Yes, they’d still die. Damn horse.
Damn noise.
Achillia stopped. Yes, that had been what had spooked the horse and made it rear up. Thunder. A great crack of the gods’ anger – bellowing out from an otherwise clear blue sky.
Achillia stumbled forward along the track towards Herculaneum. Hercules would likely not be impressed. If Pompeii was the armpit of Italy then Herculaneum was its navel. By all accounts, home to just a few thousand people. Insignificant. Probably not even a good place to hide, unless you had a lot of family living there. Which Denter did, and he’d be surrounded by them. A good idea then to find her horse, or at the very least jump someone with a sword.
The fall from the horse – the voice of the Sibyl – had made her groggy. Achillia swayed. She wondered if the earth was moving again but doubted it. No, she just needed a few seconds to allow her head to stop swimming. She moved to the side of the path and leant against a sturdy-looking tree. Until being thrown, she’d been making good time, had left Pompeii at first light. And yet…
It was dark.
She’d been aiming to arrive in Herculaneum by late morning. Maybe early afternoon. But it was already getting dark. She looked up at the sky, towards the distant Vesuvius. Her stomach turned.
Most of the mountain appeared to have been lifted into the air. A great, thick torrent of smoke was rising into the sky. Higher than even the bravest gods might venture – and then spreading out like a tree, the top of the cloud expanding to form branches above the main trunk. The smoke was completely black, blocking out the sun, but also lighting up every few seconds with brief jagged flashes.
You will save Marcus Villius Denter.
“Shit,” she whispered. She turned and started to walk quickly. After only a few steps, a stone landed in front of her. Automatically, Achillia stooped to pick it up. She yelped and dropped it. The stone was scorching hot, and more followed in its wake, pattering all around her. “Shit,” she said again, this time louder.
You will save her husband Marcus Villius Denter by taking him to meet Balbus in Herculaneum.
72
New Pompeii
NICK FELL TO his knees. He lifted the sword in both hands so he could feel the tip of the weapon against his stomach. He just needed to pull it towards him. Hard and fast. The blade would do the rest. There would be no more Nick Houghton. No more Decimus Horatius Pullus.
No more pain.
“All I ever wanted to be was a Roman,” Nick said, quietly. “Ever since I was a small boy, visiting Hadrian’s Wall. Waving my fist at the barbarian hordes as they descended south.” He knew his words meant nothing to Habitus. “He was a fine emperor. And born in Spain. Imagine that, one of Rome’s greatest emperors, and he wasn’t even born in Italy.”
“Do you really want these to be your last words?”
“Neither was Trajan,” continued Nick. “Or Claudius. You know him, don’t you? Claudius, the historian? The stuttering fool? Found hiding by the Praetorian Guard after Caligula had been killed? The most unlikely of emperors. He was born in Gaul, not Italy. Not Rome. So I guess I’ve always been wrong about what made a Roman.”
Nick shifted his grip on the sword, and started to breathe fast. He looked up at Habitus. “You have the cellphone?” he asked, his voice breaking.
“Yes,” replied Habitus.
“And you think that means you control the future?”
“You said so yourself, Pullus. Someone spoke to you from the future. They called this phone. And to do so, they needed to know its number. Its unique identifier. And with the phone, I’m the only person who’s going to know it. And I’ll be the only man left in this town called Marcus. Why, you think my logic flawed? You think I’m wrong?”
Pullus didn’t answer. But he already knew the frumentarius was wrong. Because he’d read a clear message from the future, transmitted deep into the past. And he’d heard the voice on the phone. All he needed to do was hold his nerve. The off-hand remark. The one additional piece of information that had allowed him to make sense of all this.
I have a bunch of letters from my father.
Pullus screwed his eyes shut, screaming inside his own head. Because if this didn’t work anyone could find those letters. Even Habitus. And then they would all know. Because he couldn’t protect a thought that had already been written down.
