A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (38 page)

“Who is she?” I ask, thunderstruck by the resemblance.

“A little friend,” Sabinus replies, offering the child a smile of his own despite the circumstances. Then, lowering his voice. “I found her alone and abandoned in the streets.”

Could she be my own daughter? Prima would tell me I was a fool for thinking it, even for a moment. And I
am
a fool for thinking it. It is a desperate, wishful thought; but even that tiny question in my mind changes everything. “You need to take her out of the city. Get her to the harbor. The navy—”

“The ships can’t come in.” Sabinus replies. “Even the fishing boats can’t go out. The seas are too rough. Most of the falling stones are porous. They’re floating and blocking the rescuers. In any event, your dark rain has come, Capella, and it’s too dangerous to go out until the stones stop falling. My little friend cannot breathe, and if I am struck down who will take her from my arms?”

I will
, I want to say.
I will take her from your arms if you are struck down.

But I have already failed one gap-toothed girl today.

“My sister is out there,” I cry. “I told her we should leave by the Stabian Gate and make for the water. Now she is out there alone and you say it’s too dangerous.”

“Your sister will find her way,” Sabinus says, avoiding my eyes just as he did the last time we were together. He was a lovesick groom, eagerly anticipating his wedding, and there was something in his voice that told me that once he’d made love to his new wife, he would not come back to visit me again. “When your sister sees there are no ships, she’ll keep going. You’ve said your sister is wily and strong, and this is a time for both.”

He meets my gaze at last. So, these last words, at least, are not platitudes. He believes them. And I believe him. Not only because he speaks with the authority of a Roman
paterfamilias
who knows best and must be obeyed, but because my sister has always known how to survive.

Prima is simply too
hard
for the stones to smash.

Still, I say, “I have to go after her. I have to go
with
her. But there are people waiting for this water in the
ekklesiasterion
.” My fingers are still wrapped tight around the handles of the jug. “Will you carry it to them?”

Before he can answer, a distraught woman in jewels shrieks from the other end of the portico. “There are men chained in the barracks! They can’t get out.”

Gladiators, she means. Dangerous slaves who must be chained for a reason. Or so many would say. But Sabinus does not. “I would not let a dog die chained in this,” he says. “What can I use to free them? Is there anything in this temple I might wield to break a chain?”

My mind circles in a panic, trying to remember anything that might help. The only thing I can think of is the sacrificial ax on the slab near the cistern where geese are burned for Isis, and I say so. “But you just said it was too dangerous to go out into the hail of stones!”

“I did. But you have my little friend now. If I fall, you will look after her.”

He cannot mean to leave
me
with a child. To entrust a pure little girl into the arms of a prostitute. But when he dashes into the falling stone, I realize that he does mean it. Alas, I have no idea what to do as I try to balance the jug of water in one arm and the child in the other.

I have never held a child before today. Not even the one I birthed. I don’t know how to comfort this little one. How to touch her. How to soothe her fears. But somehow she knows what to do, turning onto her side to press her face against my belly. Turning away from the sight of the stones piling higher, rolling over one another like the endless river in my vision.

And I fear we are
all
going to drown.

PRIMA

“Let
me go!” Prima raged, raking her captor’s arms, pummeling his ribs, flailing her legs. “Why won’t you let me go?”

Her struggling had no effect. Though he was coughing from the ash, Pansa was too strong—able to hold her with one arm while holding up his torch with the other. The
aedile
trudged on wordlessly, stopping only when they got to the harbor, where he bellowed with pure, frustrated fury. He was charged with regulating the vessels, the water supply, the use of the streets and sewers. But he couldn’t control the navy, and seeing it sail away from Pompeii, not toward it, his bellow became a bitter laugh. “They’re going to
Stabiae
. Of course they are. It’s wealthier than Pompeii. All that fame and public glory, and Admiral Pliny just sails where the wind blows and worries only for his rich friends.”

Was it the navy’s fault, though, when the harbor was clogged with debris? Regardless of who was to blame, Prima realized with horror that there would be no escape by sea. Her sister, too, would be stranded, waiting for rescuers who would never come. “Capella!” she screamed again.

“She can’t hear you,” Pansa said, coldly. “You
know
she can’t hear you.”

“I have to go back for her,” Prima insisted, again tugging frantically, wondering how long Pansa could possibly maintain the strength of his grip. “She doesn’t know there won’t be ships. She doesn’t know.”

With a shrug of his massive shoulder, Pansa said, “Give her up. She is likely already dead. So leave her. Count her a loss. Move on.”

Like a sausage split open by fire, Prima exploded with an angry hiss, clawing at his hideously handsome face. Trying to make him hurt. Trying to make him bleed. Trying to make him kill her. Because she would sooner die than give her sister up or count her a loss.

“You harpy!” he cursed, boxing her head until a strange ringing echoed in her ears.

But he didn’t kill her and he didn’t leave her for dead. Instead, Pansa hauled her up again, trudging through drifts of stone back to the road. He did not seem to tire until they came to the necropolis. There, amidst the half-buried urns and statues and plaques to the dead, he finally stopped and pulled his toga over his head in reverence. The air was hot and foul smelling, filled with sulfur and ash. Prima had been able to cover her own face with her toga, but he’d needed both his hands to hold her and the torch. He’d been gulping in breaths of bad vapors, and it seemed to finally take its toll. He gasped as if something inside him was singed and swelling shut.

