A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (40 page)

There is a strange grace in this surrender. It makes each small pleasure immeasurably sweeter.

There is a child in my lap. A little girl who lets me stroke her dark hair and rub her back, and dream that she is my daughter. But then, they are all my children now. Each person in this temple. The girl. The merchant who cannot stop bickering with his wife and children. Even Sabinus. They’re all going to die, if not in this moment, then in another. And so I resolve to love them now and help them know themselves before we die and are reborn and must start the learning all over again.

I ask the merchant about his cabbages and he tells us how to pile them up in the market, green and round with possibility, so that all the cooks will pay the best price. I ask his wife about the blend of spices in her recipe for stew. And I smile when the girl, now sitting between Sabinus and me, says the word
esurio
.

She’s hungry. I know nothing about feeding a child. I have no milk in my breasts for her, nor do I know if she has been weaned. I think she must be two or three; so she should take Prima’s bread. I tear off a triangle of it and feed her little bits. I hope she takes as much pleasure in it as my sister did.

Where is Prima now?

She will never forgive me, I fear. Not in this life or the one after. But I think about how she might be away from this mountain and that makes me glad. Meanwhile, Sabinus must be thinking about the gladiators, because the hand that is not stroking the child keeps squeezing the handle of the ax at his other side. He wants to go again to the barracks and try to free the chained men. But none of the others will go with him. Worse, he has been coughing ever since he returned, his airway irritated by whatever malevolent air he inhaled in his efforts.

To distract him, I ask, “How was your wedding?”

“I was to marry Aemilia tonight.” He grimaces, but tries to make light of it. “I’m afraid the wedding has been canceled on account of bad weather.” He draws something from the purse at his side and fingers it reflexively. I cannot see the object clearly in the dim light, but I would swear it is a small doll. “I’m sure the guests were very disappointed.”

“The bride most of all,” I say, with a gentle smile. “By chance, did you forget to invite the fiery god of the mountain to your nuptials?”

“
Aha
,” he says, trying to laugh. “That’s what went wrong …”

He gets up and goes to the door, coughing into his hand. “It’s slowing. The fall of stones is slowing.”

I listen, and it
is
quieter, like a rain shower that is weakening. But it’s too dark to tell, and I say so.

Sabinus shakes his head. “I don’t have my tools with me, but an hour ago I marked the height of the debris on the stairs with the haft of the ax—”

“An hour ago?” I ask, confused. Like immortal Isis, I have lost all sense of time. Without the sun, I don’t know if we have been in this temple an hour or a day. “What time is it now?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But this oil lamp is marked by the half hour. So I noted where the oil stood when I returned. When it burned down another line, I checked outside. A half hour ago, I checked again. And here is the mark I just made,” he says, showing me the series of marks he scraped on the stick. “The last two are much closer together. That means that either the debris is settling or … we’ve weathered the worst of it. Perhaps I am a fool to think so, but I am still a man of hope.”

In my vision, I saw the swell of a river followed by the crashing waves of a dark and violent sea. I fear the worst is yet to come. But I do not say so, because his hope is a contagion. It leaps from Sabinus to the others, who crowd near the door holding lamps and torches to watch as the storm loses its power. The flood of rock and ash is mounded up high enough that it would have buried even a tall man, but Sabinus says, “We can go now. The debris will hold us. It’s like snow on the alpine mountains. It will be unsteady beneath our feet, but we can walk on it.”

I have never seen snow on the alpine mountains. But the merchant—who once served in the legions—nods his head. They want to go now. They want to run from the city. And I nearly laugh at myself for wanting to stay. All my life I have been running. And yet, now when everyone else wants to run, I want to remain still.

Yes, inside this temple, there is a stillness in me. An understanding that from the darkness, I have already been reborn.

They all look to me. Even Sabinus, whose arms and legs nearly twitch with restless energy. He wants to get back to his Aemilia, the girl he means to make his wife. Or perhaps, if he dies, he wants to die on his feet. They all do. They want to use their limbs. Push and strain and struggle with every breath.

Because that, too, is how we are born.

Only Sabinus’ little friend wishes to remain, as I do. She whimpers in protest when he picks her up and settles her on his hip to go. “Ah, little one,” he says, kissing her ash-covered brow, “I have something for you if you are a good girl and a brave one.” The small object emerges again from his purse. It is a small doll made of scraps of linen and blue silk. He hands it to the child who hugs it to herself, delighted. “That belonged to another good girl. A brave one, too.”

Sabinus and I take turns carrying the child and her prize.

It is slow going and not only because the earth is hot and shaking beneath our feet. Illuminated by the burning city, we are cautious. With every step we sink into the rubble and we must wait for it to settle enough for us to take another. We climb over fallen bricks and splintered beams of wood. Over the bodies of the dead, human and animal, in a grotesque rictus, all covered in ash.

The children who follow me walk until they fall. Then they
crawl
, until I help them up again. Their arms and legs are shaking. They are thirsty enough to lick the sweat from each other’s brows. But they keep going. Sabinus is tired, too, yet he is grimly determined. I see him fall a hundred times—always careful not to land on our little charge if he has her in his arms. And always he props himself back up, straining to rise again. I think he has turned his ankle, but he will not admit it. His eyes are glassy and distant. “Are we beyond the walls, yet?” he finally asks. It’s startling proof that he’s disoriented, for if Sabinus does not know Pompeii then no man does. “I have promised to go to Nuceria,” he murmurs, as if he were explaining himself to a servant. “Are we still in Pompeii?”

None of us know.

PRIMA

Prima
was crying.

