Correus again found himself pushing, shoving, and kicking, trying to herd the panic-stricken, to get them moving anywhere except here in the street, where a wall was likely to fall in on them. Caritius, cursing his lost ship and all his gods, worked with him, and once they saw the commander with a pillow tied on his head watching calmly from the steps of his friend’s house, with the household gathered around him.
* * *
By morning every town along the curving, lovely sea-coast that had been the bay of Neapolis was crowded with a terror-stricken mob, looting, fighting, trampling each other while they waited for someone, anyone, who would tell them what to do and where to run.
In the morning, Pompeii was dead. Dead and buried almost to the rooftops in cinders and rubble, choked into silence by the poisonous air. Soon even the rooftops would be gone, blotted out by the still-falling ash.
Flavius had waited until the last minute, until the horse, that Correus had left him had torn its reins from the ring and bolted, until the streets were knee-high with fallen rock, so that he found himself clambering over it, his head above the door tops. There would be no pulling anyone from those doomed and shuttered houses now.
The fumes had grown steadily worse, and a scorching rain had begun to fall. It burned his hands and face and combined with the ash caked in his hair, turning it to glue. And with it, the tumult in the streets died to an ominous quiet, with only the burning rain for a background, and the voice of an occasional straggler clambering over the rubble to the gates.
Time to be going, Flavius thought. Or stay and sink beneath the earth with the city. The rain had put out his torch, and he fought his way over the rubble by instinct, hoping that instinct held true. He could still see the fire on the mountain behind him and tried to judge the direction of the gate from that. There were bodies in the road now, the old or weak of lung, and he fell over them as he went. Not everyone had made it that far. Those who had decided to wait out the holocaust indoors would never come out again, suffocated by the poisoned air, walled up behind the rising tide of stone and ash. He could feel his own chest tighten with every breath.
He thought that the gate was not far now. He might even make it, if the walls didn’t fall in on him first. Had Correus made it? Or had Flavius unknowingly fallen over his brother’s body? He prayed briefly, urgently to the god whose word was Light, for one breath of clean air, one sight of the sun, and one sign that the world had not been tipped wailing into the pit. Logically, he knew that Mount Vesuvius, long thought dormant, had wrenched itself open at last, and that beyond its range there would be sunlight and trees and the world as it had been. But here at the foot of the fire, it was hard to believe in anything but black chaos and death – Ragnarok, Forst would have called it, the final battle of the gods.
A flicker of flame glowed to his left, and there was the sound of furious, desperate sobbing. Flavius lurched toward it and fell over another body. A woman was kneeling by a fall of rubble, trying frantically to dig the stones away with her hands. They were under the sloping overhang of a half-fallen building, and the torch was sheltered from the rain by its eaves. Another stone rambled and slid.
“Get out of there!” Flavius said. “The whole thing’s going to come down!”
“I can’t!” the woman shrieked. “She’s caught!” She was well over the edge of hysteria, oblivious to everything but the other woman who lay with her leg pinned by a tangle of stone and roof tile. The first woman turned a frantic face to Flavius, and he recognized one of the Syrian dancers in the nightmarish light of the torch.
“Help me!” She dragged at the stone, her fingers bleeding.
Flavius knelt beside her. “You won’t get anywhere like that. Clear off the stuff on top, one at a time.” The woman under the stones never moved, and he wondered if they were digging for a corpse.
They shifted the stones on top while more rock rained down around them, and Flavius saw why her sister had been unable to pull her free – one leg lay under a fallen column of marble a good three feet in diameter.
The dancer began to tug at it, screaming.
“We might – roll it,” he said. “It will hurt.” He looked at the woman’s still face and thought perhaps not, but it was plain that her sister wouldn’t leave her. “Here, help me.”
The woman lay on a sloping bed of broken stone, and they stood one on each side of her and pushed at the marble column. It turned slightly, and the woman opened her eyes and moaned. She was alive, at any rate, Flavius thought. For now. He shoved at the column again, trying to gain momentum, and it rolled. The woman screamed as the whole weight of the column rolled over her foot and down the slope. It thundered to a crashing stop against the building opposite, and the wall behind them shivered. Flavius picked up the woman and screamed too as the whole wall began to slide.
“Get out!”
They half ran, half slid down the rubble slope into the street as the wall crashed in behind them, blotting out the torch’s small light.
Somehow they made it through the gate, one woman a dead weight in his arms, the other stumbling beside him, calling urgently to her sister in a childhood language Flavius didn’t know. I’ll never make it, he thought as they stumbled over the half-buried roadway, the woman like an iron weight on his arms and his lungs tightening with each breath. A few stragglers stumbled with them, the last ebbing tide of the human flood that had fled Pompeii.
Somehow they made it, a few desperate miles toward Stabiae, and sat to rest by the roadside with their backs to a fallen tombstone until the air grew too thick to breathe. Then they got up, shook off a shower of ash and cinders that had fallen on and around them, and went on.
They reached Stabiae at dawn, if the rising sun could have been seen through the blackness, and staggered on southward along the coast with the refugees out of Stabiae, until it was plain to Flavius that he could go no farther even if he died here by the road.
