The tremor subsided as Livia’s pain grew. She strained against the arms of Veneria’s assistants. She felt her body ripping apart with every push.
“Be strong, love.” Maximus gripped Livia’s hand. His palm was as icy as hers. He closed his eyes and prayed to Nona, the goddess of pregnancy, the spinner of life’s thread. But it was her sister’s wrinkled face that Maximus saw in his head. Morta sneered at him, holding up the shears that she used to cut what Nona spun. She ran her crooked finger over its dull blade, a cruel promise of how the pain would be slow.
Veneria positioned her hands around the baby’s crowning head. “Just one more push,” she said.
An animal-like cry rose out of Livia’s throat.
No one heard her.
A thunderous roar drowned out her scream. It echoed in the arcaded streets of Herculaneum and rumbled through the ground, bringing the town to its knees.
Maximus was not sure if the ground had stopped shaking. His body had not. He unclasped his trembling hands from his ears. The terrible roar had stopped. And so had Livia’s screams. There was only a hollow ringing in his head. It was like being underwater, he thought. He watched a mute scene unfold before him.
Veneria led the pantomime. She held an infant in her arms, its body staining her tunic with blood. Maximus could not see its face or hear its cry, but his deafness gave him hope. As long as he could not hear Veneria’s condolences, he could pretend that his child was alive.
Veneria approached Maximus and Livia, but her eyes were not on them or the child she carried. Her gaze was fixed on the sky outside the window. Wordlessly—because she was no longer capable of speaking—she laid the baby, as was the custom, at its father’s feet.
The ringing in Maximus’s ears faded. He could now hear the lusty cries of the child. The sound was new to him. He had never heard anything so puzzling. It made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. And so he did. The baby had been laid at his feet to be judged if it was worthy of life. He took the bundle from the floor and looked into her bright brown eyes. He knew then that the real question was whether he was worthy of her. He turned to his wife. “Livia, we have a daughter—”
That’s when he saw it—the abomination that already gripped Veneria and her assistants by their throats. His daughter slipped from his arms. Livia caught her. Maximus knelt beside his family.
The mountain outside his window had spawned a demon. It writhed upward toward the sky, taking the shape of a black and gnarled tree, more enormous than any myth’s imagining. Its sprawling canopy scorched the daylight from the sky, gorging itself on the sun and a town’s shattered peace. It was this demon’s birth cry that had roared through Herculaneum, Maximus thought, and it was its mother’s labor that had shaken the ground.
He held his family close. He kissed his daughter’s head and asked for her forgiveness for the choice he was making for her. He would let her live in a world that was about to end.
The tremors were growing stronger. Blue lightning ripped across the dark clouds spewing from the mountain. It was clear to Maximus that the nightmare was not about to fade away. Things were only getting worse.
He walked over to his daughter on the bed. She slept soundly. Livia lay beside her, too weak to move. Maximus kissed both of them lightly on their foreheads before leaving the room.
From his terrace he could see the sea churning. Its convulsions almost matched the chaos on the shore. The town of five thousand was spilling onto the beach, neighbors and friends trampling one another for the remaining boats. Fishermen held their ground for the highest bid.
The panic below was no place for his family, but as the sky grew darker and the thunder louder, Maximus accepted that he had no other choice. Livia was in no condition to flee the countryside by foot as many already had. Their only possible escape was by sea. If they didn’t leave now, they never would.
One fisherman was now tenfold wealthier for the trade he had just made. The sea-weathered man waited for his passengers at the end of the shallows. His fishing boat rocked against the jetty, pummeled by the rising waves. Two grim-faced slaves drew their swords and kept the crowd gathering on the dock away from the boat for their master.
Maximus carried Livia from their villa to the teeming beach. Veneria followed him closely, clutching their newborn daughter under her cloak. They pushed through the swarm of people. Their clothes and skin became stained with the sweat and tears of the frantic throng. They made their way to the jetty.
Maximus set a barely conscious Livia down on the fishing boat. Veneria squeezed next to her and propped her upright with her shoulder. The baby wriggled against her chest, searching for a breast to suckle. The women servants and their children boarded the boat next. The crowd on the dock pressed closer. Maximus’s men waved them away with their swords.
Maximus stroked his daughter’s pink cheek and climbed back to the jetty. He took his place beside his men and drew his sword. He ordered the crowd to move back. He knew that if he dropped his sword even slightly, the crowd would swarm the boat—and all that was important to him in this world would be lost to the sea.
The fisherman called to Maximus and urged that they cast off. The waves were swelling and soon even escape by boat would no longer be possible.
But Maximus was not yet ready to leave. There was enough room for four more people. He searched the faces of the crowd around him and struggled to make the impossible choice.
A woman raised her small child above the horde and begged him to take her son. He reached through the wall of bodies between them and pulled the woman and her child from the frenzy. The pleas and screams of the crowd grew louder. They edged closer.
