On the threshold of the villa, right at the entrance to the atrium, a fine mosaic displays a message the young man cannot read: CAVE CANEM. Alongside the inscription is an image, exquisite and terrible, of a pitch-black Molosser, all teeth and instinct. The beast is depicted on a leash, crouched slightly on its hind legs, in the act of launching an attack against an unwary intruder who has ventured, pushed on by his predatory instincts, into the private mansion.
Verus has no time to register all that information, he notices only the picture of the dog before crossing the atrium, sandals burning up under his feet, and diving into the impluvium, the large pool for collecting rainwater found in every patrician villa.
The water is tepid and a few rocks lie on the bottom. They look nothing more than harmless, stationary stones, but it is likely they caused massive damage as they rained down through the enormous hole in the ceiling.
There is not even the time to put his thoughts in order before the horror reaches out to touch the nape of his neck: a severed thumb is floating in the pool.
Somebody’s thumb.
Like a pallid worm, death brushing up against him without prior notice.
Verus lets out a scream, scrambles out of the pool and continues in his mad race. The commotion has awakened the guard, who reaches him in a scrabble of claws on decorated stone.
A dog, a damned mastiff that looks just like the one depicted on the mosaic at the entrance, leaps onto Verus, sinking its teeth into his calf.
Surprise gets the better of pain, panic swells the veins in his neck and speeds his reactions. Verus kicks out violently, with all the force his body can muster, and the beast slackens its grip, ending up in the impluvium. It thrashes around for a minute or two, dazed by the heat, the cold, by rage and pain. Then it notices the floating thumb, bites into it, and the frenzy is over.
Verus feels the bile rising in his throat, gagging as though he has fallen victim to some African curse. The door is open. He goes outside. A moment before another retch from Vulcan comes down on the roof, doing away with the house, the dog, the pool, life.
Again.
There are voices crying in the distance, Verus runs without taking a breath.
He has covered the whole length of the decumanus, the main street running east to west, and is reaching the edge of the town. But the heat is unbearable, the ash is everywhere, dead bodies litter the ground like wooden automatons in need of repair.
He is afraid, the damned Briton. He will have to die in this land of merciless flames, never again to see the grassy lands where he came into this world. Fire in his head, fire in his eyes, salt on his skin and terror, terror filling all things.
The end is just around the corner. The end is the next barred door.
He breaks down the entrance of a workshop with his shoulder, hoping to find a jug of water to empty onto his head, but instead he finds that fate has a fine fucking sense of humor: a blacksmith’s furnace stares back at him from the corner of the room. Loaded with more hot embers than he has ever seen.
After all that running, Verus is back where he started.
Iron and flame, like the night of the massacre.
Strength and hope desert him, he falls to his knees, ready to embrace the red death while screaming at the top of his lungs—in any case, there will be no one to hear him.
Then, a moment before slipping into unconsciousness among the fumes and the sulfur, he hears it. The sound of salvation, the hand stretched out on the edge of the cliff, the oasis in the desert.
A horse neighing.
Splendid, magnificent, sonorous. A lament, pleading for exactly the same thing as him: freedom.
Verus looks out the back of the workshop, where a panicked steed is pawing at the ground, its saddle tied to a stake driven into the earth. Next to the beast lies its dead master, suffocated by the fumes, horribly yellowed eyes wide open.
Verus unties the animal and climbs onto it. The horse is desperate to get out of there, breaking into gallop without even waiting for a slap on its flank.
The way is not easy; the monster of magma and flaming boulders is loosing its last salvos, and it strikes hard. More than once the Briton has to convince the horse to swerve suddenly in order to avoid breaking a leg. It is so hot his skin burns, even the horse’s hooves begin to smoke, but the animal does not stop.
It runs, and runs some more.
Out of the city, through the woods, the clouds, heading north, hungry for fresh air.
Neither one of them has any intention of letting go, Verus pushes the beast beyond its limits and rides for hours.
It is evening when he spots the headland at Misenum and the people’s faces, pink and pearled with sweat, tell him a tale of salvation.
Verus does not know it, but as he slides from the horse’s back, at the wharf where the Imperial fleet bobs calmly and helplessly at its moorings, as he collapses to the ground unconscious, after one last glimpse of the distant monster, itself now tired of vomiting fury, he is less than a hundred paces from the house of Pliny, known to posterity as “the Younger.”
The young man has not moved from the terrace all day. The horror had slowly worked its way into him. He was the first to hear the people’s stories, standing on tiptoes to get a clearer view of the unfolding horror. Slowly, Pliny allowed the idea of death to sink into his heart, and at dusk he finally began to weep, when an unspeakable thought began mercilessly to shake his soul. Only when night had fallen did he consent to return inside the house, upon the insistence of his mother, worried by his strange obsession for the dark things of the world.
Pliny bid farewell as went to his bed, not knowing whom he was bidding it to or why.
In the exact same moment as he finds relief in the arms of Morpheus, the uncle who bears his name is taking his last breath on a lonely beach smothered in ash, once again flailing impotent before the wrath of the gods.
Finally, Vulcan sleeps. Tomorrow morning, the Gulf will awaken to discover that the mountain has been transformed.
