Pompeii

“No.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Exomnius?” Africanus spread his hands. How was he supposed to remember? So many customers. So many faces.

“When did he pay his rent?”

“In advance. On the calends of every month.”

“So he paid you at the beginning of August?” Africanus nodded. Then one thing was settled. Whatever else had happened to him, Exomnius had not planned to disappear. The man was obviously a miser. He would never have paid for a room he had no intention of using. “Leave me,” he said. “I’ll straighten it up.”

Africanus seemed about to argue, but when Attilius took a step toward him he held up his hands in surrender and retreated to the landing. The engineer closed the broken door on him and listened to his footsteps descending to the bar.

He went around the room, reassembling it so that he could get an impression of how it had looked, as if by doing so he might conjure some clue as to what else it had held. He laid the eviscerated mattress back on the bed and placed the pillow—also slashed—at the head. He folded the thin blanket. He lay down. When he turned his head he noticed a pattern of small black marks on the wall and he saw that they were made by squashed insects. He imagined Exomnius lying here in the heat, killing bedbugs, and wondered why, if he was taking bribes from Ampliatus, he had chosen to live like a pauper. Perhaps he had spent all his money on whores? But that did not seem possible. A tumble with one of Africanus’s girls could not have cost more than a couple of copper coins.

A floorboard creaked.

He sat up very slowly and turned to look at the door. The moving shadows of a pair of feet showed clearly beneath the cheap wood and for a moment he was sure it must be Exomnius, come to demand an explanation from this stranger who had taken his job and invaded his property and was now lying on his bed in his ransacked room. “Who’s there?” he called, and when the door opened slowly and he saw it was only Zmyrina, he felt oddly disappointed. “Yes?” he said. “What do you want? I told your master to leave me alone.”

She stood on the threshold. Her dress was split, to show her long legs. She had a fading purple bruise the size of a fist on her thigh. She gazed around the room and put her hands to her mouth in horror. “Who done this?”

“You tell me.”

“He said he take care for me.”

“What?”

She came farther into the room. “He said when come back he take care for me.”

“Who?”

“Aelianus. He said.”

It took him a beat to work out who she meant—Exomnius. Exomnius Aelianus. She was the first person he had met who had used the aquarius’s given, rather than his family, name. That just about summed him up. His only intimate—a whore. “Well, he isn’t coming back,” he said roughly, “to take care for you. Or for anyone else.”

She passed the back of her hand under her nose a couple of times and he realized that she was crying. “He dead?”

“You tell me.” Attilius softened his tone. “The truth is, no one knows.”

“Buy me from Africanus. He said. No whore everyone. Special him. Understand?” She touched her chest and gestured to Attilius, then touched herself again.

“Yes, I understand.”

He looked at Zmyrina with new interest. It was not uncommon, he knew, especially in this part of Italy. The foreign sailors, when they left the navy after their twenty-five years’ service and were granted Roman citizenship—the first thing most of them did with their demob money was head for the nearest slave market and buy themselves a wife. The prostitute was kneeling now, picking up the scattered clothes and folding them, putting them away in the chest. And perhaps it was a point in Exomnius’s favor, he thought, that he should have decided to choose her, rather than someone younger or prettier. Or, then again, perhaps he was just lying and never intended to come back for her. Either way, her future had more or less disappeared along with her principal client.

“He had the money, did he? Enough money to buy you? You wouldn’t think it, to look at this place.”

“Nothere .” She sat back on her heels and looked up at him with scorn. “Not safe moneyhere . Money hidden. Plenty money. Someplace clever. Nobody find. He said. Nobody.”

“Somebody has tried—”

“Money not here.”

She was emphatic, and he thought,Yes, I bet you searched it yourself often enough when he wasn’t around. “Did he ever tell you where this place was?”

She stared him, her vermilion mouth wide open, and suddenly she bent her head. Her shoulders were shaking. He thought at first she was crying again, but when she turned he saw that the glint in her eyes was from tears of laughter. “No!” She started rocking again. She looked almost girlish in her delight. She clapped her hands. It was the funniest thing she had ever heard, and he had to agree—the idea of Exomnius confiding in a whore of Africanus where he had hidden his money—itwas funny. He began laughing himself, then swung his feet to the floor.

There was no point in wasting any more time here.

On the landing he glanced back at her, still kneeling on her haunches in her split dress, one of Exomnius’s tunics pressed to her face.

Attilius hurried back the way he had come, along the shadowy side street. This must have been Exomnius’s route from the brothel to the castellum aquae. This must have been what he saw whenever he came here—the whores and drunks, the puddles of piss and patches of vomit baked to crusts in the gutter, the graffiti on the walls, the little effigies of Priapus beside the doorways, with his enormous jutting cock dangling bells at its tip to ward off evil. So what was in his head as he walked this way for the final time? Zmyrina? Ampliatus? The safety of his hidden money?

He looked back over his shoulder but no one was paying him any attention. Still, he was glad to reach the wide central thoroughfare and the safety of its glaring light.

The town remained much quieter than it had been in the morning, the heat of the sun keeping most people off the road, and he made quick progress up the hill toward the Vesuvius Gate. As he approached the small square in front of the castellum aquae he could see the oxen and the carts, now fully laden with tools and materials. A small crowd of men sprawled in the dirt outside a bar, laughing at something. The horse he had hired was tethered to its post. And here was Polites—faithful Polites, the most trustworthy member of the work gang—advancing to meet him, holding out his bag and purse.

“You were gone a long while, aquarius.”

Attilius took his bag, ignoring the tone of reproach. “I’m here now. Where is Musa?”

“Still not here.”

“What?” He swore and cupped his hand to his eyes to check the position of the sun. It must be four hours—no, nearer five—since the others had ridden off. He had expected to receive some word by now. “How many men do we have?”

“Twelve.” Polites rubbed his hands together uneasily.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“They’re a rough-looking bunch, aquarius.”

“Are they? Their manners don’t concern me. As long as they can work.”

“They’ve been drinking for an hour.”

“Then they’d better stop.”

Attilius crossed the square to the bar. Ampliatus had promised a dozen of his strongest slaves and once again he had more than kept his word. It looked as if he had supplied a troop of gladiators. A flagon of wine was being handed around, from one pair of tattooed arms to another, and to pass the time they had fetched Tiro from the castellum and were playing a game with him. One of them had snatched off the water-slave’s felt cap and whenever he turned helplessly in the direction of whoever he thought was holding it, it would be tossed to someone else.

“Cut that out,” said the engineer. “Leave the lad alone.” They paid him no attention. He spoke up more loudly. “I am Marcus Attilius, aquarius of the Aqua Augusta, and you men are under my command now.” He snatched Tiro’s cap and pressed it into his hand. “Go back to the castellum, Tiro.” And then, to the slave gang: “That’s enough drinking. We’re moving out.”

The man whose turn it was with the wine regarded Attilius with indifference. He raised the clay jar to his mouth, threw back his head and drank. Wine dribbled down his chin and onto his chest. There was an appreciative cheer and Attilius felt the anger ignite inside himself. To train so hard, to build and work, to pour so much skill and ingenuity into the aqueducts—and all to carry water to such brutes as these, and Africanus. They would be better left to wallow beside some mosquito-infested swamp. “Who is the senior man among you?”

The drinker lowered the flagon. “The senior man,” he mocked. “What is this? The fucking army?”

“You are drunk,” said Attilius quietly. “But I am sober, and in a hurry. Nowmove. ” He lashed out with his foot and caught the flagon, knocking it out of the drinker’s hand. It spun away and landed on its side, where it lay, unbroken, emptying itself across the stones. For a moment, in the silence, theglug-glug of the wine was the only sound, and then there was a rush of activity—the men rising, shouting, the drinker lunging forward, with the apparent intention of sinking his teeth into Attilius’s leg. Through all this commotion, one booming voice rang louder than the rest—“Stop!”—and an enormous man, well over six feet tall, came running across the square and planted himself between Attilius and the others. He spread out his arms to keep them back.

“I am Brebix,” he said. “A free man.” He had a coarse red beard, trimmed, shovel-shaped. “If anyone is senior, I am.”

“Brebix.” Attilius nodded. He would remember that name. This one, he saw, actuallywas a gladiator, or rather an ex-gladiator. He had the brand of his troop on his arm, a snake drawing back to strike. “If you are their foreman, you should have been here an hour ago. Tell them that if they have any complaints, they should take them to Ampliatus. Tell them that none has to come with me, but any who stay behind will have to answer for it to their master. Now get those wagons out through the gate. I’ll meet you on the other side of the city wall.”

He turned, and the crowd of drinkers from the other bars, who had come thronging into the square in the hope of seeing a fight, stood aside to let him pass. He was trembling and he had to clench his fist to stop it showing. “Polites!” he called.

“Yes?” The slave eased his way through the mob.

“Fetch me my horse. We’ve wasted long enough here.”

Polites looked anxiously toward Brebix, now leading the reluctant work gang over to the wagons. “These men, aquarius—I don’t trust them.”

“Neither do I. But what else can we do? Come on. Get my horse. We’ll meet up with Musa on the road.”

As Polites hurried away, Attilius glanced down the hill. Pompeii was less like a seaside resort, more like a frontier garrison: a boomtown. Ampliatus was rebuilding her in his own image. He would not be sorry if he never saw her again—apart from Corelia. He wondered what she was doing, but even as the image of her wading toward him through the glittering pool began to form in his mind he forced himself to banish it. Get out of here, get to the Augusta, get the water running, and then get back to Misenum and check the aqueduct’s records for evidence of what Exomnius had been up to. Those were his priorities. To think of anything else was foolish.

In the shadow of the castellum aquae Tiro crouched, and Attilius was on the point of raising his hand in farewell, until he saw those flickering, sightless eyes.

The public sundial showed it was well into the ninth hour when Attilius passed on horseback beneath the long vault of the Vesuvius Gate. The ring of hooves on stone echoed like a small detachment of cavalry. The customs official poked his head out of his booth to see what was happening, yawned, and turned away.

The engineer had never been a natural rider. For once, though, he was glad to be mounted. It gave him height, and he needed every advantage he could get. When he trotted over to Brebix and the men they were obliged to squint up at him, screwing their eyes against the glare of the sky.

“We follow the line of the aqueduct toward Vesuvius,” he said. The horse wheeled and he had to shout over his shoulder. “And no dawdling. I want us in position before dark.”

“In position where?” asked Brebix.

“I don’t know yet. It should be obvious when we see it.”

His vagueness provoked an uneasy stir among the men—and who could blame them? He would have liked to have known where he was going himself. Damn Musa! He brought his mount under control and turned it toward the open country. He raised himself from the saddle so that he could see the course of the road beyond the necropolis. It ran straight toward the mountain through neat rectangular fields of olive trees and corn, separated by low stone walls and ditches—centuriated land, awarded to demobbed legionaries decades ago. There was not much traffic on the paved highway—a cart or two, a few pedestrians. No sign of any plume of dust that might be thrown up by a galloping horseman. Damn him, damn him . . .

Brebix said, “Some of the lads aren’t too keen on being out near Vesuvius after nightfall.”

“Why not?”

A man called out, “The giants!”

“Giants?”

Brebix said, almost apologetically, “Giants have been seen, aquarius, bigger than any man. Wandering over the earth by day and night. Sometimes journeying through the air. Their voices sound like claps of thunder.”

“Perhaps theyare claps of thunder,” said Attilius. “Have you considered that? There can be thunder without rain.”

“Aye, but this thunder is never in the air. It’s on the ground. Or even under the ground.”

“So this is why you drink?” Attilius forced himself to laugh. “Because you are scared to be outside the city walls after dark? And you were a gladiator, Brebix? I’m glad I never wagered money on you! Or did you only train men to fight blind boys?” Brebix began to swear, but the engineer talked over his head, to the work gang. “I asked your master to lend me men, not women! We’ve argued long enough! We have to go five miles before dark. Perhaps ten. Now drive those oxen forward, and follow me.”

He dug his heels into the sides of his horse and it started off at a slow trot. He passed along the avenue between the tombs. Flowers and small offerings of food had been left on some, to mark the Festival of Vulcan. A few people were picnicking in the shade of the cypresses. Small black lizards scattered across the stone vaults like spreading cracks. He did not look back. The men would follow, he was sure. He had goaded them into it and they were scared of Ampliatus.

