Pompeii (24 page)
He finished his water and called to the men to move on.
Silence also in the great house.
She could always tell when her father had gone. The whole place seemed to let out its breath. She slipped her cloak around her shoulders and listened again at the shutters before she opened them. Her room faced west. On the other side of the courtyard the sky was as red as the terra-cotta roof, the garden beneath her balcony in shadow. A sheet still lay across the top of the aviary and she pulled it back, to give the birds some air, and then—on impulse: it had never occurred to her before that moment—she released the catch and opened the door at the side of the cage.
She drew back into the room.
The habits of captivity are hard to break. It took a while for the goldfinches to sense their opportunity. Eventually, one bird, bolder than the rest, edged along its perch and hopped onto the bottom of the door frame. It cocked its red-and-black-capped head at her and blinked one tiny bright eye, then launched itself into the air. Its wings cracked. There was a flash of gold in the gloom. It swooped across the garden and came to rest on the ridge tiles opposite. Another bird fluttered to the door and took off, and then another. She would have liked to have stayed and watch them all escape but instead she closed the shutters.
She had told her maid to go with the rest of the slaves to the forum. The passage outside her room was deserted, as were the stairs, as was the garden in which her father had held what he thought was his secret conversation. She crossed it quickly, keeping close to the pillars in case she encountered anyone. She passed through into the atrium of their old house and turned toward the tablinum. This was where her father still conducted his business affairs—rising to greet his clients at dawn, meeting them either singly or in groups until the law courts opened, whereupon he would sweep out into the street, followed by his usual anxious court of petitioners. It was a symbol of Ampliatus’s power that the room contained not the usual one but three strongboxes, made of heavy wood bonded with brass, attached by iron rods to the stone floor.
Corelia knew where the keys were kept because in happier days—or was it simply a device to convince his associates of what a charming fellow he was?—she had been allowed to creep in and sit at his feet while he was working. She opened the drawer of the small desk, and there they were.
The document case was in the second strongbox. She did not bother to unroll the small papyri, but simply stuffed them into the pockets of her cloak, then locked the safe and replaced the key.
The riskiest part was over and she allowed herself to relax a little. She had a story ready in case she was stopped—that she was better now and had decided to join the others in the forum after all—but nobody was about. She walked across the courtyard and down the staircase, past the swimming pool with its gently running fountain, and the dining room in which she had endured that terrible meal, moving swiftly around the colonnade toward the red-painted drawing room of the Popidii. Soon she would be the mistress of all this: a ghastly thought.
A slave was lighting one of the brass candelabra but drew back respectfully against the wall to let her pass. Through a curtain. Another, narrower flight of stairs. And suddenly she was down in a different world—low ceilings, roughly plastered walls, a smell of sweat: the slaves’ quarters. She could hear a couple of men talking somewhere and a clang of iron pots and then, to her relief, the whinny of a horse.
The stables were at the end of the corridor, and it was as she had thought—her father had decided to take his guests by litter to the forum, leaving all the horses behind. She stroked the nose of her favorite, a bay mare, and whispered to her. Saddling her was a job for the slaves but she had watched them often enough to know how to do it. As she fastened the leather harness beneath the belly the horse shifted slightly and knocked against the wooden stall. She held her breath but no one came.
She whispered: “Easy, girl, it’s only me, it’s all right.”
The stable door opened directly onto the side street. Every sound seemed absurdly loud to her—the bang of the iron bar as she lifted it, the creak of the hinges, the clatter of the mare’s hooves as she led her out into the road. A man was hurrying along the pavement opposite and he turned to look at her but he didn’t stop—he was late, presumably, and on his way to the sacrifice. From the direction of the forum came the noise of music and then a low roar, like the breaking of a wave.
She swung herself up onto the horse. No decorous, feminine sideways mount for her tonight. She opened her legs and sat astride it like a man. The sense of limitless freedom almost overwhelmed her. This street—this utterly ordinary street, with its cobblers’ shops and dressmakers, along which she had walked so many times—had become the edge of the world. She knew that if she hesitated any longer the panic would seize her completely. She pressed her knees into the horse and pulled hard left on the reins, heading away from the forum. At the first crossroads she turned left again. She stuck carefully to the empty back streets and only when she judged that she was far enough away from the house to be unlikely to meet anyone she knew did she join the main road. Another wave of applause carried from the forum.
Up the hill she went, past the deserted baths her father was building, past the castellum aquae and under the arch of the city gate. She bowed her head as she passed the customs post, pulling the hood of her cloak low, and then she was out of
Pompeii
and onto the road to Vesuvius.
VESPERA
[
hours]
The arrival of magma into the near-surface swells
the reservoir and inflates the surface . . .
—
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VOLCANOES
Attilius and his expedition reached the matrix of the Aqua Augusta just as the day was ending. One moment the engineer was watching the sun vanish behind the great mountain, silhouetting it against a red sky, making the trees look as though they were on fire, and the next it had gone. Looking ahead, he saw, rising out of the darkening plain, what appeared to be gleaming heaps of pale sand. He squinted at them, then spurred his horse and galloped ahead of the wagons.
