‘As black as midnight in Oplontis,’ someone replied, ‘and Pompeii must be even worse.’
‘Pompeii?’ said Attilius sharply. That woke him up. ‘What’s happening in Pompeii?’
The traveller shook his head, drawing his finger across his throat, and Attilius recoiled, remembering Corelia. When he had forced her to leave the aqueduct he had thought he was sending her out of harm’s way. But now, as his eye followed the curve of the road towards Pompeii, to the point where it disappeared into the murk, he realised he had done the opposite. The outpouring of Vesuvius, caught by the wind, was blowing directly over the town.
‘Don’t go that way, citizen,’ warned the man, ‘there’s no way through.’
But Attilius was already turning his horse to face the stream of refugees.
The further he went the more clogged the road became, and the more pitiful the state of the fleeing population. Most were coated in a thick grey dust, their hair frosted, their faces like death masks, spattered with blood. Some carried torches, still lit: a defeated army of whitened old men, of ghosts, trudging away from a calamitous defeat, unable even to speak. Their animals – oxen, asses, horses, dogs and cats – resembled alabaster figures come creakingly to life. Behind them on the highway they left a trail of ashy wheel-marks and footprints.
On one side of him, isolated crashes came from the olive groves. On the other, the sea seemed to be coming to the boil in a myriad of tiny fountains. There was a clatter of stones on the road ahead. His horse stopped, lowered its head, refused to move. Suddenly the edge of the cloud, which had seemed to be almost half a mile away, appeared to come rushing towards them. The sky was dark and whirling with tiny projectiles and in an instant the day passed from afternoon sun to twilight and he was under a bombardment. Not hard stones but white clinker, small clumps of solidified ash, falling from some tremendous height. They bounced off his head and shoulders. People and wagons loomed out of the half-light. Women screamed. Torches dimmed in the darkness. His horse shied and turned. Attilius ceased to be a rescuer and became just another part of the panicking stream of refugees, frantically trying to outrun the storm of debris. His horse slipped down the side of the road into the ditch and cantered along it. Then the air lightened, became brownish, and they burst back into the sunshine.
Everyone was hurrying now, galvanised by the threat at their backs. Not only was the road to Pompeii impassable, Attilius realised, but a slight shift in the wind was spreading the danger westwards around the bay. An elderly couple sat weeping beside the road, too exhausted to run any further. A cart had overturned and a man was desperately trying to right it, while his wife soothed a baby and a little girl clung to her skirts. The fleeing column streamed around them and Attilius was carried in the flow, borne back along the road towards Herculaneum.
The shifting position of the wall of falling rock had been noticed at the city gates and by the time he reached them the traders were hastily packing away their goods. The crowd was breaking up, some heading for shelter in the town, others pouring out of it to join the exodus on the road. And still, amid all this, Attilius could see across the red-tiled roofs the normality of the fishermen on the bay and, further out, the big grain ships from Egypt steering towards the docks at Puteoli. The sea, he thought: if he could somehow launch a boat, it might just be possible to skirt the downpour of stones and approach Pompeii from the south – by sea. He guessed it would be useless to try to fight his way down to the waterfront in Herculaneum, but the great villa just outside it – the home of the senator, Pedius Cascus, with his troop of philosophers – perhaps they might have a vessel he could use.
He rode a little further along the crowded highway until he came to a high pair of gateposts, which he judged must belong to the Villa Calpurnia. He tied his horse to a railing in the courtyard and looked around for any sign of life but the enormous palace seemed to be deserted. He walked through the open door into the grand atrium, and then along the side of an enclosed garden. He could hear shouts, footsteps running along the marble corridors, and then a slave appeared around a corner pushing a wheelbarrow stacked high with rolls of papyri. He ignored Attilius’s shout and headed through a wide doorway into the brilliant afternoon light, as another slave, also pushing a wheelbarrow – this one empty – hurried through the entrance and into the house. The engineer blocked his path.
‘Where’s the senator?’
‘He’s in Rome.’ The slave was young, terrified, sweating.