At the edge of the cemetery he drew on the reins and waited until he heard the creak of the wagons trundling over the stones. They were just crude farm carts—the axle turned with the wheels, which were no more than simple sections of tree trunk a foot thick. Their rumble could be heard a mile away. First the oxen passed him, heads down, each team led by a man with a stick, pulling the lumbering carts, and finally the rest of the work gang. He counted them. All were there, including Brebix. Beside the road, the marker stones of the aqueduct, one every hundred paces, dwindled into the distance. Neatly spaced between them were the round stone inspection covers that provided access to the tunnel. The regularity and precision of it gave the engineer a fleeting sense of confidence. If nothing else, he knew how this worked.

He spurred his horse.

An hour later, with the afternoon sun dipping toward the bay, they were halfway across the plain—the parched and narrow fields and bone-dry ditches spread out all around them, the ocher-colored walls and watchtowers of Pompeii dissolving into the dust at their backs, the line of the aqueduct leading them remorselessly onward, toward the blue-gray pyramid of Vesuvius, looming ever more massively ahead.

HORA DUODECIMA

[18:47 hours]

While rocks are extremely strong in compression, they are weak in tension (strengths of about 1.5 x 10⁷bars). Thus, the strength of the rocks capping a cooling and vesiculating magma body is easily exceeded long before the magma is solid. Once this happens, an explosive eruption occurs.

—VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

Pliny had been monitoring the frequency of the trembling throughout the day—or, more accurately, his secretary, Alexion, had been doing it for him, seated at the table in the admiral’s library, with the water clock on one side and the wine bowl on the other.

The fact that it was a public holiday had made no difference to the admiral’s routine. He worked whatever day it was. He had broken off from his reading and dictation only once, in the middle of the morning, to bid good-bye to his guests, and had insisted on accompanying them down to the harbor to see them aboard their boats. Lucius Pomponianus and Livia were bound for Stabiae, on the far side of the bay, and it had been arranged that they would take Rectina with them, in their modest cruiser, as far as the Villa Calpurnia in Herculaneum. Pedius Cascus, without his wife, would take his own fully manned liburnian to Rome for a council meeting with the emperor. Old, dear friends! He had embraced them warmly. Pomponianus could play the fool, it was true, but his father, the great Pomponius Secundus, had been Pliny’s patron, and he felt a debt of honor to the family. And as for Pedius and Rectina—their generosity to him had been without limit. It would have been hard for him to finish theNatural History, living outside Rome, without the use of their library.

Just before he boarded his ship, Pedius had taken him by the arm. “I didn’t like to mention it earlier, Pliny, but are you sure you’re quite well?”

“Too fat,” wheezed Pliny, “that’s all.”

“What do your doctors say?”

“Doctors? I won’t let those Greek tricksters anywhere near me. Only doctors can murder a man with impunity.”

“But look at you, man. Your heart—”

“ ‘In cardiac disease the one hope of relief lies undoubtedly in wine.’ You should read my book. And that, my dear Pedius, is a medicine I can administer myself.”

The senator looked at him, then said grimly, “The emperor is concerned about you.”

That gave Pliny a twinge in his heart, right enough. He was a member of the imperial council himself. Why had he not been invited to this meeting, to which Pedius was hurrying?

“What are you implying? That he thinks I’m past it?”

Pedius said nothing—a nothing that said everything. He suddenly opened his arms and Pliny leaned forward and hugged him, patting the senator’s stiff back with his pudgy hand. “Take care, old friend.”

“And you.”

To his shame, when Pliny pulled back from the embrace, his cheek was wet. He stayed on the quayside, watching until the ships were out of sight. That was all he seemed to do these days: watch other people leave.

The conversation with Pedius had stayed with him all afternoon, as he shuffled back and forth on the terrace, periodically wandering into the library to check Alexion’s neat columns of figures.“The emperor is concerned about you.” Like the pain in his side, it would not go away.

He took refuge, as always, in his observations. The number of “harmonic episodes,” as he had decided to call the tremors, had increased steadily. Five in the first hour, seven in the second, eight in the third, and so on. More striking still had been their lengthening duration. Though they were too small to measure at the beginning of the day, as the afternoon went on Alexion had been able to use the accuracy of the water clock to estimate them—first at one-tenth part of the hour, and then one-fifth, until finally, for the whole eleventh hour, he had recorded one tremor only. The vibration of the wine was continuous.

“We must change our nomenclature,” muttered Pliny, leaning over his shoulder. “To call such movements an ‘episode’ will no longer suffice.”

And increasing in proportion with the movement of the earth, as if man and nature were bound by some invisible link, came reports of agitation in the town—a fight at the public fountains when the first hour’s water discharge had ended and not everyone had filled their pots; a riot outside the public baths when they had failed to open at the seventh hour; a woman stabbed to death for the sake of two amphorae of water—water!—by a drunk outside the Temple of Augustus; now it was said that armed gangs were hanging around the fountains, waiting for a fight.

Pliny had never had any difficulty issuing orders. It was the essence of command. He decreed that the evening’s sacrifice to Vulcan should be canceled and that the bonfire in the forum must be dismantled at once. A large public gathering at night was a recipe for trouble. It was unsafe, in any case, to light a fire of such a size in the center of the town when the pipes and fountains were dry and the drought had rendered the houses as flammable as kindling.

“The priests won’t like that,” said Antius.

The flagship captain had joined Pliny in the library. The admiral’s widowed sister, Julia, who kept house for him, was also in the room, holding a tray of oysters and a jug of wine for his supper.

“Tell the priests that we have no choice. I’m sure Vulcan in his mountain forge will forgive us, just this once.” Pliny massaged his arm irritably. It felt numb. “Have all the men, apart from the sentry patrols, confined to their barracks from dusk on. In fact, I want a curfew imposed across the whole of Misenum from vespera until dawn. Anyone found on the streets is to be imprisoned and fined. Understood?”

“Yes, admiral.”

“Have we opened the sluices in the reservoir yet?”

“It should be happening now, admiral.”

Pliny brooded. They could not afford another such day. Everything depended on how long the water would last. He made up his mind. “I’m going to take a look.”

Julia came toward him anxiously with the tray. “Is that wise, brother? You ought to eat and rest—”

“Don’t nag, woman!” Her face crumpled and he regretted his tone at once. Life had knocked her about enough as it was—humiliated by her wastrel husband and his ghastly mistress, then left widowed with a boy to bring up. That gave him an idea. “Gaius,” he said, in a gentler voice. “Forgive me, Julia. I spoke too sharply. I’ll take Gaius with me, if that will make you happier.”

On his way out, he called to his other secretary, Alcman, “Have we had a signal back yet from Rome?”

“No, admiral.”

“The emperor is concerned about you . . .”

He did not like this silence.

Pliny had grown too fat for a litter. He traveled instead by carriage, a two-seater, with Gaius wedged in next to him. Beside his red and corpulent uncle he looked as pale and insubstantial as a wraith. The admiral squeezed his knee fondly. He had made the boy his heir and had fixed him up with the finest tutors in Rome—Quintilian for literature and history; the Smyrnan, Nicetes Sacerdos, for rhetoric. It was costing him a fortune but they told him the lad was brilliant. He would never make a soldier, though. It would be a lawyer’s life for him.

An escort of helmeted marines trotted on foot on either side of the carriage, clearing a path for them through the narrow streets. A couple of people jeered. Someone spat.

“What about our water, then?”

“Look at that fat bastard! I bet you he’s not going thirsty!”

Gaius said, “Shall I close the curtains, uncle?”

“No, boy. Never let them see that you’re afraid.”

He knew there would be a lot of angry people on the streets tonight. Not just here, but in Neapolis and Nola and all the other towns, especially on a public festival.Perhaps Mother Nature is punishing us, he thought,for our greed and selfishness. We torture her at all hours by iron and wood, fire and stone. We dig her up and dump her in the sea. We sink mineshafts into her and drag out her entrails—and all for a jewel to wear on a pretty finger. Who can blame her if she occasionally quivers with anger?

They passed along the harbor front. An immense line of people had formed, queuing for the drinking fountain. Each had been allowed to bring one receptacle only and it was obvious to Pliny that an hour was never going to be sufficient for them all to receive their measure. Those who had been at the head of the line already had their ration and were hurrying away, cradling their pots and pans as if they were carrying gold. “We shall have to extend the flow tonight,” he said, “and trust to that young aquarius to carry out the repairs as he promised.”

“And if he doesn’t, uncle?”

“Then half this town will be on fire tomorrow.”

Once they were free of the crowd and on the causeway the carriage picked up speed. It rattled over the wooden bridge, then slowed again as they climbed the hill toward the Piscina Mirabilis. Jolting around in the back Pliny felt sure he was about to faint and perhaps he did. At any rate, he nodded off, and the next thing he knew they were drawing into the courtyard of the reservoir, past the flushed faces of half a dozen marines. He returned their salute and descended, unsteadily, on Gaius’s arm.If the emperor takes away my command, he thought,I shall die, as surely as if he orders one of his praetorian guard to strike my head from my shoulders. I shall never write another book. My life force has gone. I am finished.

“Are you all right, uncle?”

“I am perfectly well, Gaius, thank you.”

Foolish man! he reproached himself. Stupid, trembling, credulous old man! One sentence from Pedius Cascus, one routine meeting of the imperial council to which you are not invited, and you fall to pieces. He insisted on going down the steps into the reservoir unaided. The light was fading and a slave went on ahead with a torch. It was years since he had last been down here. Then, the pillars had been mostly submerged, and the crashing of the Augusta had drowned out any attempt at conversation. Now it echoed like a tomb. The size of it was astonishing. The level of the water had fallen so far beneath his feet he could barely make it out until the slave held his torch over the mirrored surface, and then he saw his own face staring back at him—querulous, broken. The reservoir was also vibrating slightly, he realized, just like the wine.

“How deep is it now?”

“Fifteen feet, admiral,” said the slave.

Pliny contemplated his reflection. “ ‘There has never been anything more remarkable in the whole world,’ ” he murmured.

“What was that, uncle?”

“ ‘When we consider the abundant supplies of water in public buildings, baths, pools, open channels, private houses, gardens, and country estates, and when we think of the distances traversed by the water before it arrives, the raising of arches, the tunneling of mountains and the building of level routes across deep valleys, then we shall readily admit that there has never been anything more remarkable than our aqueducts in the whole world.’ I quote myself, I fear. As usual.” He pulled back his head. “Allow half the water to drain away tonight. We shall let the rest go in the morning.”

“And then what?”

“And then, my dear Gaius? And then we must hope for a better day tomorrow.”

In Pompeii, the fire for Vulcan was to be lit as soon as it was dark. Before that, there was to be the usual entertainment in the forum, supposedly paid for by Popidius, but in reality funded by Ampliatus—a bullfight, three pairs of skirmishing gladiators, some boxers in the Greek style. Nothing too elaborate, just an hour or so of diversion for the voters while they waited for the night to arrive, the sort of spectacle an aedile was expected to lay on in return for the privilege of office.

Corelia feigned sickness.

She lay on her bed, watching the lines of light from the closed shutters creep slowly up the wall as the sun sank, thinking about the conversation she had overheard, and about the engineer Attilius. She had noticed the way he looked at her, both in Misenum yesterday, and this morning, when she was bathing. Lover, avenger, rescuer, tragic victim—in her imagination she pictured him briefly in all these parts, but always the fantasy dissolved into the same brutal coupling of facts: she had brought him into the orbit of her father and now her father was planning to kill him. His death would be her fault.

She listened to the sounds of the others preparing to leave. She heard her mother calling for her, and then her footsteps on the stairs. Quickly she felt for the feather she had hidden under her pillow. She opened her mouth and tickled the back of her throat, vomited noisily, and when Celsia appeared she wiped her lips and gestured weakly to the contents of the bowl.

Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress and put her hand on Corelia’s brow. “Oh my poor child. You feel hot. I should send for the doctor.”

“No, don’t trouble him.” A visit from Pumponius Magonianus, with his potions and purges, was enough to make anyone ill. “Sleep is all I need. It was that endless, awful meal. I ate too much.”

“But my dear, you hardly ate a thing!”

“That’s not true—”

“Hush!” Her mother held up a warning finger. Someone else was mounting the steps, with a heavier tread, and Corelia braced herself for a confrontation with her father. He would not be so easy to fool. But it was only her brother, in his long white robes as a priest of Isis. She could smell the incense on him.

