Colosseum (6 page)

“Not all, but most. Then there are those who choose to give five years of their lives over to death. But there again the world is full of madmen, my friend. Take my uncle, for instance…”

Suddenly, Verus is interested.

“Did he become a gladiator?”

Massinissa answers without looking him in the eye. Delicate balance and cutting jokes.

“No, he fell in love with his goat.”

Verus lets his mind fly elsewhere for a moment. His thoughts move swiftly and without baggage. In an instant they cover the entire world. The Briton imagines a future of iron and glory, not goats and raving lunatics. Massinissa, however, confuses the excess of concentration for interest.

“Fucked that goat better than he did his wife. And more often, apparently…”

Verus starts listening again as he stops daydreaming, for the first time since the night of the massacre, about freedom, and the absurd bundle of emotions that the damned word brings with it. Because, he realizes, there are slaves and there are slaves: it is one thing to break rocks all day, and another to test your courage with weapon in hand, urged on by the loving roar of the crowd.

“To listen to him, you'd think the fucking goat let him do what he liked to it…” Messinissa is gathering steam.

Verus stops him brusquely: “Listen, brother. I don't know if I really want to hear this, seriously…”

But it is in this very moment that the gods decide the time has come and there will be no tomorrow.

The sky darkens, gray clouds loaded with death blow out of Vulcan's belly.

Verus's pulse is racing when the first flaming rock hits the ground. The size of a fist, it slams into the sand and begins to sweat dense smoke.

The second is as big as a sheep, and knocks the pile of stones supporting Verus and Massinissa to the ground.

The two slaves lose their balance and tumble to earth. The African burns himself, screaming as his flesh blisters revoltingly. Verus looks up and realizes the blue vault above him is swarming with ash, the air filled with shouting and commotion.

The guards run, and so do the slaves in chains. The soldiers on the watchtowers of the quarry waver, and then break.

Hades flings its doors open wide and vomits fire onto the victims' heads. The bright red tower, which looked to Pliny like a tree trunk atop Vesuvius, now looks like the boiling innards of a butchered titan. A heavy stench that fills the lungs, but the boiling hail is the worst punishment of all. Verus wants to help his friend, but a burning chunk of embers puts the African out of his misery, smashing into his heart.

The impact is nauseating, Verus kneels and vomits bile, rolls on the ground, scratched and burnt. He rasps teeth and elbows in the sand, makes it to his feet and runs.

Here is panic everywhere.

And darkness.

And ash.

The rain gets heavier by the moment, Verus threads his way through rocks and flame.

His mind races. He is losing it.

Damned fire. Fire again.

The night of the massacre explodes in his chest, the river of white-hot memories burrowing through his insides as fear does the rest, pumping blood into his legs.

Verus looks for shelter and bursts through the door of a guard hut. The roof is solid, strong beechwood beams that creak but do not break. But it is beginning to give way under the weight of the flaming rock.

The roof cracks, the smoke is inside now.

He is enveloped in a world of ash; his lungs cry out for relief.

But there is no end to it, the fury only swells.

The Briton goes outside again and sees him: Demetrius, his master, face broken by rocks, legs mauled by flames. A few steps further on is the frenzied crowd that has trampled him.

The slaves have broken their chains.

Faced with the end, the damned Christians have a point: we are not very different from one another. The well-to-do and the wretched of the Earth, they all die in the same way.

Verus joins the rush, fighting the urge to gag as the air and the ground, he notices only now, become hotter with every step.

And the more the temperature rises, the more his reason begins to fail.

The group reaches the city when the worst has already arrived. The roads are rivers of terror, sweaty flesh and aching lungs. Verus has been daydreaming for months of the wealth and unchecked luxury. Of the houses of the rich, for which they break their backs every single day. And now that he has them in front of him, he realizes they look like so many shining prisons, each one with its roof covered in burning rocks, ready to crush those foolish enough to be underneath them still.

Fire in the sky and on the ground, fire everywhere.

Verus darts through the alleyways and passes the
insulae
at the entrance to the city, unfortunate homes already touched by ruin. One unlucky victim is the color of crimson; he has crawled outside, but not quickly enough. His flesh, hair and face are a single mass. Where once there was a person, now there is only smooth, scalding matter, mouth throbbing and agape beneath a burnt, gray veil.

Mutilated human beings turned to statues by the ferocious impact, or by the caress of the growing fire.

Verus knows that entering the house is a big risk, but he also knows if he does not find water it will all be over for him.

On the threshold of the villa, right at the entrance to the atrium, a fine mosaic displays a message the young man cannot read:
CAVE CANEM
. Alongside the inscription is an image, exquisite and terrible, of a pitch-black Molosser, all teeth and instinct. The beast is depicted on a leash, crouched slightly on its hind legs, in the act of launching an attack against an unwary intruder who has ventured, pushed on by his predatory instincts, into the private mansion.

Verus has no time to register all that information, he notices only the picture of the dog before crossing the atrium, sandals burning up under his feet, and diving into the
impluvium
, the large pool for collecting rainwater found in every patrician villa.

The water is tepid and a few rocks lie on the bottom. They look nothing more than harmless, stationary stones, but it is likely they caused massive damage as they rained down through the enormous hole in the ceiling.

There is not even the time to put his thoughts in order before the horror reaches out to touch the nape of his neck: a severed thumb is floating in the pool.

Somebody's thumb.

Like a pallid worm, death brushing up against him without prior notice.

Verus lets out a scream, scrambles out of the pool and continues in his mad race. The commotion has awakened the guard, who reaches him in a scrabble of claws on decorated stone.

A dog, a damned mastiff that looks just like the one depicted on the mosaic at the entrance, leaps onto Verus, sinking its teeth into his calf.

