Death in the Ashes

by Albert A. Bell, Jr.

  “I will slice you, sir, much as I don’t want to.”

  Cicero said you can’t defeat an enemy who has nothing to live for. I decided this wasn’t the time to test the truth of that axiom. I let myself be tied to the front wheel of the raeda.

  When the boy got into the carriage I heard him gasp. “Papa, there’s a woman in here.”

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Bastet cried.

  “Get out here, woman,” the man said, leaning on the back wheel.

  Bastet climbed out of the raeda, with her shaking hands drawn up to her mouth and tears running down her face. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Should I tie her up, Papa?”

  The man shook his head and pointed his knife toward the Nubian. “Sit down and keep still, woman.” Bastet, quivering, moved toward the back of the wagon.

  The man turned to his son. “See, she’s afraid but she knows we’re not goin’ to hurt nobody, so she won’t hurt us. And we need somebody to untie these gentlemen after we’re gone.” He slipped his knife into his belt. “Now let’s see what’s for lunch.”

  The boy climbed into the raeda and pushed the baskets toward his father, who remained at the door. They were so absorbed in unwrapping their bounty that I saw what was going to happen before either of them did. Bastet picked up a rock, took two steps toward the man, and brought it down full force on his head. I had my mouth open to cry out, and the boy saw her coming and yelled, “Papa!” But the man had barely turned before the stone crushed his skull. Blood splattered on the raeda and on the boy, bright red against the gray.

  “Papa!” the child screamed. “Papa!”

  Bastet drew the rock back again, but I cried out. “Don’t! If you harm that boy, it will cost you your life. I swear it!”

  As the boy hugged his father and wept, Bastet was clearly weighing her options. Was she thinking that she could kill us all and disappear? I had made a threat that I was in no position—literally—to enforce.

  Bastet’s eyes met mine as she hefted the bloodstained rock. She might even have half smiled. Then she threw the rock as far as she could into the desolate landscape beside the road. Pulling the boy off his father, she shoved him toward Tacitus. “Untie them, you worthless little wretch!”

  With tears making tracks down his dirty face, the boy untied the three of us. As soon as my hands were free, I knelt beside the man, but I could not detect any signs of life.

  “He’s dead, ain’t he?” the boy said as he dropped to both knees beside me.

  “Yes, I’m afraid he is. I’m sorry.” It felt odd to say that about a man who, just moments before, had had a knife pressed to my throat, but I was truly sorry. I put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He jerked away from me and threw himself on his dead father, crying.

  “We’d best get going, my lord,” Bastet said.

  I jumped up and turned on her, as angry as I had ever been at another human being. “Why did you do that?”

  “I had to protect you men, my lord.” She crossed her arms over her chest and drew herself up in her best regal manner.

  “He wasn’t going to hurt us!” I’ve never had a slave whipped or tortured. At that moment I could have. “He was so weak he could barely hold the knife.”

  “Are you certain of that, my lord?”

  I thrust my face into hers. “I’ve had a knife at my throat before, held by a man who could have taken my head off. I know what it feels like. This man was leaning on me just to keep himself standing. I didn’t do anything because I didn’t want to hurt him in front of his child.”

  “I had no way of knowing that, my lord.” There was no remorse or humility in Bastet’s voice. “It looked to me like you were in danger.”

  “You could have just knocked him out, stunned him for a moment. He was so weak you could have pushed him over with one hand. You didn’t have to kill him right in front of his child.”

  “I did not know how weak he was, my lord, and I did not know how hard I hit him. My only thought was for your safety.”

  Why did I find that so hard to believe?

  “We were not in any immediate danger. The poor man was just trying to feed himself and his son.”

  “You may believe that if you wish, my lord, but you were defenseless. He could have killed you in any of a dozen ways.” She seemed to be picturing them.

  The boy, still kneeling beside his father, piped up between sobs. “My papa never killed nobody.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the boy jump up.

