of hope. “If your sister somehow survives, she’ll need you alive to find her when this is all over.”

  “What if it’s never over?” Prima asked, still staring at the ground. “What if this nightmare never ends?”

  “Everything ends,” Pansa said.

  And so she took his hand.

  They walked. Slower and slower as they came upon other travelers on the road, as if Pansa didn’t want to be recognized. As if he feared people would accuse him of having failed them somehow as the aedile. Still, they walked on and on, until it was Pansa’s knees that gave out beneath him. He crashed down like a tumbling colossus, and the torch crashed down with him, guttering out and leaving them in the dark under the starless sky.

  It was the second time today that she’d seen a powerful man crumple; this time, she stopped to listen for breath. It was the smoke that got him, she thought. Pansa had been taking in big, gulping breaths to fortify his strength whereas she had breathed through the filter of a toga.

  Only the gods themselves could guess how much ash he’d inhaled.

  “Thirsty,” he croaked, coming back to consciousness.

  It startled her, though she tried not to show it. “Maybe someone on the road has water in one of those wagons. I’ll get some for you.”

  “How?” he asked, as if he actually believed she would do it.

  “I’ll have to steal it …”

  “Buy water,” Pansa said, unfastening a coin purse tied at his hip. “Get fire for the torch, too.”

  He put the whole heavy purse in her hand—and, when she opened it, she saw gold stamped with the faces of emperors. More coins than she had ever held in her life. Money enough to buy her freedom, she guessed.

  More money than she was worth.

  How foolish was Pansa to think she would use it for water and fire?

  If he’s foolish enough to trust a whore, then he deserves what he gets.

  That’s what he’d once said to her about another man—a boy, really. The one with the important uncle. Which is why she walked away from Pansa, telling herself that she didn’t care if he ever got back up again. She didn’t need Pansa; she just needed to follow the road to Nuceria. She told herself that she didn’t care if Pansa died choking on his own thirst and his swollen tongue. He wasn’t her master. He wasn’t her lover. He wasn’t her friend, and he certainly wasn’t her sister.

  He was no one to her. No one at all
. Worse than no one.

  She begged fire for her torch from a man who walked like a soldier. His name was Rufus. “Walk with my servant and me,” he said. “It’s not safe for someone as small as you, on her own.”

  Rufus looked like a decent sort. A veteran. She gauged him to be a simple man of simple needs. The kind of man she might be able to seduce and manipulate.

  She ought to have gone with him, keeping Pansa’s coin purse for herself. Instead, Prima found herself spending the coins, bargaining with other travelers for precious water.

  Then, in defiance of all reason, she went back for Pansa.

  He’d somehow dragged himself to the edge of the road. And he seemed almost as surprised that she’d come back as she was. When she’d wedged the torch between the rocks so she could cradle his head in her lap and give him sips of water, he asked, “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  Then she stroked his handsome cheek. She didn’t know why she did that either, because there was nothing in it for her. And she couldn’t guess how long she held him underneath the shelter of another umbrella pine as he slowly suffocated in her arms. There was something evil in the way a powerful man could be taken down by seemingly nothing. Was it the vapors, or had he been struck by something and she never noticed? Her fingers found no wound, no raised lump on his head, nothing to make her understand why he was stricken and she was not.

  “Go,” he said, shuddering with each diminishing breath. “Get safely to Nuceria.”

  “I will,” Prima promised. But as he writhed in agony, she remembered a different promise she made to him.

  I’m going to kill you. You’re going to want to rest—you’ll want to close your eyes—and when you do, I will make sure that you never open them again.

  She wanted to keep that promise now, but not for cruelty or malice. She didn’t have any more hatred left for him or anyone. It had all dried up. Evaporated. Burned away with the heat from the mountain. She only wanted to kill Pansa to end his suffering. But hadn’t he said they were just alike?

  Whether it’s a few years more, or a few hours more, or a few moments more …

  He would want them. He would want whatever he could get. And he would not want to die alone. People weren’t meant to be alone. So Prima let him struggle for life in her embrace until he struggled no more. Only when she was sure he was dead, did she close his eyes, fingertips tickled by his very long lashes.

  Then she bent her head to kiss him. She pressed her crooked mouth to his perfect lips while her tears wet his face. It was the first kiss she’d given a man freely in her whole life. A kiss for a dead man, and in that kiss she felt the heaviness of grief for a man she had never liked and had scarcely known. She cried for him. Not like a necropolis whore who wails with grief during the day and with pleasure at night. But like someone filled with more love than hatred.

  Someone like her sister.

  And when Prima finally lifted her head from weeping, she saw a miraculous light.

  CAPELLA

  “IS it fire?” Sabinus asks, his words slurred.

  With wonder and awe at the pale, obscured haze of light in the distance, I answer, “It’s dawn.”

  The mere hint of rising sun—even pale and obscured by ash—makes us weep. Then we laugh. We laugh with joy because we were not sure there would ever be another morning. But this one has come. Like a blazing lighthouse in a storm. And it is glorious.

  “We’re going to make it,” Sabinus says, as if awakening from a nightmare.

  There is not a patch of skin on any of us that is not scraped, burned, or sore, but we’re alive. And the dawn rejuvenates us. Exhilarates us. We have nothing at all but each other and the dawn to make us walk faster. But we do. The little girl in my arms hums a sweet tune to her new doll. And she twines the fingers of her empty hand in my filthy hair, as if it were liquid gold. We walk in a line, using a low wall to guide us. Once it must have been a substantial house with a lovely orchard. Now it is collapsed upon itself but for this wall.