‘Your mistress?’
‘Beside the pool. Please – let me past.’
Attilius moved aside to let him go and ran out into the sun. Beneath the terrace was the huge pool he had seen from the liburnian on his voyage to Pompeii and all around it people: dozens of slaves and white-robed scholars hurrying back and forth ferrying armfuls of papyri, stacking them into boxes at the water’s edge, while a group of women stood to one side, staring along the coast towards the distant storm, which looked from here like an immense brown sea-fog. The craft offshore from Herculaneum were mere twigs against it. The fishing had stopped. The waves were getting up. Attilius could hear them crashing against the shore in quick succession; no sooner had one broken than another came in on top of it. Some of the women were wailing, but the elderly matron in the centre of the group, in a dark blue dress, seemed calm as he approached her. He remembered her – the woman with the necklace of giant pearls.
‘Are you the wife of Pedius Cascus?’
She nodded.
‘Marcus Attilius. Imperial engineer. I met your husband two nights ago, at the admiral’s villa.’
She looked at him eagerly. ‘Has Pliny sent you?’
‘No. I came to beg a favour. To ask for a boat.’
Her face fell. ‘Do you think if I had a boat I would be standing here? My husband took it yesterday to Rome.’
Attilius looked around the vast palace, at its statues and gardens, at the art treasures and books being piled up on the lawns. He turned to go.
‘Wait!’ She called after him. ‘You must help us.’
‘There’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to take your chance on the road with the rest.’
‘I’m not afraid for myself. But the library – we must rescue the library. There are too many books to move by road.’
‘My concern is for people, not books.’
‘People perish. Books are immortal.’
‘Then if books are immortal, they will survive without my assistance.’
He began climbing the path back up towards the house.
‘Wait!’ She gathered her skirts and ran after him. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To find a boat.’
‘Pliny has boats. Pliny has the greatest fleet in the world at his command.’
‘Pliny is on the other side of the bay.’
‘Look across the sea! An entire mountain is threatening to descend on us! Do you think one man in one little boat can do anything? We need a fleet. Come with me!’
He would say this for her: she had the willpower of any man. He followed her around the pillared walkway surrounding the pool, up a flight of steps and into a library. Most of the compartments had been stripped bare. A couple of slaves were loading what remained into a wheelbarrow. Marble heads of ancient philosophers looked down, dumbstruck at what was happening.
‘This is where we keep the volumes which my ancestors brought back from Greece. One hundred and twenty plays by Sophocles alone. All the works of Aristotle, some in his own hand. They are irreplaceable. We have never allowed them to be copied.’ She gripped his arm. ‘Men are born and die by the thousand every hour. What do we matter? These great works are all that will be left of us. Pliny will understand.’ She sat at the small table, took up a pen and dipped it in an ornate brass inkstand. A red candle flickered beside her. ‘Take him this letter. He knows this library. Tell him Rectina pleads with him for rescue.’
Behind her, across the terrace, Attilius could see the ominous darkness moving ste
adily around the bay, like the shadow on a sundial. He had thought it might diminish but if anything the force of it was intensifying. She was right. It would take big ships – warships – to make any impression against an enemy on this scale. She rolled the letter and sealed it with the dripping candle, pressing her ring into the soft wax. ‘You have a horse?’
‘I’d go faster with a fresh one.’
‘You’ll have it.’ She called to one of the slaves. ‘Take Marcus Attilius to the stables and saddle the swiftest horse we have.’ She gave him the letter and, as he took it, clasped her dry and bony fingers around his wrist. ‘Don’t fail me, engineer.’
He pulled his hand free and ran after the slave.
Hora Nona
[15:32 hours]
‘The effect of the sudden release of huge volumes of magma can alter the geometry of the plumbing system, destabilize the shallow reservoir, and induce structural collapse. Such a situation frequently increases the eruption intensity, inducing contact between phreatic fluids and magma, as well as explosive decompression of the hydrothermal system associated with the shallow reservoir.’
