The whole room lurched suddenly and the lamp, suspended from three silver chains above the table, swung and tilted as one chain snapped, pouring burning oil onto the table.
Cursing, they pulled the tablecloth up and rolled it in on itself, singeing their hands, and Correus grabbed the first thing handy, which was a pillow off his couch and smothered the flames with it. The floor was a mess of spilled wine and broken dishes, and Caritius’s wife stood looking at it with her hand over her mouth, while slaves came running from all directions.
“Are you sure this is normal?” Correus said looking from Caritius to his wife to the dangling lamp.
“No,” Caritius said grimly, “it’s not. Something’s cooking. We may be in for a bad one. If you don’t want to get stuck helping clean up, you’d best get out in the morning and take that leave you’re due. One pair of hands more or less won’t make any difference, but you’re likely to get detailed for it anyway, if there’s any damage.”
“I was going to anyway,” Correus said. “If the gods don’t bury me in my bed tonight,” he added, making it a joke.
But in the morning he somehow found a thing or two to do, and then something else, and then it seemed that one of Antaeus’s shoes was loose and should be looked at. The trouble was, he acknowledged, sitting outside the blacksmith’s barn, he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was dodging something. Flavius had told him to go, Caritius had told him to go, even the commander, Plinius, had taken it for granted that Centurion Julianus would take the leave due him before he reported officially for duty. None of them seemed to feel that Correus’s presence would avert disaster or be of much use in the aftermath, with a whole naval station of able bodies at Misenum to help pick up. And they were all perfectly right, but he still felt silly galloping out of town under the threat of earthquake. Too much care for his own dignity, he thought wryly, and if he didn’t go and see his father, he’d never hear the end of it. And there was Felix. And there was also Flavius, out of whose business he had solemnly promised to keep his meddling self. He shrugged. When Antaeus’s shoe was fixed, he would leave.
“Here you are, sir.” The blacksmith emerged with Antaeus, who seemed to have worked his usual charm on strangers. “Good as a baby,” the blacksmith proclaimed. “Good thing you brought him in. Be a shame to lame a nice beast like him with a thrown shoe. He’ll see you home now, sir.” The blacksmith rubbed the gold nose, and Antaeus slobbered happily down his apron. “Holy Isis, what’s that?”
“What?” Correus looked up. The blacksmith, oblivious to Antaeus now, was pointing a sooty hand to the southeast. As they looked, the commander’s sister came running past, her trailing gown clutched around her plump figure. Above the rooftops, a mottled mass of cloud rose, blotched and threatening, from across the bay.
“Centurion Julianus!” The commander’s sister swerved as she saw him. “Have you seen it? We must tell my brother immediately!”
“Of course,” Correus said, rising gallantly to the occasion. “Do let me escort you.” She looked thoroughly unnerved. “Put him in stables for me, will you?” He gave Antaeus’s reins back to the smith.
“Thank you, Centurion.” The commander’s sister tucked an arm through Correus’s. “I feel quite faint. What could it be? We must find my brother!”
“Dunno what she thinks he can do about it,” the blacksmith said, watching her tow the centurion off in the direction of the Praetorium. But there was a growing feeling of unease in the air and as the cloud rose above the mountains across the bay, someone said the terrifying word “Volcano.”
The Praetorium was a pleasant house just above the sea, and they found Misenum’s scholarly commander hard at work on his books, oblivious to natural disaster.
“Good heavens!” he said mildly when his sister informed him of events, and he called for his shoes.
They climbed up on the outer wall, and from this vantage point it was clear that the cloud was rising above the mountains beyond Pompeii. It leapt upward in a single column and then billowed outward in great blotches that shaded from white to black. Gaius Plinius peered at it and then patted his sister on the shoulder. “This bears looking into, I should think, but I wouldn’t worry about it this far away. I shall want a boat.” He smiled at his sister’s son, who was peering dubiously at the cloud from his side. “Would you like to go with me?”
“I think I should finish my studies, sir,” the nephew said firmly. “You set me some extracts to write, you remember.” He edged back from the wall before his uncle could think to relieve him of this duty, and collided with a slave coming from the house on the run.
