A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (22 page)

"Not quite.” Marcus felt a flicker of interest. “The law gives freedom to those used illegally in a whore’s trade. It was Emperor Vespasian’s innovation; I worked with him on the finer legal details.” It had been an interesting case; the kind of law he enjoyed hammering out, and he smiled at this rude little slave girl for bringing him the chance to address the law in a live setting. She was insolent, she was vulgar, and she undoubtedly deserved a good whipping for the way she addressed her superiors, but her quandary was exactly the kind of detached problem he enjoyed unpicking. “Would you happen to possess a copy of your bill of sale?” he asked politely.

She stopped chewing and stared at him as though he were speaking Greek. “Of course I don’t!” she snapped, as if she thought he was trying to trick her. “People like me—we eat, we shit, we fuck, we die. And nobody cares. Laws are only for rich old men like you.”

“That is where you are wrong. Laws are for every Roman, high and low.” Marcus imagined the look on that smug
aedile’s
face if he could deliver another blow by stealing his little spy. “If you will come with me—”

He reached for her wrist again, and that was a mistake. Her nostrils flared in anger or alarm, and her hand came around in a vicious arc, smashing the wine jug against his knee. As soon as he doubled over with a hiss of pain, the jug hammered across his ear—and then it was nothing but darkness.

AND now Vesuvius had exploded, and he’d missed it all because of that jug. “A vast and entirely unique phenomenon, whether natural or divine, and I slept through it,” Marcus heard himself commenting. “Admiral Pliny will howl at me.”

“Not to pry—” Diana helped Marcus sit up as people buffeted past, some carrying bundles under their arms, some pausing to stare and point at the darkened sky. “How in the name of all the gods did you get yourself knocked unconscious outside the most notorious brothel in Pompeii?”

“I was looking for a man.”

“Didn’t think your tastes went that way,” Diana said. “My cousin Marcella will be disappointed. She was always bent on seducing you.”

Marcus brushed off the flippancy, his head pounding. “Yes, well, tangling with corrupt officials leads one to strange places. Even brothels.”

“Why didn’t you take a good hulking slave or two with you? I never met a senator in my life who didn’t travel with an entourage!”

His knee was throbbing as badly as his head. “Never mind why.”

“Very well. Can you walk? Lean on me.”

He managed to lurch upright with her small callused hands lifting his elbow. He hissed pain through his teeth, tipping his head back, and when he caught sight of the sky, his eyes were finally clear. It was pitch dark, and specks of ash whirled like black snow. “Dear gods,” he breathed. “What is this?”

“I was in the amphitheater when it happened.” Diana slid her arm under his shoulder, supporting him on the injured side. “There was a huge double boom, like Jove dropping every thunderbolt in his quiver. And then an enormous cloud rose from the mountain. By the time I managed to fight my way free of the amphitheater, the sun was gone. Very bad timing.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“Because all the chaos cut off a very exciting bout. A
thraex
and a
murmillo
going at it like Hector and Achilles
.
I was sure the
thraex
was going to win, but—” she looked up at the black sky and shrugged.

Marcus had never been a superstitious man, looking for omens in every cloud on the horizon or feather that fell from a bird’s wing. But he stared into that unnatural black sky, and shuddered. “Perhaps the gods have decided to end it all.”

Diana let out an extraordinarily rude snort.

“You don’t see a sign in this?” He waved a hand up at the swirling ash, the day turned night. “What else could it be?”

“No idea,” she said briskly. “But if you want signs, Marcus Norbanus, think about this one. I’m stumbling my way from the amphitheater to the Herculaneum Gate, and halfway across town I fall over you. What are the odds
that’s
a good sign?”

If I’d been looking for a sign of good fortune, it wouldn’t be you.
Of all the people to be thrown together with in a disaster, he would never have chosen Diana of the Cornelii. Not merely because she was a woman—Marcus knew women of tremendous
gravitas
and good sense, and he also knew women of lethal determination and resourcefulness. But Diana was something of a joke. All through Rome she was known as a girl whose face was eagerly gazed upon and whose conversation (unless one was a Reds follower or a lover of horseflesh) speedily avoided.

