The Far Time Incident (17 page)

We covered probably a good four miles before nearing the town. On the way, we passed the remnants of a second bonfire. Occasionally Helen would pull us out of the way of a passing cart (one of them carrying the old woman and the girl back into town)—“I’d rather not try to interact with locals just yet,” Helen said—but the sounds of activity had mostly ceased in the vineyards, orchards, and farmhouses adjoining the road. Probably everyone was taking an afternoon siesta. I could have used one myself. The parts of the road that were lined with trees provided some relief, but it was
really
starting to get scorchy. “Let’s not add dehydration to our problems,” the security chief said, and we discreetly helped ourselves to a smattering of figs and grapes
from the greenery by the road. It didn’t help much—the unripe grapes, especially, were tart and very seedy.

“We need to find another inscription to confirm—or, hopefully, disprove,” Helen whispered through parched lips as we passed from a shady part of the road into full sunlight.

“We could go into one of those little buildings,” I suggested, pointing, “and see if someone will give us water and information.”

We had left the cultivated farmland behind us. Here the road was lined with small stone buildings of varying heights and shapes, all the way down to the town gate. A couple of circular stone benches, which looked like they had been placed there for weary travelers such as us, were interspersed with the small buildings. At the end of the street, the gate gaped like an elongated mouth in the defensive wall, an unmanned observation tower rising to the right of it.

“And ask what?
Ubi sumus? Quid annus est?
Where are we? What year is it?” Helen said. “It’s unlikely that the locals would know the year. Besides, those are tombs, dear Julia, not houses. But you are right, they are exactly what we need,” she added. “Tombs always have inscriptions.”

We waited behind a square, squat tomb with a decorative column rising from its top as Helen translated the inscription. It had been built for one Septumia, daughter of Lucius, she said. No date was given. Two women who had been conversing in the shade of the town wall disappeared through the gate, and when they were out of sight we moved from Septumia’s tomb to where a stone tablet, rather like a modern tombstone, stood set into the ground. The letters looked familiar, but the text was illegible to me. Helen peered down at the inscription, then squatted and swept at the grass so that she could read the bottom line.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“You’ve figured out where we are in far time, Dr. Presnik?” Chief Kirkland asked in the tone of one who was prepared for anything.

Abigail had also read the inscription. “Yikes,” she said.

Pallor had driven the pink tinge of exertion from Helen’s face. She moved aside as the rest of us huddled around the upright stone. “Abigail, why don’t you translate for us.”

“Sure, Professor. It’s a proclamation, right? The tribune Titus Suedius Clemens…on the authority of emperor Augustus…has restored to the town some lands illegally taken by private individuals… The bottom lines are the interesting ones. The land was restored to the citizens of—Pompeii.”

I stared at the stone. It read:

EX AUCTORITATE
IMP CAESARIS
VESPASIANI AUG
LOCA PUBLICA A PRIVATIS
POSSESSA T SUEDIUS CLEMENS
TRIBUNUS CAUSIS COGNITIS ET
MENSURIS FACTIS REI
PUBLICAE POMPEIANORUM
RESTITUIT.

“Pompeii?” the chief asked.

Helen gave a small twitch. “That’s right, dears. The town just over that wall, I’m afraid”—she pointed at the pockmarked stone blocks of the wall that towered over us—“is Pompeii. And the cone-shaped mountain with the lovely vineyards and orchards on its slopes must be the Vesuvius volcano. I’m afraid, dears, that we
are
in a ghost zone.”

Pompeii.

The word conjured up images of hot ash and scorched rock, of a mountain erupting and changing the outlines of land and sea forever, of a town and its residents entombed by a fiery flow. Vesuvius, which had seemed like a peaceful mountain gracing an idyllic seaside town, now positively loomed over it—and us.