For the first time that she could remember, she was crying real tears. In truth, she felt herself choked with sobs. With despair. And despair
hurt
. It hurt more than anger. It hurt more than her sore muscles and aching feet … feet that somehow kept moving, as if on their own accord, shuffling along behind the
aedile
.

He was right. He didn’t have to drag her anymore. And because he was right, Prima sobbed inconsolably into her hands, “I left her. I left her …”

“I gave you no choice,” Pansa said. “That’s the advantage of being a slave. You don’t have choices. You don’t have—”

“What would you know about what slaves have?” Prima asked, hating the way her voice no longer held its sharp edge. She sounded weak. Distraught. But he was wrong about slaves having no choices. She could’ve gone with Capella to get the water from the cistern. She could’ve stayed with her sister—and in truth, she’d never intended to leave her. If she had, she wouldn’t have told such a venomous lie. She’d told her sister that she hated her. Now that lie might be the last thing she ever said to Capella.

And what had her sister said in return?

I love you. I have loved you from my first breath; I will love you to my last.

The memory drove Prima to her knees.

Prima didn’t remember falling. For a moment she couldn’t even make sense of the sharp edges cutting into her shins and her palms, as anguish howled through the hollow and empty place where a soul ought to be.

“Come now,” the
aedile
said, softly. “Get up.”

Just as her voice had lost its sharp edge, his had lost its sense of command. He was having trouble breathing, she could tell, as if something was swelling closed inside him. But extending his hand, he offered a tiny morsel of hope. “If your sister somehow survives, she’ll need you alive to find her when this is all over.”

“What if it’s never over?” Prima asked, still staring at the ground. “What if this nightmare never ends?”

“Everything ends,” Pansa said.

And so she took his hand.

They walked. Slower and slower as they came upon other travelers on the road, as if Pansa didn’t want to be recognized. As if he feared people would accuse him of having failed them somehow as the
aedile
. Still, they walked on and on, until it was Pansa’s knees that gave out beneath him. He crashed down like a tumbling colossus, and the torch crashed down with him, guttering out and leaving them in the dark under the starless sky.

It was the second time today that she’d seen a powerful man crumple; this time, she stopped to listen for breath. It was the smoke that got him, she thought. Pansa had been taking in big, gulping breaths to fortify his strength whereas she had breathed through the filter of a toga.

Only the gods themselves could guess how much ash he’d inhaled.

“Thirsty,” he croaked, coming back to consciousness.

It startled her, though she tried not to show it. “Maybe someone on the road has water in one of those wagons. I’ll get some for you.”

“How?” he asked, as if he actually believed she would do it.

“I’ll have to steal it …”

“
Buy
water,” Pansa said, unfastening a coin purse tied at his hip. “Get fire for the torch, too.”

He put the whole heavy purse in her hand—and, when she opened it, she saw gold stamped with the faces of emperors. More coins than she had ever held in her life. Money enough to buy her freedom, she guessed.

More money than she was worth.

How foolish was Pansa to think she would use it for water and fire?

If he’s foolish enough to trust a whore, then he deserves what he gets.

That’s what he’d once said to her about another man—a boy, really. The one with the important uncle. Which is why she walked away from Pansa, telling herself that she didn’t care if he ever got back up again. She didn’t need Pansa; she just needed to follow the road to Nuceria. She told herself that she didn’t care if Pansa died choking on his own thirst and his swollen tongue. He wasn’t her master. He wasn’t her lover. He wasn’t her friend, and he certainly wasn’t her sister.

He was no one to her. No one at all. Worse than no one.

She begged fire for her torch from a man who walked like a soldier. His name was Rufus. “Walk with my servant and me,” he said. “It’s not safe for someone as small as you, on her own.”

Rufus looked like a decent sort. A veteran. She gauged him to be a simple man of simple needs. The kind of man she might be able to seduce and manipulate.

She ought to have gone with him, keeping Pansa’s coin purse for herself. Instead, Prima found herself spending the coins, bargaining with other travelers for precious water.

Then, in defiance of all reason, she went back for Pansa.

He’d somehow dragged himself to the edge of the road. And he seemed almost as surprised that she’d come back as
she
was. When she’d wedged the torch between the rocks so she could cradle his head in her lap and give him sips of water, he asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.

Then she stroked his handsome cheek. She didn’t know why she did that either, because there was nothing in it for her. And she couldn’t guess how long she held him underneath the shelter of another umbrella pine as he slowly suffocated in her arms. There was something evil in the way a powerful man could be taken down by seemingly nothing. Was it the vapors, or had he been struck by something and she never noticed? Her fingers found no wound, no raised lump on his head, nothing to make her understand why he was stricken and she was not.

“Go,” he said, shuddering with each diminishing breath. “Get safely to Nuceria.”

“I will,” Prima promised. But as he writhed in agony, she remembered a different promise she made to him.

I’m going to kill you. You’re going to want to rest—you’ll want to close your eyes—and when you do, I will make sure that you never open them again.

She wanted to keep that promise now, but not for cruelty or malice. She didn’t have any more hatred left for him or anyone. It had all dried up. Evaporated. Burned away with the heat from the mountain. She only wanted to kill Pansa to end his suffering. But hadn’t he said they were just alike?

Whether it’s a few years more, or a few hours more, or a few moments more …

He would want them. He would want whatever he could get. And he would not want to die alone. People weren’t meant to be alone. So Prima let him struggle for life in her embrace until he struggled no more. Only when she was sure he was dead, did she close his eyes, fingertips tickled by his very long lashes.