A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (27 page)

They went down in a tangle, and Marcus’ leg sent out a shriek of agony so much deeper than all the pain before it that his vision went white.
Not yet,
he insisted somewhere inside the agony, and felt a warm rush of blood across him and another girlish-sounding gurgle. The dagger tumbled free as the giant fell into the straw at Marcus’ side.

Under the breastbone, straight and fast to the heart
, he thought incongruously.
That’s the way to do it.

Then a pair of hands descended on his neck, and his breath crushed off inside his throat. “Bastard,” a voice snarled, and Marcus opened swimming eyes to see the second man, shoulders blocking out the torchlight, tears cutting absurdly through the ash on his face. “You bastard, that was my
brother
—”

Oh,
Marcus thought almost politely.
I’m sorry. Well, not really—your brother was a raping, looting thug and so are you—

Then the hands tightened about his throat, and his head filled with sparks. He opened his mouth but could not even gasp. His hand thrashed after the dagger in the straw, but he couldn’t find it and his head was exploding, everything was red-rimmed and fading—but he smiled. He still managed a smile.
Not too bright, are you
? he wanted to ask of the man now throttling him.
You turned your back on her.

Diana was up from the straw as noiseless as a wraith, and she had the length of spare rein doubled between her hands. Two soundless steps and she’d whipped it about the man’s throat. Then she clamped her knees around his back as though settling onto a horse, and leaned back with her full weight. She hauled on his throat as hard as she must have ever hauled a four-horse team to bring them to a halt, and Marcus could see the tendons cording all the way down her slim arms.

The killing pressure in his throat fell away. Marcus let out one enormous gasp, dragging in a lungful of air that tasted like wine, and then his hand was lunging for the dagger again. Because Diana had hauled the man up like an unruly horse, but he was three times her size and the moment he snapped back she’d go flying—

Marcus fumbled the dagger through a fistful of straw, everything moving too fast, everything but his own impossibly clumsy fingers. He brought it round in another slash but missed; the man’s eyes bulged and he yanked and gurgled against the rein looped taut around his throat. He yanked, and Diana abruptly let one side go. His weight fell forward, hands peddling, and all Marcus had to do was hold the blade still.

For the second time he was crushed under foul-smelling weight. It took the man a few moments to die, gasping and choking, and Marcus just lay there, breathing shallowly and enjoying it.
The breathing,
he clarified, even if just to himself—he liked to be clear in his thoughts. It was the breathing that was so enjoyable, not the man’s dying, or his weight, or his stench. The stench really was unbearable. Ash, sweat, and the kind of ingrained dirt which meant the man hadn’t utilized a bathhouse in many a day.
Disgraceful,
Marcus thought.
Roman baths are available to all, even those of direst poverty. Frequent bathing is what sets a citizen of Rome apart from a rank barbarian.

He opened his mouth to say something—he wasn’t sure what; he was still trembling, and his throat was on fire, not to mention his knee—and what came out was a calm, “I think it entirely possible our assailants were not Roman citizens.”

Diana stared at him. She was squatting on her heels in the straw, length of rein still dangling from one hand, and she tipped her head back and laughed. There was an edge of hysteria in that laugh, but there was real amusement too. “Gods’ wheels, Marcus, is that all you can say?”

“I have never killed anyone before.” He rolled the limp form off him with some difficulty, and sat up. “What is one supposed to say?”

“How should I know? No one tells these things to girls.” Diana staggered upright and went for the horse, which stood sidling and blowing nervously in one corner, white showing round its eyes at the smell of blood. She crooned and cuddled it for a while until the beast’s tail stopped switching, then she tied it to the wall again and came back. She settled beside Marcus, and reached out to take his wrist in her hand. The slashed wrist, which was still, he realized, dripping blood.

“I heard what you told that thug,” she said. “When he was about to cut your throat. You said, ‘Don’t kill me.’”

Marcus shrugged.

She peered at him through her filthy fringe of hair like a mare peering through her forelock. “Does that mean you don’t want to die anymore?”

It means I didn’t want
you
to die,
Marcus thought.
Because I knew you’d try to rescue me, you mad girl
.

“Don’t make me kill you,” Diana said, and he saw there were tears in her eyes. Not once during this unnatural night of horrors had she wept, and she was on the brink of it now. “Don’t make me kill you by leaving you behind. Please.”

There were a thousand arguments he could make, but the astonishment of seeing her tears held him mute.

“I know what people think of me in Rome, Marcus.” Her bloodied fingers slipped through his, linked tight. “I’m a joke—mad little Diana with straw in her hair and her pennant always waving for the Reds. The women think me unnatural, and the men laugh behind my back unless they’re speculating how to get me on my knees.”

He felt a surge of shame that hurt more than his leg. “Diana—”

“No.” She cut him off, rejecting pity again. “I don’t care. I made the life I wanted, and gods know few enough women get to do that. Few men, either, for that matter. I’m mad little Diana who breeds horses and cheers the Reds, and I’ve faced things that would have killed half the upstanding Roman citizens I know. Today is the second time I’ve watched a city tear itself to bits. I saw people get out, people on the road to what is probably safety … but I saw others. People like that pregnant girl and the man with the child on his back—”

Marcus thought incongruously of the skinny whore who had smacked him with a jug and caused his entire predicament to begin with. Who knew if she was alive or dead?

“—and I wanted to save them, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t.” Diana looked at him steadily, and that was when her eyes overflowed. “Please, Marcus. Let me save someone today besides a
horse
.”

He looked at her. She cried proudly, not screwing up her face, just letting the tears snake down through the streaks of ash, her bloody fingers tight through his. He looked at her, and inevitability rose in him like a wave.

“Please,” begged Diana of the Cornelii. “Let me save you.”