Encyclopaedia of Volcanoes
It took Attilius just under two hours of hard riding to reach Misenum. The road wound along the coastline, sometimes running directly beside the water’s edge, sometimes climbing higher inland, past the immense villas of the Roman elite. All the way along it he passed small groups of spectators gathered at the edge of the highway to watch the distant phenomenon. He mostly had his back to the mountain, but when he rounded the northern edge of the bay and began to descend towards Neapolis, he could see it again, away to his left – a thing of extraordinary beauty now. A delicate veil of white mist had draped itself around the central column, rising for mile after mile in a perfect translucent cylinder, reaching up to brush the lower edge of the mushroom-shaped cloud that was toppling over the bay.
There was no sense of panic in Neapolis, a sleepy place at the best of times. He had far outpaced the weary, laden refugees emerging from beneath the hail of rock and no word of the catastrophe enveloping Pompeii had yet reached the city. The Greek-style temples and theatres facing out to sea gleamed white in the afternoon sun. Tourists strolled in the gardens. In the hills behind the town he could see the redbrick arcade of the Aqua Augusta where she ran above the surface. He wondered if the water was flowing yet but he did not dare stop to find out. In truth, he did not care. What had earlier seemed the most vital matter in the world had dwindled in importance to nothing. What were Exomnius and Corax now but dust? Not even dust; barely even a memory. He wondered what had happened to the other men. But the image of which he could not rid himself was Corelia – the way she had swept back her hair as she mounted her horse, and the way she had dwindled into the distance, following the road he had set for her – to the fate that he, and not Destiny, had decreed.
He passed through Neapolis and out into the open country again, into the immense road-tunnel that Agrippa had carved beneath the promontory of Pausilypon – in which the torches of the highway slaves, as Seneca had observed, did not so much pierce the darkness as reveal it – past the immense concrete grain-wharfs of the Puteoli harbour – another of Agrippa’s projects – past the outskirts of Cumae – where the Sibyl was said to hang in her bottle and wish for death – past the vast oyster beds of Lake Avernus, past the great terraced baths of Baiae, past the drunks on the beaches and the souvenir shops with their brightly painted glassware, the children flying kites, the fishermen repairing their flaxen nets on the quaysides, the men playing bones in the shade of the oleanders, past the century of marines in full kit running at the double down to the naval base – past all the teeming life of the Roman superpower, while on the opposite side of the bay Vesuvius emitted a second, rolling boom, turning the fountain of rock from grey to black and pushing it even higher.
Pliny’s greatest concern was that it might all be over before he got there. Every so often he would come waddling out of his library to check on the progress of the column. Each time he was reassured. Indeed, if anything, it seemed to be growing. An accurate estimation of its height was impossible. Posidonius held that mists, winds and clouds rose no more than five miles above the earth, but most experts – and Pliny, on balance, took the majority view – put the figure at one hundred and eleven miles. Whatever the truth, the thing – the column – ‘the manifestation’, as he had decided to call it – was enormous.
In order to make his observations as accurate as possible he had ordered that his water clock should be carried down to the harbour and set up on the poop deck of the liburnian. While this was being done and the ship made ready he searched his library for references to Vesuvius. He had never before paid much attention to the mountain. It was so huge, so obvious, so inescapably there, that he had preferred to concentrate on Nature’s more esoteric aspects. But the first work he consulted, Strabo’s Geography, brought him up short. ‘This area appears to have been on fire in the past and to have had craters offlame . . .’ Why had he never noticed it? He called in Gaius to take a look.
‘You see here? He compares the mountain to Etna. Yet how can that be? Etna has a crater two miles across. I have seen it with my own eyes, glowing across the sea at night. And all those islands that belch flames – Strongyle, ruled by Aeolus, god of wind, Lipari, and Holy Island, where Vulcan is said to live – you can see them all burning. No one has ever reported embers on Vesuvius.’
‘He says the craters of flame “were subsequently extinguished by a lack of fuel”,’ his nephew pointed out. ‘Perhaps that means some fresh source of fuel has now been tapped by the mountain, and has brought it back to life.’ Gaius looked up excitedly. ‘Could that explain the arrival of the sulphur in the water of the aqueduct?’
