He gazed towards the blue bay and the volcano beyond. The tree-shaped pillar of ash which rose from Vesuvius was no longer white but a dirty grey. The ground still trembled beneath them.
‘I suspected Rectina was pregnant with Pliny’s baby. When he was born, I saw the clubfoot. That was when I knew he wasn’t mine.’ He drained his cup again. ‘I named him Publius.’ Tascius gave a hollow laugh. ‘After my father.’
‘Did you ever tell your wife what you suspected?’ asked Aristo.
Tascius shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to lose her. I loved her, you see. Later I couldn’t accuse her because . . .’ Tascius refilled his cup with undiluted wine.
‘The world will soon end. May as well tell you everything.
‘Soon after the baby was born, I’d finished my military service. We decided to move to Rectina’s Herculaneum villa. Only took two slaves with us. The rest were due to arrive in a day or two, with our belongings. It was a tiring journey. Rectina went to have a nap with the baby.
‘Somehow I found myself in Rectina’s room. The baby lay next to her on the couch. I remember he was wrapped up tightly in swaddling clothes. I picked him up. He opened his eyes. Great dark eyes like Rectina’s.
‘I carried him to the window. A low window with iron bars. Overlooking vineyards. I rested the baby on the sill against the bars. Then I went outside.’
Tascius got up from his couch and stood near the colonnade, where the shade ended and the sunshine began. His back was to them now but they could still hear his voice.
‘If the baby had cried, or made the slightest noise. But he didn’t. From outside the window it was easy enough to pull him through the bars.
‘I saddled a horse. Rode to Pompeii and left him in some bushes by the river. Slave-girls were washing their clothes nearby. He began to cry as I rode off. I knew he would be found.’
Tascius paused for a moment, resting his head against one of the cool white columns.
‘On my way back to the villa, I stopped at Herculaneum to see an old friend. In case anyone should ask where I’d been. Had a cup of wine with him. When I returned at dusk, the house was in uproar. Rectina was . . . I thought she might be relieved to be rid of the baby. But her anguish was terrible. I never wanted to hurt her.’
There was a distant rumble from the volcano and another tremor shook the villa. Tascius’s wine-cup, which he had left near the edge of the table, fell and shattered on the marble floor. Tascius did not turn around and no one else moved.
‘The next morning I rode back to Pompeii. Searched the river bank. Made enquiries. Posted rewards. Punished our house-slaves. But the baby had vanished.
‘Later, I thought that if Rectina had another child perhaps she would forget the first one. But there were no more babies. Rectina’s womb had closed up with grief. Or perhaps the gods were punishing me.’ He turned and looked at them.
‘When Rectina took in that first little orphan girl, she seemed happy again. I allowed her to keep the baby. And eventually eight more. You’ve seen how I love them. How much they love me. I’m a good father.’ His face relaxed for a moment. Then he frowned and walked over to the shattered wine-cup. He knelt beside it and began picking up the shards of clay.
‘Then when he appeared at the Vulcanalia yesterday, she fainted. I brought her back here. When she revived she desperately wanted to know where he was. I told her I didn’t know. She looked at me and said “It was our son, wasn’t it, Titus?” and I said “Not our son, your son.” She asked what I meant. At last I said what I had never said before: “That cripple was never mine. He was Pliny’s child.” She looked at me. And I think . . . For the first time she realised what I had done all those years ago.’
Tascius stood and squeezed his thumb where he had pricked it on one of the shards.
His voice faltered. ‘Then Rectina asked me where he was. And may the gods forgive me. I said . . . I said, “Who? Pliny, or your son?”’
Tascius looked at the drop of red blood on his thumb.
‘Early this morning she took my daughters and left me forever. Now I am truly alone.’
Lupus and Vulcan were less than two miles from Misenum, with the harbour in clear sight, when something struck the blacksmith’s forehead and knocked him backwards.
At first Lupus thought Vulcan was dead. He crawled forward and pressed his fingertips against Vulcan’s neck, as he had once seen Mordecai do. After a moment he felt a pulse, weak but steady.