“My dear girl …” he sighed, and heard himself trail off.

She waited, dashing a filthy hand across her eyes.

He held his wrist up. “Bandage me?”

The
horse was not at all keen on leaving the stable once it realized rocks were pelting from the sky. “Sensible animal,” Marcus said, strapping his wrist closed, and Diana had to pad the beast’s haunches and neck in every blanket she could find before Marcus clambered aboard and they left the enclosure. The road to Herculaneum stretched along the coast—normally, Marcus would have seen the glittering blue expanse of bay on one side, the craggy hills rising on the other into rich green stretches of farmland. It was still a black and ashy underworld; the road choked with hunched and stumbling refugees shuffling through the accumulation of rock. Pebbles still rained from the dark swirl overhead, and when Marcus turned his head back toward Pompeii—

The city was not dead yet, but it was … slowing down. No lamps, no cheery windows lit against the dark. Just the restless spark of spreading fires, and mindless spasmodic movement in the streets.
Gods help them,
Marcus thought, and could barely make out the hulking shape of Vesuvius.
When will it stop?

The horse flinched to step out into the shifting debris of rock. “I’ll have to blind-fold him,” Diana shouted. “You be my eyes!” Marcus kept watch from the horse’s back—not one, but two bloody knives lying openly across his knees—and he saw more than one set of speculative eyes slide away.
I helped kill two men today,
he thought, but he had no regrets. He would threaten to kill more if necessary, to keep them off Diana who led the blindfolded horse step by step into the seething chaos of the road, crooning, stroking, praising with every nervous sidling step. Her voice as she cajoled the animal forward dropped to a honeyed bedroom whisper that would have had every man in Rome trailing her with his tongue out.

I wouldn’t mind hearing that kind of whisper in
my
ear again,
Marcus reflected. His life has become a dark and arid sort of place—the habit of despair, as Diana had put it, did not really make room for female companionship.
Perhaps I should do something about that.
If the gods don’t decide to kill me on this road, that is.
What supreme irony that would be … He gave a passing carter a sharp glance and a warning lift of the daggers, as the man eyed the horse.

Marcus could not afterward be certain how many hours passed—only that they did, in black and shuffling watchfulness. His lungs burned from breathing ash, his eyes stung from constantly scanning the road for creeping looters, and the only constant was Diana’s unbowed shoulders beside the horse’s head. When Marcus first saw light he caught his breath, wondering if he was imagining it.

He was not.

“Look.” He leaned down to touch Diana’s shoulder; she kept shuffling onward a moment but finally looked up. She swayed back and forth in exhaustion even when still: a gray ghost in the dark. Only it was no longer quite dark. The coastal road was winding its way, slowly but surely, out of the black shadow cast by the mountain. Cries went up around them as others began to see what Marcus had. “Sunset,” Marcus said, pointing at the faint rosy glow in the west. “We’ve walked out of night into sunset.”

Her face crumpled, and for a moment he thought she was about to cry again. Instead, she just looked outraged. “We’ve walked out of night into more
night
?” she complained. “I’ve done night already. I’ve done night
all fucking
day.
”

Marcus laughed. He was starving and filthy, wheezing and light-headed, and could not remember feeling so content in a very long time. He looked at the fading red streak in the sky over the bay—the debris-choked waters were just beginning to become visible again—and he thought inconsequentially,
I shall live to see another sunset. I shall live, in fact, to see my son become a man.

Diana swayed on her feet again. “Ride for a while,” Marcus ordered in his best from-the-
Rostra
voice. “The horse is too tired to need to be coaxed along anymore.” Besides, the fall of rock seemed to be diminishing, the way underfoot less rough.

Diana untied the blindfold from the horse’s eyes, hesitating. “But you can’t walk—”

“No. In fact, I doubt this knee is ever going to be the same again.” It crunched every time he flexed it. No doubt he would be the senator with the limp as well as the crooked shoulder—at the moment, he did not care in the slightest if he was laughed at. “But you’re a little thing, Diana. The horse can carry us both for a while.”

She accepted Marcus’ extended hand, scrambling up over the horse’s withers and settling herself in front of him. He linked an arm about her waist, moving her filthy hair off her neck as it flapped in his face. “You know something,” he said, kicking the horse into motion, “I’m taking your advice. I’m going to marry again.”

“Mmm.” She was already drowsing against his shoulder. She smelled absolutely vile, ash and blood and horse, and Marcus doubted he was any better. Rank barbarians, the pair of them.

“I’ll call on your father when we return to Rome,” he went on. “And the augurs. Find an auspicious date for a wedding …”

She gave a sleepy shake of her head. “
I’m
not going to marry you, Marcus. What a terrible idea.”

“Why?” He rather thought he could get used to the notion.

“What would we ever have to talk about? You think aqueducts are interesting, and you don’t even follow the Reds.”

“Aqueducts
are
interesting,” he said mildly. “But it’s true: I hate chariot racing.”

“See? You think I’m a crashing bore, and you
are
a crashing bore. It’s a bad fit,” she yawned, and snuggled into his shoulder. “Marry some little heiress who will worship the ground you walk on and give you a dozen babies.”

“Very well.” On the whole, that was probably a better idea. Paulinus needed a mother, and gods knew, Diana couldn’t mother anything that wasn’t hoofed.

“Why did you offer, anyway?” Diana’s sooty lashes didn’t rise; she sounded three-quarters asleep. “Surely you don’t love me.”

“No.” He liked her and honored her more than any woman he knew, though, and that was a far rarer thing than love. “Men have dishonored you. They have mocked you even as they desired you—you’re quite right about that—and you deserve nothing but honors. I thought it appropriate to offer you mine, in all sincerity.”