  “But you killed my papa!” he cried as he lunged at Bastet with the knife he’d taken from his father’s belt.

  I grabbed his thin arm and had no trouble twisting the knife from his hand. He kicked and lashed his fists at me. “Are you gonna kill me now?”

  I took a breath to calm myself and embraced the boy to hold him still. There was no reason to frighten the child any more than we already had. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. This is all a terrible mistake, but we’re not going to hurt you. I promise you.”

  I handed the knife to Tacitus. Still holding the boy’s wrist, I asked, “Did you and your father live around here?”

  He jerked his head to indicate some place behind me. “Over there, just a ways, in a cave.”

  I released the boy and let him drop back to his father’s side. “We can’t leave this man here,” I said. “We’ll take him home.”

  Leaving Tacitus to guard the raeda and clean up the blood, I made Bastet and our driver carry the man’s body through a ravine created by the mounds of ash to the place where the boy directed us. He and his father had worn the beginnings of a path.

  “How do you know there’s not a band of them waiting for us, my lord?” Bastet protested.

  “There’s nobody but me and my papa,” the boy said, walking beside his father and holding his hand. “Now, it’s just me.” He started crying again.

  The “cave” the boy led us to was actually part of a rural villa that had been covered in the eruption. Stopping at the entrance, the boy fished a flint and a lamp out of a niche someone had carved into the ash.

  “We keep this here ’cause we need a light to get out and back in again,” he said.

  When he had lit it, he led us into one of the rooms off the atrium. Ash had filled the atrium, falling through the opening in the roof, but had left a couple of the rooms off it accessible to anyone willing to do a little digging. The opening that the man had cut out was low enough that we had to stoop to enter. It was braced with timbers, which looked none too sturdy. To one side of it were a fire pit and a hole which, from the smell, was used as a latrina.

  Standing up inside the room, I saw that the man had scrounged up enough utensils and bits of furniture—a small table and two beds—to make a nest for himself and his son. Because the ground shook so badly during the eruption, most of the plaster and the frescos painted on it had cracked and fallen off the walls.

  “That’s Papa’s bed.” The boy pointed to a sleeping couch.

  “Put him there,” I told Bastet and the driver. “Cover him with that blanket.”

  Before they covered his father, the boy kissed him one more time and smoothed his filthy hair. Then he looked at me. “What do I do now? Where do I go?”

  “You’ll come with us.” I ignored Bastet’s gasp. “How long have you and your father lived here?”

  “As long as I can remember.”

  Probably since just after the eruption, I realized. The boy must have been four or five when that disaster happened. “Did you live in this villa before the eruption?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Papa said everything looked so different, he wasn’t sure where we were.”

  “Was your mother here with you?”

  “No, sir. Papa said he couldn’t save her.”

  “What was your father’s name?”

  “Ferox. His name was Ferox. That’s what it says.” He pointed to the table beside the bed.

  “The fierce one.” The name hardly fit the trembl
ing man who had threatened me. I picked up a bronze slave bracelet, still intact, off the table. It would have fit the man’s wrist snugly at some point, but he was so thin now that it must have slipped off easily. It said FEROX SERV GN LUC.

  “He was a slave of Gnaeus Lucullus,” I said to Bastet. “Do you know that family?”

  “No, my lord.”

  Why did I not believe her? Was it just because I found it difficult to trust her in anything? Or because she did not look me in the eye when she spoke?

  I turned to the driver. “Do you know them?”

  “No, my lord.”

  The boy’s soft crying brought my attention back to him. I put my arm around him and pulled him to me. “What’s your name, son?”

  He ran his arm across his mouth and nose and wiped it on his tunic. “Papa called me Philippos, ’cause I love horses so much.” He pointed to the other bed, where a section of a fresco showing two horses pulling a chariot still clung to the wall.

  “Well, Philippos, how would you like to help drive our horses?”

  “Yes, sir, I’d like that.”