But beneath the roof of a mausoleum, Pansa seemed affected by more than the burden of his exertions. He seemed … to be hovering on the edge of tears. It was unseemly for a Roman man to cry. If Pansa cried, Prima would only have more contempt for him. But what had him so upset here? These were not his ancestors, she knew. The Cuspii Pansae were far too prominent to be buried here. The tombs of his ancestors were sure to be to the north, nearer to the angry mountain. And yet, the
aedile’s
reddened eyes welled. “Here sleep the fathers of Pompeii.”

Prima wanted to spit on the fathers of Pompeii. She wanted to spit at the
aedile
, too. But her mouth was so dry she could not draw any spittle to her lips. “So why don’t you lay down with them and die?”

His very square chin jerked up. “I should. Rather than abandon the city like so many cowards before me, I should lie down and die here with the ancestors … but I have to save you.”

“Save
me
?” Prima asked with an indelicate snort. “Don’t make me your excuse. Because you might as well know I can be of no use to you anymore. There aren’t any pimply-faced boys on the road for me to betray. Or any senators to spy on. And if you don’t let me go, I’ll only slow you down.”

She waited for him to strike her for her insolence, but he only said, “Nevertheless, I’m going to save you.”

“You’re a fool, Pansa. Don’t you know I hate you? I’ve never done anything at your bidding that didn’t make me despise you.”

His grave expression crumbled, his voice thick with emotion. “And I never did anything at my father’s bidding that didn’t make me despise him. I did it anyway because it had to be done. We are just the same, Prima. That’s why I chose you out of all the whores in Pompeii to work for me. You and I, we do what we must do.”

It wasn’t possible that one of the great swaggering men of the Cuspii Pansae—an elected official, a man with a statue of himself in the amphitheater—would liken himself to an enslaved tavern whore. The comparison betrayed some manner of dangerous derangement. “Are you a murderer, then?” she asked. “Because I am.” Her crime didn’t matter now. Not if she couldn’t go back for Capella. There was no patch of sunlight in which she might ever be content without her sister. They might as well nail her to a cross. “I killed that senator just before the mountain exploded. I bashed his skull with a wine jug and he fell to the street like a sacrificial ox under the hammer.”

This finally shook the
aedile
out of his strangely teary stupor. “I told you to follow him, not kill him!”

“You didn’t tell me what to do if he caught me. And he did. He told me he could crush you like a flea.”

Pansa’s jaw clenched. “So you killed him to protect me?”

“No,” Prima said, slumping against the wall of a tomb, so exhausted she couldn’t even pretend. “I killed him because I’m a rabid dog who bites anyone who passes too near, even to offer the slightest kindness. Senator Norbanus gave me meat and he gave me wine and I attacked him anyway. That’s what I do.”

Pansa’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How do you know he’s dead?”

“Because he fell to the ground and didn’t get up again.”

Pansa cuffed her. “Did you stop to listen for his breath?”

“I stopped for nothing,” she said, her ear ringing from the blow. “I ran. Just as I’m going to run from you when you get too tired to drag me.”

“I won’t get too tired.”

Prima smashed her fist against his chest. “Why won’t you let me go?”

His eyes still swam with unshed tears. “I don’t
know
.”

“Do you think you love me?”

“Shut up,” he snapped.

“That’s it, isn’t it? A grown man should know better, but you’re like those pathetic sentimental boys I steal from. I steal their purses. I steal their hearts. I steal their manhood. Do you harbor some hope that with you, it would be different?”

“I don’t love you, Prima.”

“Then you lust for me. Is that it, Gaius Cuspius Pansa? All this time, you’ve paid me to do everything but what you really wanted. Well, as long as you let me go, you can have me here, in a tomb, like one of the
bustuariae
, those filthy leprous necropolis whores who wail with grief during the day and with pleasure at night—”

“I don’t want you,” he said, shaking her. “I don’t love you and I don’t lust for you. But I’m not leaving this city alone. I’m taking you.”

He was taking her. He was taking her away from the one thing that meant more to her than life. He had torn her from her sister, and she screamed, “Why, why,
why
?”

But he would only answer that he didn’t know.

CAPELLA

The
priest is dying. He is bleeding out his life on the floor of the
ekklesiasterion
, which can only be reached now by climbing over the layer of stones and sliding back down into the open doorway. I go to him covered in white ash with the tiny child toddling behind me, clinging to one hand, and, like the cult statue, an
oenochoe
jug in the other. The priest looks up at me and smiles. “
Isis
.”

Then his life slips away.

I think I am the only one to notice.

When I kneel down to close his eyes, I find a sack of bread and coins.
Prima’s,
I realize, and I am overcome with emotion. Did she leave it for me as a final gift? No. Prima doesn’t leave food behind. She meant to come back for it—and for me. Knowing this eases the pain in my heart, but if she meant to come back, why hasn’t she? She must be dead, or she would have come back! I stifle a sob of love and longing for my sister.

No. If Prima cannot survive this, no one can—she’ll come back for me when she’s able to. She always knows where to find me.

The merchant says, “We’re going to be buried alive in here.”

I look at him more closely. I’ve seen him in the streets before, peddling cabbages. He and his family all stare back at me, and the nameless girl’s hands grip tighter on me. These people are looking to
me
to tell them what to do. But all I know is what I saw in my vision. A flood. How does one survive a flood?

“We’ll get to higher ground,” I decide. The beautiful temple, painted ornately in green and red, is raised on a dais over the rubble. Last I saw it, the roof was undamaged and the glorious carved doors were open. The temple houses the cult statue; we will profane the sacred place by using the
cella
for shelter. Nevertheless, I say, “We’ll go into the temple.”