The frumentarius took a few steps forward. “It’s time, Pullus,” he said. “It’s time for the man who can’t be killed to die.”
“I heard a voice on the phone,” Pullus whispered, almost to himself. “A voice I didn’t recognise.” His words were barely audible, and Habitus leant forwards.
Instinct. Even for a spy, it was instinct.
Something he shouldn’t have really done.
“But have you ever heard a recording of your own voice, Habitus?” Pullus turned the sword and thrust it upwards. Straight into the frumentarius’s gut. “Because if you have you’ll know it’s hard to recognise it. Especially if you’re going to develop a locked jaw.”
73
Ancient Herculaneum, AD 79
ACHILLIA HAD LONG stopped being scared of the ground moving beneath her feet. She stumbled into the streets of Herculaneum, not really knowing where she was going but knowing she needed to be there.
The town was no coastal navel. The buildings looked expensive, the streets well maintained. She could see a theatre in the distance. There was money here, more so than further around the bay in Pompeii.
A brief shower of hot rock and pebbles scattered around her. She looked upwards at the cloud above Vesuvius. It looked heavy. The branches of the smoke-laden tree now looked more and more like a hammer about to fall.
Just as soon as the trunk snapped.
She ignored it and concentrated on the words of the Sibyl. She saw a woman in the distance, covering her head with a pillow and hurrying across the street. Achillia followed her down an alley, felt a moment’s panic as a building beside her started to crack, and then caught the woman by the arm.
“Marcus Villius Denter!”
The woman looked back at her, confused.
“Marcus Villius Denter! Where is he? Where can I find him?”
The woman didn’t answer. She looked feeble, but still managed to wriggle her arm free and scramble away. Achillia let her go. Another load of hot rock and ash fell around her, singeing her hair, gathering on her shoulders. She headed back to the open street and stumbled onwards, heading through the town until she managed to reach its very edge. A thin promenade that looked down over a wall and deep into the town’s harbour.
And then she laughed. Because the sea had gone.
There was no water. No sea. Just a long, wide expanse of sand covered in nothing but a myriad of small pools, fish and stranded boats. It looked odd, desperately funny. Lined up against the boathouses along the shore stood what must have been most of the town’s inhabitants, staring mute into the bay. Seemingly stranded between the shore and the town’s walls.
Slaves, free men and the rich, Achillia thought bitterly. All suddenly the same, staring at the catastrophe unfolding in front of them, when all they had to do was to look up to see what was going to happen next. The hammer above them.
You will save her husband Marcus Villius Denter by taking him to meet Balbus in Herculaneum.
Achillia felt anger rise in her belly. All this time, the Sibyl had been toying with her. Marking her path, and trying to influence her future. But she didn’t want it. There’s no such thing as fate, she reminded herself. No such thing as destiny.
“Why? Why the fuck should I?”
There was no answer from the Sibyl. And what had Barbatus once told her? Hadn’t the Sibyl once burned her own prophecies? Hadn’t she burned the future?
Behind her, buildings fell. Each one filled the air with more dust. She wanted to shout at the Sibyl. But she didn’t.
Because she’d found Balbus.
She stumbled towards him. A man riding a white horse, loo
king out over the harbour. Perhaps signalling to those arriving by boat that this had once been his town. Once. A man who was already dead. A man who’d already been given his statue.
M. Nonius Balbus.
The inscription was clear.
Achillia blinked, again laughing. A senator. He’d been dead for years. The Sibyl had been fucking with her. Telling her to rescue some man by taking him to see another who was already dead.
She turned away from the statue. Another woman was now heading past her, down towards the harbour. She took a step forward to block her, but the woman swerved just out of reach. “Marcus Villius Denter!” she shouted, but got no response. Perhaps she didn’t hear. Perhaps she didn’t know who she was talking about. Not that it mattered. Denter would be down in the harbour, along with all the rest. But to find him down there? Amongst all the others? No, it suddenly seemed impossible. And that was perhaps something even the Sibyl hadn’t foreseen.