  His face didn’t exactly brighten up, but I couldn’t expect it to. He had seen his father murdered right before his eyes. The man’s blood was on his tunic. He would never forget that. I had lost my father when I was too young to know what was happening. Then I lost my second father—my uncle—when I was old enough to realize that death was the ultimate end for all of us. But this boy wasn’t old enough to ­understand any of that. All he knew was that he had lost the one person in the world who loved him and cared about him, the person he had depended on for the last five years.

  “Is there anything here you’d like to take with you?” I asked the boy.

  He took his father’s slave bracelet out of my hand and laid it on the shrouded body, then looked around the grim room. “No, sir. Nothing.”

  “Well, there’s one more thing we need to do before we leave,” I said. “I’m sorry we can’t provide a proper funeral, but we can do this.”

  I had noticed the fire pit where they cooked outside the door as we came in. The ashes were heavy in it, and a few pieces of wood stuck out. I picked up one, and with the charred end, wrote on the wall above Ferox’s corpse, in large letters: D M FEROX.

  Since I assumed Philippos couldn’t read, I pointed to the first two letters and said, “That stands for ‘Dis Manibus—To the gods of the underworld.’ ” Then I ran my finger along the second line. “That’s your father’s name. This will protect him”—from imaginary monsters, perhaps, but not from the animals and insects that would descend on the body by the time we were back at the raeda. I took a coin out of the pouch under my tunic, placed it in the dead man’s mouth, and pulled the blanket over his face. “That will pay his passage across the Styx.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Philippos said, choking back a sob.

  He need not know that I didn’t believe a word of it. I had stopped believing it before I was his age.

  I wished I could have done better by Ferox and provided him with a funeral pyre. Even if he was a slave, he should have some kind of reward for keeping himself and his son alive for five years under such difficult circumstances. I doubt many men of my class would have survived. To judge from their physical condition, he had been giving Philippos the larger share of whatever food he found. However, there was nothing in the room or nearby to fuel a pyre. Ferox’s tunic and the covering on his bed would burn, but not nearly long enough or hot enough to consume the body. Leaving the corpse half-burnt would be an even worse indignity than leaving the man untended and unprotected.

  When we were outside the room again I noticed that the chunks of hardened ash that Ferox had chiseled out were piled up not far from the entrance to his “home,” probably as far away as he could move them in his weakened condition. If I couldn’t dispose of the body properly, I decided, I could at least keep anyone from disturbing it.

  “Help me,” I told the driver. We piled the larger pieces over the low opening until it was completely blocked. When Philippos saw what we were doing, he pitched in. I did not turn my back on him, for fear that he might pick up a rock and try again to take his vengeance on us. But he seemed to have accepted what had happened—one more tragedy in a young life already too familiar with them.

  Once we had the opening blocked, I picked up a charred stick from the fire pit and scratched on the flattest piece of stone: FEROX MORTUUS

  “That means Ferox is dead,” I told Philippos. “If anyone should find this place, I don’t think they’ll want to disturb him. And this will be one more bit of protection, I hope.” I rubbed enough of the soot in one place that I could then press my seal ring into it.

  †

  We returned to the raeda and gave Philippos something to eat. We finally had to stop him from eating so there would be something left for Calpurnius. The apple crop was just in and Aurelia had packed several in our basket. I sliced one in half and let Philippos feed each of the horses. In spite of the tragedy he’d just been through, the boy’s eyes showed a spark as he petted one of the horses on its haunch.

  As we packed up and prepared to get back in the carriage, Bastet said she thought we had another half mile to go before reaching Calpurnius’ house. “Look for the tops of two pines sticking out of the ash,” she told the driver. “They’re dead, of course, but you’ll see the branches.”

  “I know that place, sir,” Philippos said, wiping his mouth on his arm. “My Papa and me’s been in there ’cause it was dug out so well.”

  “Why didn’t you live there?” Tacitus asked.

  “We was afraid somebody’d come back, sir. It didn’t look like they was finished with the place. We never took nothin’,” he added quickly.

