A Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii (41 page)

Then she bent her head to kiss him. She pressed her crooked mouth to his perfect lips while her tears wet his face. It was the first kiss she’d given a man freely in her whole life. A kiss for a dead man, and in that kiss she felt the heaviness of grief for a man she had never liked and had scarcely known. She cried for him. Not like a necropolis
whore who wails with grief during the day and with pleasure at night. But like someone filled with more love than hatred.

Someone like her sister.

And when Prima finally lifted her head from weeping, she saw a miraculous light.

C
APELLA

“Is
it fire?” Sabinus asks, his words slurred.

With wonder and awe at the pale, obscured haze of light in the distance, I answer, “It’s dawn.”

The mere hint of rising sun—even pale and obscured by ash—makes us weep. Then we laugh. We laugh with joy because we were not sure there would ever be another morning. But this one has come. Like a blazing lighthouse in a storm. And it is
glorious
.

“We’re going to make it,” Sabinus says, as if awakening from a nightmare.

There is not a patch of skin on any of us that is not scraped, burned, or sore, but we’re alive. And the dawn rejuvenates us. Exhilarates us. We have nothing at all but each other and the dawn to make us walk faster. But we do. The little girl in my arms hums a sweet tune to her new doll. And she twines the fingers of her empty hand in my filthy hair, as if it were liquid gold. We walk in a line, using a low wall to guide us. Once it must have been a substantial house with a lovely orchard. Now it is collapsed upon itself but for this wall.

“We’re going to escape your dark flood, Capella,” Sabinus says. “The mountain will not have us.”

“Praise Isis!” cries the merchant’s wife. “She has saved us. Isis has saved us.”

After all their bickering, the merchant hugs his wife then kisses her right on the mouth.

Seeing this, I smile and Sabinus reaches for my hand.

There is, in touch, an affirmation of life, of immortality. But when our fingers clasp, I hear a different call of immortality. Of eternity. One I’ve been hearing all my life.

It is the roar of the ocean.

We turn together to see black waves churning violently down the mountain with a power and speed at once ungodly and breathtaking. Frothing and boiling up over the city, the darkness comes, like the spray of the sea when it smashes against rock.

It is a sight both majestic and ghastly.

There is no running from this dark sea, and not even Sabinus tries. He watches it come, his mouth slightly agape, not in terror but in something beyond that. As if fascinated by the natural power of what we are seeing.

I, too, am beyond terror, because I have seen this dark sea before. It is the promise my goddess made to me. The promise she makes to us all. We are meant to be free. We are meant to be more than body, blood, and bones. Though we are nameless, we are meant to endure a thousand years and a thousand more. There is a part of us that will never die.

I know this dark ocean will hurl us, and the remains of a whole city up to the gods; there is no escaping it. None. Which means there is nothing left but to embrace it. To the crying little girl in my arms, I whisper as if it were a day of celebration. “Here come the waves, little one. Open your arms.” And just as I once stepped into the frothing waves of the sea during the
Navigium Isidis
, I walk toward the boiling tidal wave of ash.

With hot wind billowing my gown and my hair whipping high into the air around me, I hold tight to the little girl in my arms until the blast rips her from my grasp. Until the searing pain of my soul shredding away from my body makes me lose my hold on everything.

In violence we are torn away from each other, and this world into the next …

… but
becoming
is always an agony.

It all happens in an instant, but for me, it stretches into an eternity. The ocean breaks us like stones into sand. Like sand that will one day become beautiful gleaming sea glass in a thousand years or a thousand years more. We are all, all of us, every one of us in life, sailors trying to survive a rough sea. All looking for the light that will guide us home. And I can already see that bright beacon.

But first, there must be
darkness
.

We are born in darkness. We perish in darkness. And then we are born again.

EPILOGUE

Worse
than Troy
, Prima thought. Not a million Greeks in a thousand wooden horses could wreak such devastation. There was a city here once, beneath her feet. Now, weeks later, just a tomb. The mountain was half gone, like a ravaged loaf of bread from the oven, still smoking at its pith. The city itself covered in a thick blanket of ash. Some of that same ash still drifted in the wind like snow.

There were no survivors.

On the day of the blast, that last deathly cloud at sunrise had rolled over the city, killing everyone and everything, leaving an unearthly quiet behind. A haunting stillness for the living to sift through and make sense of.