“This just came off a fisher boat for you, sir.” The slave handed the commander a hastily written message scrawled on wax.
“Dear me.” Plinius frowned as he deciphered it. “This changes things, I’m afraid. Centurion Julianus, would you be good enough to order the launching of every warship we have as soon as possible? I will take the flagship. It appears that Mount Vesuvius has exploded.” His eyes strayed back to the letter. “Silly woman,” he said sadly. “She should have come herself and left her damned silverware.”
* * *
A sheet of fire blazed like the mouth of Erebus halfway down the mountain. In the bay the air was thick with falling ash and hot as a furnace. Pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked in the flames, rained down on the Merope’s deck. Correus stood in the bow with the commander and Caritius, and watched death fall out of the sky.
The fleet was strung out behind them, pitifully few to take away the refugees of five cities.
“We’ll never make shore here, sir!” Caritius shouted above the roaring in the air and the beat of the hortator’s mallets, trying to hold the ship steady in the heaving sea. Before them lay the shallow waters of Oplontis harbor, broken into angry reefs by the black, piled debris. The sea swelled with the shaking earth, and the spray lifted angrily over the cinders and wreckage. “Best we turn back, sir!” Caritius shouted. “We’ll break up in there sure!”
Plinius sighed, the hot wind lifting his gray hair into little tufts around his ears, but he shook his head. “I fear we’re too badly needed. Fortune keeps an eye on the courageous, Captain; let us give her the chance. Can we make Stabiae?”
“Wind’s right,” Caritius said. “Blow us clean to hell if you want.” But he signaled the hortator, and the Merope slipped slowly down the coast to Stabiae with the fleet behind her.
“We must hope for a change, Captain,” Plinius said. “To blow us back out again. Us and the poor souls on shore.”
Caritius looked grim, but he didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say, Correus thought, that wasn’t plain to them all – if the wind didn’t shift, the Misenum Fleet would never take anyone back from Stabiae. The Merope came in on the mouth of a storm. There would be no going back through it.
In Stabiae harbor, there was full-fledged panic. Most of the populace with any access to a boat had loaded their goods on board already in the hope of a favorable wind. The rest mobbed the Merope as she came in, fighting each other hysterically as they plunged through the shallow water to her. Stabiae lay on the far side of a smaller bay within the great one, and so far the danger was only a black and burning threat to the north, but the air was hot and darkening, and the Misenum sailors found themselves fighting the people they had come to save to prevent them from capsizing the ship in their terror.
Plinius came upon a friend praying hysterically on the dock beside his laden ship and commandeered his house for a headquarters. “You will feel much better with something to do, my friend. Captain, I wish to be notified the moment there is the slightest chance of putting out from here. In the meantime, signal the fleet to stay well back, and we’ll move what folk we can south by road.”
The signal flags ran up on the Merope’s mast, and in a few minutes they could see the fleet begin to tack back out into the bay. Correus shook himself out of a trance. It was like watching monsters come up out of the earth, looking at that black a
nd fiery cloud for too long.
“I have a brother in Pompeii, sir.” No going back to Rome now, not in the face of the hell-wind, whatever Flavius said. “Permission to go and help there. They’ll be worse off than Stabiae.”
Plinius sighed. “Permission granted, Centurion, but I’m afraid you’ll find no good there. If you can, though – remember, the important thing is, don’t let them panic. They’ll trample themselves to death in a panic,” he said tiredly. “Just like sheep, you know.”
The road was choked with the terrified, running to anywhere from the horror at their backs. A riderless horse careened by, foam-flecked, with its reins dangling. Correus grabbed them and pulled himself up, forcing the animal back the way it had come. The sky was turning black around him. He would never get to Pompeii on foot. If he didn’t kill the horse doing it, he might have a chance that way. He forced his way against the tide, fighting the horse as much as the terrified stream of people who poured out along the road on mules or wagons or were pushing their household goods in carts. A pig ran squealing under the horse’s feet, and a woman on a mule sat in the saddle and screamed endlessly while another woman walked beside it and held the bridle. She looked at Correus blankly as he rode by, whipping the horse into the darkness that had been Pompeii. He had to fight his way through the town gates in pitch blackness. It was mid-afternoon, but the dark had come down around them like night, lit only by the fires of burning buildings and the distant wall of flame that blanketed Vesuvius.
