Pompeii (31 page)
By the time he reached the center of the reservoir he was breathless with the effort of repeatedly hoisting his feet out of the clinging sediment. He propped himself against a pillar as Gaius came up beside him. But he was glad that he had made the effort. The water-slave had been wise to send for him. This was something to see, right enough: a mystery of nature had become also a mystery of man.
The object in the mud was an amphora used for storing quicklime. It was wedged almost upright, the bottom part buried in the soft bed of the reservoir. A long, thin rope had been attached to its handles and this lay in a tangle around it. The lid, which had been sealed with wax, had been prised off. Scattered, gleaming in the mud, were perhaps a hundred small silver coins.
“Nothing has been removed, admiral,” said Dromo anxiously. “I told them to leave it exactly as they found it.”
Pliny blew out his cheeks. “How much is in there, Gaius, would you say?”
His nephew buried both hands into the amphora, cupped them, and showed them to the admiral. They brimmed with silver denarii. “A fortune, uncle.”
“And an illegal one, we may be sure. It corrupts the honest mud.” Neither the earthenware vessel nor the rope had much of a coating of sediment, which meant, thought Pliny, that it could not have
lain
on the reservoir floor for long—a month at most. He glanced up toward the vaulted ceiling. “Someone must have rowed out,” he said, “and lowered it over the side.”
“And then let go of the rope?” Gaius looked at him in wonder. “But who would have done such a thing? How could he have hoped to retrieve it? No diver could swim down this deep!”
“True.” Pliny dipped his own hand into the coins and examined them in his plump palm, stroking them apart with his thumb. Vespasian’s familiar scowling profile decorated one side, the sacred implements of the augur occupied the other. The inscription round the edge—
IMP CAES VESP AVG COS III
—showed that they had been minted during the emperor’s third consulship, eight years earlier. “Then we must assume that their owner didn’t plan to retrieve them by diving, Gaius, but by draining the reservoir. And the only man with the authority to empty the piscina whenever he desired was our missing aquarius, Exomnius.”
HORA QUARTA
[
hours]
Average magma ascent rates obtained in recent studies suggest that
magma in the chamber beneath Vesuvius may have started rising
at a velocity of > 0.2 metres per second into the conduit of the
volcano some four hours before the eruption—that is, at
approximately 9
A.M
. on the morning of 24 August.
BURKHARD MÜLLER-ULLRICH (EDITOR)
DYNAMICS OF VOLCANISM
The quattuorviri—the Board of Four: the elected magistrates of
Pompeii
—were meeting in emergency session in the drawing room of Lucius Popidius. The slaves had carried in a chair for each of them as well as a small table, around which they sat, mostly silent, arms folded, waiting. Ampliatus, out of deference to the fact that he was not a magistrate, reclined on a couch in the corner, eating a fig, watching them. Through the open door he could see the swimming pool and its silent fountain, and also, in a corner of the tiled garden, a cat playing with a little bird. This ritual of extended death intrigued him. The Egyptians held the cat to be a sacred animal: of all creatures the nearest in intelligence to man. And in the whole of nature, only cats and men—that he could think of—derived an obvious pleasure from cruelty. Did that mean that cruelty and intelligence were inevitably entwined? Interesting.
He ate another fig. The noise of his slurping made Popidius wince. “I must say, you seem supremely confident, Ampliatus.” There was an edge of irritation in his voice.
“I am supremely confident. You should relax.”
“That’s easy enough for you to say. Your name is not on fifty notices spread around the city assuring everyone that the water will be flowing again by
.”
“Public responsibility—the price of elected office, my dear Popidius.” He clicked his juicy fingers and a slave carried over a small silver bowl. He dunked his hands and dried them on the slave’s tunic. “Have faith in Roman engineering, your honors. All will be well.”
It was four hours since
Pompeii
had woken to another hot and cloudless day and to the discovery of the failure of its water supply. Ampliatus’s instinct for what would happen next had proved correct. Coming on the morning after most of the town had turned out to sacrifice to Vulcan, it was hard, even for the least superstitious, not to see this as further evidence of the god’s displeasure. Nervous groups had started forming on the street corners soon after dawn. Placards, signed by L. Popidius Secundus, posted in the forum and on the larger fountains, announced that repairs were being carried out on the aqueduct and that the supply would resume by the seventh hour. But it was not much reassurance for those who remembered the terrible earthquake of seventeen years before—the water had failed on that occasion, too—and all morning there had been uneasiness across the town. Some shops had failed to open. A few people had left, with their possessions piled on carts, loudly proclaiming that Vulcan was about to destroy
Pompeii
for a second time. And now word had got out that the quattuorviri were meeting at the house of Popidius. A crowd had gathered in the street outside. Occasionally, in the comfortable drawing room, the noise of the mob could be heard: a growl, like the sound of the beasts in their cages in the tunnels of the amphitheater, immediately before they were let loose to fight the gladiators.
Brittius shivered. “I told you we should never have agreed to help that engineer.”
“That’s right,” agreed Cuspius. “I said so right at the start. Now look where it’s got us.”
You can learn so much from a man’s face,
thought Ampliatus. How much he indulged himself in food and drink, what manner of work he did, his pride, his cowardice,
his
strength. Popidius, now: he was handsome and weak; Cuspius, like his father, brave, brutal, stupid; Brittius sagged with self-indulgence; Holconius vinegary-sharp and shrewd—too many anchovies and too much garum in
that
diet.
