Pompeii (22 page)
“We follow the line of the aqueduct toward Vesuvius,” he said. The horse wheeled and he had to shout over his shoulder. “And no dawdling. I want us in position before dark.”
“In position where?” asked Brebix.
“I don’t know yet. It should be obvious when we see it.”
His vagueness provoked an uneasy stir among the men—and who could blame them? He would have liked to have known where he was going himself. Damn Musa! He brought his mount under control and turned it toward the open country. He raised himself from the saddle so that he could see the course of the road beyond the necropolis. It ran straight toward the mountain through neat rectangular fields of olive trees and corn, separated by low stone walls and ditches—centuriated land, awarded to demobbed legionaries decades ago. There was not much traffic on the paved highway—a cart or two, a few pedestrians. No sign of any plume of dust that might be thrown up by a galloping horseman. Damn him, damn him . . .
Brebix said, “Some of the lads aren’t too keen on being out near Vesuvius after nightfall.”
“Why not?”
A man called out, “The giants!”
“Giants?”
Brebix said, almost apologetically, “Giants have been seen, aquarius, bigger than any man. Wandering over the earth by day and night. Sometimes journeying through the air. Their voices sound like claps of thunder.”
“Perhaps they
are
claps of thunder,” said Attilius. “Have you considered that? There can be thunder without rain.”
“Aye, but this thunder is never in the air. It’s on the ground. Or even under the ground.”
“So this is why you drink?” Attilius forced himself to laugh. “Because you are scared to be outside the city walls after dark? And you were a gladiator, Brebix? I’m glad I never wagered money on you! Or did you only train men to fight blind boys?” Brebix began to swear, but the engineer talked over his head, to the work gang. “I asked your master to lend me men, not women! We’ve argued long enough! We have to go five miles before dark. Perhaps ten. Now drive those oxen forward, and follow me.”
He dug his heels into the sides of his horse and it started off at a slow trot. He passed along the avenue between the tombs. Flowers and small offerings of food had been left on some, to mark the Festival of Vulcan. A few people were picnicking in the shade of the cypresses. Small black lizards scattered across the stone vaults like spreading cracks. He did not look back. The men would follow, he was sure. He had goaded them into it and they were scared of Ampliatus.
At the edge of the cemetery he drew on the reins and waited until he heard the creak of the wagons trundling over the stones. They were just crude farm carts—the axle turned with the wheels, which were no more than simple sections of tree trunk a foot thick. Their rumble could be heard a mile away. First the oxen passed him, heads down, each team led by a man with a stick, pulling the lumbering carts, and finally the rest of the work gang. He counted them. All were there, including Brebix. Beside the road, the marker stones of the aqueduct, one every hundred paces, dwindled into the distance. Neatly spaced between them were the round stone inspection covers that provided access to the tunnel. The regularity and precision of it gave the engineer a fleeting sense of confidence. If nothing else, he knew how this worked.
He spurred his horse.
An hour later, with the afternoon sun dipping toward the bay, they were halfway across the plain—the parched and narrow fields and bone-dry ditches spread out all around them, the ocher-colored walls and watchtowers of Pompeii dissolving into the dust at their backs, the line of the aqueduct leading them remorselessly onward, toward the blue-gray pyramid of Vesuvius, looming ever more massively ahead.
HORA DUODECIMA
[
hours]
While rocks are extremely strong in compression, they are weak in tension (strengths of about 1.5 x 10
7
bars). Thus, the strength of the rocks capping a cooling and vesiculating magma body is easily exceeded long before the magma is solid. Once this happens, an explosive eruption occurs.
—
VOLCANOES: A PLANETARY PERSPECTIVE
Pliny had been monitoring the frequency of the trembling throughout the day—or, more accurately, his secretary, Alexion, had been doing it for him, seated at the table in the admiral’s library, with the water clock on one side and the wine bowl on the other.
The fact that it was a public holiday had made no difference to the admiral’s routine. He worked whatever day it was. He had broken off from his reading and dictation only once, in the middle of the morning, to bid good-bye to his guests, and had insisted on accompanying them down to the harbor to see them aboard their boats. Lucius Pomponianus and Livia were bound for Stabiae, on the far side of the bay, and it had been arranged that they would take Rectina with them, in their modest cruiser, as far as the Villa Calpurnia in
Herculaneum
. Pedius Cascus, without his wife, would take his own fully manned liburnian to
Rome
for a council meeting with the emperor. Old, dear friends! He had embraced them warmly. Pomponianus could play the fool, it was true, but his father, the great Pomponius Secundus, had been Pliny’s patron, and he felt a debt of honor to the family. And as for Pedius and Rectina—their generosity to him had been without limit. It would have been hard for him to finish the
Natural History,
living outside
Rome
, without the use of their library.
Just before he boarded his ship, Pedius had taken him by the arm. “I didn’t like to mention it earlier, Pliny, but are you sure you’re quite well?”
“Too fat,” wheezed Pliny, “that’s all.”
“What do your doctors say?”
