A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (23 page)

Or perhaps the explanation for Marcus’ idle games with his knife’s edge did not lie in such a noble reason. Perhaps they began when his own son departed home to finish his education
,
and there was no longer anyone to smile for. No longer anyone in the house at all, except indifferent slaves who thought their master a crippled fool.

Well, there was no need for a knife now. No need to walk Pompeii unattended by guards, as he’d done these past few days, because he hoped he’d be robbed and murdered. No need for anything but patience—the patience to wait for a looter come to dash his brains out with a cudgel, or for the roof of this brothel to collapse about his ears. The patience to sit calmly and wait for death.

Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus had never lacked patience.

He looked at Diana, still staring up at him with those blue-green eyes of hers, and hoped she was not about to weep.

“You idiot,” she said.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. She could drive a chariot and a four-horse team, after all—unseemly skills, but not ones generally mastered by hand-wringing weepers.

“You’re going to die in a whorehouse?” Her voice was hard. “The blood of the divine Augustus is going to make its end on a mattress soaked with the sweat of a thousand Pompeian sailors, under such charming sentiments as—” peering momentarily at an epithet scratched into the wall—“‘
Arpocras had a good fuck here with Drauca for a
denarius
.
’ Truly?”

“Not the most illustrious of surroundings for one’s final moments,” Marcus admitted. “But even the blood of Augustus cannot always choose.”

She stared at him a while longer, still sitting back on her heels.
A good many men in Rome would have given half of what they owned to have Diana of the Cornelii on her knees before them
, Marcus thought. Much more than a single
denarius
.

She rose, folding her arms across her breasts. “Why are you courting death?”

He shrugged. They might have been the last two people in Pompeii—the sounds of screams, of shouting, of pounding feet from outside had all faded into the background. “I am done, that is all. I weary of life, and I have nothing to fill it. Let it end. Take yourself to safety. I do not care in the slightest what happens to me.”

“What about your son?” she snapped.

“I would have liked to see his manhood ceremony.” It was a father’s purpose and pride to help his firstborn son into his first toga.
Tell the truth,
Marcus thought harshly.
The only reason you haven’t let the blood out of your veins yet is because you thought to wait until Paulinus’
toga virilis
ceremony passed. Until you’d draped the folds over his shoulder, and given him some words to ease the pain of losing his father.

He pushed the thought away. “My son is almost grown. He is near to done with his schooling, and he speaks of becoming a tribune in the Praetorian Guard. He has cousins and relatives aplenty who would aid him in such a career, in advancing the ranks, in finding patrons and clients and even a wife when the time comes. He no longer needs me.”

“Rubbish,” Diana said. “Get up.”

“Can you drag me out of Pompeii by force?” Marcus smiled. “I think not.”

She stared at him a long, speculative moment. “You’re right.”

“Then—” Marcus picked up her small rein-callused hand and kissed it. “May the gods see you to safety.”

“No need.” She crawled onto the grubby pallet of straw beside him, sitting cross-legged like a stable boy. “Because I’m not leaving.”

“What?”

“You’re not just going to cause your own death, Marcus Norbanus.” She gave him a dazzling smile. “You’re also going to cause mine.”

It
was perhaps the most frustrating quarter-hour he had ever experienced. “I have had forty-three years, and it is more than enough. You are only twenty-six. Far too young to resign yourself to death.”

Diana ran her finger along another line of graffiti scrawled into the wall. “
‘I fucked many girls here
.’”

“Have you thought of your father? You have never been an obedient daughter to him, and he should have put a rod across your back and forced you to a good husband a decade ago, but he will still be heart-broken to lose you.”

She twisted her head almost horizontally to look at another set of scratchings. “‘
Victor fucked with Attine here
.’”