After this day, Vesuvius will no longer have the same appearance as it did. From a single, unbroken peak will emerge two, a reminder to mere mortals that they are but passing through this valley of bitter tears.
For ever and ever.
Verus sleeps too. The sleep of the just.
Tomorrow will bring neither rescue nor redemption, he can bet on that. But in the meantime he is alive, and wants for nothing.
Only peace and quiet, now. The rest can wait until sunrise.
Hang tough, Briton. Grit your teeth.
Rome awaits you, and you do not know it yet.
From mare nostrum to the Eternal City
The person you are matters more than the place to which you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place.
SENECA, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, I 28,4
Misenum to Rome, AD 79, August–October
WHO SAID ALL ROADS lead to Rome?
Maybe they do, but it is not easy to get there, especially when fate has decided you will be a slave.
Verus awakens with his body in pieces after a dreamless sleep.
Misenum is as peaceful as a lioness sleeping on the seashore. The air is still thick with cinders, the entire Gulf wrapped in ash and gruesome memories.
As he returns to life, the view that meets his eyes from the room he finds himself in is not something one sees every day. The monster is gone, Vulcan and his burning rage have returned to the bowels of Vesuvius. But the eruption has changed the coastline forever. And, even more than that, it has changed the souls of the people who were born and raised at the foot of the red god.
The smoke is a constant presence, building up in the air at the top of the room, filling it even all these miles away. Waves crash menacingly against the shore and the seabed boils with unquenched rage.
The worst has passed, but now the hard work begins.
There is a world to be remade, and the dead await their final farewell.
<
br /> It is a new day, time to move forward.
Verus gets up off the wooden bed, pulling himself to his feet and looking around: yellow walls darkened by the mist seeping through the window, an earthenware jug, wooden bowls filled with ice water, and a chamber pot which the Briton mistakes for a fruit basket. Then again, the boy who has grown into a man still has a long way to go before he learns that sated dreamers get to piss into pots.
Too much luxury all around for it to be a prison, that much is certain. And yet the door is barred and there is no way out.
Verus has no idea what happened after he passed out. He only knows he is near the port. The two-hundred and fifty ships of the Imperial fleet lying at anchor down in the bay leave him in no doubt. Outside the window was all the hubbub of loading, unloading and good intentions, a procession of hastati and landing craft, provisions leaving and precious objects arriving.
It is hunting season and Rome thirsts for blood.
When the bolt slides open, Verus starts and puts himself instinctively on the defensive. But there is no brute behind the thick wooden door of the gilded cell, nor a hard-faced guard, but a red-cheeked maidservant. She is small but self-assured, a brisk-mannered girl with hands reddened by too many mornings spent at the washbasin, and the neat haste of someone who has not a moment to lose between sunrise and sunset.
“Come,” she says. “The master is waiting for you.”
She uses the Latin word dominus, which means everything and nothing. It describes a man with money to spend and servants to command of course, but it does not tell you what kind of property he is absolute master of. As far as Verus knows, even Demetrius—may his black soul roast in the underworld—made certain people address him that way. Yet he was the first to kneel down and use the very same term every time he happened to find himself in front of a servant of the Empire.
Verus begins to walk and the servant leads the way. Unwittingly, the petite girl swings her hips as she moves. But even though it is a sight deserving of a closer look, it is another miracle that leaves the young man open-mouthed with wonder. The master’s home is breathtaking. The first marvels for which Verus is unprepared are the colors. The youth’s life, ever since he came into the world, has always been played out in dull monochrome. One shade at a time, and nothing extraordinary: the green of the grass that freshens the soul, the brown of tree trunks and mud, the gray of furnace smoke and iron on the anvil, the color of stones broken beneath the sun, slaves’ favorite skin dye.
Here though, one shade alone is not enough even for a single wall or column: yellow, orange and the color of the sea intermingle in every direction. The pillars are cherry-red, the capitals blindingly white, with sculpted leaves painted a liquid green, making them look soft and damned near real. Not to mention the floor: a triumph of ocher, white, and myriad veins of crimson.
The Briton just about manages to focus as he walks quickly along behind the maidservant, while beneath his feet unfolds the story of Aeneas, who left Troy and found himself in Rome, despite having no wish to go there, a destiny as big as a house strapped to his back, a dying father and a knuckle-headed son in tow.
The long service corridor runs past the servants’ quarters, where troops of domestics are busying themselves with plates and dishes. Verus has lost all notion of time, but it must be almost lunchtime because the servants are also engaged in grilling large fish and chopping up the accompanying vegetables. As he passes, a jug slips from an absent minded boy’s hand and smashes on the floor, inundating the air with the rich smell of Greek wine, dense with honey and cloves.
The mixture of smells makes the Briton’s stomach rumble—he cannot remember when he last ate. But as they enter the hall, which leads up to the floor the nobles live on, the scents evaporate. The steepness of the stairs brings Verus’s nose very close to the servant’s rather attractive behind, but he is still too overcome with amazement to notice.