“It’s just me,” Achillia shouted into the air. “I’m the only one here!”
The ground moved again. From below her, in the harbour, came a wave of noise. A collective scream that signalled they all now understood. Achillia turned back to the mountain. The trunk of the tree looked to have finally snapped, the cloud of ash and smoke falling, tumbling down the mountain.
“It’s just me,” Achillia shouted again. She leapt forward and began to climb the statue, as a thin mist started to envelop its base. “It’s just me,” she said again, this time more quietly. She grasped the statue’s head with both hands. “Fuck your fate! So make your choice, Sibyl! Make your choice!”
74
New Pompeii
To Nick Houghton, NovusPart
Son,
By the time you read this, I may very well be dead. I know it is too late for us to reconcile our differences, but I still want you to know that I am very proud of you. I keep reading about you and the Empress of Time, Calpurnia. I can’t believe that you were once my Nick, now my Pullus – master of Pompeii. I hope you know that your mother would have been very proud too, and I only wish she could have seen it.
If we don’t see each other again, I can only wish you every success on your onward journey. Who knows? Perhaps the Master of Pompeii will become the Emperor of Time?
Love, Dad
Joe Arlen.
The figure standing beside the statue in the Fortuna Augusta wasn’t what he was expecting. He looked young. Almost a kid, not quite an adult. And he stood examining the detail of the inscription on the rear wall like a tourist might survey the finest frescos of Campania, showing more interest than either McMahon or Whelan ever had. Then again, New Pompeii was Arlen’s idea. It was his baby, something he must have been thinking about for a long time before he’d finally had the opportunity and technology to put it into action.
“It was written for you,” Arlen said, sounding at once both bewildered and relieved. “This is what started it all. At Cambridge, I was shown a fragment of a fresco by a friend studying ancient history. The Master of Pompeii will become the Emperor of Time. It was close to when I made my breakthrough with the temporal technology, and more than enough to trigger my obsession with this place. To focus what I wanted to do with the NovusPart device. I thought it was my destiny.”
“And is it everything you hoped for?” Pullus asked, suddenly uncertain. This wasn’t the man he’d been warned about. Not the man who’d lost his mind before being transported into the future. Maybe that had all happened later. But there was a spark there. Clear in his eyes. Some hint of genius. Maybe madness too.
“It is more than I thought I could possibly achieve.”
Pullus walked forward. His limbs remained stiff, and he knew the path to disability he would eventually follow. But he also knew that he still had time, and that diseases could be cured. Or at the very least slowed down, and relieved. Especially if pressure could be placed on those investigating the illness. What would it do to him though? Whilst he waited? How bad would it get?
Arlen continued to stare at the inscription. “So your father is dead, I presume?”
“Yes,” Nick replied. “His letters are at my townhouse. Unopened.” Pullus pointed at the rear wall of the Fortuna Augusta. “I assume the last one I received must say something like that.”
“And so we know what we must do,” said Arlen. The young man’s eyes were moving back and forth, as if working at a puzzle. “We’d need some way to communicate with the past, and get someone to write all this down for you.”
Pullus’s throat pinched. “They had no cellphones back then,” he said, thinking about how his future self would soon start communicating with Harris and directing his actions.
“You wouldn’t need one,” replied Arlen. He laughed as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “There’d be no signal. But I wonder if it would be possible to create a small perturbation using the existing tracking systems. A vibration, if you will. Deep inside the ear, by moving particles a fraction. Bumping them about. It would still be difficult of course, the message perhaps not clear. You may even be able to transmit images, if you could do the same thing in the eye.”
“Then why a phone? Why use a phone at all?”
“Oh, a phone would be useful. It would stop someone thinking they were going mad. Voices in the head, and all that.” Arlen stopped, his eyes still flicking around. He started chuckling to himself. “Less risk of that in the past,” he said. “More gods to whom we could attribute our voices. But still, it wouldn’t be pleasant for whoever we chose.”