Surprise gets the better of pain, panic swells the veins in his neck and speeds his reactions. Verus kicks out violently, with all the force his body can muster, and the beast slackens its grip, ending up in the
impluvium
. It thrashes around for a minute or two, dazed by the heat, the cold, by rage and pain. Then it notices the floating thumb, bites into it, and the frenzy is over.

Verus feels the bile rising in his throat, gagging as though he has fallen victim to some African curse. The door is open. He goes outside. A moment before another retch from Vulcan comes down on the roof, doing away with the house, the dog, the pool, life.

Again.

There are voices crying in the distance, Verus runs without taking a breath.

He has covered the whole length of the
decumanus
, the main street running east to west, and is reaching the edge of the town. But the heat is unbearable, the ash is everywhere, dead bodies litter the ground like wooden automatons in need of repair.

He is afraid, the damned Briton. He will have to die in this land of merciless flames, never again to see the grassy lands where he came into this world. Fire in his head, fire in his eyes, salt on his skin and terror, terror filling all things.

The end is just around the corner. The end is the next barred door.

He breaks down the entrance of a workshop with his shoulder, hoping to find a jug of water to empty onto his head, but instead he finds that fate has a fine fucking sense of humor: a blacksmith's furnace stares back at him from the corner of the room. Loaded with more hot embers than he has ever seen.

After all that running, Verus is back where he started.

Iron and flame, like the night of the massacre.

Strength and hope desert him, he falls to his knees, ready to embrace the red death while screaming at the top of his lungs—in any case, there will be no one to hear him.

Then, a moment before slipping into unconsciousness among the fumes and the sulfur, he hears it. The sound of salvation, the hand stretched out on the edge of the cliff, the oasis in the desert.

A horse neighing.

Splendid, magnificent, sonorous. A lament, pleading for exactly the same thing as him: freedom.

Verus looks out the back of the workshop, where a panicked steed is pawing at the ground, its saddle tied to a stake driven into the earth. Next to the beast lies its dead master, suffocated by the fumes, horribly yellowed eyes wide open.

Verus unties the animal and climbs onto it. The horse is desperate to get out of there, breaking into gallop without even waiting for a slap on its flank.

The way is not easy; the monster of magma and flaming boulders is loosing its last salvos, and it strikes hard. More than once the Briton has to convince the horse to swerve suddenly in order to avoid breaking a leg. It is so hot his skin burns, even the horse's hooves begin to smoke, but the animal does not stop.

It runs, and runs some more.

Out of the city, through the woods, the clouds, heading north, hungry for fresh air.

Neither one of them has any intention of letting go, Verus pushes the beast beyond its limits and rides for hours.

It is evening when he spots the headland at Misenum and the people's faces, pink and pearled with sweat, tell him a tale of salvation.

Verus does not know it, but as he slides from the horse's back, at the wharf where the Imperial fleet bobs calmly and helplessly at its moorings, as he collapses to the ground unconscious, after one last glimpse of the distant monster, itself now tired of vomiting fury, he is less than a hundred paces from the house of Pliny, known to posterity as “the Younger.”

The young man has not moved from the terrace all day. The horror had slowly worked its way into him. He was the first to hear the people's stories, standing on tiptoes to get a clearer view of the unfolding horror. Slowly, Pliny allowed the idea of death to sink into his heart, and at dusk he finally began to weep, when an unspeakable thought began mercilessly to shake his soul. Only when night had fallen did he consent to return inside the house, upon the insistence of his mother, worried by his strange obsession for the dark things of the world.

Pliny bid farewell as went to his bed, not knowing whom he was bidding it to or why.

In the exact same moment as he finds relief in the arms of Morpheus, the uncle who bears his name is taking his last breath on a lonely beach smothered in ash, once again flailing impotent before the wrath of the gods.

Finally, Vulcan sleeps. Tomorrow morning, the Gulf will awaken to discover that the mountain has been transformed.

After this day, Vesuvius will no longer have the same appearance as it did. From a single, unbroken peak will emerge two, a reminder to mere mortals that they are but passing through this valley of bitter tears.

For ever and ever.

Verus sleeps too. The sleep of the just.

Tomorrow will bring neither rescue nor redemption, he can bet on that. But in the meantime he is alive, and wants for nothing.

Only peace and quiet, now. The rest can wait until sunrise.

Hang tough, Briton. Grit your teeth.

Rome awaits you, and you do not know it yet.

The person you are matters more than the place to which you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place.

S
ENECA
,
Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
,
I
28
,
4

Misenum to Rome,
AD
79, August–October

WHO SAID ALL ROADS lead to Rome?

Maybe they do, but it is not easy to get there, especially when fate has decided you will be a slave.

Verus awakens with his body in pieces after a dreamless sleep.

Misenum is as peaceful as a lioness sleeping on the seashore. The air is still thick with cinders, the entire Gulf wrapped in ash and gruesome memories.

As he returns to life, the view that meets his eyes from the room he finds himself in is not something one sees every day. The monster is gone, Vulcan and his burning rage have returned to the bowels of Vesuvius. But the eruption has changed the coastline forever. And, even more than that, it has changed the souls of the people who were born and raised at the foot of the red god.

The smoke is a constant presence, building up in the air at the top of the room, filling it even all these miles away. Waves crash menacingly against the shore and the seabed boils with unquenched rage.

The worst has passed, but now the hard work begins.

There is a world to be remade, and the dead await their final farewell.

It is a new day, time to move forward.

Verus gets up off the wooden bed, pulling himself to his feet and looking around: yellow walls darkened by the mist seeping through the window, an earthenware jug, wooden bowls filled with ice water, and a chamber pot which the Briton mistakes for a fruit basket. Then again, the boy who has grown into a man still has a long way to go before he learns that sated dreamers get to piss into pots.