He put the unconscious woman down and sat, pulling the other sister down with him. She half fell against him, and they sat, too tired to speak and too afraid to sleep for fear of choking to death as they lay there, and waited for whatever it was that would come – death or the fire or daylight. Every so often they stood up to shake away the ashes and cinders – Flavius thought they might otherwise have been buried as they sat there – and tried not to think of water. His mouth was dry, and he could hear himself and the two girls wheezing like old men, and the air was foul with the smell of sulfur. Behind them the mountain still burned, and the drifting ash came down to bury the ravaged cities at its foot.
After a while they began to talk, to blot out the other sounds that came horribly from the darkness around them: the prayers and entreaties, and the low, hopeless sobbing of the living as they tried to shake their dead back to life.
They had been among the first to leave. The woman cradled her twin’s head in her lap as she spoke and held her mantle over her face to shield her from the falling ash. The column came down as they neared the gate.
“What happened to your master?”
“He was going to leave her,” the woman said. Even under the exhaustion her voice was venomous. “He tried to make me come with him, and a roof tile came down and hit him on the head.”
And so the innkeeper was dead in Pompeii, Flavius thought. Dead not more than a mile from the inn with its beautiful rose-tiled court where he had wanted to stay in the beginning. I should have let him, Flavius thought. It wouldn’t have mattered.
“You should have gone with him,” he said softly, watching the injured woman. The sky had lightened a little, and he thought she was sleeping. He knew from carrying her that the leg was crushed beyond repair. It would be gangrenous in another day. She had lain in his bed, the injured one. He didn’t want to watch her die.
The sister didn’t speak, but crooned some soft nursery tune as the injured woman stirred. There was a bond with the twin-born, he had heard, that was stronger than other ties. Oddly, he thought of Correus, who w
as only half-blood to him, but born on the same day. Would he know if Correus were dead? He had somehow always thought that he would. Their bond had chafed him almost beyond bearing. It had done small good to Correus, either. Now – now, since Britain, it had become a tie to be protected. Maybe we have grown up. Mithras, let him live. Let me find him alive in Stabiae. If there would ever be any going back to Stabiae.
The sky went black again with a fresh fall of ashes, but this time there was no new outcry. They sat by the roadside with the rest of the homeless, numb and afraid, and waited – for daylight or the end of the world.
* * *
It was light. The sun came slowly through the smoke, dark yellow like an eclipse, and the living rose and looked around on a buried world. The mountain in the distance was pale as a snow peak under the last sullen drift of smoke. Beneath it, everything was white, sunk under a blanket of ash like an Alpine field after a fall of snow. Pompeii was entirely gone beneath it, and Herculaneum on the coast to the north was gone also, obliterated in a flood of boiling mud born of Vesuvius’s ashes and the burning rain.
Everywhere the living shook away the white ash as the sun rose, and looked around them in numb exhaustion. Slowly they gathered their packs and bags, their salvaged treasures, and began to move, some of them homeward, others without direction, knowing that there would be no home to find there now.
Correus climbed up out of a roadside ditch into which he had fallen and decided that he might as well stay, and he looked in awe at the landscape.
Beside him a white mound heaved and floundered, and Caritius stood up, shaking the ash from him like a dog. “Mother-Of-Us-All, did we come through that?” he asked softly.
The road was lined with the uprooted stones of tombs and buckled in places with its paving stones angling crazily to the sky. Here and there a tomb itself had been heaved up and opened in a grotesque display of white bones and rotting grave-cloths. The sky above was sullen yellow, and the foul taste of sulfur was in their mouths.
“Are we alive?” Caritius said.
“I think so.” Correus found that his hand was still on the amber bead that hung around his neck, where it had been all night. Its luck comes somewhat sideways, I find, but I think it will keep you alive. The words rang like old ghosts in his ears, out of another lifetime. “Alive.” He hadn’t thought he would have cared so greatly about that, one way or the other.
They turned with no further word – there was none to say – back toward Stabiae. Caritius shaded his eyes with his hand and tried to peer, futilely, through the haze to Misenum across the bay.
“I think they will have been all right, that far out,” Correus said gently, remembering the captain’s pretty wife and the small, cheerful girl-child who had pattered in after dinner to say her good nights.
Caritius shook his head. When he got to Misenum and saw them, then he could be certain. And she could be certain of him. “She’ll be half-frantic, too,” he said.
Flavius, Correus thought, his heart sinking. He couldn’t have made it. Not through this. They trudged on, the soft ash rising in clouds around their feet, making thirst almost unbearable. Somewhere there must be one undamaged well in Stabiae, Correus thought. If there wasn’t, they would lose more than those already dead. So many dead. All dead. For a moment he wanted to sit down and howl like a wolf by the road. But he went on, between Caritius and a gaunt old woman with a sack over her shoulder whose survival was in itself a miracle. Back to Stabiae and the choked, obliterated road from Pompeii.