Pullus remained nervous. The power Arlen had once held over all of time had quickly corrupted him. But as Calpurnia had said, that power had now been taken away. A madman is only dangerous if he has a sword or an army. That didn’t mean, however, that Arlen could be allowed a free hand.
Behind him, some movement caught Nick’s attention. Taedia hovered on the portico of the temple, a handful of men with her. As soon as he’d dealt with the bodies at Calpurnia’s villa, he’d come back to town to speak with the Ordo, to put in motion new elections for the posts of duumvir and aedile. The men of the town council had listened to him patiently, aware no doubt that outside in the forum was a large gathering of his temple followers. Not just those that had already considered him to be a god, but all the men, women and children who were now grateful that he’d stopped Calpurnia’s son before he could travel down the path of Caligula, Nero or Commodus.
Pullus swallowed. “Tell me about Herculaneum,” he said.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Let’s just say I made a promise,” Pullus replied. “Calpurnia wanted to rescue her husband from Herculaneum. She’d been trying for years…”
“We can only get momentary glimpses through the ash cloud,” Arlen replied. “The pull wouldn’t be clean… you might not get everything coming through.”
“And what if we could get Calpurnia’s husband to wait in a specific part of the town? Somewhere we could get a lock? Maybe somewhere easy to find, like at the foot of a statue?”
“Then, yes: it would be possible. You want to bring someone here?”
Pullus kept silent for a moment. No, he didn’t want to bring Marcus, Calpurnia’s husband, here. But that didn’t mean he had to die in agony. He thought momentarily about how he himself had been snatched from the modern ruins of Herculaneum. Brought forward through time, but not all the way to their present. “I just want to skip him forward a few hours. Drop him back into the timeline after the eruption. Do you think that would be possible?”
“No, not yet,” Arlen replied. “But communication with the past? Skipping people forwards? Everything is possible with the NovusPart device, given enough time…”
75
“You’re sure this time?”
“Yes. The readings remain unclear, but there was one person standing near the statue, exactly as we instructed.”
“Then we’ve finally saved him. I kept my promise.”
NovusPart Device transcript
, New Roman Empire
Pompeii, AD 79, post-eruption
“AN ASTROLOGER CAST a young boy’s horoscope,” whispered Achillia, stretching out on her back. Her body felt like it was tucked into a soft warm bed. But she knew she was outside, resting in ash. Not quite alive, and not yet buried either. “‘He will be a lawyer, then a town official, then a governor.’ And yet the young boy died. ‘Ah, well,’ the astrologer said to his mourning mother. ‘He would have been all those things, if he’d lived.’”
Achillia chuckled. Around her, the plain of pebble, rock and ash continued to steam and smoke.
She was quite alone. And in some ways, she knew she wasn’t. She could see buildings, their upper floors just bobbing out of the ground, as if gasping for air. The largest looked like a temple. She stared at it for a good few seconds. There’d been nothing like it in Herculaneum. At least, not that she’d seen in her brief time there.
She was back in Pompeii. Yet she still couldn’t quite place it. The horizon looked different. Vesuvius was half its size. The town was gone, buried. The people all probably entombed beneath her. Habitus. Barbatus. The baker, and the crippled boy.
All gone.
She got to her feet and dusted herself down. Ran a hand through her hair, and rubbed at her scalp. The resulting cloud of dust caused her to cough.
She stared at the top of the Temple of Jupiter. She’d failed. Failed to kill Denter. Failed to save him. And yet somehow she didn’t care. The pressure in her ears – something she’d got used to since first visiting the Sibyl’s cave – was suddenly gone.
She smiled. Her failure didn’t matter because she was alive. She’d beaten them all. She could go back to Rome. And then she stopped.
She was the only one here. The only one alive for miles.
And she was standing above what had been the Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. Pompeii’s reserves of gold and silver were probably only ten or so metres beneath her feet. Completely unattended.
Empire of Time Page 28