  “We’re going to escape your dark flood, Capella,” Sabinus says. “The mountain will not have us.”

  “Praise Isis!” cries the merchant’s wife. “She has saved us. Isis has saved us.”

  After all their bickering, the merchant hugs his wife then kisses her right on the mouth.

  Seeing this, I smile and Sabinus reaches for my hand.

  There is, in touch, an affirmation of life, of immortality. But when our fingers clasp, I hear a different call of immortality. Of eternity. One I’ve been hearing all my life.

  It is the roar of the ocean.

  We turn together to see black waves churning violently down the mountain with a power and speed at once ungodly and breathtaking. Frothing and boiling up over the city, the darkness comes, like the spray of the sea when it smashes against rock.

  It is a sight both majestic and ghastly.

  There is no running from this dark sea, and not even Sabinus tries. He watches it come, his mouth slightly agape, not in terror but in something beyond that. As if fascinated by the natural power of what we are seeing.

  I, too, am beyond terror, because I have seen this dark sea before. It is the promise my goddess made to me. The promise she makes to us all. We are meant to be free. We are meant to be more than body, blood, and bones. Though we are nameless, we are meant to endure a thousand years and a thousand more. There is a part of us that will never die.

  I know this dark ocean will hurl us, and the remains of a whole city up to the gods; there is no escaping it. None. Which means there is nothing left but to embrace it. To the crying little girl in my arms, I whisper as if it were a day of celebration. “Here come the waves, little one. Open your arms.” And just as I once stepped into the frothing waves of the sea during the Navigium Isidis, I walk toward the boiling tidal wave of ash.

  With hot wind billowing my gown and my hair whipping high into the air around me, I hold tight to the little girl in my arms until the blast rips her from my grasp. Until the searing pain of my soul shredding away from my body makes me lose my hold on everything.

  In violence we are torn away from each other, and this world into the next …

  … but becoming is always an agony.

  It all happens in an instant, but for me, it stretches into an eternity. The ocean breaks us like stones into sand. Like sand that will one day become beautiful gleaming sea glass in a thousand years or a thousand years more. We are all, all of us, every one of us in life, sailors trying to survive a rough sea. All looking for the light that will guide us home. And I can already see that bright beacon.

  But first, there must be darkness.

  We are born in darkness. We perish in darkness. And then we are born again.

  EPILOGUE

  WORSE than Troy, Prima thought. Not a million Greeks in a thousand wooden horses could wreak such devastation. There was a city here once, beneath her feet. Now, weeks later, just a tomb. The mountain was half gone, like a ravaged loaf of bread from the oven, still smoking at its pith. The city itself covered in a thick blanket of ash. Some of that same ash still drifted in the wind like snow.

  There were no survivors.

  On the day of the blast, that last deathly cloud at sunrise had rolled over the city, killing everyone and everything, leaving an unearthly quiet behind. A haunting stillness for the living to sift through and make sense of.

  But Prima could make no sense of it at all.

  Only the blackened rooftops of the tallest buildings gave any hint as to what might lie buried where. Prima could not begin to guess where the caupona had been. Nor even the Temple of Isis. People wrote on markers to help give clues. Others left only poems or tributes for the dead. Or warnings to stay away from this accursed place and the spirits who must haunt it now.

  Amongst those spirits must be her sister’s, though, so she would not be warned away.

  Capella was dead. Prima knew this in a way that sisters know.

  Just
as she knew that her sister was buried beneath her feet.

  You always know where to find me, Capella had said.

  And so she did. Even if she did not know what this place once had been.

  She’d come to make an offering on what was her sister’s grave. A libation to pour, though she did not know what words she should say. She would ask forgiveness, that much she knew. Forgiveness she didn’t deserve. But if anyone ever would forgive her—ever could forgive her—it would be Capella.

  At the remembrance of her sister, her eyes blurred again with tears.

  She turned to swipe them from her cheeks and, when she did, she saw a man in a toga picking through the rubble in a swirl of smoke. An older man. A senator. One of the lemures. An angry spirit she could not appease with offerings. A spirit that would not give forgiveness. A spirit that would want vengeance.

  Prima crashed to her knees, babbling words to ward off evil spirits. “I’m sorry. Mercy—”

  “Beg pardon? Are you well, girl?”

  Her head came up at the sound of his voice. It wasn’t wrathful; it was as mild as she remembered. He limped to her side and, to her astonishment, the hand that raised her by the elbow was warm and living. Alive. The senator was alive. She hadn’t murdered him and somehow he’d escaped the destruction of Pompeii. The realization filled her with such sweet relief she gasped with the pleasure of it.

  But she had bashed him with a jug and left him for dead. And given that he had her by the arm, she was caught. Again. Why hadn’t she run before he could recognize her?

  Because surely he did recognize her now. “Are you hurt?” the senator asked as she ducked her head belatedly from his gaze. But he raised her chin with one finger, and those piercing eyes flared. “Ah,” he breathed. “The little guttersnipe from outside the brothel. Prima, isn’t it?”

  She should’ve lied. She should’ve broken free of him. He wasn’t so strong—not as strong as Pansa had been. But the senator had an entourage, she could see dimly through her haze of tears—secretaries and guards and slaves in tunics finer than anything Prima had ever worn. So instead of trying to run, she said, “I didn’t mean to hit you. I just wanted to get away. I wanted—”