Pompeii

by Harris, Robert

He said, ‘As long as we fix the Augusta, Becco can screw every girl in Italy for all I care.’

  ‘There you go, Becco. Your prick will soon be as long as your nose –’

  The ship the admiral had promised was moored before them: the Minerva, named for the goddess of wisdom, with an owl, the symbol of her deity, carved into her prow. A liburnian. Smaller than the big triremes. Built for speed. Her high sternpost reared out behind her, then curled across her low deck like the sting of a scorpion preparing to strike. She was deserted.

  ‘– Cuculla and Zmyrina. And then there’s this redhaired Jewess, Martha. And a little Greek girl, if you like that kind of thing – her mother’s barely twenty –’

  ‘What use is a ship without a crew?’ muttered Attilius. He was fretting already. He could not afford to waste an hour. ‘Polites – run to the barracks, there’s a good lad, and find out what’s happening.’

  ‘– Aegle and Maria –’

  The young slave got to his feet.

  ‘No need,’ said Corvinus, and gestured with his head towards the entrance to the port. ‘Here they come.’

  Attilius said, ‘Your ears must be sharper than mine –’ but then he heard them, too. A hundred pairs of feet, doubling along the road from the military school. As the marchers crossed the wooden bridge of the causeway, the sharp rhythm became a continuous thunder of leather on wood, then a couple of torches appeared and the unit swung into the street leading to the harbour front. They came on, five abreast, three officers wearing body armour and crested helmets in the lead. At a first shout of command the column halted; at a second, it broke and the sailors moved towards the ship. None spoke. Attilius drew back to let them pass. In their sleeveless tunics, the misshapen shoulders and hugely muscled arms of the oarsmen appeared grotesquely out of proportion to their lower bodies.

  ‘Look at them,’ drawled the tallest of the officers. ‘The cream of the Navy: human oxen.’ He turned to Attilius and raised his fist in salute. ‘Torquatus, captain of the Minerva.’

  ‘Marcus Attilius. Engineer. Let’s go.’

  It did not take long to load the ship. Attilius had seen no point in dragging the heavy amphorae of quick-lime and sacks of puteolanum down from the reservoir and ferrying them across the bay. If Pompeii was, as they described her, swarming with builders, he would use the admiral’s letter to commandeer what he needed. Tools, though, were a different matter. A man should always use his own tools.

  He arranged a chain to pass them on board, handing each in turn to Musa, who threw them on to Corvinus – axes, sledgehammers, saws, picks and shovels, wooden trays to hold the fresh cement, hoes to mix it, and the heavy flat-irons they used to pound it into place – until eventually it had all reached Becco, standing on the deck of the Minerva. They worked swiftly, without exchanging a word, and by the time they had finished it was light and the ship was making ready to sail.

  Attilius walked up the gangplank and jumped down to the deck. A line of marines with boathooks was waiting to push her away from the quay. From his platform beneath the sternpost, next to the helmsman, Torquatus shouted down, ‘Are you ready, engineer?’ and Attilius called back that he was. The sooner they left, the better.

  ‘But Corax isn’t here,’ objected Becco.

  To hell with him, thought Attilius. It was almost a relief. He would manage the job alone. ‘That’s Corax’s look-out.’

  The mooring ropes were cast off. The boathooks dropped like lances and connected with the dock. Beneath his feet, Attilius felt the deck shake as the oars were unshipped and the Minerva began to move. He looked back towards the shore. A crowd had gathered around the public fountain, waiting for the water to appear. He wondered if he should have stayed at the reservoir long enough to supervise the opening of the sluices. But he had left six slaves behind to run the Piscina and the building was ringed by Pliny’s marines.

  ‘There he is!’ shouted Becco. ‘Look! It’s Corax!’ He started waving his arms above his head. ‘Corax! Over here!’ He gave Attilius an accusing look. ‘You see! You should have waited!’

