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 him 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 and 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 it was as if they did not 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 round here. But had Exomnius – lazy, ageing, 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’ – that 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 Pompeiian 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 which 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 which 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 are sure these were with the other papyri? They could not 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 was what it was 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. He left her and walked back over 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 sulphurous, tainted soil – at least three weeks before the aqueduct had been contaminated. Worried enough to look out 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 p
resentiment 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 backwards into the earth, sulphur 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 towards 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 which might later be a source of weakness.)
By the time the sky above the manhole was turning grey 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 any more. But he kept the thought to himself.
‘Cement that dries underwater,’ he said to Musa when he came back. ‘Now that 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 Appenninus, 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 greyish-white beginning to appear across one of its flanks. They stood out clearly against the surrounding forest, shaped like arrow-heads, pointing towards 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 papyri: ‘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 be ash?’
‘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 realised. 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 which 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 recognised.
‘All right,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s get away from this place.’ He set off towards 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, marvelling 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 on to her back and opened her eyes. ‘Is the work finished?’
‘Finished 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 are the 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 that 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 cant 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. 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 back streets of Pompeii. Accept what has to happen. Live with it. You’ll survive. You’ll see.’