“Hurry up, Corelia. He’s shouting for us.”

No need to say who “he” was.

“She’s ill.”

“Is she? Even so, she must still come. He won’t be happy.”

Ampliatus bellowed from downstairs and they both jumped. They glanced toward the door.

“Yes, can’t you make an effort, Corelia?” said her mother. “For his sake?”

Once, the three of them had formed an alliance: had laughed about him behind his back—his moods, his rages, his obsessions. But lately that had stopped. Their domestic triumvirate had broken apart under his relentless fury. Individual strategies for survival had been adopted. Corelia had observed her mother become the perfect Roman matron, with a shrine to Livia in her dressing room, while her brother had subsumed himself in his Egyptian cult. And she? What was she supposed to do? Marry Popidius and take a second master? Become more of a slave in the household than Ampliatus had ever been?

She was too much her father’s daughter not to fight.

“Run along, both of you,” she said, bitterly. “Take my bowl of vomit and show it to him, if you like. But I’m not going to his stupid spectacle.” She rolled onto her side and faced the wall. Another roar came from below.

Her mother breathed her martyr’s sigh. “Oh, very well. I’ll tell him.”

It was exactly as the engineer had suspected. Having led them almost directly north toward the summit for a couple of miles, the aqueduct spur suddenly swung eastward, just as the ground began to rise toward Vesuvivus. The road turned with it and for the first time they had their backs to the sea and were pointing inland, toward the distant foothills of the Apenninus.

The Pompeii spur wandered away from the road more often now, hugging the line of the terrain, weaving back and forth across their path. Attilius relished this subtlety of aqueducts. The great Roman roads went crashing through nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards—any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant—they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view. Sometimes it was only the eagles, soaring in the hot air above some lonely mountainscape, who could appreciate the true majesty of what men had wrought.

They had passed through the gridwork of centuriated fields and were entering into the wine country, owned by the big estates. The ramshackle huts of the smallholders on the plain, with their tethered goats and their half dozen ragged hens pecking in the dust, had given way to handsome farmhouses with red-tile roofs that dotted the lower slopes of the mountain.

Surveying the vineyards from his horse, Attilius felt almost dazed by the vision of such abundance, such astonishing fertility, even in the midst of a drought. He was in the wrong business. He should give up water and go into wine. The vines had escaped from ordinary cultivation and had fastened themselves onto every available wall and tree, reaching to the top of the tallest branches, enveloping them in luxuriant cascades of green and purple. Small white faces of Bacchus, made of marble to ward off evil, with perforated eyes and mouths, hung motionless in the still air, peering from the foliage like ambushers ready to strike. It was harvesttime and the fields were full of slaves—slaves on ladders, slaves bent halfway to the ground by the weight of the baskets of grapes on their backs. But how, he wondered, could they possibly manage to gather it all in before it rotted?

They came to a large villa looking out across the plain to the bay and Brebix asked if they could stop for a rest.

“All right. But not for long.”

Attilius dismounted and stretched his legs. When he wiped his forehead the back of his hand came away gray with dust and when he tried to drink he found that his lips were caked. Polites had bought a couple of loaves and some greasy sausages and he ate hungrily. Astonishing, always, the effects of a bit of food on an empty stomach. He felt his spirits lift with each mouthful. This was always where he preferred to be—not in some filthy town, but out in the country, with the hidden veins of civilization, beneath an honest sky. He noticed that Brebix was sitting alone and he went over and broke off half a loaf for him and held it out, along with a couple of sausages. A peace offering.

Brebix hesitated, nodded, and took them. He was naked to the waist, his sweating torso crisscrossed with scars.

“What class of fighter were you?”

“Guess.”

It was a long time since Attilius had been to the games. “Not a retiarius,” he said eventually. “I don’t see you dancing around with a net and a trident.”

“You’re right there.”

“So, a thrax, then. Or a murmillo, perhaps.” A thrax carried a small shield and a short curved sword; a murmillo was a heavier fighter, armed like an infantryman, with a gladius and a full rectangular shield. The muscles of Brebix’s left arm—his shield arm, more likely than not—bulged as powerfully as his right. “I’d say a murmillo.” Brebix nodded. “How many fights?”

“Thirty.”

Attilius was impressed. Not many men survived thirty fights. That was eight or ten years of appearances in the arena. “Whose troop were you with?”

“Alleius Nigidius. I fought all around the bay. Pompeii, mostly. Nuceria. Nola. After I won my freedom I went to Ampliatus.”

“You didn’t turn trainer?”

Brebix said quietly, “I’ve seen enough killing, aquarius. Thanks for the bread.” He got to his feet lightly, in a single, fluid motion, and went over to the others. It took no effort to imagine him in the dust of the amphitheater. Attilius could guess the mistake his opponents had made. They would have thought he was massive, slow, clumsy. But he was as agile as a cat.

The engineer took another drink. He could see straight across the bay to the rocky islands off Misenum—little Prochyta and the high mountain of Aenaria—and for the first time he noticed that there was a swell on the water. Flecks of white foam had appeared among the tiny ships that were strewn like filings across the glaring, metallic sea. But none had hoisted a sail. And that was strange, he thought—that was odd—but it was a fact:there was no wind. Waves but no wind.

Another trick of nature for the admiral to ponder.

The sun was just beginning to dip behind Vesuvius. A hare eagle—small, black, powerful, famed for never emitting a cry—wheeled and soared in silence above the thick forest. They would soon be heading into shadow. Which was good because it would be cooler, and also bad, because it meant there was not long till dusk.

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

[20:00 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 flatboom. 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.

Corax was missing.

According to Musa, he and the overseer had discovered the lake less than two hours after leaving Pompeii—around noon, it must have been—and it was exactly as Attilius had predicted: how could anyone miss a flood of this size? After a brief inspection of the damage, Corax had remounted his horse and set off back to Pompeii to report on the scale of the problem, as agreed.

Attilius’s jaw was set in anger. “But that must have been seven or eight hours ago.” He did not believe it. “Come on, Musa—what really happened?”

“I’m telling you the truth, aquarius. I swear it!” Musa’s eyes were wide in apparently sincere alarm. “I thought he would be coming back with you. Something must have happened to him!”

Beside the open manhole, Musa and Corvinus had lit a fire, not to keep themselves warm—the air was still sultry—but to ward off evil. The timber they had found was as dry as tinder, the flames bright in the darkness, spitting fountains of red sparks that rose whirling with the smoke. Huge white moths mingled with the flakes of ash.

“Perhaps we missed him on the road somehow.” Attilius peered behind him into the encroaching gloom. But even as he said it he knew that it could not be right. And in any case, a man on horseback, even if he had taken a different route, would surely have had time to reach Pompeii, discover they had left, and catch up with them. “This makes no sense. Besides, I thought I made it clear that you were to bring us the message, not Corax.”

“You did.”

“Well?”

“He insisted on going to fetch you.”

He has run away,thought Attilius. It had to be the likeliest explanation. He and his friend Exomnius together—they had fled.

“This place,” said Musa, looking around. “I’ll be honest with you, Marcus Attilius—it gives me the creeps. That noise just now—did you hear it?”

“Of course we heard it. They must have heard it in Neapolis.”

“And just wait till you see what’s happened to the matrix.”

Attilius went over to one of the wagons and collected a torch. He returned and thrust it into the flames. It ignited immediately. The three of them gathered around the opening in the earth and once again he caught the whiff of sulfur rising from the darkness. “Fetch me some rope,” he said to Musa. “It’s with the tools.” He glanced at Corvinus. “And how did it go with you? Did you close the sluices?”

“Yes, aquarius. We had to argue with the priest but Becco convinced him.”

“What time did you shut it off?”

“The seventh hour.”

Attilius massaged his temples, trying to work it out. The level of water in the flooded tunnel would start to drop in a couple of hours. But unless he sent Corvinus back to Abellinum almost immediately, Becco would follow his instruction, wait twelve hours, and reopen the sluices during the sixth watch of the night. It was all desperately tight. They would never manage it.

When Musa came back Attilius handed him the torch. He tied one end of the rope around his waist and sat on the edge of the open manhole. He muttered, “Theseus in the labyrinth.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Just make sure you don’t let go of the other end, there’s a good fellow.”

Three feet of earth, then two of masonry and then six of nothing from the top of the tunnel roof to the floor. Eleven feet in all.I had better land well. He turned and lowered himself into the narrow shaft, his fingers holding tight to the lip of the manhole, and hung there for a moment, suspended. How many times had he done this? And yet never in more than a decade had he lost the sense of panic at finding himself entombed beneath the earth. It was his secret dread, never confessed to anyone, not even to his father. Especially not to his father. He shut his eyes and let himself drop, bending his knees as he landed to absorb the shock. He crouched there for a moment, recovering his balance, the stink of sulfur in his nostrils, then cautiously felt outward with his hands. The tunnel was only three feet wide. Dry cement beneath his fingers. Darkness when he opened his eyes—as dark as when they were closed. He stood, squeezed himself back a pace, and shouted up to Musa, “Throw down the torch!”

The flame guttered as it fell and for a moment he feared it had gone out, but when he bent to take the handle it flared again, lighting the walls. The lower part was encrusted with lime deposited by the water over the years. Its roughened, bulging surface looked more like the wall of a cave than anything man-made and he thought how quickly nature seized back what she had yielded—brickwork was crumbled by rain and frost, roads were buried under green drifts of weeds, aqueducts were clogged by the very water they were built to carry. Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. He picked at the lime with his thumbnail. Here was another example of Exomnius’s idleness. The lime was almost as thick as his finger. It ought to have been scraped back every couple of years. No maintenance work had been done on this stretch for at least a decade.

He turned awkwardly in the confined space, holding the torch in front of him, and strained his eyes into the darkness. He could see nothing. He began to walk, counting each pace, and when he reached eighteen he gave a murmur of surprise. It was not simply that the tunnel was entirely blocked—he had expected that—but rather it seemed as if the floor had been driven upward, pushed from below by some irresistible force. The thick concrete bed on which the channel rested had been sheared and a section of it sloped toward the roof. He heard Musa’s muffled shout behind him: “Can you see it?”

“Yes, I see it!”

The tunnel narrowed dramatically. He had to get down on his knees and shuffle forward. The fracturing of the base had, in turn, buckled the walls and collapsed the roof. Water was seeping through a compressed mass of bricks and earth and lumps of concrete. He scraped at it with his free hand, but the stench of sulfur was at its strongest here and the flames of his torch began to dwindle. He backed away quickly, reversing all the way to the shaft of the manhole. Looking up he could just make out the faces of Musa and Corvinus framed by the evening sky. He leaned his torch against the tunnel wall.

“Hold the rope fast. I’m coming out.” He untied it from around his waist and gave it a sharp pull. The faces of the men had vanished. “Ready?”

“Yes!”

He tried not to think of what might happen if they let him fall. He grasped the rope with his right hand and hauled himself up, then grabbed it with his left and hauled again. The rope swung wildly. He got his head and shoulders into the inspection shaft and for a moment he thought his strength would let him down but another heave with either hand brought his knees into contact with the aperture and he was able to wedge his back against the side of the shaft. He decided it was easier to let go of the rope and to work himself up, pushing his body up with his knees and then with his back, until his arms were over the side of the manhole and he was able to eject himself into the fresh night air.

He lay on the ground, recovering his breath as Musa and Corvinus watched him. A full moon was rising.

“Well?” said Musa. “What did you make of it?”

The engineer shook his head. “I’ve never come across anything like it. I’ve seen roof-falls and I’ve seen landslides on the sides of mountains. But this? This looks as though an entire section of the floor has just been shifted upward. That’s new to me.”

“Corax said exactly the same.”

Attilius got to his feet and peered down the shaft. His torch was still burning on the tunnel floor. “This land,” he said bitterly. “It looks solid enough. But it’s no more firm than water.” He started walking, retracing his steps along the course of the Augusta. He counted off eighteen paces and stopped. Now that he studied the ground more closely he saw that it was bulging slightly. He scraped a mark with the edge of his foot and walked on, counting again. The swollen section did not seem very wide. Six yards, perhaps, or eight. It was difficult to be precise. He made another mark. Away to his left, Ampliatus’s men were still clowning around in the lake.