As he took his hand away, Lupus noticed his fingertips were covered in blood. The blow had left an ugly gash at Vulcan’s hairline. He found the still smoking pumice and weighed it in his hand. It was an ugly chunk of rock, denser and heavier than the pumice which had fallen so far. It must have struck Vulcan a glancing blow. A direct hit would surely have killed him.
Lupus stood up, planted his feet apart to stop the boat from rocking and calculated the distance to the harbour. A mile. A mile and a half at most. He could try to row but first he would have to shift Vulcan’s powerful body and that would take too long.
It would be quicker to swim. He had covered that distance a month before, but he had been strong then and it had been a fine, fair day.
Now the sky was raining ash and gravel. And ugly lumps of clay mixed with pumice, like the one that had struck Vulcan. Lupus fingered the oilcloth pouch around his neck, Rectina’s message to Pliny. He knew it was the only hope for Clio and her sisters.
He stripped off his tunic, took a deep breath and jumped.
As Lupus plunged into the bay he almost cried out. The salt water made every tiny cut and burn on his face and body sting. It felt as if a hundred needles were pricking his skin.
He knew salt water was good for surface wounds. He had heard Doctor Mordecai telling one of his patients, a man with sores on his skin, to bathe in the sea.
But this water had a scum of ash floating on its surface and his back was exposed to a steady rain of debris from the volcano.
Soon, Lupus began to tire. He had been up since before dawn, had ridden for two hours, had carried Clio at least half a mile. Now his arms ached and his lungs could not take in enough air.
He stopped to tread water for a moment. He could see a man-made breakwater no more than half a mile distant and beyond it the masts which marked the naval port. He could even make out the silhouette of three poplars on one of the hills overlooking the harbour. Those three trees marked his goal, the admiral’s home.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, depended on him. He took a breath and struck out again.
‘Here! Give me your hand, boy. Up you come. By Hercules! What have you done to yourself? And what were you doing paddling about among the Roman fleet? This is a restricted area, you know. Soldiers and marines only. Caius! Have you got a blanket? An old cloak? Anything? Yes, that’ll do. Wrap this round yourself, boy. Better? Now under ordinary circumstances I’d have to report you to – Hey! Where are you going? Come back, you mongrel! That’s not your cloak!’
At the Villa Pomponiana in Stabia, Nubia ran to one of the dining-room columns.
‘Bug-boats!’ She cried and pointed towards the bay. From beneath a couch, Nipur sensed her excitement and began to bark.
‘Bug-boats?’ said Tascius, frowning at the slave-girl.
‘There!’ cried Jonathan. ‘Coming out from behind the promontory. Warships! One, two, three, four . . .’
‘By the gods, you have good eyesight.’ Tascius squinted. ‘Yes . . . yes! I see them. Looks like the imperial fleet!’
‘Those ships are powered by oar, are they not?’ asked Aristo.
‘Yes,’ replied Tascius, ‘by both oar and sail.’
‘Then they can go anywhere, even against the wind.’
‘But where are they going?’ asked Jonathan.
‘I’d guess Herculaneum,’ said Tascius.
‘It’s the admiral!’ cried Flavia, jumping to her feet and clapping her hands. ‘It’s Admiral Pliny! He’s launched the imperial Roman fleet to rescue t
he people at the foot of the volcano!’
Jonathan added, ‘And please, God, to rescue us, too!’
Lupus sat on a couch in the warship’s open cabin, wearing an oversized tunic and sipping warm honeyed wine. The sleek warship sped over the water, its banks of oars rising and falling in time to the rowers’ chant. Behind them followed a dozen similar warships.
Admiral Pliny reclined beside Lupus. In his hand was Rectina’s note. The admiral had read it several times but now he unfolded the papyrus again. Pliny’s scribe Phrixus stood nearby, his stylus poised over a wax tablet.
‘She writes that she is terrified by the danger threatening her and she begs me to rescue her and her daughters from an awful fate . . .’ Pliny read it aloud and then looked down at Lupus. ‘It’s a good thing you came when you did. Phrixus and I were just about to take a much smaller boat to investigate the phenomenon. I had no idea the volcano posed such a threat to the inhabitants.’
As they passed the promontory of Puteoli, Lupus thought of Vulcan, lying unconscious in a rowing boat. He stood and gazed over the water, then grunted and pointed to his right.