“Doctors? I won’t let those Greek tricksters anywhere near me. Only doctors can murder a man with impunity.”
“But look at you, man. Your heart—”
“ ‘In cardiac disease the one hope of relief lies undoubtedly in wine.’ You should read my book. And that, my dear Pedius, is a medicine I can administer myself.”
The senator looked at him, then said grimly, “The emperor is concerned about you.”
That gave Pliny a twinge in his heart, right enough. He was a member of the imperial council himself. Why had he not been invited to this meeting, to which Pedius was hurrying?
“What are you implying? That he thinks I’m past it?”
Pedius said nothing—a nothing that said everything. He suddenly opened his arms and Pliny leaned forward and hugged him, patting the senator’s stiff back with his pudgy hand. “Take care, old friend.”
“And you.”
To his shame, when Pliny pulled back from the embrace, his cheek was wet. He stayed on the quayside, watching until the ships were out of sight. That was all he seemed to do these days: watch other people leave.
The conversation with Pedius had stayed with him all afternoon, as he shuffled back and forth on the terrace, periodically wandering into the library to check Alexion’s neat columns of figures.
“The emperor is concerned about you.”
Like the pain in his side, it would not go away.
He took refuge, as always, in his observations. The number of “harmonic episodes,” as he had decided to call the tremors, had increased steadily. Five in the first hour, seven in the second, eight in the third, and so on. More striking still had been their lengthening duration. Though they were too small to measure at the beginning of the day, as the afternoon went on Alexion had been able to use the accuracy of the water clock to estimate them—first at one-tenth part of the hour, and then one-fifth, until finally, for the whole eleventh hour, he had recorded one tremor only. The vibration of the wine was continuous.
“We must change our nomenclature,” muttered Pliny, leaning over his shoulder. “To call such movements an ‘episode’ will no longer suffice.”
And increasing in proportion with the movement of the earth, as if man and nature were bound by some invisible link, came reports of agitation in the town—a fight at the public fountains when the first hour’s water discharge had ended and not everyone had filled their pots; a riot outside the public baths when they had failed to open at the seventh hour; a woman stabbed to death for the sake of two amphorae of water—water!—by a drunk outside the Temple of Augustus; now it was said that armed gangs were hanging around the fountains, waiting for a fight.
Pliny had never had any difficulty issuing orders. It was the essence of command. He decreed that the evening’s sacrifice to Vulcan should be canceled and that the bonfire in the forum must be dismantled at once. A large public gathering at night was a recipe for trouble. It was unsafe, in any case, to light a fire of such a size in the center of the town when the pipes and fountains were dry and the drought had rendered the houses as flammable as kindling.
“The priests won’t like that,” said Antius.
The flagship captain had joined Pliny in the library. The admiral’s widowed sister, Julia, who kept house for him, was also in the room, holding a tray of oysters and a jug of wine for his supper.
“Tell the priests that we have no choice. I’m sure Vulcan in his mountain forge will forgive us, just this once.” Pliny massaged his arm irritably. It felt numb. “Have all the men, apart from the sentry patrols, confined to their barracks from dusk on. In fact, I want a curfew imposed across the whole of Misenum from vespera until dawn. Anyone found on the streets is to be imprisoned and fined. Understood?”
“Yes, admiral.”
“Have we opened the sluices in the reservoir yet?”
“It should be happening now, admiral.”
Pliny brooded. They could not afford another such day. Everything depended on how long the water would last. He made up his mind. “I’m going to take a look.”
Julia came toward him anxiously with the tray. “Is that wise, brother? You ought to eat and rest—”
“Don’t nag, woman!” Her face crumpled and he regretted his tone at once. Life had knocked her about enough as it was—humiliated by her wastrel husband and his ghastly mistress, then left widowed with a boy to bring up. That gave him an idea. “Gaius,” he said, in a gentler voice. “Forgive me, Julia. I spoke too sharply. I’ll take Gaius with me, if that will make you happier.”
On his way out, he called to his other secretary, Alcman, “Have we had a signal back yet from
Rome
?”
“No, admiral.”
“The emperor is concerned about you . . .”
He did not like this silence.
Pliny had grown too fat for a litter. He traveled instead by carriage, a two-seater, with Gaius wedged in next to him. Beside his red and corpulent uncle he looked as pale and insubstantial as a wraith. The admiral squeezed his knee fondly. He had made the boy his heir and had fixed him up with the finest tutors in
Rome
—Quintilian for literature and history; the Smyrnan, Nicetes Sacerdos, for rhetoric. It was costing him a fortune but they told him the lad was brilliant. He would never make a soldier, though. It would be a lawyer’s life for him.
An escort of helmeted marines trotted on foot on either side of the carriage, clearing a path for them through the narrow streets. A couple of people jeered. Someone spat.
“What about our water, then?”
“Look at that fat bastard! I bet you he’s not going thirsty!”
Gaius said, “Shall I close the curtains, uncle?”
“No, boy. Never let them see that you’re afraid.”