Barbarian Princess

by Barbarian Princess (retail) (epub)

  There was a sharp intake of breath behind him, and Flavius’s voice said tentatively, “Correus?”

  Correus spun around. Flavius stood behind him, his dark curls gray with ash, but his sharp-angled face and queer, long-fingered hands unmistakable in the smoky yellow light.

  Correus shook his head to chase the cobwebs out. He felt odd… drunk. He pointed to the crooning woman. “I asked…”

  “She didn’t understand you,” Flavius said. “She’s been like that since last night.” He looked sharply at Correus. “Here, you don’t look so good yourself—”

  “I’m all right… now,” Correus said.

  Flavius nodded, understanding in his dark eyes. “I was afraid you were dead, too. Someone said that Plinius was dead – I was afraid you’d been with him.”

  “No,” Correus said. “I was… down the road. In a ditch.” He managed a smile. “Is this your doing?” He waved a hand at the scene in the basilica square. “I should have known I’d find you in the middle of all this… organization.”

  Flavius grinned, the reckless, flyaway grin he wore when he was pleased with himself. “I grabbed all the soldiers I could find, and they grabbed the physicians and dragged ’em back here to me. I put the soldiers to guarding the physicians’ houses for them, but they were none too happy all the same. I waved the emperor’s name around like a club.”

  “Are you in charge?” Correus asked.

  “I think so,” Flavius said. “No one else seemed to want to be. I went to commandeer some opium for the girl,” he added. “There isn’t much. We ransacked every place we could think of, but it’s all in a shambles. Half the town’s fallen in, and the rest of it’s unsafe.” He looked at the girl sadly. “She’s going to lose that leg, and I only hope her sister hasn’t permanently lost her wits. She started singing like that last night. I think it’s only fright – she spent a whole day trying to dig her sister out from under a piece of marble until I came along. I don’t think she even recognizes me now. I’ve told the physician to make sure they’re sent to me when—” He broke off suddenly and glared at Correus, sitting in the ashes looking up at him with the color beginning to flow slowly back into his face. “I know how she feels! Damn you, why didn’t you get out of here to Rome five days ago when I told you to!”

  Correus glared back at him. “Why didn’t you?” He stood up and suddenly they were both laughing like fiends, ash-white mirror images in the dark yellow light, while the wounded stared at them curiously. Correus put out both his hands and Flavius wrapped his own four-fingered ones around them, and then they were in each other’s arms, somewhere between laughter and tears, with their feet in the ashes and their heads bent to each other’s shoulders.

  XXII The Samhain

  Vesuvius in its reawakening had wrecked a world in a day, but even worse, Correus thought, sweating in the ash-laden streets of Stabiae, was the aftermath.

  Of the twenty thousand inhabitants of Pompeii alone, some two thousand had died, but the rest were homeless and they were the emperor’s responsibility now.

  Pompeii and Herculaneum were gone; Oplontis and Stabiae lay in ruins. Survivors and looters were already burrowing through the cooling ash or sifting earthquake-toppled wreckage in search of treasure. These, the thieves and the dispossessed, had been handed to Flavius to manage.

  “Take a look at this.” With a weary smile Flavius passed Correus an official tablet, much begrimed about the edges. His message to Titus must have reached the emperor just as the first eruptions began, and now Flavius had his reply, brought by a courier who had finally got up his nerve to ride into what was left of the bay of Neapolis.

  Correus opened the tablet and tried to focus on the words. Everyone’s eyes had been red and streaming for days from the ash in the air. Remain in Pompeii as the representative of the emperor. Report further, and take whatever measures you deem appropriate in the event of a natural disaster. He gave his brother a tired grin, twin to Flavius’s. “Bit of an understatement.”

  “I’m trying to compose a reply that doesn’t sound aggrieved,” Flavius said. They had been “taking measures” for two days now, sorting out the flood of refugees in Stabiae. “It isn’t Titus’s fault.”

  “No, but people will blame him for it anyway, I expect,” Correus said. A natural disaster was generally thought to carry a message with it.