He experienced a sudden rush of optimism. Actually, it wasn’t too big, this blockage. The more he pondered it, the less likely it seemed to him to have been the work of an earthquake, which could easily have shaken the roof down along an entire section—nowthat would have been a disaster. But this was much more localized: more as if the land, for some strange reason, had risen a yard or two along a narrow line.

He turned in a full circle. Yes, he could see it now. The ground had heaved. The matrix had been obstructed. At the same time the pressure of the movement had opened a crack in the tunnel wall. The water had escaped into the depression and formed a lake. But if they could clear the blockage and let the Augusta drain . . .

He decided at that moment that he would not send Corvinus back to Abellinum. He would try to fix the Augusta overnight. To confront the impossible: that was the Roman way! He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted to the men. “All right, gentlemen! The baths are closing! Let’s get to work!”

Women did not often travel alone along the public highways of Campania, and, as Corelia passed them, the peasants working in the dried-up narrow fields turned to stare at her. Even some brawny farmer’s wife, as broad as she was tall and armed with a stout hoe, might have hesitated to venture out unprotected at vespera. But an obviously rich young girl? On a fine-looking horse? How juicy a prize was that? Twice men stepped out into the road and attempted to block her path or grab at the reins, but each time she spurred her mount onward and after a few hundred paces they gave up trying to chase her.

She knew the route the aquarius had taken from her eavesdropping that afternoon. But what had sounded a simple enough journey in a sunlit garden—following the line of the Pompeii aqueduct to the point where it joined the Augusta—was a terrifying undertaking when actually attempted at dusk, and by the time she reached the vineyards on the foothills of Vesuvius she was wishing she had never come. It was true what her father said of her—headstrong, disobedient, foolish, that she acted first and thought about it afterward. These were the familiar charges he had flung at her the previous evening in Misenum, after the death of the slave, as they were embarking to return to Pompeii. But it was too late to turn back now.

Work was ending for the day and lines of exhausted, silent slaves, shackled together at the ankle, were shuffling beside the road in the twilight. The clank of their chains against the stones and the flick of the overseer’s whip across their backs were the only sounds. She had heard about such wretches, crammed into the prison blocks attached to the larger farms and worked to death within a year or two: she had never actually seen them close-up. Occasionally a slave found the energy to raise his eyes from the dirt and meet her glance; it was like staring through a hole into hell.

And yet she would not give in, even as nightfall emptied the road of traffic and the line of the aqueduct became harder to follow. The reassuring sight of the villas on the lower slopes of the mountain gradually dissolved, to be replaced by isolated points of torchlight and lamplight, winking in the darkness. Her horse slowed to a walk and she swayed in the saddle in time with its plodding motion.

It was hot. She was thirsty. (Naturally, she had forgotten to bring any water: that was something the slaves always carried for her.) She was sore where her clothes chafed against her sweating skin. Only the thought of the aquarius and the danger he was in kept her moving. Perhaps she would be too late? Perhaps he had been murdered already? She was just beginning to wonder whether she would ever catch up with him when the heavy air seemed to turn solid and to hum around her, and an instant later, from deep inside the mountain to her left, came a loud crack. Her horse reared, pitching her backward, and she was almost thrown, the reins snapping through her sweaty fingers, her damp legs failing to grip its heaving sides. When it plunged forward again and set off at a gallop she only saved herself by wrapping her fingers tightly in its thick mane and clinging for her life.

It must have charged for a mile or more and when at last it began to slow and she was able to raise her head she found that they had left the road and were cantering over open ground. She could hear water somewhere near and the horse must have heard it, too, or smelled it, because it turned and began walking toward the sound. Her cheek had been pressed close to the horse’s neck, her eyes shut tight, but now, as she raised her head, she could make out white heaps of stone and a low brick wall that seemed to enclose an enormous well. The horse bent to drink. She whispered to it, and gently, so as not to alarm it, dismounted. She was trembling with shock.

Her feet sank into mud. Far in the distance she could see the lights of camp fires.

Attilius’s first objective was to remove the debris from underground: no easy task. The tunnel was only wide enough for one man at a time to confront the obstruction, to swing a pickax and dig with a shovel, and once a basket was filled it had to be passed along the matrix from hand to hand until it reached the bottom of the inspection shaft, then attached to a rope and hauled to the surface, emptied, and sent back again, by which time a second basket had already been loaded and dispatched on its way.

Attilius, as he always did, had taken the first turn with the pick. He tore a strip from his tunic and tied it round his mouth and nose to try to reduce the smell of the sulfur. Hacking away at the brick and earth and then shoveling it into the basket was bad enough. But trying to wield the ax in the cramped space and still find the force to smash the concrete into manageable lumps was a labor fit for Hercules. Some of the fragments took two men to carry and before long he had scraped his elbows raw against the walls of the tunnel. As for the heat, compounded by the sweltering night, the sweating bodies, and the burning torches—that was worse than he imagined it could be even in the gold mines of Hispania. But still, Attilius had a sense of progress, and that gave him extra strength. He had found the spot where the Augusta was choked. All his problems would be overcome if he could clear what lay ahead of him.

After a while, Brebix tapped him on the shoulder and offered to take over. Attilius gratefully handed him the pick and watched in admiration as the big man, despite the fact that his bulk completely filled the tunnel, swung it as easily as if it were a toy. The engineer squeezed back along the line and the others shifted to make room for him. They were working as a team now, like a single body: the Roman way again. And whether it was the restorative effects of their bathe, or relief at having a specific task to occupy their thoughts, the mood of the men appeared transformed. He began to think that perhaps they were not such bad fellows after all. You could say what you liked about Ampliatus: at least he knew how to train a slave gang. He took the heavy basket from the man beside him—the same man, he noticed, whose wine he had kicked away—turned, and shuffled with it to the next in the line.

Gradually he lost track of time, his world restricted to this narrow few feet of tunnel, his sensations to the ache of his arms and back, the cuts on his hands from the sharp debris, the pain of his skinned elbows, the suffocating heat. He was so absorbed that at first he did not hear Brebix shouting to him.

“Aquarius!Aquarius! ”

“Yes?” He flattened himself against the wall and edged past the men, aware for the first time that the water in the tunnel was up to his ankles. “What is it?”

“Look for yourself.” Attilius took a torch from the man behind him and held it up close to the compacted mass of the blockage. At first glance it looked solid enough, but then he saw that it was seeping water everywhere. Tiny rivulets were running down the oozing bulk, as if it had broken into a sweat. “See what I mean?” Brebix prodded it with the ax. “If this lot goes, we’ll be drowned like rats in a sewer.”

Attilius was aware of the silence behind him. The slaves had all stopped work and were listening. Looking back he saw that they had already cleared four or five yards of debris. So what was left to hold back the weight of the Augusta? A few feet? He did not want to stop. But he did not want to kill them all, either.

“All right,” he said, reluctantly. “Clear the tunnel.”

They needed no second telling, leaning the torches up against the walls, dropping their tools and baskets and lining up for the rope. No sooner had one man climbed it, his feet disappearing into the inspection shaft, than another had it in his hands and was hauling himself to safety. Attilius followed Brebix up the tunnel and by the time they reached the manhole they were the only ones left belowground.

Brebix offered him the rope. Attilius refused it. “No. You go. I’ll stay down and see what else can be done.” He realized Brebix was looking at him as if he were mad. “I’ll fasten the rope around me for safety. When you get to the top, untie it from the wagon and pay out enough for me to reach the end of the tunnel. Keep a firm hold.”

Brebix shrugged. “Your choice.”

As he turned to climb, Attilius caught his arm. “You are strong enough to hold me, Brebix?”

The gladiator grinned briefly. “You—and your fucking mother!”

Despite his weight, Brebix ascended the rope as nimbly as a monkey, and then Attilius was alone. As he knotted the rope around his waist for a second time he thought that perhaps hewas mad, but there seemed no alternative, for until the tunnel was drained they could not repair it, and he did not have the time to wait for all the water to seep through the obstruction. He tugged on the rope. “All right, Brebix?”

“Ready!”

He picked up his torch and began moving back along the tunnel, the water above his ankles now, sloshing around his shins as he stepped over the abandoned tools and baskets. He moved slowly, so that Brebix could pay out the rope, and by the time he reached the debris he was sweating, from nerves as much as from the heat. He could sense the weight of the Augusta behind it. He transferred the torch to his left hand and with his right began pulling at the exposed end of a brick that was level with his face, working it up and down and from side to side. A small gap was what he needed: a controlled release of pressure from somewhere near the top. At first the brick wouldn’t budge. Then water started to bubble around it and suddenly it shot through his fingers, propelled by a jet that fired it past his head, so close that it grazed his ear.

He cried out and backed away as the area around the leak bulged then sprang apart, peeling outward and downward in a V—all of this occurring in an instant, yet somehow slowly enough for him to register each individual stage of the collapse—before a wall of water descended over him, smashing him backward, knocking the torch out of his hand and submerging him in darkness. He hurtled underwater very fast—on his back, headfirst—swept along the tunnel, scrabbling for a purchase on the smooth cement render of the matrix, but there was nothing he could grip. The surging current rolled him, flipped him over onto his stomach, and he felt a flash of pain as the rope snapped tight beneath his ribs, folding him and jerking him upward, grazing his back against the roof. For a moment he thought he was saved, only for the rope to go slack again and for him to plunge to the bottom of the tunnel, the current sweeping him on—on like a leaf in a gutter—on into the darkness.

NOCTE CONCUBIA

[22:07 hours]

Many observers have commented on the tendency for eruptions

to be initiated or become stronger at times of full moon

when the tidal stresses in the crust are greatest.

—VOLCANOLOGY(SECOND EDITION)

Ampliatus had never cared much for Vulcanalia. The festival marked that point in the calendar when nights fell noticeably earlier and mornings had to start by candlelight: the end of the promise of summer and the start of the long, melancholy decline into winter. And the ceremony itself was distasteful. Vulcan dwelled in a cave beneath a mountain and spread devouring fire across the earth. All creatures went in fear of him, except for fish, and so—on the principle that gods, like humans, desire most that which is least attainable—he had to be appeased by a sacrifice of fish thrown alive onto a burning pyre.

It was not that Ampliatus was entirely lacking in religious feeling. He always liked to see a good-looking animal slaughtered—the placid manner of a bull, say, as it plodded toward the altar, and the way it stared at the priest so bemusedly; then the stunning and unexpected blow from the assistant’s hammer and the flash of the knife as its throat was cut; the way it fell, as stiff as a table, with its legs sticking out; the crimson gouts of blood congealing in the dust and the yellow sac of guts boiling from its slit belly for inspection by the haruspices. Nowthat was religious. But to see hundreds of small fish tossed into the flames by the superstitious citizenry as they filed past the sacred fire, to watch the silvery bodies writhing and springing in the heat: there was nothing noble in it as far as he was concerned.

And it was particularly tedious this year because of the record numbers who wished to offer a sacrifice. The endless drought, the failure of springs and the drying of wells, the shaking of the ground, the apparitions seen and heard on the mountain—all this was held to be the work of Vulcan, and there was much apprehension in the town. Ampliatus could see it in the reddened, sweating faces of the crowd as they shuffled around the edge of the forum, staring into the fire. The fear in the air was palpable.

He was not in a good position. The rulers of the town, as tradition demanded, were gathered on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter—the magistrates and the priests at the front, the members of the Ordo, including his own son, grouped behind, whereas Ampliatus, as a freed slave, with no official recognition, was invariably banished by protocol to the back. Not that he minded. On the contrary. He relished the fact that power,real power, should be kept hidden: an invisible force that permitted the people these civic ceremonials while all the time jerking the participants as if they were marionettes. Besides, and this was what was truly exquisite, most people knew that it was actually he—that fellow standing third from the end in the tenth row—who really ran the town. Popidius and Cuspius, Holconius and Brittius—they knew it, and he felt that they squirmed, even as they acknowledged the tribute of the mob. And most of the mob knew it, too, and were all the more respectful toward him as a result. He could see them searching out his face, nudging and pointing.

“That’s Ampliatus,”he imagined them saying,“who rebuilt the town when the others ran away! Hail Ampliatus! Hail Ampliatus! Hail Ampliatus!”

He slipped away before the end.

