Free Pompeii by Robert Harris Page B

downstairs in the barracks. He closed his eyes, only to open them again almost immediately. In the panic of the crisis he had managed to forget the sight of the corpse, dragged from the pool of eels, but in the darkness he found himself replaying the whole scene—the concentrated silence at the water’s edge; the body hooked and dragged ashore; the blood; the screams of the woman; the anxious face and the pale white limbs of the girl.
    Too exhausted to rest, he swung his bare feet onto the warm floor. A small oil lamp flickered on the nightstand. His uncompleted letter home lay beside it. There was no point now, he thought, in finishing it. Either he would repair the Augusta , in which case his mother and sister would hear from him on his return. Or they would hear of him, when he was shipped back to Rome , in disgrace, to face a court of inquiry—a dishonor to the family name.
    He picked up the lamp and took it to the shelf at the foot of the bed, setting it down among the little shrine’s figures that represented the spirits of his ancestors. Kneeling, he reached across and plucked out the effigy of his great-grandfather. Could the old man have been one of the original engineers on the Augusta ? It was not impossible. The records of the Curator Aquarum showed that Agrippa had shipped in a workforce of forty thousand, slaves and legionaries, and had built her in eighteen months. That was six years after he built the Aqua Julia in Rome and seven years before he built the Virgo, and his great-grandfather had certainly worked on both of those. It pleased him to imagine that an earlier Attilius might have come south to this sweltering land—might even have sat on this very spot as the slaves dug out the Piscina Mirabilis. He felt his courage strengthening. Men had built the Augusta ; men would fix her. He would fix her.
    And then his father.
    He replaced one figure and took up another, running his thumb tenderly over the smooth head.
    Your father was a brave man; make sure you are, too.
    He had been a baby when his father had finished the Aqua Claudia, but so often had he been told the story of the day of its dedication—of how, at four months old, he had been passed over the shoulders of the engineers in the great crowd on the Esquiline Hill—that it sometimes seemed to him he could remember it all at first hand: the elderly Claudius, twitching and stammering as he sacrificed to Neptune, and then the water appearing in the channel, as if by magic, at the exact moment that he raised his hands to the sky. But that had had nothing to do with the intervention of the gods, despite the gasps of those present. That was because his father had known the laws of engineering and had opened the sluices at the head of the aqueduct exactly eighteen hours before the ceremony was due to reach its climax, and had ridden back into the city faster than the water could chase him.
    He contemplated the piece of clay in his palm.
    And you, father? Did you ever come to Misenum? Did you know Exomnius? The aquarii of Rome were always a family—as close as a cohort, you used to say. Was Exomnius one of those engineers on the Esquiline on your day of triumph? Did he swing me in his arms with the rest?
    He stared at the figure for a while, then kissed it and put it carefully with the others.
    He sat back on his haunches.
    First the aquarius disappears and then the water. The more he considered it, the more convinced he was that these must be connected. But how? He glanced around the roughly plastered walls. No clue here, that was for sure. No trace of any man’s character left behind in this plain cell. And yet, according to Corax, Exomnius had run the Augusta for twenty years.
    He retrieved the lamp and went out into the passage, shielding the flame with his hand. Drawing back the curtain opposite, he shone the light into the cubicle where Exomnius’s possessions were stored. A couple of wooden chests, a pair of bronze candelabra, a cloak,