‘What is it? What do you see?’
Lupus walked back and forth in front of the admiral, imitating Vulcan’s limp.
‘Have you injured your foot? Are you hurt?’
Lupus shook his head vigorously, then snatched the wax tablet from the scribe’s startled hands. Phrixus uttered an exclamation, but Pliny held up his hand. They both watched as the boy wrote something in the wax.
Lupus had been studying with Aristo for over a month and he had learned his alphabet and a few basic words. He had never written the name Vulcan before, but now he tried, sounding out each letter in his head as Aristo had taught him. Then he handed the tablet to Pliny. On it he had written in neat capitals:
VOLCAN
‘Yes, my boy, very astute! The phenomenon we are witnessing is indeed a “volcano”. I never suspected that Vesuvius –’
Lupus snatched the tablet back from the startled admiral and added two words. He showed Pliny the tablet again.
VOLCAN IN A BOAT
Then he pointed out to sea.
‘Over there!’ cried Phrixus. ‘I see something. A small rowing boat! The blacksmith Vulcan must be in that boat.’
Flavia helped Jonathan tie a linen napkin over the lower half of his face. He had soaked it in water to stop the fine ash from filling his lungs.
She finished off the knot at the back and they rejoined Nubia between two pillars of the dining room. They watched the Roman fleet move across the bay like insects crawling across a polished jade table.
Occasionally, they felt the ground vibrate and saw the tree-shaped plume of ash thicken and change colour. The air had been growing denser, and it was harder to make out details.
‘Have they reached the coast?’ asked Aristo anxiously.
‘Bug-boats stop,’ said Nubia quietly.
‘Are they disembarking?’ Tascius asked.
‘What are they doing?’ Jonathan held Pliny’s sachet of herbs under his napkin and Flavia noticed he wasn’t wheezing.
‘I don’t know . . .’ said Tascius, wiping the sweat from his face with his forearm. ‘Perhaps the shore is blocked. It’s hard to tell. It seems to be getting dark early today.’
‘It is dark, isn’t it?’ murmured Aristo.
‘Look at the sun,’ said Flavia. ‘It’s as red as blood.’
‘The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood at the end of this world,’ said a voice behind them and they all turned to look.
Mordecai slowly pulled the linen cloth over Xanthus’s face. Then he bowed his head and recited the prayer for the dead.
Lupus watched as Pliny’s sailors lifted Vulcan out of the rowing boat into the warship and laid him in the cabin, on the admiral’s couch.
‘By the gods, he looks dreadful!’ wheezed Pliny.
The smith’s burns and cuts had not been washed by salt water, as Lupus’s had. His face and body were terrible to see. For a long moment the admiral stood looking down at Vulcan. Then he turned to Lupus.
‘He rowed all this way from Rectina’s villa? Impossible!’
Lupus shrugged.
‘And then when he was hit by debris from the volcano you swam the rest of the way?’
Lupus nodded and Pliny frowned. ‘If I believed in the gods . . .’ The admiral shook his head and opened his canvas parasol. ‘Come Lupus, if you’re not too tired you can help us continue our observations.’
Lupus was exhausted, but he followed the admiral and his scribe to the front of the boat. The three of them leaned over the bronze beak of the ship and gazed across the water towards the volcano. Behind them the oarsmen sang their fast chant and the oars rose and fell in time.
The breeze was with them, too, and presently Lupus thought he could make out the red roof of Rectina’s villa by a row of cypress trees. Was that a figure standing on the jetty? Or just a post? The ash made it hard to see.
The wind must have shifted slightly, for suddenly a shower of gravel and pieces of flaming rock rattled down onto the parasol.
‘Fascinating,’ murmured Pliny, and turned to his scribe. ‘Phrixus, make a note of this: ashes falling hotter and thicker as we approach the shore, mixed with bits of pumice and blackened . . . um, stones, charred and cracked by the flames.’ Pliny abruptly broke off in a coughing fit.
Suddenly the lookout cried, ‘Shallow water and rocks ahead, admiral!’
Pliny leaned over the rail and then whirled to face the men.
‘Stop!’ he wheezed, holding up his hand and then, ‘Back row, back row!’ He collapsed into another fit of coughing.