A cold wave of panic had coursed through my body at Helen’s words. My feet moved of their own accord, away from the town wall and back to the open road. Stretching into the sky above us, the volcano was silent. A misleading, pregnant silence. Because ghost zone meant only one thing. An eruption—surely any second—followed by oblivion.

“The mountain reminded me of Mount St. Helens before the 1980 eruption,” the chief said quietly. “Didn’t want to say so.” He had walked up beside me, and Kamal and Abigail were silently trailing him.

“Helen!” I called out.

“Yes, Julia?” she said, joining the rest of us after a short delay, as if reluctant to leave the tablet with its telling inscription.

“Should we seek shelter in the town? Find a road that will take us away from the mountain? Check to see if anyone has come to look for us yet?”

“Is there any point in trying to flee? The eruption must be imminent.” She started listing the salient points as if she were holding an impromptu workshop on the matter. “One, the basket returned to the lab without us. Two, the twenty-fourth of August in the year 79 is believed to be the day of the eruption—and the Vulcanalia festival, with its sacrifice of small fish meant to appease the god of fire, took place on the evening of the twenty-third of August, just like it did every year.” She went on, still pale, in the same calm tone. “Three, the ease with which we’ve been able to move around. Four, the tremors we’ve been feeling… You can’t outrun an eruption, can you?”

“I don’t think you can outrun them on foot, no,” Chief Kirkland said. “Ships?” he added as if he were suggesting that we hail a taxi. He pointed in the direction of the sea and the town’s harbor. “Can we get on a ship and escape that way?”

Helen started. “Yes, I suppose we could try. The letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus—the only surviving eyewitness account of the eruption we have; I assign it to my Intermediate Latin students on occasion—the two letters tell of the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder.” She pronounced the name to rhyme with
skinny
. “The elder Pliny was a scientist and a scholar, and also the commander of the Roman fleet, which was stationed at the port of Misenum, across the bay—
is
stationed at Misenum—as I said, the younger Pliny wrote about the death of his uncle and also gave a very touching account of what he himself, in his late teens, went through during the eruption—”

“Helen!” I said.

“So this Pliny junior—obviously—survived,” Chief Kirkland prodded her.

“He and his mother were staying at his uncle’s house in Misenum, just out of reach of the worst of the eruption. It’s been a while since I’ve reread Pliny’s account myself, but I recall
him saying that the disaster began with a cloud appearing over Vesuvius, then there were extended earthquakes…the sea retreated…and the cloud descended down the mountain—”

“A pyroclastic flow,” Chief Kirkland said in an emotionless voice.

Helen nodded and went on. “The older Pliny left the safety of Misenum and sailed into Pompeii’s harbor in an attempt to get a closer look at the strange phenomenon and to help save friends and others. He never made it out. He died on the beach from toxic fumes.” Facing the volcano and shading her eyes with one hand from the sunlight, she gave it a piercing look and added, as if we needed more grisly details, “The town of Herculaneum, some ten miles up the coast, will be buried completely in ash and volcanic debris. Pompeii, though not buried quite as deeply as Herculaneum, won’t fare much better.”

Somewhere far off, a sheep bleated, then another. Cicadas chirped. The street of tombs lay deserted in the heat of the afternoon and the silence of what was essentially a cemetery was punctuated only by the sheep and cicadas and the sounds of activity on the other side of the town wall. For a moment, I was aware of my own heartbeat, which sounded as loud as a jackhammer, but then realized that the steady beat was actually a blacksmith’s tool hammering metal in a workman’s shop somewhere close by.

A terra-cotta urn perched in a niche on a nearby altar suddenly fell, probably displaced by the last tremor we’d felt. It broke in two, spewing forth a small pile of gray ash and blackened teeth.