  “I’m sure they will. A priest never wastes anything useful,” Flavius said, with his mouth compressed into a tight, irritable line, and Correus wished he had kept quiet. Flavius was still steaming because he had found a devotee of some obscure sect working his way through the streets of Stabiae to proclaim that doom had come upon them through sin and loose ways and “women such as this” – here he had paused to shake his fist in the face of the Syrian girl whose leg had been amputated at the hip two days before, and Flavius had lost his temper completely and ordered the man out of Stabiae under guard.

  “What are you going to do about those girls?” Correus couldn’t see Aemelia finding them work in the kitchens, and he had offered before to take that responsibility off his brother’s hands, but Flavius had just shaken his head and said, “No, they’re my problem.” His face was stubborn, and his expression said plainly that he had found them and they were his. It seemed he was not the only one with an inclination to collect strays, Correus thought, sadly amused. The women were free now – their master was dead and buried with the city of Pompeii, and no one would ask for an accounting – but one girl had had her leg cut off, and the other had a vague and clouded look in her eyes that made Correus’s skin cold every time he looked at her. Of the bright creatures who had danced in their diaphanous trousers in Pompeii, there was very little left to find.

  “I don’t know yet,” Flavius said now. It was what he had said before. “Something will dawn on me, I expect.” He looked too tired to think about it. “I’ve given them enough money to come to me in Rome when Naamah can travel.”

  If she ever did, Correus thought, remembering the infections in Flavius’s mutilated hands. There were plenty of ways to die of an amputated leg, and medical supplies had been hard to come by in Stabiae. A few were beginning to come in now from Neapolis and Misenum and the inland towns, but they had wounded of their own to deal with. The earthquake had split and cracked the cities it hadn’t buried. It was worse than a war. Correus choked as an oxcart piled high with a family’s salvaged goods rumbled past, raising a cloud of dust and ash. A small, grimy child sat on top of the bundles, clutching a dolly with only one arm. You couldn’t fight a volcano; you could only accept it, dig out, and start over. Correus watched the oxcart disappear. There was something important about that thought that had been hanging in the back of his mind ever since he had awakened on the Stabiae road to find himself still among the living, but whatever it was, it came no further forward when he chased it.

  He gave it up after a minute and turned his mind instead to the immediate – the necessity to keep the homeless and the roving opportunists who followed inevitably upon the heels of upheaval firmly in the grip of authority and back from the edge of anarchy.

  Flavius sent a status report and what he referred to frankly as a “yell for help” to the emperor and continued to “take measures” with Correus as a self-appointed aide. Correus discovered to his inner amusement that under a light coat of ash, very few people could tell them apart. After that, the emperor’s representative managed to be in a number of places at once.

  They prodded the town’s civil officials into action and bullied those with houses still intact into hospitality. What food they could salvage was ruthlessly rationed, and the refugees who had some place to go besides Stabiae were encouraged on their way. A danger zone was marked off in the worst damaged sections, and buildings that looked likely to come down were made off-limits even to former tenants.

  “We have enough bodies to bury,” Correus said flatly to a protesting merchant barred from the leaning remains of his seaside villa. “Are your damned accou
nt books worth getting flattened for?”

  The merchant looked as if they might be, and Correus gave him a look that sent him on his way regardless, and made a mental note to get that building pulled down as quickly as possible before the old fool tried to sneak back in. At least he had gone quietly enough for the moment. Correus chuckled. People didn’t waste his time demanding to see the man in charge when they thought they were talking to him. And some of these old boys had enough clout to have been pests otherwise. It occurred to him that he was almost enjoying himself. There was a certain exhilaration in simply wading in to cope with adversity. It must be Flavius’s influence. Flavius was in his element.

  For the next week they sifted through ash and rubble, settled disputes over recovered property, and negotiated with inland cities willing to absorb a quota of the homeless. Flavius sent a reassuring message to Aemelia and received a completely hysterical one from her in return, which must have crossed on the road with his.

  Caritius appeared, the panic-stricken look gone from his face, and Correus knew without asking that he had found his wife and child alive. Miraculously, he was leading Antaeus. His normally sleek gold hide was rough and scarred with a healing cut on one flank, and he had apparently been fending for himself for several days, but he butted his head against Correus’s tunic and slobbered down the front of it affectionately, and seemed to have taken no permanent injury.

