Pompeii (25 page)

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—now
that
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.