We all lost our heads at that point. In unison we fled in the direction of the sea, away from the tombs, toward the azure water with its sprinkling of fluffy clouds above it. Always, the shadow of the mountain hung above us. We ran without regard for roads and paths, roughly following the line of the town wall, past villas and small orchards, across a second street of tombs, away
from the danger of the mountain, the hot ash and fiery rocks that would surely come. I could hear Helen and Kamal panting as we followed a turn in the town wall, cut across a dirt road, and ran past a villa into an apple orchard. The heel of one of my boots came clean off and the chief caught my arm as I stumbled. “This way.” He pointed to where the land met the cliff’s edge, beyond which lay the sea, and pulled me along through the orchard—the dark-red fruit hung heavily, much more heavily than apples did—the cliff edge was within reach—pomegranate trees, the thought flew through my mind, not apple trees—and then that thought was replaced with nothing as I came to a jolting stop.

The force of the impact knocked the breath out of me. I realized I was on the ground again, as I had been when we’d arrived, but this time it wasn’t an earthquake that had caused me to lose my footing. I put my hand up and felt the air in front of me.

There was nothing there but I couldn’t push through.

The chief and Abigail had been able to stop themselves in time, but Helen was also on the ground, to my left. The chief picked up his fedora, which had flown off his head, pulled me up, then went to help Helen. Kamal was bent over as if his stomach was cramping from the run, his breathing uneven, reminding me of the morning he’d burst into my office with the news that Dr. Mooney had been scattered across time. Though barely a week had passed, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Let’s back up a bit and try another way,” the chief said grimly, offering Helen a steadying arm. “C’mon, Kamal, get to your feet.” On the other side of the invisible wall lay some patchy grass and a glimpse of a steep path leading down the cliff to the harbor.

“This is good news in a way, really,” Helen said, wincing as she got to her feet. “For the residents of the town, I mean. The more our freedom of movement is limited, the larger the percentage of the local population who will survive the eruption.”

“That is good news,” I said, thinking of the boy by the pine trees with the dirty feet, and the older girl with the abacus.

“Not this way either,” Abigail said from in front of Chief Kirkland. She had been forced to come to a stop.

“There must be an exit,” Chief Kirkland said. He proceeded to move around the edges of the orchard, feeling his way around
like a mime and trying to occasionally push a foot through. Abigail took the opportunity to scale one of the pomegranate trees, on which red fruit hung on long stalks like elegant Christmas tree decorations. “We’re a bit up from the harbor…I can see the statues on the piers…trading ships and fishing boats…warehouses… lots of activity… I suppose we’d have caused quite a commotion if we’d scrambled down the cliff face dressed like this and tried to board a ship or dive into the sea, right?” She jumped off as the branch swayed dangerously under her not-very-considerable weight.

“What if we retrace our steps
exactly—
that is, we back out of the orchard as if we were never here?” I asked, since no one else seemed to have any suggestions.

But History would not let us do that either.

Abigail and Kamal exchanged a look and a shrug and joined Helen, who, looking grateful for the respite, had lowered herself into the shade of one of the pomegranate trees after conceding, “We seem to be wedged in on all sides by historical paths that cannot be disturbed.” Abigail picked up a plump pomegranate from the ground and started attacking it with her nails. I joined her.

The chief, having made another full circle, came back and sat down in defeat.

“Does it matter who sent us here?” Helen asked, briefly looking up from her notebook. The linguistics professor was sketching what we could see of the town and its harbor to complement several photos Abigail had taken with the sixties Polaroid camera. (“We’re here, might as well make ourselves useful,” Helen had said.) I had helped her immobilize her injured arm by making a
sort of a pillow of her purse by stuffing Abigail’s green sweater into it. The notebook was propped up on her knee as she worked.

“Certainly it matters,” said the security chief.

I was with him on that. If I was about to be flattened into nothing when the mountain blew up, I wanted to know who was to blame. Now that I’d had some time to think about it, I didn’t believe that Dr. Rojas had done this to us. I said as much. It was a bit hard to explain why I didn’t think it was his hand that had sent us here, but it came down to this—I’d always thought I was a good judge of character, especially when it came to the people in my administrative care.