Pliny's Warning

by Nicholson, Anne Maria

  To Peter, Stephen and Eva—my shining stars.

  Pliny the Younger

  In form and shape the column of smoke was like a tremendous pine tree, for at the top of its great height it branched out into several skeins. I assume that a sudden burst of wind had carried it upwards and then dropped it, leaving it motionless, and that its own weight then spread it outwards. It was sometimes white, sometimes heavy and mottled, as it would be if it had lifted up amounts of earth and ashes.

  PLINY THE YOUNGER, 79 AD

  Pliny the Younger is hailed as the world’s first vulcanologist. The Roman poet and scholar was just seventeen when Mt Vesuvius erupted spectacularly in 79 AD, destroying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  His harrowing and descriptive eyewitness accounts of the three days of devastation, observed from his home in Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from the volcano, are still referred to by scientists today.

  His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was the commander of the Imperial Roman Fleet. He perished in the aftermath of one of the eruptions when he sailed away from his home and nephew, across to the settlement of Stabiae to rescue friends in peril.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although Pliny’s Warning is a novel, many of the events it describes in the past happened. The contemporary story contains detailed scientific data based on the latest research undertaken by vulcanologists and archaeologists working in southern Italy.

  It is true that Vesuvius remains the world’s most dangerous volcano. The threat of an eruption greater than the one that destroyed Pompeii remains very real. Millions of people live around it and would be trapped because of the proliferation of illegal development and congested roads.

  It is also true that the people of Naples continue to deal with another threat—the corrupt forces of the Camorra, which controls much of that grand old city’s finances.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Pliny the Younger

  Authors Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  Atiny white patch glowing beneath a bed of sea grass catches Frances Nelson’s eye. Her calf muscles tighten as she kicks her flippers hard and dives deeper into the turquoise Mediterranean waters, searching for answers from a lost civilisation to the threatening volcanic cataclysm.

  Hovering on the ocean floor, she brushes aside lime green fronds, hunting for the source. Suddenly, she senses a movement close to her face. An eye, like a cat’s, gleams, staring straight into her mask. Frances topples back, her air tank banging against a rock behind her. An eel, brown and yellow striped, darts its head out from a bunch of sea lilies.

  Her heart pounds, the sound ricocheting into the back of her head; just as fast, the eel retracts. She sucks a mouthful of bitter brine and nearly gags. She spits, forcing the water out of her mouth. Stay calm, whatever you do, stay calm, she tells herself. It’s just an eel, not some killer monster from the deep.

  Biting hard into her respirator, the bubbles course thickly around her, betraying her rapid breathing as she looks around for Marcello Vattani. Where the hell is he? She can still see the white glow just below and it draws her back, irresistibly, like the Sirens who were said to have lured ancient mariners to their deaths with their beautiful songs, on this very coast. She kicks her flippers again and dives, avoiding the eel’s hiding place and heading straight to the bottom.

  Sunbeams penetrating the depths shine like torches on a row of tiny white mosaic tiles. She plucks out the seagrass and sweeps away pebbles and stones with her hands. A pattern is forming, black and white, some sort of clover shape, almost medieval in its appearance, but she knows it’s much older. A heartachingly minute relic of the Roman empire, it’s at least two thousand years old. She touches a fan-shaped rock. It yawns open and the camouflaged clam slams shut, missing her hand by a second.

  Frances starts as she feels a tug on her arm. She turns around. Marcello is there, larger than life. There’s something about being underwater that magnifies everything and as he smiles, his brown eyes are surreal, enlarged behind his mask. He swims around her, lithe as a dolphin. Raising his hand, he makes a circle with his thumb and finger, asking if she’s OK. Yes, she signals back.

  She’d love to blurt out her discovery. After all, this is where oratory was once highly prized, the pleasure resort of old Baia, an oasis for the ruling elite escaping Rome’s unbearably hot summers. Emperors plotted here as they feasted and the cleverest and most cunning of minds gathered to debate the pressing matters of state.

  But in these sunken ruins of once glorious villas there’s no longer any scope for words or conversation. Struck dumb, she is reduced to pointing lamely at the mosaics.

  Even through his mask, Frances can sense Marcello’s excitement. It’s the archaeologist in him, buoyed by decades of digging around on land and under the sea, always searching to discover something new from something old. She watches him, his fit body accentuated by his wetsuit, clearing more of the grass.

  The pattern runs out. Brown rock bridges a gap to another group of mosaics. They work together, brushing away purple algae clinging to the tiny square stone chips. Gradually the chips form a different pattern in colours of maroon, black, yellow, blue and green, just like the join-the-dots pictures she did as a child. It’s broken and much is missing but the picture is clear; a portrait of a woman, hair coiffured and curled around a headband in the fashionable style of ancient Rome, lips full, eyes almond-shaped and crowned with darkly defined eyebrows. Around her throat is a chain of gold. Familiar, but Frances can’t quite place her. Is it the face of one of the women who presided here before this house, the Villa Julia, joined the procession of summer palaces and sank into the ocean?