  “I found him eating daisies in a garden,” Caritius said. “I thought I recognized him, so I dragged him back to the stables and one of the grooms there remembered him. I gave him a good feed this morning.”

  “Thank you.” Correus rubbed the gold ears gratefully.

  “He seemed remarkably sleepy about the whole thing.”

  “Antaeus is the calmest horse ever foaled,” Flavius said. “A mere earthquake wouldn’t trouble him. How is it at Misenum?”

  “In mourning for the commander,” Caritius said. “And some dead in the quake. But mostly what we’d heard was rumors. One old farmer on the way back there assured me solemnly that the ground had opened up and a giant worm had swallowed the whole naval base. But everything is pretty much standing. You’ve had the worst of it out here.”

  The worst of it… Correus watched a leaning column being lowered carefully in the noon sun the next day and thought that Caritius was wrong. And he had been wrong. The worst of it was in Pompeii. And Herculaneum. This was easy. The column came down, and the work crew looked at the sky and decided it was mealtime. Correus, knowing that nothing kept a Campanian from his lunch, went off in search of Flavius. He stopped and dipped his hands and face in the fountain in the basilica square on the way, just enjoying the feel of the water. He felt good suddenly, and a little guilty about it.

  And then abruptly it was like waking up after an illness to find that everything was healthy again. And it was Flavius who had done it – Flavius, whose worth had always been measured by a father’s or a general’s standards and found lacking.

  Flavius was standing on a pile of rubble in the street, hands on hips, laying down the law to a stout, exasperated magistrate who wanted to dig into his caved-in wine cellar. To Correus, he came sharply into focus in the dusty sunlight, clearly defined as the lines of a painting. His voice was firm and with a touch of sympathy for the lost wine at the back of it, and he explained it all to the magistrate one more time. Never had Flavius looked closer kin to Correus. If Freita had been the other half of him in one way, Flavius was his twin in another. And Flavius was still alive. Correus had run like a frightened hare from Ygerna. But he had allowed himself to love his brother, with no pious debating, Correus thought wryly. Flavius would have lived no matter what Correus thought of him or died in spite of it, if that was his Fate. The only thing that might have been lost would have been their friendship – neither would have that, only a small empty spot instead. Flavius could have told him that, he supposed – had been trying to, if it came to it.

  Flavius, oblivious to having been the subject of this lesson, climbed down off his rubble heap and gave Correus a quick grin. “Poor man, I can’t say I blame him. There are four crates of Falernian under all that mess. But I can’t spare the men to excavate it, and if he does it himself, he’ll end up down there with his wine and he won’t come out. The whole thing is still sliding. Let’s go see if we can find a drink that’s above ground. I’ve had ash in my mouth all morning.”

  Correus nodded, and they made their way across a cleared space to where a tavern keeper had set up his salvaged stock in a motley structure of boards and broken columns, roofed with a torn canvas that might have been a ship’s sail. His prices were exorbitant, but he had a corner on the market and business was brisk. Flavius ordered whatever was available, and it appeared in two mismatched cups. They sat down under the awning to drink it, while beside them a disgruntled customer carefully chalked his criticism of the wine and its prices on the side of the shed.

  “Will they rebuild, do you think?” Correus asked, watching the bustle around them. Stabiae in disaster was almost as busy as it had been in prosperity.

  Flavius shook his head. “I doubt it. There’s enough left to go on with maybe, but there’s the ash – just too much of it to clear. It’ll be years before a good soil builds up and they can farm the area again. With no farms, the city won’t be worth having. They’ll have a little business this season and then move on, I should think.”

  Correus sat silently, idly watching the scene. Everything faded and moved on. Life progressed. But man hung on while he could, the way the Stabians were hanging on. He hadn’t wanted to die, Correus thought; and since Freita had died, he had imagined that he didn’t much care about that. But when the mountain had begun to burn, he had known that he wanted to hang on, too. And now he knew why.