But she was slanting her brows at him in inquiry, and she
had
stopped to come to his aid, which was more than a great many panicky people in a crisis would have done, so he gave a nod of thanks and said “A good sign, indeed.”

She ended up hauling him into the brothel. “Better get you out of the street and sitting down so we can look at that leg. Besides, I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a whorehouse …”

“Does it live up to your expectations?” A narrow hall with five curtained nooks leading off to the side; a staircase leading upward; a door at the end wafting the stench of a latrine. Marcus did not see how any man could find himself in the mood for intimacy in such surroundings, but men of sufficient youth could find the mood more or less anywhere—he remembered that much about being young.

“It seems a little depressing.” Diana swept back the curtain of the first nook. The stone ledge with its straw-stuffed pallet had a mussed blanket, but the little space was empty. She assisted him through, turning him to sit on the pallet, and Marcus grimaced as his knee sent a jolt of agony up to his hip. “Rest here and let me see what I can find in the way of help.”

“Don’t bother,” he said, but she was already gone in a whirl of white-gold hair. So much energy, galloping through life as though it was the last lap of a race—Marcus found it a little tiring. There was a good deal of speculation among the men of Rome as to just what it would take to exhaust her in bed. So far as Marcus knew, very few had had the chance to put their theories to the test. Diana of the Cornelii belonged to the colts she bred and trained on her little villa just outside Rome—not to any particular suitor.

Footsteps ran lightly down the stairs in the hall, and she was back. “There are two whores huddled in a corner upstairs moaning in a language I’ve never heard. Absolutely useless—they refuse to budge from beneath their blankets. Everyone else appears to have fled.”

Something occurred to Marcus. “Why don’t you have slaves with you?” Diana’s father was far too absent-minded to impose any suitable control on his daughter, but even he would have insisted on attendants if she went traveling.

“I had a good pair of guards, but they fled when the awning at the amphitheater collapsed. Maybe they weren’t as good as all that.” Diana dropped to her knees. “Let’s see that leg …”

Marcus caught his breath as she straightened his knee. He didn’t need to pull back the folds of his toga to know it was swollen the size of a
trigon
ball.

“Strained,” Diana announced, fingers seeking out the painful points. “Not broken. A bit of strapping should see you able to walk.” She looked around, and tore the curtain down from the doorway.

“Since when are you a
medicus
?”

“I train my colts to run races, Marcus. You know how many times I’ve been thrown out of a chariot?” She began ripping the curtain into strips. “If it can be banged, bruised, or broken, I’ve banged it, bruised it, or broken it.”

“You are the most bizarre girl I have ever known,” Marcus observed.

“Aren’t you lucky you ran across me when the sky fell, then?” She went to her knees again, examining his leg. “This is going to hurt. Do you need something to bite down on?”

He looked at the little cell, empty except for the bed and an obscene wall-mural in flaking paint. “Bite down on what?”

Diana rummaged under the pallet and came up with a carved wooden phallus.

Marcus gave her a look.

“It does seem a bit big to get one’s teeth around,” she agreed, hefting the thing. “I don’t think real ones come in this size. None I’ve seen, anyway…”

“I assure you,” Marcus said dryly, “that I can choke back a scream without needing to insert a wooden phallus between my teeth.”

She tossed the thing aside, taking hold of his knee. “Then shut your eyes and pretend I’m a proper physician.”

“Likely a physician wouldn’t do any more good than you.” Marcus shut his eyes. “‘Medicine is the art of guessing.’”

“Who said that?”

“Aulus Cornelius Celsus, ignorant child. Don’t you know anything?” She was winding his knee in strips of cloth, by the feel of it. Yes; it hurt.