But Prima could make no sense of it at all.

Only the blackened rooftops of the tallest buildings gave any hint as to what might lie buried where. Prima could not begin to guess where the
caupona
had been. Nor even the Temple of Isis. People wrote on markers to help give clues. Others left only poems or tributes for the dead. Or warnings to stay away from this accursed place and the spirits who must haunt it now.

Amongst those spirits must be her sister’s, though, so she would not be warned away.

Capella was dead. Prima knew this in a way that sisters know.

Just as she knew that her sister was buried beneath her feet.

You always know where to find me
, Capella had said.

And so she did. Even if she did not know what this place once had been.

She’d come to make an offering on what was her sister’s grave. A libation to pour, though she did not know what words she should say. She would ask forgiveness, that much she knew. Forgiveness she didn’t deserve. But if anyone ever would forgive her—ever
could
forgive her—it would be Capella.

At the remembrance of her sister, her eyes blurred again with tears.

She turned to swipe them from her cheeks and, when she did, she saw a man in a toga picking through the rubble in a swirl of smoke. An older man. A senator. One of the
lemures
. An angry spirit she could not appease with offerings. A spirit that would not give forgiveness. A spirit that would want
vengeance
.

Prima crashed to her knees, babbling words to ward off evil spirits. “I’m sorry. Mercy—”

“Beg pardon? Are you well, girl?”

Her head came up at the sound of his voice. It wasn’t wrathful; it was as mild as she remembered. He limped to her side and, to her astonishment, the hand that raised her by the elbow was warm and living.
Alive
. The senator was alive. She hadn’t murdered him and somehow he’d escaped the destruction of Pompeii. The realization filled her with such sweet relief she gasped with the pleasure of it.

But she
had
bashed him with a jug and left him for dead. And given that he had her by the arm, she was caught. Again. Why hadn’t she run before he could recognize her?

Because surely he did recognize her now. “Are you hurt?” the senator asked as she ducked her head belatedly from his gaze. But he raised her chin with one finger, and those piercing eyes flared. “Ah,” he breathed. “The little guttersnipe from outside the brothel. Prima, isn’t it?”

She should’ve lied. She should’ve broken free of him. He wasn’t so strong—not as strong as Pansa had been. But the senator had an entourage, she could see dimly through her haze of tears—secretaries and guards and slaves in tunics finer than anything Prima had ever worn. So instead of trying to run, she said, “I didn’t mean to hit you. I just wanted to get away. I wanted—”

“You did get away.” The senator nodded gravely. “And in truth, I am rather extraordinarily glad to see that you got away, little Prima.”

He
was
glad, she saw. It startled her: a senator in a fine toga, glad that a slave girl had survived the mountain. It startled her so much that the words tumbled out. “My sister is dead.”

It was the first time Prima had spoken the words aloud.

And now that she had, she sobbed and could not seem to stop sobbing.

The senator issued some orders in a quiet voice, and someone gave Prima a stool so she could sink down and cry her eyes out. The senator crouched down next to her, waving his people away. He didn’t ask her how Capella had met her end. Maybe he knew Prima couldn’t bear it. He just drew a fold of his toga over his head in mourning and said something brief and beautiful.

“Who did you lose in the rubble?” she asked, assuming that must be why he was here in the smoking ruins.

“I had the good fortune not to lose anyone. Well—myself, nearly.” He traced a bandage around his wrist with a small, private, bittersweet expression that did not invite Prima to ask. “The emperor ordered me to return when the ash cooled, to make assessment of the damage.”

A man with the emperor’s ear. “So, I’m definitely going to be crucified, then,” Prima blurted. “A slave can’t …” she trailed off, knowing that no matter how kind he was to her, no slave could ever strike such an important man and live to tell the tale.

“A slave can’t nearly cripple a senator?” He stretched out his knee, and Prima winced to see the knob of bandages under his toga’s folds. “Correct. But Prima of Pompeii is no slave, is she? She is a freedwoman now.”

Prima eyed him warily, but not
too
warily. In truth, she was too heartsick to beware tricks. “How do you mean? I don’t know where my master is, but even if he’s dead, I’m sure he has a designated heir—”

“No one can claim among his inheritance slaves illegally used in prostitution.”