The oarsmen deftly flipped their blades, then manoeuvred to stop the forward movement of the ship.
Lupus saw one of the officers quickly run a pennant up a rope. It fluttered at the top of the mainmast, warning the other warships of danger.
‘By the gods,’ muttered Pliny as his coughing subsided. ‘The shore is blocked with debris. We’ll never reach them now!’
As he spoke a flaming boulder the size of a millstone hit the water less than three yards ahead of them. Its impact rocked the boat and spattered them with hot water.
‘The water’s hot, almost boiling!’ gasped Pliny. ‘Phrixus, make a note of that!’
The scribe ignored his request.
‘Master!’ he cried. ‘Your parasol is on fire! Quickly!’
Pliny hurled the flaming parasol overboard and the three of them hurried back to the shelter of the cabin as another shower of hot gravel rained down on their heads. Once under cover, the admiral turned and peered towards the shore again.
‘We can’t go forward,’ said Pliny. ‘I see no way to get to Rectina.’
Behind them, on the admiral’s couch, Vulcan groaned.
‘Admiral!’ cried the helmsman. ‘We must turn back now. The mountain is hurling down great stones at us and the shore is completely blocked by them. if we remain here the fleet will be destroyed. We must go back!’
‘No,’ wheezed Pliny after a moment. ‘No retreat. I shall not go back!’ He thought for a moment and then snapped his fingers.
‘I know what we’ll do! Send the other warships back to Misenum. They must take shelter there. I cannot afford to lose the entire imperial fleet. As for us, we will make for Tascius at Stabia, in case Rectina has been able to make her way back to him.’
Lupus grasped the admiral’s arm and shook his head violently. He knew Rectina would wait for them at her villa.
‘No! I’ve made up my mind,’ announced the admiral, impatiently shaking Lupus’s hand from his arm. He turned to the helmsman and said: ‘The wind is behind us, we’ll make excellent time. Those are your new orders: head for Stabia. “Fortune favours the brave”,’ he quoted. And added to Phrixus, ‘You can write that down.’
‘Behold!’ cried Nubia. ‘Bug-boats going home.’
‘Are they?’ cried Tascius, wiping his eyes with his hand, ‘Jup
iter! My eyes sting. Can’t see properly. It does look as if – but the fleet hasn’t had time to take on passengers.’
‘Nubia’s right,’ said Jonathan miserably. ‘They’re turning back.’
‘Jupiter blast it!’ cursed Tascius, turning away.
‘Be happy!’ cried Nubia, still watching the bay. ‘One bug-boat comes here!’
Lupus stood at the stern of Pliny’s flagship and looked back across the water at Herculaneum, disappearing into the fog of ash behind them. The cloak drawn over his head and shoulders hardly protected him from the angry rain of hot gravel, but he did not care.
His eyes were fixed on a tiny figure in orange, where the silver-green olive trees met the water.
The ash in the air stung his eyes and made them stream, but he did not blink. He watched the figure grow smaller and smaller, until finally he could no longer see her.
From a distance, the approaching warship had looked clean and sleek, but as it drew near, Flavia saw that it was smudged with soot and scorch marks.
She was standing between Jonathan and Nubia beneath the umbrella pines near Tascius’s private jetty. The three friends and their dogs watched the oars rise and fall like the wings of a bird, then dip to slow the warship. Carried forward by its own speed, the warship slid up beside Tascius’s private jetty, just nudging his private yacht.
The two slaves guarding Tascius’s boat had also been sheltering under the pines. Now they ran onto the short pier, caught ropes thrown by the sailors, and tied them firmly to the docking posts.
There was a strong swell in the scummy water. The ship rose and fell as the water slapped against the jetty, making it difficult to disembark, but finally the sailors manoeuvred the boarding plank over the side. The first person off the ship was an exhausted boy in an oversized tunic.
‘Lupus!’ Flavia and her friends cried, and rushed forward to greet him.
Two sailors carried Vulcan’s stretcher up the marble steps and into Tascius’s dining-room. The smith was still unconscious, so they lifted him onto a dining couch. Miriam propped him up on the black and white silk cushions and Mordecai began to bathe his head wound with vinegar and oil.
The Roman Mysteries Complete Collection Page 24