Two more, Maximus thought. An old woman stumbled, struggling to get up. He lowered his sword and bent down to take her hand. A large man burst from the crowd and rushed toward him, his sword pointed at Maximus’s chest. Maximus parried his thrust and knocked the sword out of the man’s hand. It fell into the water. The man spat and tackled him to the dock. Maximus’s men jumped on the attacker and tried to pull him off. The crowd surged toward the boat.
Maximus felt the man’s grip tighten around his neck. He gasped for air. One of his slaves pressed his sword against the man’s throat and sliced it from ear to ear. Blood gushed into Maximus’s nose and mouth. He choked and shoved the man off him. The corpse fell into the water next to the old woman Maximus had tried to help. She was floating facedown, her tunic swirling in the roiling sea.
His attacker’s blood splattered from Maximus’s lips as he begged the crowd to stop pressing forward. He pointed his sword at them to keep them at bay and ordered his men onto the boat. The crowd edged closer, inches from his sword. He thrust his sword forward. The mob stumbled back against one another. A man fell into the water. Maximus swung his sword again. He was all that stood between the mob and his family. Reason had left their eyes. They were going to rush the boat.
A large wave crashed into the fishing boat. Maximus heard his daughter cry. There was no more time. He looked at his family and tried to remember their faces. Livia opened her eyes and he gazed into them for the last time. The fisherman screamed for him to cast off over the roar of the surging mob. Maximus raised his sword and cut the rope that tethered the boat to the dock. Then he spun around, his blade meeting the wall of flesh.
The mob lost their taste for blood when the boat carrying Maximus’s family sailed away. They were too broken to hate or hope. Maximus crawled to the shore. He had fallen into the water when the crowd pounced on him. He clung to the timbers of the jetty and waited for them to disperse.
He took shelter in one of the vaults where the boats were kept in the harbor. They were all empty now. He had no desire to return to his villa. The emptiness of his home would kill him sooner than any demon would.
The chaos on the beach was gone, a dense silence taking its place. People no longer shoved and clawed at one another. There was nothing left to fight over.
Maximus warmed his hands by the
fire at the mouth of the boathouse. He looked around the room and into the faces of the people crouched inside it. He wondered if any of those huddled there had been among the mob on the jetty earlier. If they had been, he did not recognize them, and nor, it seemed, did they recognize him. Perhaps this was because they were all different people now, stripped of everything but their names. He was now a husband without a wife, a father without a daughter, a man without a life. He bowed his head and folded his arms around the cold pit in his stomach. Charms tinkled in his toga. He reached inside the folds and pulled out the bulla, the protection he had failed to give his nameless child. Hot tears welled in his eyes.
He heard a child whimper against his mother’s pregnant belly. The woman bundled the young boy closer to her and soothed him with a lullaby. Two more, he thought sadly. The boat could have carried two more. A raspy voice whispered in his ear. He jerked his head back. An old man was speaking to him.
“She is a widow,” he told Maximus.
Maximus looked at the widow’s swollen belly and thought that she could not have lost her husband too long ago—seven months at the most.
“Her husband was killed today,” the old man said.
“Today?” Maximus asked. “How?”
“I heard people say that he was murdered by runaway slaves on the jetty,” the man said. “They sliced his throat before stealing his boat. Now his family is stranded here with the rest of us.”
“Oh.” The truth behind the man’s death dawned on Maximus. There was no point correcting the old man, he thought. It would be easier for the man’s widow to grieve her husband as she remembered him. The man Maximus’s slave had killed had attacked him out of desperation, and if their roles had been reversed, Maximus knew that he would have done the same.
“But I’m sure we will be rescued,” the old man said. “The boats will come back for us, you’ll see.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Shears and silence
HERCULANEUM EXCAVATION SITE
Five Years Ago
Shelley and Max walked down the stone ramp that led to the ancient waterfront. The eruption of Vesuvius had pushed the sea over half a mile back from where it used to lap at the shores of Herculaneum. Now, instead of a view of the coast, a seventy-foot wall of hardened volcanic flow stood at the harbor’s edge, marking the boundary of the excavation site.
Built into the wall at the bottom of the ramp was a row of large, arched stone vaults. Max pulled back the tarpaulin cover from one of the vaults and ushered Shelley inside.
She sat in the hollow of the vaulted boathouse next to Max, looking out into the darkness where the sea once was.
“They found three hundred bodies huddled together in these vaults. One of the skeletons they found was of a pregnant mother still clutching her son,” Max said.
Shelley leaned against his shoulder. “Tell me how they died.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I want to know.”
Max sighed. “Shortly after midnight, the pressure that held up the massive volcanic cloud column over Vesuvius collapsed, sending a tidal wave of superheated gas, ash, and molten rock crashing down the mountain. It hurtled toward Herculaneum at a speed of one hundred kilometers per hour, scorching everything in its path. It took only about four minutes for the burning wave to engulf the town and reach the shore.