  Frances wonders if it is Julia herself, the profligate daughter of Emperor Augustus Caesar. Like a chattel, married off to his friend and loyal general, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa; then to her stepbrother and father’s successor, the brutal Emperor Tiberius Caesar. Even through this veil of water, her face is strong and alluring, a hint of defiance in her smile, as if she knew she would eventually have the last laugh, her immortality finally realized.

  Or maybe she’s another dutiful daughter of Rome, or a goddess?
Heaven knows, Frances has seen plenty of similar images, both Roman and Greek, since she’d arrived in southern Italy to work on the volcanoes project. She wonders if Marcello recognizes the mystery woman.

  They scrape around further but the mosaics have petered out. Marcello takes his camera from a bag around his wrist. He shoots and the bright flash pierces the watery gloom.

  The two divers leave the portrait behind in a trail of bubbles, gliding together past rows of seaweed-covered foundation stones. Frances pauses to touch one of the ancient building blocks, encrusted with shells and barnacles. It pricks her fingers. In the water, her hand looks green and ghostly and she pulls it away. She swims further, past remnants of walls that tell her little of the opulence and revelries that used to fill this space. There’s another wrecked villa ahead and the mortar skeleton of the public baths. All that remains of this jewel of the imperial empire are ghostly souvenirs, sharing the seabed with fish and molluscs, like a Pompeii under the sea.

  But Frances is anxious to move on. Old bones and mosaics are interesting, but it’s the new seismic threat beneath the waves that really excites her as a vulcanologist. She checks her air monitor. A hundred and fifty. Plenty left. She nudges Marcello and points ahead and they glide on, side by side.

  Images of the past continue to plague her as she moves through the ruins. Some of history’s most renowned and infamous rulers, the emperors Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula and Nero cavorted here with their rivals and followers, in debauchery and bloody treachery.

  She wonders whether they had any idea that not only would they soon perish, but the sea would also consume their coastal paradise? It was as relentless a conquest as their own centurions’ marches through the ancient world.

  They came here to Campi Flegrei, the land of fire, for the sun and miraculous hot thermal waters that flowed through their magnificent bath houses, never guessing that the source of their pleasure would one day rear up against them.

  The ancient Romans believed the craters of the volcanoes around them were gateways to hell and stayed away, but as they expanded their empire, they were oblivious to nature exerting its superior power. Lakes of red hot magma bubbled below them, gradually forcing the land up and then dropping it, a relentless cycle of rising and falling until the cliffs collapsed and the town surrendered to the waves. Once the villas of Baia were the pride of the Mediterranean. Now they are eroding monuments in a sunken ghost town.

  Frances swims ahead strongly, more confident than her first dive here with Marcello. For once, she is the leader and he the follower. They slow as they move deeper, skimming above a submerged forest of fronds. Frances pulls her depth gauge and compass from her belt and holds them close to her mask to check. Ten, eleven, twelve metres and heading south towards her target, the ruins of Portus Julius, the harbour built by Agrippa to provide a safe haven for Rome’s naval fleet.

  She feels her ears pop, pinches her nose and steadies her breathing. As the seabed slopes, two long lines of massive square-shaped pillars appear ahead of them, once part of the port’s engineering armoury to protect the shoreline, each one coated with layers of weeds and shells. They zigzag in and out of them like a pair of skiers on a slalom run. At the bottom of the slope the pillars run out. Frances knows they’re near and holds up her hand to signal Marcello to stop, pointing to piles of broken stones littering the bottom.

  The cracks look fresh, whiter marble showing beneath their weathered exteriors. Must have happened a day or two ago. Large patches of yellow sulphur stain the sea floor and bubbles pop out of holes beneath the sand. Some are tiny specks and others large and fast moving. As Frances moves closer, a sudden surge of hot water smacks her face and throws her backwards, spinning in the water. The force knocks her respirator out of her mouth and hot water floods into her mask, washing over her face. A horrible taste fills her mouth as she chokes on a watery chemical cocktail. She blinks. Her eyes are stinging. She can’t see.

  Marcello moves swiftly and grabs her, holding her firmly. She feels him push his spare breathing apparatus into her mouth. She clings to him, eyes shut. She breathes slowly from his air tank. In, out, in, out. Keep calm, she tells herself. She starts to regain control, holds onto her mask and blows some air through her nose. It clears away the water trapped in the mask and she can see again. She reaches behind her back to retrieve her own respirator. The tube is tangled up in her tank but she frees it and quickly replaces Marcello’s mouthpiece with her own. He’s watching her closely and gives her the thumbs up to end the dive. But she doesn’t want to, not yet. She still has work to do. She signals to Marcello she’s OK to continue and they swim further on, careful now not to get too close to the bottom.

  A few metres on a column has fallen and smashed into pieces. Then another and another—a whole line of columns has collapsed. The ground beneath is cracked with gaps as wide as a handspan and the bubbling of water and gas is much stronger.