  The overseer had been slouching past the fountain, a bag across his shoulder, seemingly deep in thought. But now he looked up, saw them, and started to run. He moved fast for a man in his forties. The gap between the ship and the quay was widening quickly – three feet, four feet – and it seemed to Attilius impossible that he could make it, but when he reached the edge he threw his bag and then leapt after it, and a couple of the marines stretched out and caught his arms and hauled him aboard. He landed upright, close to the stern, glared at Attilius and jerked his middle finger at him. The engineer turned away.

  The Minerva was swinging out from the harbour, prow first, and sprouting oars, two dozen on either side of her narrow hull. A drum sounded below deck, and the blades dipped. It sounded again and they splashed the surface, two men pulling on each shaft. The ship glided forwards – imperceptibly to begin with, but picking up speed as the tempo of the drum beats quickened. The pilot, leaning out above the ramming post and staring straight ahead, pointed to the right, Torquatus called out an order, and the helmsman swung hard on the huge oar that served as a rudder, steering a course between two anchored triremes. For the first time in four days, Attilius felt a slight breeze on his face.

  ‘You have an audience, engineer!’ shouted Torquatus, and gestured towards the hill above the port. Attilius recognised the long white terrace of the admiral’s villa set amid the myrtle groves, and, leaning against the balustrade, the corpulent figure of Pliny himself. He wondered what was going through the old man’s mind. Hesitantly, he raised his arm. A moment later Pliny responded. Then the Minerva passed between the two great warships, the Concordia and the Neptune, and when he looked again the terrace was deserted.

  In the distance, behind Vesuvius, the sun was starting to appear.

  Pliny watched the liburnian gather speed as she headed towards open water. Against the grey, her oars stroked vivid flashes of white, stirring somewhere a long-forgotten memory of the leaden Rhine at daybreak – at Vetera, this must have been, thirty years ago – and the troop-ferry of Legion V ‘The Larks’ taking his cavalry to the far bank. Such times! What he would not give to embark again on a voyage at first light, or better still to command the fleet in action, a thing he had never done in his two years as admiral. But the effort of simply coming out of his library and on to the terrace to see the Minerva go – of rising from his chair and taking a few short steps – had left him breathless, and when he lifted his arm to acknowledge the wave of the engineer he felt as if he were hoisting an exercise weight.

  ‘Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, hearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life.’

  Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere; less easy when one was fifty-six and the enemy was advancing in full view across the plain.

  He leaned his fat belly against the balustrade, hoping that neither of his secretaries had noticed his weakness, then pushed himself away and shuffled back inside.

  He had always had a fondness for young men of Attilius’s kind. Not in the filthy Greek way, of course – he had never had time for any of that malarkey, although he had seen plenty of it in the Army – but rather spiritually, as the embodiment of the muscular Roman virtues. Senators might dream of empires; soldiers might conquer them; but it was the engineers, the fellows who laid down the roads and dug out the aqueducts, who actually built them, and who gave to Rome her global reach. He promised himself that when the aquarius returned he would summon him to dinner and pick his brains to discover exactly what had happened to the Augusta. And then together they would consult some of the texts in the admiral’s library and he would teach him a few of the mysteries of Nature, whose surprises were never-ending. These intermittent, harmonic tremors, for example – what were these? He s
hould record the phenomenon and include it in the next edition of the Natural History. Every month he discovered something new that required explanation.

  His two Greek slaves stood waiting patiently beside the table – Alcman for reading aloud, Alexion for dictation. They had been in attendance since soon after midnight, for the admiral had long ago disciplined himself to function without much rest. ‘To be awake is to be alive,’ that was his motto. The only man he had ever known who could get by on less sleep was the late Emperor, Vespasian. They used to meet in Rome in the middle of the night to transact their official business. That was why Vespasian had put him in charge of the fleet: ‘My ever-vigilant Pliny,’ he had called him, in that country bumpkin’s accent of his, and had pinched his cheek.