“Based on the contorted limbs of the skeletons they found here, scientists say that the people died from intense thermal shock. Plainly speaking, they were cooked to death. The extreme heat—around four hundred degrees centigrade—caused their hands and feet to contract into a death grip. Their bones and teeth cracked and their flesh vaporized. Their brains boiled in their head and their skulls exploded.”
Shelley covered her mouth with her hand and tried not to be sick.
“But the scientists believe that all this happened in the blink of an eye,” Max said. “The people were incinerated instantly and their death was painless and swift.”
“Thank God,” she said. “They didn’t even know what happened to them.”
“Shelley,” he said, “I said, that’s what the scientists believe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Death is never swift, luv,” Max said, “no matter how those left behind would like to comfort themselves with the thought.”
HERCULANEUM
August 25, A.D. 79
1:00 A.M.
The dark cloud over Vesuvius bled seamlessly into the night sky. Maximus stood on the beach and waited for a flash of lightning to reveal where it ended and where it began. He wanted to see the face of his enemy before it struck him down. He did not have to wait long. Before the next flash struck, the demon was racing down the mountain to meet him.
Maximus watched the broiling tree trunk collapse upon itself and surge toward Herculaneum. The beach shook as heated gusts of wind blew down from the mountain and pushed back the sea. This is how he would die. Interesting, he thought, surprising himself at his detachment. He did not know if his family was alive, and without them, he did not wish to live. He welcomed the end. Perhaps in the fields of Elysium he would see his wife and daughter again.
A child began to cry. The sound came from inside the boathouse. Maximus peered in. It was the child of the man who had attacked him. No lullaby could quiet him now. His mother rocked him against her breast. The people in the boathouse huddled closer together. If they had seen what was coming for them, he thought, they would not have bothered. No vault or embrace would save any of them.
Maximus looked up at the black wave sweeping over Herculaneum. He felt its heat on his skin. It rose over his villa, engulfing it. It surged over the stone ramp leading to the shore. And then it fell upon him. In the corner of his eye, he caught a glint of metal. It was Morta raising her dull shears.
A friend had told Maximus once that his entire life had flashed before him when his horse threw him, and he thought he was going to die. Maximus now knew that his friend was a liar. Death was not as kind as his friend had led him to believe. What Maximus saw as the wave cooked him from the inside was not the life that he had lived—it was the life he would not have. He watched the fishing boat carry his family to safety. He watched his daughter grow into a beautiful stranger with amber eyes just like his own. He watched his widow find comfort in another man’s arms.
Livia.
Her name was going to be his last thought. Maximus wondered if there was still time to say it out loud.
He had difficulty telling which came first: his lungs roasting, his tears broiling his eyes, or his skin flaking into ash.
Maximus did not know what came next because he no longer had a body to feel the pain. But there were two things he did know.
It was now silent.
And he did not want to die.
HERCULANEUM EXCAVATION SITE
Five Years Ago
1:00 A.M.
Shelley sighed as they made their way out of the ruins. “I can’t decide.”
“Decide what?”
“I can’t decide which was more tragic,” she said. “How this family began or how it ended.”
“Dying is not the real tragedy, Shelley.”
“It’s not?”
“Forgetting is.”
She thought of Dex, his pictures, and the train he refused to jump from. He had said that being forgotten was worse than dying. She now wondered if what he was really afraid of was being the one who would forget. Perhaps he had taken those photographs for himself as much as for Sheila. It was the same reason, she realized, that Max took people on his tour. Isabelle and Livia were long gone. They would not care if they were remembered or not. It was Max who did not want to forget—and she did not know why. But she did know that she and Max would now remember their story together. She reached for his hand. “There was no tragedy here, then.”
Max smiled and pulled her into an embrace.
“You know, something just occurred to me,” Shelley said.
&n
bsp; “What?” he asked.
“There weren’t any chickens or eggs in this story.”
Max smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “And look what happened.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Shells and seasickness
A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES
Now
Shelley fastened her seat belt as the plane began its descent to Manila. She wondered how much of what Max had said about Herculaneum was true. She hoped that he was lying. Imagining how a stranger suffered in those final moments on the beach without feeling some measure of empathy was impossible. Realizing that the stranger was her husband … She couldn’t bear the thought. Her eyes darted around her, searching for a distraction. She glimpsed Paolo’s face. Something was wrong.
It was a change so subtle, she thought, that if Paolo hadn’t looked so much like her husband, she would have missed it. But Paolo did look like Max, and Shelley knew their shared face well enough to see how the laugh lines around their eyes could deepen ever so slightly, how the back of their throats could constrict, and how the muscle behind their brow could tense up. It was the same way Max had looked after he had seen Mihael. She could tell that Paolo was scared. “What’s the matter?”
“Huh?” Paolo pasted on a quick smile. “Nothing.”
“No,” she said. “Something’s bothering you. It’s written all over your face.”
He sighed. “It’s … it’s just that I didn’t expect it to happen like that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maximus was on the beach,” Paolo said. “I think that’s when it happened.”
“What happened?”
Before Ever After Page 26