Once again, he decided he would walk rather than ride in his litter, passing down the steps of the temple between the ranks of the spectators—a nod bestowed here, an elbow squeezed there—along the shadowy side of the building, under the triumphal arch of Tiberius and into the empty street. His slaves carried his litter behind him, acting as a bodyguard, but he was not afraid of Pompeii after dark. He knew every stone of the town, every hump and hollow in the road, every storefront, every drain. The vast full moon and the occasional streetlight—another of his innovations—showed him the way home clearly enough. But it was not just Pompeii’s buildings he knew. It was its people, and the mysterious workings of its soul, especially at elections: five neighborhood wards—Forenses, Campanienses, Salinienses, Urbulanenses, Pagani—in each of which he had an agent; and all the craft guilds—the laundrymen, the bakers, the fishermen, the perfume makers, the goldsmiths, and the rest—again, he had them covered. He could even deliver half the worshippers of Isis, his temple, as a block vote. And in return for easing whichever booby he selected into power he received those licenses and permits, planning permissions and favorable judgments in the basilica that were the invisible currency of power.

He turned down the hill toward his house—hishouses, he should say—and stopped for a moment to savor the night air. He loved this town. In the early morning the heat could feel oppressive, but usually, from the direction of Capri, a line of dark-blue rippling waves would soon appear and by the fourth hour a sea breeze would be sweeping over the city, rustling the leaves, and for the rest of the day Pompeii would smell as sweet as spring. True, when it was hot and listless, as it was tonight, the grander people complained that the town stank. But he almost preferred it when the air was heavier—the dung of the horses in the streets, the urine in the laundries, the fish-sauce factories down in the harbor, the sweat of twenty thousand human bodies crammed within the city walls. To Ampliatus this was the smell of life: of activity, money,profit.

He resumed his walk and when he reached his front door he stood beneath the lantern and knocked loudly. It was still a pleasure for him to come in through the entrance he had not been permitted to use as a slave and he rewarded the porter with a smile. He was in an excellent mood, so much so that he turned when he was halfway down the vestibule and said, “Do you know the secret of a happy life, Massavo?”

The porter shook his immense head.

“To die.” Ampliatus gave him a playful punch in the stomach and winced; it was like striking wood. “To die, and then to come back to life, and relish every day as a victory over the gods.”

He was afraid of nothing, no one. And the joke was, he was not nearly as rich as everyone assumed. The villa in Misenum—ten million sesterces, far too expensive, but he had simply had to have it!—that had only been bought by borrowing, chiefly on the strength of this house, which had itself been paid for through a mortgage on the baths, and they were not even finished. Yet Ampliatus kept it all running somehow by the force of his will, by cleverness and by public confidence, and if that fool Lucius Popidius thought he was getting his old family home back once he had married Corelia—well, sadly, he should have got himself a decent lawyer before he signed the settlement.

As he passed the swimming pool, lit by torches, he paused to study the fountain. The mist of the water mingled with the scent of the roses, but even as he watched it seemed to him that it was beginning to lose its strength, and he thought of the solemn young aquarius, out in the darkness somewhere, trying to repair the aqueduct. He would not be coming back. It was a pity. They might have done business together. But he was honest, and Ampliatus’s motto was always “May the gods protect us from an honest man.” He might even be dead by now.

The flaccidity of the fountain began to perturb him. He thought of the silvery fish, springing and sizzling in the flames, and tried to imagine the reaction of the townspeople when they discovered the aqueduct was failing. Of course, he realized, they would blame it all on Vulcan, the superstitious fools. He had not considered that. In which case tomorrow might be an appropriate moment finally to produce the prophecy of Biria Onomastia, the sibyl of Pompeii, which he had taken the precaution of commissioning earlier in the summer. She lived in a house near the amphitheater and at night, amid swathes of smoke, she communed with the ancient god Sabazius, to whom she sacrificed snakes—a disgusting procedure—on an altar supporting two magical bronze hands. The whole ceremony had given him the creeps, but the sibyl had predicted an amazing future for Pompeii, and it would be useful to let word of it spread. He decided he would summon the magistrates in the morning. For now, while the others were still in the forum, he had more urgent business to attend to.

His prick began to harden even as he climbed the steps to the private apartments of the Popidii, a path he had trodden so many times, so long ago, when the old master had used him like a dog. What secret, frantic couplings these walls had witnessed over the years, what slobbering endearments they had overheard as Ampliatus had submitted to the probing fingers and had spread himself for the head of the household. Far younger than Celsinus he had been, younger even than Corelia—who was she to complain about marriage in the absence of love? Mind you, the master had always whispered that he loved him, and perhaps he had—after all, he had left him his freedom in his will. Everything that Ampliatus had grown to be had had its origin in the hot seed spilled up here. He had never forgotten it.

The bedroom door was unlocked and he went in without knocking. An oil lamp burned low on the dressing table. Moonlight spilled through the open shutters, and by its soft glow he saw Taedia Secunda lying prone upon her bed, like a corpse upon its bier. She turned her head as he appeared. She was naked; sixty if she was a day. Her wig was laid out on a dummy’s head beside the lamp, a sightless spectator to what was to come. In the old days it was she who had always issued the commands—here, there,there —but now the roles were reversed, and he was not sure if she didn’t enjoy it more, although she never uttered a word. Silently she turned and raised herself on her hands and knees, offering him her bony haunches, blue-sheened by the moon, waiting, motionless, while her former slave—her master now—climbed up onto her bed.

Twice after the rope gave way Attilius managed to jam his knees and elbows against the narrow walls of the matrix in an effort to wedge himself fast and twice he succeeded only to be pummeled loose by the pressure of the water and propelled farther along the tunnel. Limbs weakening, lungs bursting, he sensed he had one last chance and tried again, and this time he stuck, spread wide like a starfish. His head broke the surface and he choked and spluttered, gasping for breath.

In the darkness he had no idea where he was or how far he had been carried. He could see and hear nothing, feel nothing except the cement against his hands and knees and the pressure of the water up to his neck, hammering against his body. He had no idea how long he clung there but gradually he became aware that the pressure was slackening and that the level of the water was falling. When he felt the air on his shoulders he knew that the worst was over. Very soon after that his chest was clear of the surface. Cautiously he let go of the walls and stood. He swayed backward in the slow-moving current and then came upright, like a tree that had survived a flash flood.

His mind was beginning to work again. The backed-up waters were draining away and because the sluices had been closed in Abellinum twelve hours earlier there was nothing left to replenish them. What remained was being tamed and reduced by the infinitesimal gradient of the aqueduct. He felt something tugging at his waist. The rope was streaming out behind him. He fumbled for it in the darkness and hauled it in, coiling it around his arm. When he reached the end he ran his fingers over it. Smooth. Not frayed or hacked. Brebix must simply have let go of it. Why? Suddenly he was panicking, frantic to escape. He leaned forward and began to wade but it was like a nightmare—his hands stretched out invisible in front of him feeling along the walls in the infinite dark, his legs unable to move faster than at an old man’s shuffle. He felt himself doubly imprisoned, by the earth pressing in all around him, by the weight of the water ahead. His ribs ached. His shoulder felt as if it had been branded by fire.

He heard a splash and then in the distance a pinprick of yellow light dropped like a falling star. He stopped wading and listened, breathing hard. More shouts, followed by a second splash, and then another torch appeared. They were searching for him. He heard a faint shout—“Aquarius!”—and tried to decide whether he should reply. He was scaring himself with shadows, surely? The wall of debris had given way so abruptly and with such force that no normal man would have had the strength to hold him. But Brebix was not a man of normal strength and what had happened was not unexpected: the gladiator was supposed to have been braced against it.

“Aquarius!”

He hesitated. There was no other way out of the tunnel, that was certain. He would have to go on and face them. But his instinct told him to keep his suspicions to himself. He shouted back, “I’m here!” and splashed on through the dwindling water toward the waving lights.

They greeted him with a mixture of wonder and respect—Brebix, Musa, and young Polites all crowding forward to meet him—for it had seemed to them, they said, that nothing could have survived the flood. Brebix insisted that the rope had shot through his hands like a serpent and as proof he showed his palms. In the torchlight each was crossed by a vivid burn mark. Perhaps he was telling the truth. He sounded contrite enough. But then, any assassin would look shamefaced if his victim came back to life. “As I recall it, Brebix, you said you could hold me and my mother.”

“Aye, well, your mother’s heavier than I thought.”

“You’re favored by the gods, aquarius,” declared Musa. “They have some destiny in mind for you.”

“My destiny,” said Attilius, “is to repair this fucking aqueduct and get back to Misenum.” He unfastened the rope from around his waist, took Polites’s torch, and edged past the men, shining the light along the tunnel.

How quickly the water was draining! It was already below his knees. He imagined the current swirling past him, on its way to Nola and the other towns. Eventually it would work its way all around the bay, across the arcades north of Neapolis and over the great arch at Cumae, down the spine of the peninsula to Misenum. Soon this section would be drained entirely. There would be nothing more than puddles on the floor. Whatever happened, he had fulfilled his promise to the admiral. He had cleared the matrix.

The point where the tunnel had been blocked was still a mess but the force of the flood had done most of their work for them. Now it was a matter of clearing out the rest of the earth and rubble, smoothing the floor and walls, putting down a bed of concrete and a fresh lining of bricks, then a render of cement—nothing fancy: just temporary repairs until they could get back to do a proper job in the autumn. It was still a lot of work to get through in a night, before the first tongues of fresh water reached them from Abellinum, after Becco had reopened the sluices. He told them what he wanted and Musa started adding his own suggestions. If they brought down the bricks now, he said, they could stack them along the wall and have them ready to use when the water cleared. They could make a start on mixing the cement aboveground immediately. It was the first time he had shown any desire to cooperate since Attilius had taken charge of the aqueduct. He appeared awed by the engineer’s survival.I should come back from the dead more often, Attilius thought.

Brebix said, “At least that stink has gone.”

Attilius had not noticed it before. He sniffed the air. It was true. The pervasive stench of sulfur seemed to have been washed away. He wondered what that had all been about—where it had come from in the first place, why it should have evaporated—but he did not have time to consider it. He heard his name being called and he kicked his way back through the water to the inspection shaft. It was Corvinus’s voice: “Aquarius!”

“Yes?” The face of the slave was silhouetted by a red glow. “What is it?”

“I think you ought to come see.” His head disappeared abruptly.

Now what?Attilius took the rope and tested it carefully, then started climbing. In his bruised and exhausted state it was harder work than before. He ascended slowly—right hand, left hand, right hand, hauling himself into the narrow access shaft, working himself up, thrusting his arms over the lip of the manhole and levering himself out into the warm night.

In the time he had been underground the moon had risen—huge, full, and red. It was like the stars in this part of the world—like everything, in fact—unnatural and overblown. There was quite an operation in progress on the surface by now: the heaps of spoil excavated from the tunnel, a couple of big bonfires spitting sparks at the harvest moon, torches planted in the ground to provide additional light, the wagons drawn up and mostly unloaded. He could see a thick rim of mud in the moonlight around the shallow lake, where it had already mostly drained. The slaves of Ampliatus’s work gang were leaning against the carts, waiting for orders. They watched him with curiosity as he hauled himself to his feet. He must look a sight, he realized, drenched and dirty. He shouted down into the tunnel for Musa to come up and set them back to work, then looked around for Corvinus. He was about thirty paces away, close to the oxen, with his back to the manhole. Attilius shouted to him impatiently. “Well?”

Corvinus turned and by way of explanation stepped aside, revealing behind him a figure in a hooded cloak. Attilius set off toward them. It was only as he came closer and the stranger pulled back the hood that he recognized her. He could not have been more startled if Egeria herself, the goddess of the water-spring, had suddenly materialized in the moonlight. His first instinct was that she must have come with her father and he looked around for other riders, other horses. But there was only one horse, chewing placidly on the thin grass. She was alone and as he reached her he raised his hands in astonishment.

“Corelia—what is this?”

“She wouldn’t tell me what she wants,” interrupted Corvinus. “She says she’ll only talk to you.”

“Corelia?”

She nodded suspiciously toward Corvinus, put her finger to her lips, and shook her head.

“See what I mean? The moment she turned up yesterday I knew she was trouble—”

“All right, Corvinus. That’s enough. Get back to work.”

“But—”

“Work!”

As the slave slouched away Attilius examined her more closely. Cheeks smudged, hair disheveled, cloak and dress spattered with mud. But it was her eyes, unnaturally wide and bright, that were most disturbing. He took her hand. “This is no place for you,” he said gently. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to bring you these,” she whispered and from the folds of her cloak she began producing small cylinders of papyrus.