Pliny regarded him with fresh respect. Yes. The lad was right. That must be it. Sulphur was the universal fuel of all these phenomena – the coil of flame at Comphantium in Bactria, the blazing fishpool on the Babylonian Plain, the field of stars near Mount Hesperius in Ethiopia. But the implications of that were awful: Lipari and Holy Island had once burned in mid-sea for days on end, until a deputation from the Senate had sailed out to perform a propitiatory ceremony. A similar explosive fire on the Italian mainland, in the middle of a crowded population, could be a disaster.
He pushed himself to his feet. ‘I must get down to my ship. Alexion!’ He shouted for his slave. ‘Gaius, why don’t you come with me? Leave your translation.’ He held out his hand and smiled. ‘I release you from your lesson.’
‘Do you really, uncle?’ Gaius stared across the bay, and chewed his lip. Clearly he, too, had realised the potential consequences of a second Etna on the bay. ‘That’s kind of you, but to be honest I have actually reached rather a tricky passage. Of course, if you insist –’
Pliny could see he was afraid, and who could blame him? He felt a flutter of apprehension in his own stomach and he was an old soldier. It crossed his mind to order the boy to come – no Roman should ever succumb to fear: what had happened to the stern values of his youth? – but then he thought of Julia. Was it fair to expose her only son to needless danger? ‘No, no,’ he said, with forced cheerfulness. ‘I won’t insist. The sea looks rough. It will make you sick. You stay here and look after your mother.’ He pinched his nephew’s spotty cheek and ruffled his greasy hair. ‘You’ll make a good lawyer, Gaius Plinius. Perhaps a great one. I can see you in the Senate one day. You’ll be my heir. My books will be yours. The name of Pliny will live through you –’ He stopped. It was beginning to sound too much like a valedictory. He said gruffly, ‘Return to your studies. Tell your mother I’ll be back by nightfall.’
Leaning on the arm of his secretary, and without a backward glance, the admiral shuffled out of his library.
Attilius had ridden past the Piscina Mirabilis, over the causeway into the port, and was beginning his ascent of the steep road to the admiral’s villa, when he saw a detachment of marines ahead clearing a path for Pliny’s carriage
. He just had time to dismount and step into the street before the procession reached him.
‘Admiral!’
Pliny, staring fixedly ahead, turned vaguely in his direction. He saw a figure he did not recognise, covered in dust, his tunic torn, his face, arms and legs streaked with dried blood. The apparition spoke again. ‘Admiral! It’s Marcus Attilius!’
‘Engineer?’ Pliny signalled for the carriage to stop. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘It’s a catastrophe, admiral. The mountain is exploding – raining rocks –’ Attilius licked his cracked lips. ‘Hundreds of people are fleeing east along the coastal road. Oplontis and Pompeii are being buried. I’ve ridden from Herculaneum. I have a message for you –’ he searched in his pocket ‘– from the wife of Pedius Cascus.’
‘Rectina?’ Pliny took the letter from his hands and broke the seal. He read it twice, his expression clouding, and suddenly he looked ill – ill and overwhelmed. He leaned over the side of the carriage and showed the hasty scrawl to Attilius: ‘Pliny, my dearest friend, the library is in peril. I am alone. I beg you to come for us by sea – at once – if you still love these old books and your faithful old Rectina.’ ‘This is really true?’ he asked. ‘The Villa Calpurnia is threatened?’
‘The entire coast is threatened, admiral.’ What was wrong with the old man? Had drink and age entirely dulled his wits? Or did he think it was all just a show – some spectacular in the amphitheatre, laid on for his interest? ‘The danger follows the wind. It swings like a weathervane. Even Misenum might not be safe.’
‘Even Misenum might not be safe,’ repeated Pliny. ‘And Rectina is alone.’ His eyes were watering. He rolled up the letter and beckoned to his secretary who had been running with the marines beside the carriage. ‘Where is Antius?’