Correus pushed his way past the theaters and the Gladiators’ School more by instinct than by sight. He couldn’t tell if the inn was standing or not – half the buildings around him lay in rubble, and the hot ash and pumice had already begun to drift up against the doorways.
Suddenly the inn’s walls loomed up in front of him, the sign momentarily illuminated by a torch in someone’s hand. A woman ran past, clutching a silver pitcher to her breast, and another dragged two terrified children behind her.
“No! Get out, you fools, you’ll die in there!” the man with the torch shouted, and dragged the innkeeper and his dancing twins bodily into the street. “Make for the gate! Get out!”
The innkeeper said something that was lost in the chaos, and the twins each grabbed a hand and ran, with their master stumbling between them.
The man with the torch turned round and his light fell on Correus, tying his terrified horse to a ring in the wall. “Get out of here, damn you!” he screamed. It was Flavius, his hair and clothes gray with ash and his face furious.
“Flavius!”
“Correus?” Flavius squinted at him, coughing from the choking ash in the air.
“Come on, you can’t stay here!”
“I know! But they keep going back to get things!” They were still shouting to make themselves heard over the rumble of the mountain and the terrorized screaming of the refugees. “Get out to the gate and try to keep them from turning back and jamming up. Keep them moving.”
“You get moving!”
“I will, but don’t wait for me! We need you more at the gate!”
“All right!” Correus shouted. “But you take the horse – you may have to get out fast!” He turned and plunged back toward the gate on foot, collecting stragglers as he went, pushing, shoving, shouting at them to keep moving. Behind him he heard Flavius, one small voice of authority in the darkness, ordering people from their houses.
XXI A Mountain of Fire
It was a scene straight from Erebus, the blackness lit only by forked tongues of flame from the burning mountain, the air thick as if they stood not in the open but in a sealed tomb from which all light had been withdrawn. The ground heaved beneath them so that carriages rolled wildly this way and that, dragging their terrified horses with them, smashing carriage and occupants against the slowly falling city walls.
Correus stood well back from the Stabian Gate, fighting to see with streaming eyes through the black air, shouting, “Move! Move, damn you!” as the miserable townspeople milled in the gateway, all sense of purpose vanished in the panic fear that drives out reason. They responded somewhat to orders, relieved that some voice told them what to do, and they pressed out through the gate toward Stabiae, screaming in the dark for their lost children and kin. A howling child ran by Correus and he caught it by the arm and grabbed a woman from the flood at random.
“Here! Hold onto this!”
They seemed to accept this chance mating and stumbled on.
The air was choking with the smell of sulfur and the falling ash, and Correus pulled his scarf up over his face, wondering as he did so if anything could filter that deadly air for long. He had no idea what time it was. In Pompeii, it was night, as if the thing that shook the ground now reached up to pull down the sky. The flood of refugees was increasing, pushing against those ahead of them, but somewhere on the road they were hopelessly jammed up, too frightened to move, ready only to sit down in the road and die. Correus began to work his way down the side of the road, his feet braced against the heaving ground and his back turned firmly away from the fire behind. If it came for him, he thought, there would be little use in seeing it.
“All right, then, keep moving. We’re going to make for Stabiae. And take your baggage with you,” he added, a voice of authority from the darkness, which miraculously they heeded. If they began to abandon the baggage, which they had dragged this far, they would block the road beyond clearing.
Somehow the mass began to move again, inching its way toward Stabiae, carrying Correus with it. To go back was impossible, and he knew that even if he could, without some force to drive them on, they would stop and mill like sheep or sit screaming and praying by the roadside, waiting to be buried in the endlessly falling ash.
“It’s the gods’ vengeance for our sins!” an old man screamed as Correus pushed him along.
“If you want to give yourself to the gods, don’t do it in the road!” Correus shouted back, and a woman came up beside them and pulled the old man along with her.