“Balls,” said Ampliatus amiably. “Think about it. If we hadn’t helped him, he would simply have gone to Nola for assistance and we would still have lost our water, only a day later—and how would that have looked when Rome got to hear of it? Besides, this way we know where he is. He’s in our power.”
The others did not notice, but old Holconius turned round at once. “And why is it so important that we know where he is?”
Ampliatus was momentarily lost for an answer. He laughed it off. “Come on, Holconius! Isn’t it always useful to know as much as possible? That’s worth the price of lending him a few slaves and some wood and lime. Once a man is in your debt, isn’t it easier to control him?”
“That’s certainly true,” said Holconius drily and glanced across the table at Popidius.
Even Popidius was not stupid enough to miss the insult. He flushed scarlet. “Meaning?” he demanded. He pushed back his chair.
“Listen!” commanded Ampliatus. He wanted to stop this conversation before it went any further. “I want to tell you about a prophecy I commissioned in the summer, when the tremors started.”
“A prophecy?” Popidius sat down again. He was immediately interested. He loved all that stuff, Ampliatus knew: old Biria with her two magical bronze hands, covered in mystic symbols, her cage full of snakes, her milky-white eyes that couldn’t see a man’s face but could stare into the future. “You’ve consulted the sibyl? What did she say?”
Ampliatus arranged his features in a suitably solemn expression. “She sacrificed serpents to Sabazius, and skinned them for their meaning. I was present throughout.” He remembered the flames on the altar, the smoke, the glittering hands, the incense, the sibyl’s wavering voice: high-pitched, barely human—like the curse of that old woman whose son he had fed to the eels. He had been awed by the whole performance, despite himself. “She saw a town—our town—many years from now. A thousand years distant, maybe more.” He let his voice fall to a whisper. “She saw a city famed throughout the world. Our temples, our amphitheater, our streets—thronging with people of every tongue. That was what she saw in the guts of the snakes. Long after the Caesars are dust and the empire has passed away, what we have built here will endure.”
He sat back. He had half convinced himself. Popidius let out his breath. “Biria Onomastia,” he said, “is never wrong.”
“And she will repeat all this?” asked Holconius skeptically. “She will let us use the prophecy?”
“She will,” Ampliatus affirmed. “She’d better. I paid her plenty for it.” He thought he heard something. He rose from the couch and walked out into the sunshine of the garden. The fountain that fed the swimming pool was in the form of a nymph tipping a jug. As he came closer he heard it again, a faint gurgling, and then water began to trickle from the vessel’s lip. The flow stuttered, spurted, seemed to stop, but then it began to run more strongly. He felt suddenly overwhelmed by the mystic forces he had unleashed. He beckoned to the others to come and look. “You see. I told you. The prophecy is correct!”
Amid the exclamations of pleasure and relief, even Holconius managed a thin smile. “That’s good.”
“Scutarius!” Ampliatus shouted to the steward. “Bring the quattuorviri our best wine—the Caecuban, why not? Now, Popidius, shall I give the mob the news or will you?”
“You tell them, Ampliatus. I need a drink.”
Ampliatus swept across the atrium toward the great front door. He gestured to Massavo to open it and stepped out onto the threshold. Perhaps a hundred people—“
his
people” was how he liked to think of them—were crowded into the street. He held up his arms for silence. “You all know who I am,” he shouted when the murmur of voices had died away, “and you all know you can trust me!”
“Why should we?” someone shouted from the back.
Ampliatus ignored him. “The water is running again! If you don’t believe me—like that insolent fellow there—go and look at the fountains and see for yourselves. The aqueduct is repaired! And later today, a wonderful prophecy, by the sibyl Biria Onomastia, will be made public. It will take more than a few trembles in the ground and one hot summer to frighten the colony of
Pompeii
!”
A few people cheered. Ampliatus beamed and waved. “Good day to you all, citizens! Let’s get back to business.
Salve lucrum! Lucrum gaudium!
” He ducked back into the vestibule. “Throw them some money, Scutarius,” he hissed, still smiling at the mob. “Not too much, mind you. Enough for some wine for them all.”
He lingered long enough to hear the effects of his largesse, as the crowd struggled for the coins, then headed back toward the atrium, rubbing his hands with delight. The disappearance of Exomnius had jolted his equanimity, he would not deny it, but in less than a day he had dealt with the problem, the fountain looked to be running strongly, and if that young aquarius wasn’t dead yet he would be soon. A cause for celebration! From the drawing room came the sound of laughter and the clink of crystal glass. He was about to walk around the pool to join them when, at his feet, he noticed the body of the bird he had watched being killed. He prodded it with his toe, then stooped to pick it up. Its tiny body was still warm.
A red cap, white cheeks
, black-and-yellow wings. There was a bead of blood in its eye.
A goldfinch. Nothing to it but fluff and feathers. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, some dark thought moving in the back of his mind, then let it drop and quickly mounted the steps into the pillared garden of his old house. The cat saw him coming and darted out of sight behind a bush but Ampliatus was not interested in pursuing it. His eyes were fixed on the empty cage on Corelia’s balcony and the darkened, shuttered windows of her room. He bellowed, “Celsia!” and his wife came running. “Where’s Corelia?”