At the threshold of the tablinum, the space where the master of the house receives his own clients and dedicates a few hours to writing, the maidservant takes her leave without much ceremony, puffing, “Here he is—” in the general direction of her master, offering a hurried bow and slipping away again downstairs, looking frantically for something to be getting on with. With Janus as her witness, there really is never enough time.
Indeed, Verus has not had enough time to dwell on the dominus, but he certainly did not expect someone of his own age.
Pliny the Younger smiles, but his eyes are tired: “How are you feeling today?”
The Briton is taken aback: every other interlocutor has always given his ass a kicking before saying anything to him. He is certainly not used to these dulcet tones. So he drops to his knees and mumbles: “Master.” You can never go far wrong calling things by their proper name.
Pliny smiles and gestures for him to stand up. His heart is filled with pain—news of his uncle’s death was brought to him no more than twelve hours ago—but he still finds time to attend to the lowly.
These are difficult days, people are dying by the wagonload on a whim of the gods. The least that can be expected from those in a position of power is a little understanding.
The commander’s nephew seats himself behind the beautiful desk of dark wood and invites the Briton to sit down on an ornate bench with lion’s paws carved into the ebony. Verus feels uncomfortable and his curious eyes glance over the splendor of the carved wood.
“Do you know why they make them like that? With those elaborate decorations, I mean?”
Verus does not know, but during the last two years he has learnt that, nine times out of ten, silence is the rudest answer of all.
“Because they are beautiful, my lord? To add prestige to your magnificent home?”
Pliny shakes his head. Then he stands up and takes another stool from a chest, similar to that upon which Verus’s servile backside rests for the first time, and places it on the floor.
Then he puts his right foot on it and shows the Briton that the three legs are not perfectly level: “It rocks,” he says firmly. “The ones without carvings rock back and forth. Is it worth making a saving if it means you are uncomfortable? Sit on this and you feel as though you are at sea.”
Verus shows his array of shiny teeth, without much conviction. He is not accustomed to the possessions of the wealthy. But he is grateful to this strange young man, and can barely wait to thank him.
“You saved my life, master. I am in your debt.”
Pliny tries to smile but his heart is too heavy: “That is true, but do not trouble yourself…What is your name?”
“Verus,” answers the Briton without hesitation.
“Verus…in these dark days we have all lost somebody. My uncle died attempting to save innocent survivors from the villas of Stabiae, and it is my intention to honor his memory by looking after whosoever finds himself in difficulty following these tragic events.”
“They certainly like to embellish their words, these nobles…” The impertinent thought enters the Briton’s mind like a mogilus into the backside of an adulterer caught in the act, and he curses himself for his own ingratitude.
“You have nothing to feel indebted for, I only do my duty…But there again, you have not told me who you are yet. Where did you come from? What happened to you?”
There it is, the damned crossroads. The unexpected twist, the opportunity of a lifetime.
Not only has the awkward son of the Island escaped death, but now he is also being offered the chance to be born again. The chance to lie about his station in life, to bow down low in thanks, and then to run far away—perhaps across the sea, all the way home.
But what home?
The Island is far away, Verus, and your heart has turned cold. The name gifted to you when you were born is dead and buried.
All or nothing.
Once again.
All or nothing.
The young Briton takes a deep breath, finally daring to look his savior in the eye—he has no
t done so since entering the room—and tells the truth. The whole truth: “I am a slave, my lord.”
He lets the words hang in the air, and then settle on the ground with all their weight.
Pliny’s gaze is relaxed. He is young but wise, and appreciates the value of a man’s heart: “To whom do you belong, then?”
Verus feels the burden on his chest slowly crumble away: “I belonged to Demetrius the builder. But he died in the fire, I imagine you already know. I have no idea how many of my companions in the quarry made it.”
Bitterness flashes in Pliny’s eyes. Death has suddenly struck again, the echo of the monster’s bile that does not stop burning him.
“Yes, the quarry was buried under ash and boulders, like Herculaneum and Pompeii. No one survived. I am sorry—but it is a miracle that you are all in one piece…”
Verus takes the news like an expert pugilist. He has lost so much in his life that, by now, he has accepted that fate has only defeat in store for him.
He says nothing but stares stiffly at a floor as sparkling as a polished jewel.
Pliny folds his arms. He takes no pleasure in saying what he is about to say, but he cannot avoid it. And time is short; with so much to do he cannot allow himself to spend the morning consoling servants. Even so, his kind heart tightens a little when he begins to speak.
“Verus, I cannot free you, you know that. I am not your master…”
The Briton feels emboldened. Sincerity must be worth something around here: “But you could be, my lord. I would serve you with integrity, I know many trades, believe me. I would be ever faithful and grateful to you…”
Pliny stops him: “This too would be impossible. The villa already has all the servants it needs, and it would vex those I already have if I were to send you to the kitchen or to take care of the gardens. Furthermore, this place will shortly begin to seem more like a sanatorium than a Roman nobleman’s house. It is my intention to help the wounded and survivors, placing the space from which my family benefits at their disposition. Even if I wanted to keep you with me, it would not be just. Thank the gods that you are as healthy as a horse. Your place is elsewhere.”
Colosseum Page 5