The documents were of different ages and conditions. Six in total, small enough to fit into the cradle of one arm. Attilius took a torch and with Corelia beside him moved away from the activity around the aqueduct to a private spot behind one of the wagons, looking out over the flooded ground. Across what remained of the lake ran a wavering path of moonlight, as wide and straight as a Roman road. From the far side came the rustle of wings and the cries of the waterfowl.

He took her cloak from her shoulders and spread it out for her to sit on. Then he jammed the handle of the torch into the earth, squatted, and unrolled the oldest of the documents. It was a plan of one section of the Augusta—this very section: Pompeii, Nola, and Vesuvius were all marked in ink that had faded from black to pale gray. It was stamped with the imperial seal of the Divine Augustus as if it had been inspected and officially approved. A surveyor’s drawing. Original. Drafted more than a century ago. Perhaps the great Marcus Agrippa himself had once held it in his hands? He turned it over. Such a document could only have come from one of two places, either the archive of the Curator Aquarum in Rome, or the Piscina Mirabilis in Misenum. He rolled it up carefully.

The next three papyri consisted mostly of columns of numerals and it took him a while to make much sense of them. One was headed“Colonia Veneria Pompeianorum” and was divided into years—DCCCXIV, DCCCXV, and so on—going back nearly two decades, with further subdivisions of notations, figures, and totals. The quantities increased annually until, by the year that had ended last December—Rome’s eight hundred thirty-third—they had doubled. The second document seemed at first glance to be identical until he studied it more closely and then he saw that the figures throughout were roughly half as large as in the first. For example, for the last year, the grand total of 352,000 recorded in the first papyrus had been reduced in the second to 178,000.

The third document was less formal. It looked like the monthly record of a man’s income. Again there were almost two decades’ worth of figures and again the sums gradually mounted until they had almost doubled. And a good income it was—perhaps fifty thousand sesterces in the last year alone, maybe a third of a million overall.

Corelia was sitting with her knees drawn up, watching him. “Well? What do they mean?”

He took his time answering. He felt tainted: the shame of one man, the shame of them all. And who could tell how high the rot had spread? But then he thought,No, it would not have gone right the way up to Rome, because if Rome had been a part of it, Aviola would never have sent me south to Misenum. “These look like the actual figures for the amount of water consumed in Pompeii.” He showed her the first papyrus. “Three hundred fifty thousand quinariae last year—that would be about right for a town of Pompeii’s size. And this second set of records I presume is the one that my predecessor, Exomnius, officially submitted to Rome. They wouldn’t know the difference, especially after the earthquake, unless they sent an inspector down to check. And this”—he did not try to hide his contempt as he flourished the third document—“is what your father paid him to keep his mouth shut.” She looked at him, bewildered. “Water is expensive,” he explained, “especially if you’re rebuilding half a town. ‘At least as valuable as money’—that’s what your father said to me.” No doubt it would have made the difference between profit and loss.Salve lucrum!

He rolled up the papyri. They must have been stolen from the squalid room above the bar. He wondered why Exomnius would have run the risk of keeping such an incriminating record so close to hand. But then he supposed that incrimination was precisely what Exomnius would have had in mind. They would have given him a powerful hold over Ampliatus:don’t ever think of trying to move against me—of silencing me, or cutting me out of the deal, or threatening me with exposure—because if I am ruined, I can ruin you with me.

Corelia said, “What about those two?”

The final pair of documents were so different from the others that it was as if they didn’t belong with them. They were much newer, for a start, and instead of figures they were covered in writing. The first was in Greek.

The summit itself is mostly flat, and entirely barren. The soil looks like ash, and there are cave-like pits of blackened rock, looking gnawed by fire. This area appears to have been on fire in the past and to have had craters of flame which were subsequently extinguished by a lack of fuel. No doubt this is the reason for the fertility of the surrounding area, as at Caetana, where they say that soil filled with the ash thrown up by Etna’s flames makes the land particularly good for vines. The enriched soil contains both material that burns and material that fosters production. When it is over-charged with the enriching substance it is ready to burn, as is the case with all sulphurous substances, but when this has been exuded and the fire extinguished the soil becomes ash-like and suitable for produce.

Attilius had to read it through twice, holding it to the torchlight, before he was sure he had the sense of it. He passed it to Corelia. “The summit?” The summit of what? Of Vesuvius, presumably—that was the only summit around here. But had Exomnius—lazy, aging, hard-drinking, whore-loving Exomnius—really found the energy to climb all the way up to the top of Vesuvius, in a drought, to record his impressions in Greek? It defied belief. And the language—“cave-like pits of blackened rock . . . fertility of the surrounding area”—didn’t sound like the voice of an engineer. It was too literary, not at all the sort of phrases that would come naturally to a man like Exomnius, who was surely no more fluent in the tongue of the Hellenes than Attilius was himself. He must have copied it from somewhere. Or had it copied for him. By one of the scribes in that public library on Pompeii’s forum, perhaps.

The final papyrus was longer, and in Latin. But the content was equally strange:

Lucilius, my good friend, I have just heard that Pompeii, the famous city in Campania, has been laid low by an earthquake which also disturbed all the adjacent districts. Also, part of the town of Herculaneum is in ruins and even the structures which are left standing are shaky. Neapolis also lost many private dwellings. To these calamities others were added: they say that a flock of hundreds of sheep were killed, statues were cracked, and some people were deranged and afterwards wandered about unable to help themselves.

I have said that a flock of hundreds of sheep were killed in the Pompeian district. There is no reason you should think this happened to those sheep because of fear. For they say that a plague usually occurs after a great earthquake, and this is not surprising. For many death-carrying elements lie hidden in the depths. The very atmosphere there, which is stagnant either from some flaw in the earth or from inactivity and the eternal darkness, is harmful to those breathing it. I am not surprised that sheep have been infected—sheep have a delicate constitution—the closer they carried their heads to the ground, since they received the afflatus of the tainted air near to the ground itself. If the air had come out in greater quantity it would have harmed people too; but the abundance of pure air extinguished it before it rose high enough to be breathed by people.

Again, the language seemed too flowery to be the work of Exomnius, the execution of the script too professional. In any case, why would Exomnius have claimed to have “just heard” about an earthquake that had happened seventeen years earlier? And who was Lucilius? Corelia had leaned across to read the document over his shoulder. He could smell her perfume, feel her breath on his cheek, her breast pressed against his arm. He said, “And you’re sure these were with the other papyri? They couldn’t have come from somewhere else?”

“They were in the same box. What do they mean?”

“And you didn’t see the man who brought the box to your father?”

Corelia shook her head. “I could only hear him. They talked about you. It was what they said that made me decide to find you.” She shifted fractionally closer to him and lowered her voice. “My father said he didn’t want you to come back from this expedition alive.”

“Is that so?” He made an effort to laugh. “And what did the other man say?”

“He said that it would not be a problem.”

Silence. He felt her hand touch his—her cool fingers on his raw cuts and scratches—and then she rested her head against his chest. She was exhausted. For a moment, for the first time in three years, he allowed himself to relish the sensation of having a woman’s body close to his.

So this is what it’s like to be alive,he thought. He had forgotten.

After a while she fell asleep. Carefully, so as not to wake her, he disengaged his arm from hers. He left her and walked back to the aqueduct.

The repair work had reached a decisive point. The slaves had stopped bringing debris up out of the tunnel and had started lowering bricks down into it. Attilius nodded warily to Brebix and Musa, who were standing talking together. Both men fell silent as he approached and glanced beyond him to the place where Corelia was lying, but he ignored their curiosity.

His mind was in a turmoil. That Exomnius was corrupt was no surprise—he had been resigned to that. And he had assumed his dishonesty explained his disappearance. But these other documents, this piece of Greek and this extract from a letter, these cast the mystery in a different light entirely. Now it seemed that Exomnius had been worried about the soil through which the Augusta passed—the sulfurous, tainted soil—at least three weeks before the aqueduct had been contaminated. Worried enough to look up a set of the original plans and to go researching in Pompeii’s library.

Attilius stared distractedly down into the depths of the matrix. He was remembering his exchange with Corax in the Piscina Mirabilis the previous afternoon: Corax’s sneer—“He knew this water better than any man alive. He would have seen this coming”—and his own unthinking retort—“Perhaps he did, and that was why he ran away.”For the first time he had a presentiment of something terrible. He could not define it. But too much was happening that was out of the ordinary—the failure of the matrix, the trembling of the ground, springs running backward into the earth, sulfur poisoning . . . Exomnius had sensed it, too.

The fire of the torches glowed in the tunnel.

“Musa?”

“Yes, aquarius?”

“Where was Exomnius from? Originally?”

“Sicily, aquarius.”

“Yes, yes, I know, Sicily. Which part exactly?”

“I think the east.” Musa frowned. “Caetana. Why?”

But the engineer, gazing across the narrow moonlit plain toward the shadowy mass of Vesuvius, did not reply.

JUPITER

24 August

The day of the eruption

HORA PRIMA

[06:20 hours]

At some point, hot magma interacted with ground-water

seeping downwards through the volcano, initiating the first event,

the minor phreato-magmatic eruption which showered fine-grained

grey tephra over the eastern flanks of the volcano. This probably

took place during the night or on the morning of 24 August.

—VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE

He kept his increasing anxiety to himself all through the sweltering night, as they worked by torchlight to repair the matrix. He helped Corvinus and Polites on the surface mix the wooden troughs of cement, pouring in the quicklime and the powdery puteolanum and a tiny amount of water—no more than a cupful, mind, because that was the first secret of making a good cement: the drier the mixture, the stronger it set—and then he helped the slaves carry it down in baskets into the matrix and spread it out to form a new base for the conduit. He helped Brebix smash up the rubble they had dug out earlier and they added a couple of layers of that into the base for strength. He helped saw the planks they used to shutter the walls and to crawl along over the wet cement. He passed bricks to Musa as he laid them. Finally he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Corvinus to apply the thin coat of render. (And here was the second secret of perfect cement: to pound it as hard as possible, “hew it as you would hew wood,” to squeeze out every last bubble of water or air that might later be a source of weakness.)

By the time the sky above the manhole was turning gray he knew that they had probably done enough to bring the Augusta back into service. He would have to return to repair her properly. But for now, with a bit of luck, she would hold. He walked with his torch to the end of the patched-up section, inspecting every foot. The waterproof render would be setting even as the aqueduct started to flow again. By the end of the first day it would be hard; by the end of the third it would be stronger than rock.

If being stronger than rock means anything anymore.But he kept the thought to himself.

“Cement that dries underwater,” he said to Musa when he came back. “Nowthat is a miracle.”

He let the others climb up ahead of him. The breaking day showed that they had pitched their camp in rough pasture, littered with large stones, flanked by mountains. To the east were the steep cliffs of the Apenninus, with a town—Nola, presumably—just becoming visible in the dawn light about five or six miles away. But the shock was to discover how close they were to Vesuvius. It lay directly to the west and the land started to rise almost immediately, within a few hundred paces of the aqueduct, steepening to a point so high the engineer had to tilt his head back to see the summit. And what was most unsettling, now that the shadows were lifting, were the streaks of grayish-white beginning to appear across one of its flanks. They stood out clearly against the surrounding forest, shaped like arrowheads, pointing toward the summit. If it had not been August he would have sworn that they were made of snow. The others had noticed them as well.

“Ice?” said Brebix, gawping at the mountain. “Ice in August?”

“Did you ever see such a thing, aquarius?” asked Musa.

Attilius shook his head. He was thinking of the description in the Greek papyrus: “The ash thrown up by Etna’s flames makes the land particularly good for vines.” “Could it,” he said hesitantly, almost to himself, “could it perhaps beash ?”

“But how can there be ash without fire?” objected Musa. “And if there had been a fire that size in the darkness we would have seen it.”

“That’s true.” Attilius glanced around at their exhausted, fearful faces. The evidence of their work was everywhere—heaps of rubble, empty amphorae, dead torches, scorched patches where the night’s fires had been allowed to burn themselves out. The lake had gone, and with it, he noticed, the birds. He had not heard them leave. Along the mountain ridge opposite Vesuvius the sun was beginning to appear. There was a strange stillness in the air. No birdsong of any sort, he realized. No dawn chorus. That would send the augurs into a frenzy. “And you’re sure it was not there yesterday, when you arrived with Corax?”