Four pyramids of gravel were grouped around a roofless, circular brick wall, about the height of a man’s waist. It was a settling tank. He knew there would be at least a dozen of these along the length of the
Augusta
—one every three or four miles was Vitruvius’s recommendation—places where the water was deliberately slowed to collect impurities as they sank to the bottom. Masses of tiny pebbles, worn perfectly round and smooth as they were washed along the matrix, had to be dug out every few weeks and piled beside the aqueduct, to be carted away and either dumped or used for road-building.
A settling tank had always been a favorite place from which to run off a secondary line and as Attilius dismounted and strode across to it he saw that this was indeed the case here. The ground beneath his feet was spongy, the vegetation greener and more luxuriant, the soil singing with saturation. Water was bubbling over the carapace of the tank at every point, washing the brickwork with a shimmering translucent film. The final manhole of the
Pompeii
spur lay directly in front of the wall.
He rested his hands on the lip and peered over the side. The tank was twenty feet across and he would guess at least fifteen deep. With the sun gone it was too dark to see all the way to the gravel floor but he knew there would be three tunnel mouths down there—one where the Augusta flowed in, one where it flowed out, and a third connecting Pompeii to the system. Water surged between his fingers. He wondered when Corvinus and Becco had shut off the sluices at Abellinum. With luck, the flow should be starting to ease very soon.
He heard feet squelching over the ground behind him. Brebix and a couple of the other men were walking across from the wagons.
“So is this the place, aquarius?”
“No, Brebix. Not yet. But not far now. You see that? The way the water is gushing from below? That’s because the mainline is blocked somewhere further down its course.” He wiped his hands on his tunic. “We need to get moving again.”
It was not a popular decision, and quickly became even less so when they discovered that the wagons were sinking up to their axles in the mud. There was an outbreak of cursing and it took all their strength—shoulders and backs applied first to one cart and then to the other—to heave them up onto firmer ground. Half a dozen of the men went sprawling and refused to move and Attilius had to go round offering his hand and pulling them up onto their feet. They were tired, superstitious,
hungry
—it was worse than driving a team of ill-tempered mules.
He hitched his horse to the back of one of the wagons and when Brebix asked him what he was doing he said, “I’ll walk with the rest of you.” He took the halter of the nearest ox and tugged it forward. It was the same story as when they left
Pompeii
. At first nobody moved but then, grudgingly, they set off after him.
The natural impulse of men is to follow,
he thought,
and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate the rest.
Ampliatus understood that better than anyone he’d met.
They were crossing a narrow plain between high ground. Vesuvius was to their left; to their right, the distant cliffs of the Apenninus rose like a wall. The road had once again parted company with the aqueduct and they were following a track, plodding along beside the Augusta—marker stone, manhole, marker stone, manhole, on and on—through ancient groves of olives and lemons, as pools of darkness began to gather beneath the trees. There was little to hear above the rumble of the wheels except the occasional sound of goats’ bells in the dusk.
Attilius kept glancing off to the line of the aqueduct. Water was bubbling around the edges of some of the manholes, and that was ominous. The aqueduct tunnel was six feet high. If the force of the water was sufficient to dislodge the heavy inspection covers, then the pressure must be immense, which in turn suggested that the obstruction in the matrix must be equally massive, otherwise it would have been swept away. Where were Corax and Musa?
An immense crash, like a peal of thunder, came from the direction of Vesuvius. It seemed to go rolling past them and echoed off the rock face of the Apenninus with a flat
boom.
The ground heaved and the oxen shied, turning instinctively from the noise, dragging him with them. He dug his heels into the track and had just about managed to bring them to a halt when one of the men shrieked and pointed. “The giants!” Huge white creatures, ghostly in the twilight, seemed to be issuing from beneath the earth ahead of them, as if the roof of Hades had split apart and the spirits of the dead were flying into the sky. Even Attilius felt the hair stiffen on the back of his neck and it was Brebix in the end
who
laughed and said, “They’re only birds, you fools! Look!”
Birds—immense birds: flamingos, were they?—rose in their hundreds like some great white sheet that fluttered and dipped and then settled out of sight again.
Flamingos,
thought Attilius: waterbirds.
In the distance he saw two men, waving.
Nero himself, if he had spent a year on the task, could not have wished for a finer artificial lake than that which the
Augusta
had created in barely a day and a half. A shallow depression to the north of the matrix had filled to a depth of three or four feet. The surface was softly luminous in the dusk, broken here and there by clumpy islands formed by the dark foliage of half-submerged olive trees. Waterfowl scudded between them; flamingos lined the distant edge.
The men of Attilius’s work gang did not stop for permission. They tore off their tunics and ran naked toward it, their sunburned bodies and dancing, snow-white buttocks giving them the appearance of some exotic herd of antelope come down for an evening drink and a bathe. Whoops and splashes carried to where Attilius stood with Musa and Corvinus. He made no attempt to stop them. Let them enjoy it while they could. Besides, he had a fresh mystery to contend with.