At Stabiae, Caritius turned down to the wreckage on the shore, wallowing through ashes and fallen roof beams to the beach. The Merope was a heap of gray-shrouded spars, smashed as if by an angry child, and lesser craft lay around her. Stabiae’s wharves were no more than broken pilings now, with the sea running noisily in and out between them, and all along the beach were the carcasses of fish and shore birds, thrown up by the sea or battered down by the deadly weight of the air.
The beach was almost deserted, the Stabians turning first to what remained of their homes, and a few scattered officials trying vainly to organize the rest into some sort of order. He should go and help them, Correus thought, and knew that he didn’t want to because that was where Flavius would be, and if he didn’t find him there with the other officials, then he would know for sure. A sudden wail that made his skin crawl rose in the air, and he turned toward it, half expecting to see the ban-sidhes behind him, the Britons’ witch-women whose cry is death.
Instead it was only a serving girl with her shawl over her head, who knelt beside a stout, familiar figure on the beach.
“Stop that row!” A gentleman in a mired and ragged tunic aimed a cuff at her head, and she subsided into hiccups.
Correus knelt also and looked at the still, pale face of Gaius Plinius, commander of Misenum, with his pillow still tied bravely to his head.
“Poor old gentleman,” the girl sobbed. “He wouldn’t leave, not for anything he wouldn’t. He wanted to be an example, and he promised me a whole silver denarius, just for bringing him his wine!” She began to wail again, and the man gave her an exasperated look.
“Are you crying for him or your denarius?” he asked gruffly. “Now go away.” He looked at Correus and Caritius, and they recognized him as the commander’s old friend. “His lungs just wouldn’t stand it. We tried to make him leave with us, but he was stubborn as a mule. And then he just choked and collapsed. Someone’s going to have to tell his family,” he added. “I—I can’t leave here now.”
Correus bit back a retort. If he did leave, the looters would leave nothing of his house by the time he got back. He looked at Caritius. “You go.”
To take the commander’s body to Misenum – that was a priority errand that could commandeer whatever transportation Caritius could find. He could be in Misenum by nightfall. He nodded. “Thank you.”
“You go back to your house,” Correus said to the commander’s host. “The girl can stay with him.”
The man nodded and shambled away gratefully, and Caritius ran up the slope to find something, anything to carry the body.
Correus watched him go and hoped that he found what he was looking for at Misenum. The ash there wouldn’t have been as bad, but the ground was rocking even now, and earthquake and panic were death-bringers enough. Mithras grant that someone found his kinfolk still alive. He turned back to the girl. “Will you stay with him till the captain comes back?”
She nodded, the tears leaving wet streaks in the ashes on her face. “He was such a nice old gentleman,” she said loudly. Her voice shook. “It wasn’t the denarius!”
“No,” Correus said gently. “No, I know it wasn’t.” He went slowly back up the beach through the fallen columns of a seaside villa to make himself useful.
Like most resort cities, Stabiae boasted a high population of physicians, and someone had rounded up those who could be found and by some force unknown had set them to work in the great square in front of the town basilica. The basilica itself was leaning dangerously into the columns of its portico, and a rope had been stretched in front of it with the red rags of someone’s military cloak tied on as warning flags.
The sick and hurt were laid out in rows in the courtyard where miraculously the marble conch shell of the fountain still streamed water into the pool below. Some were untouched, only poisoned by the ash and sulfurous air. Others lay with arms and legs at unreal angles, broken by falling stone or trampled by their fellow citizens in flight.
Correus touched a physician on the shoulder, and the man turned and glared at him. He was blond, with a peeved, boyish face.
“How can I help?”
The physician’s expression relented a little. He peered at the scarlet rags that had been Correus’s uniform tunic. “Army? Know anything about wounds?”
“Some.”
“Some is better than nothing,” the man said shortly. “Go down that line and tie a rag or something – whatever you can find – around the feet of the w
orst ones.” Correus nodded and began tearing his red neck scarf into strips. That would last for a while, and then he would find someone’s cloak. If they didn’t mark the worst wounded, most of them would die waiting for their turn. The basilica square was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with them.
A woman with a horribly mangled leg, her face gray-green with the pain, lay at the head of the second row with another woman crouched over her. Correus bent down to tie the last strip of his scarf around her other foot and recognized in the contorted features one of the little dancers from Pompeii. He put his hand on the other woman’s shoulder and shook it urgently.
“My brother – have you seen my brother?”
She looked at him with vacant eyes and shook her head. He sat back on his heels, tying the red rag mechanically around the dancer’s foot, fighting the panic that jumped under his breastbone like an animal. There were thousands in Stabiae. One woman who hadn’t seen Flavius meant nothing. Ygerna’s amber bead seemed to crawl against his skin under his tunic. Its luck comes somewhat sideways, I find… No! Not again, not this time, not again to find himself alive and the other dead. Not again, not with Flavius… He felt his stomach wrench, and he turned away gagging in the still drifting ashes.
“A physician is coming,” a quiet voice behind him said, “but the leg is going to have to come off. You are to come to me afterward, do you understand?”
There was no reply, only a little crooning song from the crouching woman, and Correus gagged again, choking on the ashes and thirst and the hopelessness that let voices unbidden into his head.
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