  “Nobody’s going to punish you, boy,” I said. “But I want you to ride in front with the driver and show him where to stop.”

  The driver didn’t dare object, even though his eyes showed his ­annoyance. The boy’s presence would make the driver’s platform crowded, but making him our lookout provided a good excuse for him not to sit with Tacitus and me, staring at the woman who killed his father. It also meant we wouldn’t have to smell him.

  “What do you mean to do with him?” Tacitus asked as we settled ourselves and the raeda picked up speed.

  “I don’t know, but I couldn’t leave him in that hole to die.”

  “No, of course not. His legal status will be difficult to sort out, though. He’s the son of a slave, so that means he’s a slave. You’ll have to find Gnaeus Lucullus or his family, if there are any left, and return the boy to them.”

  “All in due time. For now, he’s safe and has had a good meal. Obviously his first in a long time.”

  “I’d say it’s been even longer since he had a bath,” Tacitus said.

  “We’ll get all of that taken care of when we get back to Aurelia’s house.” I looked at Bastet, daring her to contradict me—even to open her mouth.

  “For a boy, he certainly cries a lot,” Tacitus said.

  “By the gods, man! He’s a child. He just saw his father killed right in front of him. How would anyone react in that situation?”

  Bastet stirred and spoke softly, looking at a spot in the rear of the raeda, or perhaps seeing something beyond that. “They might mourn for the rest of their lives. As I have done, since I saw my entire family slaughtered by your Roman soldiers.” She broke into a chant, in a language I had never heard before, and began rocking back and forth.

  I knew little about our presence in Egypt. It’s not a province but the personal possession of the princeps. “In what battle was your tribe defeated?” I asked.

  Bastet broke off her chanting. “Our last battle. I don’t know what you Romans call it.”

  “Who attacked first?” Tacitus asked.

  “My people had taken the head off a statue of your Augustus. It stood on the boundary between Roman land and ours, on top of the graves of our ancestors. We buried it. When the soldiers demanded its return
, we refused.”

  “That was a grievous insult,” Tacitus said.

  “I suppose it was. Almost as much of an insult as placing the statue over our graves.” She lapsed back into her chanting and rocking.

  A few moments later the wagon slowed and the driver called, “We’ve come about half a mile, my lords, like the woman said. The boy says we’ve arrived.”

  “Is this the place?” I asked Bastet, placing a hand on her arm.

  She blinked her eyes, like someone awaking from a dream, and collected herself for a moment. “I’ll see, my lord.”

  We got out of the raeda and found ourselves in a landscape even bleaker than we had confronted a few miles back up the road. We were closer to the volcano than I had ever been, close enough to feel the weight of its mass. I wondered how anyone could tell the location of one house from another. It all looked like desert dunes made of stone. Five years of rain had hardened the ash and shaped it into unpredictable lumps and depressions. Wind-blown dirt and debris had settled in some of those depressions. The lack of any vegetation taller than my waist made me feel, for a moment, like a Titan.

  “This is it,” Bastet said. “A place even more dead than the African desert. The shaft that Calpurnius’ servants dug when they were trying to recover things from the house should be just over here.”

  With Philippos trailing after us, she led us to a place where we could climb up the ash on the side of the road toward the bay. A few steps had been cut into the ash. I nudged Tacitus and pointed to a small spot that appeared to be blood—fresh blood. He nodded.

  When we got to the top and were standing between the skeletal tips of the dead pines, I paused to look out toward the water. “Was this house on the shore before the eruption?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Bastet said. “Right on the shore. You could hear the waves from anywhere in the house.”

  I turned to Tacitus. “What would you estimate the distance to the water is now?”

  Tacitus put his hand up to shade his eyes. “At least a quarter of a mile.”

  I looked up at Vesuvius, in awe that the mountain could have spewed out so much and still be standing. How much more did it have stored up to unleash on us when we least expected it?