  He glanced around the room at the treasures accumulated during his journeys across the Empire. One hundred and sixty notebooks, in which he had recorded every interesting fact he had ever read or heard (Larcius Licinius, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, had offered him four hundred thousand sesterces for the lot, but he had not been tempted). Two pieces of magnetite, mined in Dacia, and locked together by their mysterious magic. A lump of shiny grey rock from Macedonia, reputed to have fallen from the stars. Some German amber with an ancient mosquito imprisoned inside its translucent cell. A piece of concave glass, picked up in Africa, which gathered together the sun’s rays and aimed them to a point of such concentrated heat it would cause the hardest wood to darken and smoulder. And his water clock, the most accurate in Rome, built according to the specifications of Ctesibius of Alexandria, inventor of the water organ, its apertures bored through gold and gems to prevent corrosion and plugging.

  The clock was what he needed. It was said that clocks were like philosophers: you could never find two that agreed. But a clock by Ctesibius was the Plato of timepieces.

  Alcman, fetch me a bowl of water. No –’ He changed his mind when the slave was halfway to the door, for had not the geographer, Strabo, described the luxurious Bay of Neapolis as ‘the wine bowl’? ‘On second thoughts, wine would be more appropriate. But something cheap. A Surrentum, perhaps.’ He sat down heavily. ‘All right, Alexion – where were we?’

  ‘Drafting a signal to the Emperor, admiral.’

  ‘Ah yes. Just so.’

  Now that it was light, he would have to send a dispatch by flash to the new emperor, Titus, to alert him to the problem on the aqueduct. It would shoot, from signal tower to signal tower, all the way up to Rome, and be in the Emperor’s hands by noon. And what would the new Master of the World make of that, he wondered?

  ‘We shall signal the Emperor, and after we have done that, I think we shall start a new notebook, and record some scientific observations. Would that interest you?’

  ‘Yes, admiral.’ The slave picked up his stylus and wax tablet, struggling to suppress a yawn. Pliny pretended not to see it. He tapped his finger against his lips. He knew Titus well. They had served in Germania together. Charming, cultivated, clever – and completely ruthless. News that a quarter of a million people were without water could easily tip him over the edge into one of his lethal rages. This would require some careful phrasing.

  ‘To His Most Eminent Highness, the Emperor Titus, from the Commander-in-Chief, Misenum,’ he began. ‘Greetings!’

  The Minerva passed between the great concrete moles that protected the entrance to the harbour and out into the expanse of the bay. The lemony light of early morning glittered on the water. Beyond the thicket of poles that marked the oyster beds, where the seagulls swooped and cried, Attilius could see the fishery of the Villa Hortensia. He got to his feet for a better view, bracing himself against the motion of the boat. The terraces, the garden paths, the slope where Ampliatus had set up his chair to watch the execution, the ramps along the shoreline, the gantries between the fish-pens, the big eel pond set away from the rest – all deserted. The villa’s crimson-and-gold cruiser was no longer moored at the end of the jetty.

  It was exactly as Atia had said: they had gone.

  The old woman had still not recovered her senses when he left the reservoir before dawn. He had lain her on a straw mattress in one of the rooms beside the kitchen, and had told the domestic slave, Phylo, to summon a doctor and to see that she was cared for. Phylo had made a face, but Attilius had told him gruffly to do as he was told. If she died – well, that might be a merciful release. If she recovered – then, as far as he was concerned, she could stay. He would have to buy another slave in any case, to look after his food and clothes. His needs were few; the work would be light. He had never paid much attention to such matters. Sabina had looked after the household when he was married; after she had gone, his mother had taken over.

  The great villa looked dark and shuttered, as though for a funeral; the screams of the gulls were like the cries of mourners.

  Musa said, ‘I hear he paid ten million for it.’

  Attilius acknowledged the remark with a grunt, without taking his eyes off the house. ‘Well, he’s not there now.’

  ‘Ampliatus? Of course he’s not. He never is. He has houses everywhere, that one. Mostly, he’s in Pompeii.’

  ‘Pompeii?’

  Now the engineer looked round. Musa was sitting cross-legged, his back propped against the tools, eating a fig. He always seemed to be eating. His wife sent him to work each day with enough food to feed half a dozen. He stuffed the last of the fruit into his mouth and sucked his fingers. ‘That’s where he comes from. Pompeii’s where he made his money.’

  ‘And yet he was born a slave.’

