Pompeii (30 page)

She went meekly in the end, with barely another word, and he felt ashamed of what he had said. He had silenced her well enough, but in a coward’s way—unmanly and self-pitying. Had ever an unctuous lawyer in
Rome
used a cheaper trick of rhetoric to sway a court than this ghastly parading of the ghosts of a dead wife and child? She swept her cloak around her and then flung her head back, flicking her long dark hair over her collar, and there was something impressive in the gesture: she would do as he asked but she would not accept that he was right. Never a glance in his direction as she swung herself easily into the saddle. She made a clicking sound with her tongue and tugged the reins and set off down the track behind Polites.

It took all his self-control not to run after her.
A poor reward,
he thought,
for all the risks she took for me.
But what else did she expect of him? And as for fate—the subject of his pious little lecture—he
did
believe in fate. One was shackled to it from birth as to a moving wagon. The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it—whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

Still, he felt sick as he watched her go, the sun brightening the landscape as the distance between them increased, so that he was able to watch her for a long time, until at last the horses passed behind a clump of olive trees, and she was gone.

In Misenum, the admiral was lying on his mattress in his windowless bedroom, remembering.
He was remembering the flat, muddy forests of Upper Germany, and the great oak trees that grew along the shore of the northern sea—if one could speak of a shore in a place where the sea and the land barely knew a boundary—and the rain and the wind, and the way that in a storm the trees, with a terrible splintering, would sometimes detach themselves from the bank, vast islands of soil trapped within their roots, and drift upright, their foliage spread like rigging, bearing down on the fragile Roman galleys. He could still see in his mind the sheet lightning and the dark sky and the pale faces of the Chauci warriors amid the trees, the smell of the mud and the rain, the terror of the trees crashing into the ships at anchor, his men drowning in that filthy barbarian sea.

He shuddered and opened his eyes to the dim light, hauled himself up, and demanded to know where he was. His secretary, sitting beside the couch next to a candle, his stylus poised, looked down at his wax tablet.

“We were with Domitius Corbulo, admiral,” said Alexion, “when you were in the cavalry, fighting the Chauci, in eight hundred.”

“Ah yes. Just so. The Chauci. I remember . . .”

But what did he remember? The admiral had been trying for months to write his memoirs—his final book, he was sure—and it was a welcome distraction from the crisis on the aqueduct to return to it. But what he had seen and done and what he had read or been told seemed nowadays to run together, in a kind of seamless dream. Such things he had witnessed! The empresses—Lollia Paulina, Caligula’s wife—sparkling like a fountain in the candlelight at her betrothal banquet, cascading with forty million sesterces’ worth of pearls and emeralds. And the Empress Agrippina, married to the drooling Claudius: he had seen her pass by in a cloak made entirely of gold. And gold mining he had watched, of course, when he was procurator in northern
Spain
—the miners cutting away at the mountainside, suspended by ropes, so that they looked, from a distance, like a species of giant birds pecking at the rock face. Such work, such danger—and to what end? Poor Agrippina, murdered here, in this very town, by Ancietus, his predecessor as admiral of the Misene Fleet, on the orders of her son, the Emperor Nero, who put his mother to sea in a boat that collapsed and then had her stabbed to death by sailors when she somehow struggled ashore. Stories! That was his problem. He had too many stories to fit into one book.

“. . . the Chauci.” How old was he then? Twenty-four? It was his first campaign. He began again. “The Chauci, I remember, dwelled on high wooden platforms to escape the treacherous tides of that region. They gathered mud with their bare hands, which they dried in the freezing north wind, and burned for fuel. For drink they consumed only rainwater, which they collected in tanks at the front of their houses—a sure sign of their lack of civilization. Miserable bastards, the Chauci.” He paused. “Leave that last bit out.”

The door opened briefly, admitting a shaft of brilliant white light. He heard the rustling of the
Mediterranean
, the hammering of the shipyards. So it was morning already. He must have been awake for hours. The door closed again. A slave tiptoed across to the secretary and whispered into his ear. Pliny rolled his fat body over onto one side to get a better view. “What time is it?”

“The end of the first hour, admiral.”

“Have the sluices been opened at the reservoir?”

“Yes, admiral. We have a message that the last of the water has drained away.”

Pliny groaned and flopped back onto his pillow.

“And it seems, sir, that a most remarkable discovery has just been made.”

The work gang had left about a half hour after Corelia. There were no elaborate farewells: the contagion of fear had spread throughout the men to infect Musa and Corvinus and all were eager to get back to the safety of
Pompeii
. Even Brebix, the former gladiator, the undefeated hero of thirty fights, kept turning his small dark eyes nervously toward Vesuvius. They cleared the matrix and flung the tools, the unused bricks, and the empty amphorae onto the backs of the wagons. Finally, a couple of the slaves shoveled earth across the remains of the night’s fires and buried the gray scars left by the cement. By the time this was finished it was as if they had never been there.

Attilius stood warily beside the inspection shaft with his arms folded and watched them prepare to leave. This was his moment of greatest danger, now that the work was done. It would have been typical of Ampliatus to make sure he extracted a final measure of use out of the engineer before dispensing with him. He was ready to fight, to sell himself dearly if he had to.

Musa had the only other horse and once he was in the saddle he called down to Attilius. “Are you coming?”

“Not yet. I’ll catch up to you later.”