“Yes.” Musa was staring at Vesuvius, transfixed. He wiped his hands uneasily on his filthy tunic. “It must have happened last night. That crash that shook the ground, remember? That must have been it. The mountain has cracked and spewed.”

There was a general muttering of uneasiness among the men and someone cried out, “That can only be the giants!”

Attilius wiped the sweat from his eyes. It was starting to feel hot already. Another scorching day in prospect. And something more than heat—a tautness, like a drumskin stretched too far. Was it his mind playing tricks, or did the ground seem to be vibrating slightly? A prickle of fear stirred the hair on the back of his scalp. Etna and Vesuvius—he was beginning to sense the same terrible connection that Exomnius must have recognized.

“All right,” he said briskly. “Let’s get away from this place.” He set off toward Corelia. “Bring everything up out of the matrix,” he called over his shoulder. “And look sharp about it. We’ve finished here.”

She was still asleep, or at least he thought she was. She was lying beside the more distant of the two wagons, curled up on her side, her legs drawn up, her hands raised in front of her face and balled into fists. He stood looking down at her for a moment, marveling at the incongruity of her beauty in this desolate spot—Egeria among the humdrum tools of his profession.

“I’ve been awake for hours.” She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. “Is the work finished?”

“Close enough.” He knelt and began collecting together the papyri. “The men are going back to Pompeii. I want you to go on ahead of them. I’ll send an escort with you.”

She sat up quickly. “No!”

He knew how she would react. He had spent half the night thinking about it. But what other choice did he have? He spoke quickly. “You must return those documents to where you found them. If you set off now you should be back in Pompeii well before midday. With luck, he need never know you took them, or brought them out here to me.”

“But they’re proof of his corruption.”

“No.” He held up his hand to quiet her. “No, they’re not. On their own, they mean nothing. Proof would be Exomnius giving testimony before a magistrate. But I don’t have him. I don’t have the money your father paid him or even a single piece of evidence he spent any of it. He’s been very careful. As far as the world is concerned, Exomnius was as honest as Cato. Besides, this isn’t as important as getting you away from here. Something’s happening to the mountain. I’m not sure what. Exomnius suspected it weeks ago. It’s as if—” He broke off. He didn’t know how to put it into words. “It’s as if it’s—coming alive.You’ll be safer in Pompeii.”

She was shaking her head. “And what will you do?”

“Return to Misenum. Report to the admiral. If anyone can make sense of what is happening, he can.”

“Once you’re alone they’ll try to kill you.”

“I don’t think so. If they’d wanted to do that, they had plenty of chances last night. If anything, I’ll be safer. I have a horse. They’re on foot. They couldn’t catch me even if they tried.”

“I also have a horse. Take me with you.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why? I can ride.”

For a moment he played with the image of the two of them turning up in Misenum together. The daughter of the owner of the Villa Hortensia sharing his cramped quarters at the Piscina Mirabilis. Hiding her when Ampliatus came looking for her. How long would they get away with it? A day or two. And then what? The laws of society were as inflexible as the laws of engineering.

“Corelia, listen.” He took her hands. “If I could do anything to help you, in return for what you’ve done for me, I would. But this is madness, to defy your father.”

“You don’t understand.” Her grip on his fingers was ferocious. “I can’t go back. Don’t make me go back. I can’t bear to see him again, or to marry that man.”

“But you know the law. When it comes to marriage, you’re as much your father’s property as any one of those slaves over there.” What could he say? He hated the words even as he uttered them. “It may not turn out to be as bad as you fear.” She groaned, pulled away her hands, and buried her face in them. He blundered on. “We can’t escape our destiny. And, believe me, there are worse ones than marrying a rich man. You could be working in the fields and dead at twenty. Or a whore in the necropolis of Pompeii. Accept what has to happen. Live with it. You’ll survive. You’ll see.”

She gave him a long, slow look—contempt, was it, or hatred? “I swear to you, I sooner would be a whore.”

“And I swear you would not.” He spoke more sharply. “You’re young. What do you know of how people live?”

“I know I could not be married to someone I despised. Could you?” She glared at him. “Perhaps you could.”

He turned away. “No, Corelia.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“But youwere married?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I was married. My wife is dead.”

That shut her up for a moment. “And did you despise her?”

“Of course not.”

“Did she despise you?”

“Perhaps she did.”

She was briefly silent again. “How did she die?”

He did not ever talk of it. He did not even think of it. And if, as sometimes happened, especially in the wakeful hours before dawn, his mind ever started off down that miserable road, he had trained himself to haul it back and set it on a different course. But now . . . there was something about her: she had got under his skin. To his astonishment, he found himself telling her.

“She looked something like you. And she had a temper, too, like yours.” He laughed briefly, remembering. “We were married three years.” It was madness; he couldn’t stop himself. “She was in childbirth. But the baby came from the womb feet first, like Agrippa. That’s what the name means—Agrippa, aegre partus, ‘born with difficulty’—did you know that? I thought at first it was a fine omen for a future aquarius, to be born like the great Agrippa. I was sure it was a boy. But the day went on—it was June in Rome, and hot: almost as hot as down here—and even with a doctor and two women in attendance, the baby would not move. And then she began to bleed.” He closed his eyes. “They came to me before nightfall. ‘Marcus Attilius, choose between your wife and your child!’ I said that I chose both. But they told me that was not to be, so I said—of course I said—‘My wife.’ I went into the room to be with her. She was very weak, but she disagreed. Arguing with me, even then! They had a pair of shears, you know—the sort that a gardener might use? And a knife. And a hook. They cut off one foot, and then the other, and used the knife to quarter the body, and then the hook to draw out the skull. But Sabina’s bleeding didn’t stop, and the next morning she also died. So I don’t know. Perhaps at the end she did despise me.”

He sent her back to Pompeii with Polites. Not because the Greek slave was the strongest escort available, or the best horseman, but because he was the only one Attilius trusted. He gave him Corvinus’s mount and told him not to let her out of his sight until she was safely home.

She went meekly in the end, with barely another word, and he felt ashamed of what he had said. He had silenced her well enough, but in a coward’s way—unmanly and self-pitying. Had ever an unctuous lawyer in Rome used a cheaper trick of rhetoric to sway a court than this ghastly parading of the ghosts of a dead wife and child? She swept her cloak around her and then flung her head back, flicking her long dark hair over her collar, and there was something impressive in the gesture: she would do as he asked but she would not accept that he was right. Never a glance in his direction as she swung herself easily into the saddle. She made a clicking sound with her tongue and tugged the reins and set off down the track behind Polites.

It took all his self-control not to run after her.A poor reward, he thought,for all the risks she took for me. But what else did she expect of him? And as for fate—the subject of his pious little lecture—hedid believe in fate. One was shackled to it from birth as to a moving wagon. The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it—whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

Still, he felt sick as he watched her go, the sun brightening the landscape as the distance between them increased, so that he was able to watch her for a long time, until at last the horses passed behind a clump of olive trees, and she was gone.

In Misenum, the admiral was lying on his mattress in his windowless bedroom, remembering.

He was remembering the flat, muddy forests of Upper Germany, and the great oak trees that grew along the shore of the northern sea—if one could speak of a shore in a place where the sea and the land barely knew a boundary—and the rain and the wind, and the way that in a storm the trees, with a terrible splintering, would sometimes detach themselves from the bank, vast islands of soil trapped within their roots, and drift upright, their foliage spread like rigging, bearing down on the fragile Roman galleys. He could still see in his mind the sheet lightning and the dark sky and the pale faces of the Chauci warriors amid the trees, the smell of the mud and the rain, the terror of the trees crashing into the ships at anchor, his men drowning in that filthy barbarian sea.

He shuddered and opened his eyes to the dim light, hauled himself up, and demanded to know where he was. His secretary, sitting beside the couch next to a candle, his stylus poised, looked down at his wax tablet.

“We were with Domitius Corbulo, admiral,” said Alexion, “when you were in the cavalry, fighting the Chauci, in eight hundred.”

“Ah yes. Just so. The Chauci. I remember . . .”

But what did he remember? The admiral had been trying for months to write his memoirs—his final book, he was sure—and it was a welcome distraction from the crisis on the aqueduct to return to it. But what he had seen and done and what he had read or been told seemed nowadays to run together, in a kind of seamless dream. Such things he had witnessed! The empresses—Lollia Paulina, Caligula’s wife—sparkling like a fountain in the candlelight at her betrothal banquet, cascading with forty million sesterces’ worth of pearls and emeralds. And the Empress Agrippina, married to the drooling Claudius: he had seen her pass by in a cloak made entirely of gold. And gold mining he had watched, of course, when he was procurator in northern Spain—the miners cutting away at the mountainside, suspended by ropes, so that they looked, from a distance, like a species of giant birds pecking at the rock face. Such work, such danger—and to what end? Poor Agrippina, murdered here, in this very town, by Ancietus, his predecessor as admiral of the Misene Fleet, on the orders of her son, the Emperor Nero, who put his mother to sea in a boat that collapsed and then had her stabbed to death by sailors when she somehow struggled ashore. Stories! That was his problem. He had too many stories to fit into one book.

“. . . the Chauci.” How old was he then? Twenty-four? It was his first campaign. He began again. “The Chauci, I remember, dwelled on high wooden platforms to escape the treacherous tides of that region. They gathered mud with their bare hands, which they dried in the freezing north wind, and burned for fuel. For drink they consumed only rainwater, which they collected in tanks at the front of their houses—a sure sign of their lack of civilization. Miserable bastards, the Chauci.” He paused. “Leave that last bit out.”

The door opened briefly, admitting a shaft of brilliant white light. He heard the rustling of the Mediterranean, the hammering of the shipyards. So it was morning already. He must have been awake for hours. The door closed again. A slave tiptoed across to the secretary and whispered into his ear. Pliny rolled his fat body over onto one side to get a better view. “What time is it?”

“The end of the first hour, admiral.”

“Have the sluices been opened at the reservoir?”

“Yes, admiral. We have a message that the last of the water has drained away.”

Pliny groaned and flopped back onto his pillow.

“And it seems, sir, that a most remarkable discovery has just been made.”

The work gang had left about a half hour after Corelia. There were no elaborate farewells: the contagion of fear had spread throughout the men to infect Musa and Corvinus and all were eager to get back to the safety of Pompeii. Even Brebix, the former gladiator, the undefeated hero of thirty fights, kept turning his small dark eyes nervously toward Vesuvius. They cleared the matrix and flung the tools, the unused bricks, and the empty amphorae onto the backs of the wagons. Finally, a couple of the slaves shoveled earth across the remains of the night’s fires and buried the gray scars left by the cement. By the time this was finished it was as if they had never been there.

Attilius stood warily beside the inspection shaft with his arms folded and watched them prepare to leave. This was his moment of greatest danger, now that the work was done. It would have been typical of Ampliatus to make sure he extracted a final measure of use out of the engineer before dispensing with him. He was ready to fight, to sell himself dearly if he had to.

Musa had the only other horse and once he was in the saddle he called down to Attilius. “Are you coming?”

“Not yet. I’ll catch up to you later.”

“Why not come now?”

“Because I’m going to go up onto the mountain.”

Musa looked at him, astonished. “Why?”

A good question.Because the answer to what has been happening down here must lie up there. Because it’s my job to keep the water running. Because I am afraid. The engineer shrugged. “Curiosity. Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten my promise, if that’s what’s bothering you. Here.” He threw Musa his leather purse. “You’ve done well. Buy the men some food and wine.”

Musa opened the purse and inspected its contents. “There’s plenty here, aquarius. Enough for a woman as well.”

Attilius laughed. “Go safely, Musa. I’ll see you soon. Either in Pompeii or Misenum.”

Musa gave him a second glance and seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. He wheeled away and set off after the carts and Attilius was alone.

Again, he was struck by the peculiar stillness of the day, as if nature were holding her breath. The noise of the heavy wooden wheels slowly faded into the distance and all he could hear was the occasional tinkle of a goat’s bell and the ubiquitous chirping of the cicadas. The sun was quite high now. He glanced around at the empty countryside, then lay on his stomach and peered into the matrix. The heat pressed heavily on his back and shoulders. He thought of Sabina and of Corelia and of the terrible image of his dead son. He wept. He did not try to stop himself but for once surrendered to it, choking and shaking with grief, gulping the tunnel air, inhaling the cold and bitter odor of the wet cement. He felt oddly apart from himself, as if he had divided into two people, one crying and the other watching him cry.