  He thought it was Flavius who had triggered that knowledge. But it could have been the wineshop keeper with his ragtag stall; or Naamah, the Syrian girl now with only one leg, calmly preparing to take her sad, blank-eyed sister back to Syria, in spite of Flavius’s offer. Or maybe it was the mountain itself, the unknown, That Which Is and cannot be fought. But somehow, as the Demetae had been Flavius’s salvation, so Vesuvius was his, and its message had burned clear – nothing is safe, there is no certainty. Death is a knife in the dark or a volcano or a runaway carriage in the street. Either he chose to accept that, or to go lonely the rest of his life out of fear.

  “There are reinforcements coming,” Flavius said, and Correus shook himself out of the fog and looked at his brother.

  “I thought you’d gone into a trance, like the Sibyl,” Flavius said.

  “Close,” Correus said.

  “Well, wake up. You’re about to get out of here. The emperor is sending a staff to cope with this, and medical supplies, and we get to go home. Or at least you do. I expect I’ll have to stick around a while yet, but you’re overdue in Rome.”

  “So you’ve said. When does this relief column arrive?”

  “A day or two,” Flavius said. “You’ll get some extra leave, by the way, for heroic services rendered. If you want to buy me a drink in thanks for my glowing descriptions to the emperor, I won’t object.”

  “You must have lied like a fiend,” Correus said. “But I’ll buy you the drink.”

  Flavius laughed and lifted his cup. “To home,” he said. “Finally.”

  Correus grinned back at him and drank, but he wasn’t going home. Not yet.

  * * *

  “This is not particularly informative.” Appius Julianus tapped the small, neatly rolled scroll and gave his son the eye of suspicion across it.

  “I don’t expect it was meant to be,” Flavius said blandly.

  “He was with you in Pompeii, Flavius. I have not yet attained the degree of senility with which you and your brother apparently credit me. Where, has Correus gone?”

  “He didn’t tell me, sir, and that’s the truth.” Flavius bowed gravely to the statue of Athena beside them by way of emphasis.

  “But
you know.” Appius gave him the look before which countless subordinates had been made to quail, and Flavius found himself cursing Correus for unnecessary mysteriousness.

  “I think I do, sir.” He resisted the urge to fidget with his clothes. “But nothing may come of it, and I think he’d rather not think we were putting bets on the results. It may not come off, you know.”

  “You mean she may throw a vase at him,” Appius said. “I think I get your drift. I don’t know what happened when he left Britain, but Helva tried to pump young Julius in her inimitable way, and he shied like a nervous horse.”

  “That may have been just Helva, sir.” Flavius grinned at him. “She’s a bit… overpowering.”

  “She’s a disgrace,” Appius said, “and she gets worse as she gets older. It comes of keeping her looks so well.”

  “Well, if Correus marries, she can go live with him,” Flavius said cheerfully. “And you can, uh… visit.”

  Since he was well aware that his father still slept in Helva’s bed occasionally, even these days, this bordered on the inexcusable. Feeling that he might have gone a bit far, Flavius bowed hastily and beat a retreat to the center of the rose garden, where Aemelia was proudly displaying her daughter to her mother-in-law. He had only been home a day, and already Correus’s absence was proving something of a trial. Aemelia had seemed more relieved than not, but after Bericus had assured himself that there were no holes in Flavius’s own hide, he had brought Julius to him to be assured that the same could be said of Correus. When he discovered that Correus had gone off without him to parts unknown, Julius had declared loudly that he knew no good would come of leaving the centurion on his own in Pompeii like that. He appeared to hold himself personally responsible for both the volcano and whatever the centurion was doing now.

  Flavius had no sooner ordered Bericus, with his most awful glare, to remove his brother’s body servant from his presence, than Helva had fluttered in with much the same performance, although with more tears and effusions. No wonder Correus hadn’t wanted to come home first, Flavius thought, finally left in peace. If he were Correus, he would have given a second thought to coming home at all, especially if he had fulfilled his family’s worst suspicions in the meantime. So far as he knew, no one had ever mentioned Ygerna to Helva, but Helva had her methods of gathering information. He sank down gratefully on the marble bench between his wife and his own mother and put out a finger for his daughter to play with.