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After which came the rumours, flocking in on every hand like psychopomp birds, equally impossible to discount as to prove—black wonders and obscene miracles enacted across the whole of Herculanaeum, without apparent cause or cure. Fresh plagues breeding necklaces of buboes that burst open, mouth-like, to whisper poison in their sufferers’ ears. Fearsome dust devils blowing back and forth through the empty streets, scooping stragglers up into that misery-colored sky and dropping them again days later, half-eaten. Cicadas singing dirges in the trees before dawn, their voices almost understandable. A luminous vapour leaking in over the water each sunset, dissipating wherever it reaches the shore . . .

Or that day two weeks past, when Dromio sent Chryse to market for the last time, only to see her come home late beyond hope of excuse, empty-handed, fix-eyed and panting. Claiming: “Market was gone.”

“What are you talking about, you stupid slut?”

“I couldn’t find the old road, I swear it on Juno’s breasts, though I looked everywhere—just some other, wide and well-laid, like it’d been there for years. But . . . I didn’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“ . . . It looked . . . wrong.”

So that night they made do with food from the storehouse, and Chryse was beaten—not over-hard, for her child’s sake, though Marcilla saw Gnaius bite his lip at every stroke. Just like she heard Dromio and the head cook whispering about it, afterward: Dromio reckoning the Villa’s accounts on his wax tablet, cook shelling peas, neither looking at the other directly. Firelight painted both their faces as red-tinged tragedy masks, impossible to read aside from whatever their voices let slip.

“End of the world, that’s what they’re saying over at Piso’s Retreat. What d’you think, Dromio?”

“I think the world’s always ending, or so someone always claims. That Jewish preacher in Rome, twenty years ago—Petros, his name was—said the exact same, and all he got for it was crucified. Head-downwards, by his own request.”

“Suppose you’re right.”

“Yes, well—Jews always prophesy calamity, and lo and behold, calamity usually comes. It makes the cheat all the better: Any omen might mean any one of ten thousand disasters, and your god decides which it was.” A pause. “But all the same, this man was no ranting lunatic took with heatstroke visions; seemed sane as you

or I, or saner. Didn’t speak of the world’s end as tragedy, only salvation—the return of his savior, that false Jew-king Pilate did for.”

“Must not’ve done his duty too well, he had to return for a second go at it.”

“You know he didn’t. The legions smashed the Jews’ high temple for good and all, nine years gone.”

“So things never improved, one way or the other?”

“Not for them.”

To which the cook shrugged, tipping the last of her husks together into her drawn-up apron. And said, rising—

“Doesn’t sound like much of a god to me, then . . . hardly one worth dying for, anyhow.”

Thus confirming something Marcilla’s always suspected about her captors, especially given their habit of routinely deifying dead emperors, whether or not said rulers were mainly loved or feared during their lifetimes: that when all is said and done, lares and penates aside, the only thing Romans really worship is themselves. Which certainly makes some sense, considering the way they tend to treat everyone else they come across.

Since then, there’ve been no more market expeditions—Locusta’s servants stay inside, bide their time, arrange their days to coincide with her own strange schedule: eat, sleep, pray. Watch the world darken, not least with the slow appearance of men they don’t know at the very edges of her fields, eddying here and there like phantoms. They don’t come much closer, don’t seem to see the Villa somehow, not even when they stare at it directly: a testament to Locusta’s power, perhaps, or to the power she serves. But they don’t go away, either.

And then, yesterday—finally—the worst thing yet. A cloud arching up over Vesuvius like some funeral pine, spreading its branches to blot out the sun . . .

Whatever the Lady Locusta’s drawn down upon this city, and no matter her reasoning for doing so, Marcilla knows she’s already lingered far too long in its path to get away clean. But she’s not ready to watch Gnaius Vespis and his Chryse die as well, not just yet; not when they want so badly, the both of them, to live—with each other. For each other.

And then there’s the child, who has no say in any of this at all. Surely someone should think to speak for it, while—

(if)

—there’s still time.

***

They find Chryse upstairs, at last—still asleep, hands pressed tight to her distended belly, and no amount of Gnaius’ whispering or caresses seems to wake her. Finally, he gives in and does his fabled demigod act after all—hoists her up high and drapes her across himself like a senator’s toga, limping more than ever under the strain, so they can creep back down and out through the peristyle interiora, Locusta’s hidden garden, through which they might yet hope to reach the posticum, the bath-house, the road and trees beyond.

By the water clock in the atrium, night has already eked past into morning and beyond, not that anyone left awake would be able to tell the difference. The cloud around Vesuvius’ summit has blocked out the sky, turning it a lowering, vivid grey so dark it seems almost purple. Sometimes the clouds part far enough to admit a brownish-yellow shaft or two of the sort of light which comes during an eclipse, even as juddering sheets of lightning continually spit and tangle above the torrent of ash and pumice, in flashes so bright they seem to cut Heaven wide open.

The rest of Villa Locusta is darker and even more silent than before, eating their footsteps like a sacred grove. Marcilla runs her hand along the wall as they go, tracing the painted river; on better days, this ribbon of bright, meandering blue “flows” so clear you might almost think you see fish flicker beneath its surface, poised to jump. Now it’s opaque, shadowed by dense and overhanging green foliage, behind which—if you pause incautiously long enough to study it too closely—a series of almost-familiar faces sometimes seem to peer out at you, baring their tiny phantom teeth.

As they clear the peristyle’s entrance, Chryse stirs, gives a rattling sigh. Asks, in a thin little voice: “ . . . Gnaius?”