After a while he stopped and raised himself to wipe his face on the sleeve of his tunic and it was only when he looked down again that his eye was caught by something—by a glint of reflected light in the darkness. He drew his head back slightly to let the sun shine directly along the shaft and he saw very faintly that the floor of the aqueduct was glistening. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Even as he watched, the quality of the light seemed to change and become more substantial, rippling and widening as the tunnel began to fill with water.

He whispered to himself, “She runs!”

When he was satisfied that he wasn’t mistaken and that the Augusta had indeed begun to flow again, he rolled the heavy manhole cover across to the shaft. He slowly lowered it, pulling his fingers back at the last instant to let it drop the final few inches. With a thud the tunnel was sealed.

He untethered his horse and climbed into the saddle. In the shimmering heat, the marker stones of the aqueduct dwindled into the distance like a line of submerged rocks. He pulled on the reins and turned away from the Augusta to face Vesuvius. He spurred the horse and they moved off along the track that led toward the mountain, walking at first but quickening to a trot as the ground began to rise.

At the Piscina Mirabilis the last of the water had drained away and the great reservoir was empty—a rare sight. It had last been allowed to happen a decade before and that had been for maintenance, so that the slaves could shovel out the sediment and check the walls for signs of cracking. The admiral listened attentively as the slave explained the workings of the system. He was always interested in technical matters.

“And how often is this supposed to be done?”

“Every ten years would be customary, admiral.”

“So this was going to be done again soon?”

“Yes, admiral.”

They were standing on the steps of the reservoir, about halfway down—Pliny, his nephew Gaius, his secretary Alexion, and the water-slave, Dromo. Pliny had issued orders that nothing was to be disturbed until he arrived and a marine guard had been posted at the door to prevent unauthorized access. Word of the discovery had got out, however, and there was the usual curious crowd in the courtyard.

The floor of the piscina looked like a muddy beach after the tide has gone out. There were little pools here and there, where the sediment was slightly hollowed, and a litter of objects—rusted tools, stones, shoes—that had fallen into the water over the years and had sunk to the bottom, some of them entirely shrouded so that they appeared as nothing more than small humps on the smooth surface. The rowboat was grounded. Several sets of footprints led out from the bottom of the steps toward the center of the reservoir, where a larger object lay, and then returned. Dromo asked if the admiral would like him to fetch it.

“No,” said Pliny, “I want to see it where it lies for myself. Oblige me, would you, Gaius.” He pointed to his shoes and his nephew knelt and unbuckled them while the admiral leaned on Alexion for support. He felt an almost childish anticipation and the sensation intensified as he descended the last of the steps and cautiously lowered his feet into the sediment. Black slime oozed between his toes, deliciously cool, and immediately he was a boy again, back at the family home in Comum, in Cisalpine Italy, playing on the shores of the lake, and the intervening years—nearly half a century of them—were as insubstantial as a dream. How many times did this occur each day? It never used to happen. But lately almost anything could set it off—a touch, a smell, a sound, a color glimpsed—and immediately memories he did not know he still possessed came flooding back, as if there were nothing left of him anymore but a breathless sack of remembered impressions.

He hoisted the folds of his toga and began stepping gingerly across the surface, his feet sinking deep into the mud, which then made a delightful sucking noise each time he lifted them. He heard Gaius shout behind him, “Be careful, uncle!” but he shook his head, laughing. He kept away from the tracks the others had made: it was more enjoyable to rupture the crust of mud where it was still fresh and just beginning to harden in the warm air. The others followed at a respectful distance.

What an extraordinary construction it was, this underground vault, with its pillars each ten times higher than a man! What imagination had first envisioned it, what will and strength had driven it through to construction—and all to store water that had already been carried for sixty miles! Pliny had never had any objection to deifying emperors. “God is man helping man,” that was his philosophy. The Divine Augustus deserved his place in the pantheon simply for commissioning the Campanian aqueduct and the Piscina Mirabilis.

By the time he reached the center of the reservoir he was breathless with the effort of repeatedly hoisting his feet out of the clinging sediment. He propped himself against a pillar as Gaius came up beside him. But he was glad that he had made the effort. The water-slave had been wise to send for him. This was something to see, right enough: a mystery of nature had become also a mystery of man.

The object in the mud was an amphora used for storing quicklime. It was wedged almost upright, the bottom part buried in the soft bed of the reservoir. A long, thin rope had been attached to its handles and this lay in a tangle around it. The lid, which had been sealed with wax, had been prised off. Scattered, gleaming in the mud, were perhaps a hundred small silver coins.

“Nothing has been removed, admiral,” said Dromo anxiously. “I told them to leave it exactly as they found it.”

Pliny blew out his cheeks. “How much is in there, Gaius, would you say?”

His nephew buried both hands into the amphora, cupped them, and showed them to the admiral. They brimmed with silver denarii. “A fortune, uncle.”

“And an illegal one, we may be sure. It corrupts the honest mud.” Neither the earthenware vessel nor the rope had much of a coating of sediment, which meant, thought Pliny, that it could not have lain on the reservoir floor for long—a month at most. He glanced up toward the vaulted ceiling. “Someone must have rowed out,” he said, “and lowered it over the side.”

“And then let go of the rope?” Gaius looked at him in wonder. “But who would have done such a thing? How could he have hoped to retrieve it? No diver could swim down this deep!”

“True.” Pliny dipped his own hand into the coins and examined them in his plump palm, stroking them apart with his thumb. Vespasian’s familiar scowling profile decorated one side, the sacred implements of the augur occupied the other. The inscription round the edge—IMP CAES VESP AVG COS III—showed that they had been minted during the emperor’s third consulship, eight years earlier. “Then we must assume that their owner didn’t plan to retrieve them by diving, Gaius, but by draining the reservoir. And the only man with the authority to empty the piscina whenever he desired was our missing aquarius, Exomnius.”

HORA QUARTA

[10:37 hours]

Average magma ascent rates obtained in recent studies suggest that

magma in the chamber beneath Vesuvius may have started rising

at a velocity of > 0.2 metres per second into the conduit of the

volcano some four hours before the eruption—that is, at

approximately 9A.M . on the morning of 24 August.

BURKHARD MÜLLER-ULLRICH (EDITOR)

DYNAMICS OF VOLCANISM

The quattuorviri—the Board of Four: the elected magistrates of Pompeii—were meeting in emergency session in the drawing room of Lucius Popidius. The slaves had carried in a chair for each of them as well as a small table, around which they sat, mostly silent, arms folded, waiting. Ampliatus, out of deference to the fact that he was not a magistrate, reclined on a couch in the corner, eating a fig, watching them. Through the open door he could see the swimming pool and its silent fountain, and also, in a corner of the tiled garden, a cat playing with a little bird. This ritual of extended death intrigued him. The Egyptians held the cat to be a sacred animal: of all creatures the nearest in intelligence to man. And in the whole of nature, only cats and men—that he could think of—derived an obvious pleasure from cruelty. Did that mean that cruelty and intelligence were inevitably entwined? Interesting.

He ate another fig. The noise of his slurping made Popidius wince. “I must say, you seem supremely confident, Ampliatus.” There was an edge of irritation in his voice.

“I am supremely confident. You should relax.”

“That’s easy enough for you to say. Your name is not on fifty notices spread around the city assuring everyone that the water will be flowing again by midday.”

“Public responsibility—the price of elected office, my dear Popidius.” He clicked his juicy fingers and a slave carried over a small silver bowl. He dunked his hands and dried them on the slave’s tunic. “Have faith in Roman engineering, your honors. All will be well.”

It was four hours since Pompeii had woken to another hot and cloudless day and to the discovery of the failure of its water supply. Ampliatus’s instinct for what would happen next had proved correct. Coming on the morning after most of the town had turned out to sacrifice to Vulcan, it was hard, even for the least superstitious, not to see this as further evidence of the god’s displeasure. Nervous groups had started forming on the street corners soon after dawn. Placards, signed by L. Popidius Secundus, posted in the forum and on the larger fountains, announced that repairs were being carried out on the aqueduct and that the supply would resume by the seventh hour. But it was not much reassurance for those who remembered the terrible earthquake of seventeen years before—the water had failed on that occasion, too—and all morning there had been uneasiness across the town. Some shops had failed to open. A few people had left, with their possessions piled on carts, loudly proclaiming that Vulcan was about to destroy Pompeii for a second time. And now word had got out that the quattuorviri were meeting at the house of Popidius. A crowd had gathered in the street outside. Occasionally, in the comfortable drawing room, the noise of the mob could be heard: a growl, like the sound of the beasts in their cages in the tunnels of the amphitheater, immediately before they were let loose to fight the gladiators.

Brittius shivered. “I told you we should never have agreed to help that engineer.”

“That’s right,” agreed Cuspius. “I said so right at the start. Now look where it’s got us.”

You can learn so much from a man’s face,thought Ampliatus. How much he indulged himself in food and drink, what manner of work he did, his pride, his cowardice, his strength. Popidius, now: he was handsome and weak; Cuspius, like his father, brave, brutal, stupid; Brittius sagged with self-indulgence; Holconius vinegary-sharp and shrewd—too many anchovies and too much garum inthat diet.

“Balls,” said Ampliatus amiably. “Think about it. If we hadn’t helped him, he would simply have gone to Nola for assistance and we would still have lost our water, only a day later—and how would that have looked when Rome got to hear of it? Besides, this way we know where he is. He’s in our power.”

The others did not notice, but old Holconius turned round at once. “And why is it so important that we know where he is?”

Ampliatus was momentarily lost for an answer. He laughed it off. “Come on, Holconius! Isn’t it always useful to know as much as possible? That’s worth the price of lending him a few slaves and some wood and lime. Once a man is in your debt, isn’t it easier to control him?”

“That’s certainly true,” said Holconius drily and glanced across the table at Popidius.

Even Popidius was not stupid enough to miss the insult. He flushed scarlet. “Meaning?” he demanded. He pushed back his chair.

“Listen!” commanded Ampliatus. He wanted to stop this conversation before it went any further. “I want to tell you about a prophecy I commissioned in the summer, when the tremors started.”

“A prophecy?” Popidius sat down again. He was immediately interested. He loved all that stuff, Ampliatus knew: old Biria with her two magical bronze hands, covered in mystic symbols, her cage full of snakes, her milky-white eyes that couldn’t see a man’s face but could stare into the future. “You’ve consulted the sibyl? What did she say?”

Ampliatus arranged his features in a suitably solemn expression. “She sacrificed serpents to Sabazius, and skinned them for their meaning. I was present throughout.” He remembered the flames on the altar, the smoke, the glittering hands, the incense, the sibyl’s wavering voice: high-pitched, barely human—like the curse of that old woman whose son he had fed to the eels. He had been awed by the whole performance, despite himself. “She saw a town—our town—many years from now. A thousand years distant, maybe more.” He let his voice fall to a whisper. “She saw a city famed throughout the world. Our temples, our amphitheater, our streets—thronging with people of every tongue. That was what she saw in the guts of the snakes. Long after the Caesars are dust and the empire has passed away, what we have built here will endure.”

He sat back. He had half convinced himself. Popidius let out his breath. “Biria Onomastia,” he said, “is never wrong.”

“And she will repeat all this?” asked Holconius skeptically. “She will let us use the prophecy?”

“She will,” Ampliatus affirmed. “She’d better. I paid her plenty for it.” He thought he heard something. He rose from the couch and walked out into the sunshine of the garden. The fountain that fed the swimming pool was in the form of a nymph tipping a jug. As he came closer he heard it again, a faint gurgling, and then water began to trickle from the vessel’s lip. The flow stuttered, spurted, seemed to stop, but then it began to run more strongly. He felt suddenly overwhelmed by the mystic forces he had unleashed. He beckoned to the others to come and look. “You see. I told you. The prophecy is correct!”

Amid the exclamations of pleasure and relief, even Holconius managed a thin smile. “That’s good.”

“Scutarius!” Ampliatus shouted to the steward. “Bring the quattuorviri our best wine—the Caecuban, why not? Now, Popidius, shall I give the mob the news or will you?”

“You tell them, Ampliatus. I need a drink.”