Slowly they fought their way from Pompeii to Stabiae, through a sulfurous world of fire and blackness where demons stalked abroad, and Correus found himself praying, also.
“Mithras, give us back the light. Lord of Light, put out your hand to us.” And let Flavius be among the refugees that swelled the road behind them.
It was no more than a few miles to Stabiae, but it was an eternity on the way, a walk along the heaving banks of the Styx, where nameless things reached out their hands, and for each man the terror in his soul was greater than the fire behind him. The sky lightened a little to a murky haze as they neared Stabiae, through which pale faces, gray as corpses with the falling ash, floated like the ghosts in Erebus.
He found Caritius of the Merope on the shore with Plinius, dismally watching the heaving sea.
“The fleet’s got to move out, sir,” Caritius was saying. “We’ve got to back them off while we’ve got light enough to signal!” Night was falling fast, and the ominous dark shroud that had hidden Pompeii all afternoon was beginning to flow over Stabiae. “A sorcerer couldn’t bring ’em in through this! D’you want to lose them where they sit?”
Plinius sighed and peered through the murk as Correus’s face appeared beside the captain’s. “Julianus! I was afraid we’d lost you.”
“You nearly did, sir,” Correus said, trying to catch his breath. Even here the air was too thick with ash and fumes to breathe comfortably. Plinius and the captain had their cloaks pulled around their faces. The ground lurched again, and they stumbled. In the bay, the waves sucked out as if swept by a giant hand and crashed back again, smashing on the wharves with a splinter of pilings.
“Pompeii?” Plinius asked.
“Gone, sir. Or it will be. Ahriman’s loose on that mountain.”
“The fleet, sir!” Caritius said again urgently.
Plinius nodded. “Very well, Captain. You may signal.” He sighed again. “I had hoped to take some of these poor souls off by sea.”
&nb
sp; “It’s impossible, sir,” Caritius said. The sailor beside him began swinging his lantern above their heads. Then he steadied it and began to open and close the lantern face toward the bay. He counted to twenty, swung the lantern aloft, and signaled again. “Hope they see us, sir,” he murmured, “but I wouldn’t be betting on it.”
“Keep signaling,” Caritius said.
“Oh, aye, sir, we’ll signal.”
The sea swept out again, leaving a phantasmagoric scene of ocean floor abruptly bared and exposing strange sea things stranded in the sand before it rushed back again against the shore. With the beginning of the storm they had hauled the boats of Stabiae farther up the shore, and Caritius had ordered the Merope dragged up with them. Now the smaller craft were sucked back seaward with the deadly tide, and as they watched, the Merope heeled over in the sand with the crack of a snapping mast. The spray broke around them and drenched them to the skin, and the sailor yelped as the Merope slipped seaward with the next wave.
“Poseidon Father!” Then, “Sir, they’ve seen us!”
Far out in the raging bay a faint prick of light showed and went out.
“Sea Father grant we signaled in time,” Caritius said. He gave the commander a black look.
“We needed them,” Plinius said, “while there was still a chance.” His voice wheezed under the folds of his cloak. “The refugees will have to go by road, I fear – the ones who can.”
“We’ll try to keep them moving, sir,” Correus said. He peered at the commander’s gray face in the gloom. “You should go too, sir.”
Plinius took a wheezing breath and coughed. “No, there will be less panic, perhaps, if it’s known that I haven’t bolted yet. I fear it is all I can do of any use. My lungs are not what they were.” He coughed again. “I shall go and rest, I think.” He turned toward Stabiae, a stout, dignified figure with his cloak over his head.
People were beginning to stream through the gates of Stabiae, too, to join with the flood of homeless that poured south from Pompeii. Those who would not abandon all they owned to the looters, who were roving the streets, barricaded themselves within their houses until the falling rubble blocked the doorways and they were forced to break them open or be buried. Slowly Stabiae darkened to black under that dark rolling cloud that seemed to press down the sky, and its people milled in the streets, afraid of the rocking, swaying walls inside and the falling pumice stone without.
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