So he remembered. “But I can’t prove—I don’t have our bill of sale.”

He swept a hand out at the still-smoking expanse of ash and rock; the vents of steam like a giant’s slumbering breath. “My dear girl, the evidence is buried along with the rolls upon which you were registered. Who is to naysay you? Or,” he added with more authority, “
me
?”

She blinked. “You?” The chance her master or his heir might take on Senator Marcus Norbanus was exceedingly slim. “Why would you vouch for me?”

“Because Roman law says you are free,” he answered. “And Roman law is for all of us. You did not believe me last time I told you that—perhaps you will believe me now.”

Prima nodded. He was offering to help; it didn’t matter if she understood his reasons. Only the price required. “What do you want in exchange?”

“A little trust.” He rose, brushing off his snowy toga with its rich purple border. “I shall be near the ruins of Pompeii a great deal in the months to come, overseeing relief funds. As a surviving freedwoman, you would be eligible for some assistance. Will you trust my word enough to rely on it?”

Trust
. It was like faith. The faith her sister had. The faith Prima never had. But now, in this moment, she wanted it. She hungered for it. So she not only believed the senator would keep his word, but found herself wishing she could give aid or comfort to other survivors. “Could I help in some way?”

“Naturally.” He didn’t sound surprised at the offer. Perhaps he simply expected better from her from now on. “You can start by remembering the people in this city. Their hopes and dreams. The things that mattered most to them. Too many of those lost will never have death masks or eulogies or mausoleums. So be a living monument to the nameless dead.” With that, he gave her a nod, the kind of nod a citizen of Rome gave to a free woman, and disappeared into his entourage, wound in smoke.

Watching him go, Prima wasn’t sure it had happened. Perhaps it had all been a vision. A message from her sister from beyond. If there
was
a beyond. Prima had said, again and again, that there was nothing but this.

We eat, we shit, we fuck, and we die. That’s all there is.

But she was wrong. There was human connection. There was love of family. Love of friends. Love of enemies and even nameless strangers. Love that endured beyond life. Love beyond death. The proof of that was all around her, in the few survivors still searching the rubble of what had once seemed like a big city, but was now made quite small. Slaves, free citizens, and the high-born, all asking the same painful questions.

Have you seen him? Have you seen her? Have you seen the one I love?

I think she went to Stabiae, to Herculaneum, to Misenum, to Nuceria …

Did he leave the city before the mountain blew apart? Did she stay behind?

The stillness gave no answers … but still they asked, drawn together in grief. So unmoored from all that had once separated them that Prima and a wealthy girl might stand shoulder to shoulder.

The girl had asphodel flowers in her hand and hair as red as flame. She bent to put the white flowers on the stones for the man she said would have made her his wife. Though she was not married, the girl was draped in a dark
stola
of mourning as if she were his widow in truth. “He promised to come to Nuceria and find me,” she explained, fingering a bunch of keys strung from her girdle the way Prima’s sister used to finger her
ankh
charms. “I cannot find where his house stood, and this is as close to the city as we can climb, but I think maybe he would have been somewhere near here. He would have tried to come to me—his name was Sabinus.”

Then, perhaps seeing recognition in Prima’s expression, the girl asked, “Did you know him?”

For Prima, the name Sabinus no longer dredged up anger or contempt. Her sister had liked the man and counted him a friend. Perhaps he
was
a friend to her in the end. Prima liked to imagine it that way.

And so she said, “I’m afraid I didn’t know him at all.”

“Neither did I. Or rather, I knew him all my life without appreciating him—” The girl broke off, too well-born to sob. But her voice lowered, thick with emotion. “He thought me worthy of him. I would like to be.”

“I understand,” Prima said, because she did.

The wealthy girl narrowed her eyes, perhaps realizing for the first time that she was confiding in a stranger. “Should I know you? Who are you?”

The wind seemed to echo her question.

Who are you?

Prima wondered how anyone could answer such a question amid the shattered remains. The world she knew had died, and a part of her with it. And yet, when she reached inside herself for an answer, her heart swelled, giving her a weight and substance she’d never had before.

“Who am I?” Prima asked, brushing tears from her eyes. “I don’t know yet.”

But she was hungry to find out.

Hungrier than any child ever born.