“No one of the Cornelii will soil themselves with horse-breeding. If you die, your family will sell all your precious horses—”

“My father shall send them to the Reds.” Diana uncurled her slender legs and stood up on the mattress, craning her neck at another bit of filth high on the wall. “‘
Anyone who wants to fuck should ask Attice for sixteen
asses
.’
Really, just sixteen?”

“A woman who looked like you could charge a great deal more,” Marcus snapped.

She batted her pale lashes at him. “You flatter me.”

“You are a foolish child.”

“Do you want this foolish child’s death on your head?”

He tried silence after that.
She will lose her nerve,
he thought, listening to the distant noise of shouting and thumping feet, curses and screams.
She will break and bolt for safety. All I need do is out-wait her.

She fell back on her elbows—cool as though she were reclining at a banquet. He remained silent. She smiled at him. He did not smile back. The silence stretched.

The young want to live,
he thought
. It is the strongest urge they know. Nerve or not, it will drive her away in the end.

“Did I tell you why I came to Pompeii?” Diana tilted her head, looking at Marcus down the length of the pallet. “A horse.”

Naturally
.

“Splendid beast; a chestnut as tall at the shoulder as my eyes. Plenty of muscle; might anchor a
quadriga
as an inside runner. A season to race him for the Reds and then I’ll put him to stud.” She extended her legs, crossing her feet comfortably in his lap. “I’m naming him Boreas, after my old stallion that just died. Decent lineage out of Spain, sired by Aquila who was sired by Hannibal, who in turn was sired by Bubalus, and before him Hibernus—”

No one can know more than four generations of a horse’s lineage,
Marcus thought in horror, but she rattled off a full fifteen generations on
both
sides of the wretched animal’s bloodlines, then mentioned the mare she had just brought to foal before coming to Pompeii. “Now, she was sired by Ajax, who came from Gemmula and Nereus”—on and on in that cheerful drone, listing horse after horse as her feet flexed and unflexed in his lap; it was her only sign of restlessness—“Polynices out of Pertinax, Sagitta out of Speudosa—”

Marcus reconsidered whether or not he did, in fact, have endless patience. “Will you not leave a man to die in quiet?”

“—and then there’s Pegasus who just retired from the Greens; not the most original name, but that horse really could fly—”

He squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Please.”

Her eyes twinkled evilly through her fringe of hair. “—and Valens wasn’t much in the way of stamina, but they crossed him with a line of chariot ponies out of Britannia and got Volucer, who won more heats for the Whites than any stallion since the Republic—”

“What will it take,” Marcus interrupted, “to quiet you?”

“Come with me out of Pompeii,” she said promptly.

“I will only slow your escape. Believe me, I am not being noble. You will never get to safety towing me and my wretched knee.”

“It’s a chance I will have to take,” Diana said, “because I will not leave you behind. You are family, Marcus, however distantly. I’ve known you since I was a child, and I cannot—”

“I
am
family, your senior in family status as well as age, and I order you—”

“I’ve got a lovely little mare named Callisto, she gave me twin colts last spring so of course I had to name them Castor and Pollux—”

“You may be the most beautiful girl in Rome, but you are also the most boring!” Marcus knew he was not being polite, but really, even his calm had limits. This was enough. “Even when you are not trying to annoy me as you are now, your conversation has always quite literally sent me sprinting from the room after a quarter hour!”

“I could say the same for you, Marcus Norbanus. You may be brilliant, but whenever you drone on about grain laws or the declining birth rate, my eyes start crossing. Takes far less than a quarter hour, too.” Diana’s wicked sparkle faded to seriousness as she looked at him. “Please—come with me. For my safety, if no other reason. You think a lone woman will be able to make it through the streets as they are now?”

“A woman of your rank—”

“Rank means nothing in chaos. I’ll be robbed, raped, and left for dead if I don’t have a man with me.”

Marcus refused to give way for the logic of such damp sentiment. “I am an aging senator with a limp and a bad shoulder. I will be no protection, so don’t use my arm’s questionable prowess as your excuse.”

“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.