  ‘So it goes these days,’ said Musa bitterly. ‘Your slave dines off silver plate, while your honest, free-born citizen works from dawn till nightfall for a pittance.’

  The other men were sitting towards the stern, gathered around Corax, who had his head hunched forwards and was talking quietly – telling some story that required a lot of emphatic hand gestures and much heavy shaking of his head. Attilius guessed he was describing the previous night’s meeting with Pliny.

  Musa uncorked his waterskin and took a swig then wiped the top and offered it up to Attilius. The engineer took it and squatted beside him. The water had a vaguely bitter taste. Sulphur. He swallowed a little, more to be friendly than because he was thirsty, wiped it in return and handed it back.

  ‘You’re right, Musa,’ he said carefully. ‘How old is Ampliatus? Not even fifty. Yet he’s gone from slave to master of the Villa Hortensia in the time it would take you or I to scrape together enough to buy some buginfested apartment. How could any man do that honestly?’

  ‘An honest millionaire? As rare as hen’s teeth! The way I hear it,’ said Musa, looking over his shoulder and lowering his voice, ‘he really started coining it just after the earthquake. He’d been left his freedom in old man Popidius’s will. He was a good-looking lad, Ampliatus, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for his master. The old man was a lecher – I don’t think he’d leave the dog alone. And Ampliatus looked after his wife for him, too, if you know what I mean.’ Musa winked. ‘Anyway, Ampliatus got his freedom, and a bit of money from somewhere, and then Jupiter decided to shake things up a bit. This was back in Nero’s time. It was a very bad quake – the worst anyone could remember. I was in Nola, and I thought my days were up, I can tell you.’ He kissed his lucky amulet – a prick and balls, made of bronze, which hung from a leather thong around his neck. ‘But you know what they say: one man’s loss is another’s gain. Pompeii caught it worst of all. But while everyone else was getting out, talking about the town being finished, Ampliatus was going round, buying up the ruins. Got hold of some of those big villas for next to nothing, fixed them up, divided them into three or four, then sold them off for a fortune.’

  ‘Nothing illegal about that, though.’

  ‘Maybe not. But did he really own them when he sold them? That’s the thing.’ Musa tapped the side of his nose. ‘Owners dead. Owners missing. Legal heirs on the other side of the Empire. Half the town was rubble, don�
��t forget. The Emperor sent a commissioner down from Rome to sort out who owned what. Suedius Clemens was his name.’

  ‘And Ampliatus bribed him?’

  ‘Let’s just say Suedius left a richer man than he arrived. Or so they say.’

  ‘And what about Exomnius? He was the aquarius at the time of the earthquake – he must have known Ampliatus.’

  Attilius could see at once that he had made a mistake. The eager light of gossip was immediately extinguished in Musa’s eyes. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he muttered, and busied himself with his bag of food. ‘He was a fine man, Exomnius. He was good to work for.’

  Was, thought Attilius. Was a fine man. Was good to work for. He tried to make a joke of it. ‘You mean he didn’t keep dragging you out of bed before dawn?’

  ‘No. I mean he was straight and would never try to trick an honest man into saying more than he ought.’

  ‘Hey, Musa!’ shouted Corax. ‘What are you going on about over there? You gossip like a woman! Come and have a drink!’

  Musa was on his feet at once, swaying down the deck to join the others. As Corax threw him the wineskin, Torquatus jumped down from the stern and made his way towards the centre of the deck, where the mast and sails were stowed.

  ‘We’ll have no need of those, I fear.’ He was a big man. Arms akimbo he scanned the sky. The fresh, sharp sun glinted on his breastplate; already it was hot. ‘Right, engineer. Let’s see what my oxen can do.’ He swung his feet on to the ladder and descended down the hatch to the lower deck. A moment later, the tempo of the drum increased and Attilius felt the ship lurch slightly. The oars flashed. The silent Villa Hortensia dwindled further in the distance behind them.

  The Minerva pushed on steadily as the heat of the morning settled over the bay. For two hours the oarsmen kept up the same remorseless pace. Clouds of steam curled from the terraces of the open-air baths in Baiae. In the hills above Puteoli, the fires of the sulphur mines burned pale green.