“I know how to drive a four-horse chariot, subdue any unruly stallion in the empire, and calculate betting odds for four factions in sixteen heats simultaneously. And I know how to strap a knee. Hold still, now—”

“Why go to so much trouble?” Marcus opened his eyes as she tied the bandage off. He knew he should be more afraid than he was, but he could not summon it. Not fear, not panic—he felt nothing but a certain mild interest. “I don’t really require a working knee at the moment.”

“Are you mad? We have to get out of Pompeii, and I may be nicknamed after Diana the Huntress, but I don’t really see her swooping down on her moon-chariot to give us a ride to safety. If we’re to get out of the city, we’ll have to walk every step of the way.”

“What if I don’t mean to flee?”

“This isn’t some ridiculous display of stoicism, is it?”

“Pliny’s nephew thought I was a Stoic,” Marcus mused, “but no, I cannot really subscribe to that philosophy. Its precepts demand a control over emotion that can be impractical in times of—”

“Marcus.” Diana looked up at him through the fringes of her hair. “I don’t know if the gods are tipping Rome into Tartarus, or if Vulcan simply stripped the top off the mountain to air out his forge, but Pompeii is no longer safe. I saw people trampling each other underfoot at the amphitheater. I saw a man’s head crushed against a stone step. When I finally got free, I saw people running from their houses with arm-loads of belongings, and then thugs clubbing them to the ground for a chance to steal whatever they were carrying. By the time the sky went dark, the main thoroughfare was so well lit by buildings that had caught fire from fallen lamps, I could see my own shadow running behind me. We are getting
out,
Marcus.”

“No,” he said quietly.

“What?”

Until now, he had not been certain. He looked around this fetid, windowless little cell that stank of male seed and female despair; he heard pounding feet and the rising mindless note of a shriek from the streets where a city was tearing itself to pieces, and he felt … he felt …

Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus exhaled a long breath. “I intend to die.”

He felt relief.

WHEN did it start, the bleak, creeping tide of hopelessness? At yet another interminable meeting in the Senate House where he listened to the spite, the pride, the petty jealousies that rippled along under all the unctuous profundity, and realized that
nothing
he worked for mattered? During yet another banquet where a woman’s shrill laughter reminded him of the wife who had deserted him for a young Cornelii? Or was it the pain in his crooked shoulder stabbing him dawn after gray and meaningless dawn, the pain of an arm badly wrenched out of place when he was arrested and tossed in a cell during the Year of Four Emperors?

Maybe the hopelessness had been seeded in that cell, ten years ago. A cell no bigger than this one; smelling not of semen and sweat but of stark, brassy terror; enduring the pain in his shoulder and wondering if he was to be dragged out and torn apart by a mob—all because the current claimant to the purple felt uneasy of Marcus’ illustrious family name.
If they’d left me a knife, I’d have opened my veins in that stinking straw and spared myself the next decade.
A decade of bitter senatorial back-stabbing and even more bitter boredom, knowing that no matter how many laws he helped to pass, they helped nobody—the lowborn and the luckless like young Prima with her empty stomach and eyes full of scorn would still be ground to nothing. A decade of ignoring the snickers that came when he stood at the Rostra with his crooked shoulder. And he was so often tired, because his last decade was all days as black as the afternoon had turned outside, and nights that were utterly unspeakable.

“I intend to die,” he said again, and the relief was violent. How many times had he thought that, awake and sleepless in his quiet
domus
in Rome, working on another treatise whose advice would never be heard? How many times had he put down his stylus and taken up his knife instead, pressing it almost idly against the blue line of the vein in his arm?

That habit might have started in the last year. When sensible, even-handed Emperor Vespasian had died and the purple passed to his hot-headed son Titus—Titus, who was not so bad a fit for the purple, but who had no sons of his own. Titus, whose health was inexplicably failing after just a year, and who had no one to succeed him but a wild-eyed and vicious younger brother.
I would rather be dead than serve that thug Domitian if he becomes Emperor.