“Why not come now?”

“Because I’m going to go up onto the mountain.”

Musa looked at him, astonished. “Why?”

A good question.
Because the answer to what has been happening down here must lie up there. Because it’s my job to
keep
the water running. Because I am afraid.
The engineer shrugged. “Curiosity. Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten my promise, if that’s what’s bothering you. Here.” He threw Musa his leather purse. “You’ve done well. Buy the men some food and wine.”

Musa opened the purse and inspected its contents. “There’s plenty here, aquarius. Enough for a woman as well.”

Attilius laughed. “Go safely, Musa. I’ll see you soon. Either in
Pompeii
or Misenum.”

Musa gave him a second glance and seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. He wheeled away and set off after the carts and Attilius was alone.

Again, he was struck by the peculiar stillness of the day, as if nature were holding her breath. The noise of the heavy wooden wheels slowly faded into the distance and all he could hear was the occasional tinkle of a goat’s bell and the ubiquitous chirping of the cicadas. The sun was quite high now. He glanced around at the empty countryside, then lay on his stomach and peered into the matrix. The heat pressed heavily on his back and shoulders. He thought of Sabina and of Corelia and of the terrible image of his dead son. He wept. He did not try to stop himself but for once surrendered to it, choking and shaking with grief, gulping the tunnel air, inhaling the cold and bitter odor of the wet cement. He felt oddly apart from himself, as if he had divided into two people, one crying and the other watching him cry.

After a while he stopped and raised himself to wipe his face on the sleeve of his tunic and it was only when he looked down again that his eye was caught by something—by a glint of reflected light in the darkness. He drew his head back slightly to let the sun shine directly along the shaft and he saw very faintly that the floor of the aqueduct was glistening. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Even as he watched, the quality of the light seemed to change and become more substantial, rippling and widening as the tunnel began to fill with water.

He whispered to himself, “She runs!”

When he was satisfied that he wasn’t mistaken and that the
Augusta
had indeed begun to flow again, he rolled the heavy manhole cover across to the shaft. He slowly lowered it, pulling his fingers back at the last instant to let it drop the final few inches. With a thud the tunnel was sealed.

He untethered his horse and climbed into the saddle. In the shimmering heat, the marker stones of the aqueduct dwindled into the distance like a line of submerged rocks. He pulled on the reins and turned away from the
Augusta
to face Vesuvius. He spurred the horse and they moved off along the track that led toward the mountain, walking at first but quickening to a trot as the ground began to rise.

At the Piscina Mirabilis the last of the water had drained away and the great reservoir was empty—a rare sight. It had last been allowed to happen a decade before and that had been for maintenance, so that the slaves could shovel out the sediment and check the walls for signs of cracking. The admiral listened attentively as the slave explained the workings of the system. He was always interested in technical matters.

“And how often is this supposed to be done?”

“Every ten years would be customary, admiral.”

“So this was going to be done again soon?”

“Yes, admiral.”

They were standing on the steps of the reservoir, about halfway down—Pliny, his nephew Gaius, his secretary Alexion, and the water-slave, Dromo. Pliny had issued orders that nothing was to be disturbed until he arrived and a marine guard had been posted at the door to prevent unauthorized access. Word of the discovery had got out, however, and there was the usual curious crowd in the courtyard.

The floor of the piscina looked like a muddy beach after the tide has gone out. There were little pools here and there, where the sediment was slightly hollowed, and a litter of objects—rusted tools, stones, shoes—that had fallen into the water over the years and had sunk to the bottom, some of them entirely shrouded so that they appeared as nothing more than small humps on the smooth surface. The rowboat was grounded. Several sets of footprints led out from the bottom of the steps toward the center of the reservoir, where a larger object lay, and then returned. Dromo asked if the admiral would like him to fetch it.

“No,” said Pliny, “I want to see it where it lies for myself. Oblige me, would you, Gaius.” He pointed to his shoes and his nephew knelt and unbuckled them while the admiral leaned on Alexion for support. He felt an almost childish anticipation and the sensation intensified as he descended the last of the steps and cautiously lowered his feet into the sediment. Black slime oozed between his toes, deliciously cool, and immediately he was a boy again, back at the family home in Comum, in Cisalpine Italy, playing on the shores of the lake, and the intervening years—nearly half a century of them—were as insubstantial as a dream. How many times did this occur each day? It never used to happen. But lately almost anything could set it off—a touch, a smell, a sound, a color glimpsed—and immediately memories he did not know he still possessed came flooding back, as if there were nothing left of him anymore but a breathless sack of remembered impressions.

He hoisted the folds of his toga and began stepping gingerly across the surface, his feet sinking deep into the mud, which then made a delightful sucking noise each time he lifted them. He heard Gaius shout behind him, “Be careful, uncle!” but he shook his head, laughing. He kept away from the tracks the others had made: it was more enjoyable to rupture the crust of mud where it was still fresh and just beginning to harden in the warm air. The others followed at a respectful distance.

What an extraordinary construction it was, this underground vault, with its pillars each ten times higher than a man! What imagination had first envisioned it, what will and strength had driven it through to construction—and all to store water that had already been carried for sixty miles! Pliny had never had any objection to deifying emperors. “God is man helping man,” that was his philosophy. The Divine Augustus deserved his place in the pantheon simply for commissioning the Campanian aqueduct and the Piscina Mirabilis.