  This is what Frances feared. Back at the observatory she’d seen evidence of seismic tremors that had shaken all of the Campi Flegrei area, on along the deep lake of magma that connected it to Mt Vesuvius in nearby Naples, and further out into the Mediterranean to the ancient volcanoes in the Aeolian Islands. The earthquakes were small but there were dozens of them over two days. The scientific team had spread out to analyse the damage, Frances putting up her hand to inspect the underwater archaeological site.

  Marcello is agitated, upset by the damage, darting quickly, photographing smashed pillars that had survived so many other disasters over so many centuries.

  Frances fears the destructive volcanic power is back with a vengeance. The rising and falling of the land that doomed ancient Baia has never stopped, and now it’s gathering pace, putting the entire coastline at risk.

  She has seen this same dramatic volcanism before, pounding another landscape, far away on the other side of the world. Although the water is warm and she’s wearing a wetsuit, she shivers, remembering what happened on an island in the Pacific.

  No one lived on the island. But here, millions of people lived along the coast, where ancient Roman villas that had been the prizes of the victorious lay ten metres beneath the sea.

  As she swims through the hot bubbling mass of water, Frances feels as if time has stopped—she can almost hear the rumblings of the same dangerous forces echo through the millennia.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Frances accelerates as she reaches a short clear stretch of road leading home to her apartment high on the western hill overlooking the Bay of Naples. The traffic is as impossible as ever and her motorbike is coated in dust after the ride back from Baia. Corso Vittorio Emanuele throbs with vehicles, people on the pavements scurrying in and out, shopping for their evening meal.

  The sun is setting and Frances glances towards Mt Vesuvius across the bay, rising sharply above the city. But the metropolis seems to fight its presence, majestic and threatening at the same time, covering it with a smoggy haze. She squints into the light that bounces off the yellow, ochre and white apartment buildings hugging the street, their little balconies festooned with lines of washing.

  A horn beeps loudly. She looks in her side mirror and a truck driver waves at her furiously. She pulls over, too timid to stand her ground. The driver, black hair swept back in the latest style, winds down his window and blows her a kiss. ‘Bellissima!’ he calls out as he cruises past.

  Frances laughs at his cheek, glad to be back with the living rather than floating underwater with ghosts. She pulls out again and rides back into the traffic, her fatigue eased by the Italian flirt.

  Struggling with the demands of scuba diving seems insignificant compared to the hair-raising antics of wending through Naples traffic. But she’s come a long way since her arrival. At first, riding pillion on her roommate Riccardo’s motorbike was truly terrifiying. She’d clung to him like a child as he wove between trucks and cars or mounted the pavement to get through jams on their way to the observatory. Motorcyclists were the cit
y’s anarchists, breaching traffic rules, jumping red lights, anything they could get away with.

  As a foreigner, she was reluctant to drive, but as her contract with Progetto Vulcano was for a year, she had figured the options weren’t great. Cars were constantly caught up on overcrowded narrow roads, nearly all with a patina of dents and scratches testifying to the wild conditions. And she’d wasted far too many hours waiting for buses and trains that failed to arrive.

  Frances navigates her silver Piaggio into a cobble-stoned lane, avoiding a woman laden with plastic shopping bags and a group of laughing teenagers chatting on cellphones. She loves this bike—she’d bought it a month ago as Riccardo and her schedules became increasingly divergent. It was all just a matter of keeping her nerve and keeping moving. And she never forgot one golden rule. Just as holding your breath while scuba diving was a death wish, so was closing your eyes for even a second riding through Naples.

  A final burst of speed brings her into the courtyard, riding right up to two young boys, a tangle of arms and legs, pulling and pushing each other. She dismounts, removes her helmet and runs a hand through her shoulder-length fair hair.

  ‘Hey Stefano, Lorenzo, stop that!’ The twins are dressed alike in blue jeans with knee patches and red and white checked shirts. She ruffles the heads of the five-year-olds clambering around her trying to grab her helmet. ‘How’s that baby sister of yours?’

  ‘We don’t like her. She poos her nappies,’ Stefano smirks. They shriek with laughter. ‘Take us for a ride on your bike. Please, Francesca, please!’

  ‘Not now. Maybe another time,’ Frances laughs as she extracts herself from their hands. Before she reaches the heavy metal front door of the building, they’ve forgotten her and are wrestling again.

  Above the entry, the large pink bow announcing Luciana’s birth, eight weeks earlier, flutters in a soft breeze. She was born the day Frances arrived, but as a stranger, she hadn’t known until she heard the unmistakable cries of a newborn some days later. She unlocks the door and climbs the first of the huge grey stone steps that lead up four steep storeys to her apartment, already used to doing without a lift, absent from many old buildings. By Neapolitan standards, though, this is quite new, just one hundred and fifty years or so old, a blip on the city’s radar, compared to the eight-centuries-old places crowded into its ancient heart below.