Pompeii

others preparing to leave. She heard her mother calling for her, and then her footsteps on the stairs. Quickly she felt for the feather she had hidden under her pillow. She opened her mouth and tickled the back of her throat, vomited noisily, and when Celsia appeared she wiped her lips and gestured weakly to the contents of the bowl. Her mother sat on the edge of the mattress and put her hand on Corelia's brow. 'Oh my poor child. You feel hot. I should send for the doctor.'
    'No, don't trouble him.' A visit from Pumponius Magonianus, with his potions and purges, was enough to make anyone ill. 'Sleep is all I need. It was that endless, awful meal. I ate too much.'
    'But my dear, you hardly ate a thing!'
    'That's not true –'
    'Hush!' Her mother held up a warning finger. Someone else was mounting the steps, with a heavier tread, and Corelia braced herself for a confrontation with her father. He would not be so easy to fool. But it was only her brother, in his long white robes as a priest of Isis. She could smell the incense on him.
    'Hurry up, Corelia. He's shouting for us.'
    No need to say who he was.
    'She's ill.'
    'Is she? Even so, she must still come. He won't be happy.'
    Ampliatus bellowed from downstairs and they both jumped. They glanced towards the door.
    'Yes, can't you make an effort, Corelia?' said her mother. 'For his sake?'
    Once, the three of them had formed an alliance: had laughed about him behind his back – his moods, his rages, his obsessions. But lately that had stopped. Their domestic triumvirate had broken apart under his relentless fury. Individual strategies for survival had been adopted. Corelia had observed her mother become the perfect Roman matron, with a shrine to Livia in her dressing room, while her brother had subsumed himself in his Egyptian cult. And she? What was she supposed to do? Marry Popidius and take a second master? Become more of a slave in the household than Ampliatus had ever been?
    She was too much her father's daughter not to fight.
    'Run along, both of you,' she said bitterly. 'Take my bowl of vomit and show it to him, if you like. But I'm not going to his stupid spectacle.' She rolled on to her side and faced the wall. Another roar came from below.
    Her mother breathed her martyr's sigh. 'Oh, very well. I'll tell him.'

    It was exactly as the engineer had suspected. Having led them almost directly north towards the summit for a couple of miles, the aqueduct spur suddenly swung eastwards, just as the ground began to rise towards Vesuvivus. The road turned with it and for the first time they had their backs to the sea and were pointing inland, towards the distant foothills of the Appenninus.
    The Pompeii spur wandered away from the road more often now, hugging the line of the terrain, weaving back and forth across their path. Attilius relished this subtlety of aqueducts. The great Roman roads went crashing through Nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards – any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant – they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view. Sometimes it was only the eagles, soaring in the hot air above some lonely mountainscape, who could appreciate the true majesty of what men had wrought.
    They had passed through the gridwork of centuriated fields and were entering into the wine-growing country, owned by the big estates. The ramshackle huts of the smallholders on the plain, with their tethered goats and their half-dozen ragged hens pecking in the dust, had given way to handsome farmhouses with red-tile roofs that dotted the lower slopes of the mountain.
    Surveying the vineyards from his horse, Attilius felt almost dazed by the vision of such abundance, such astonishing fertility, even in the midst of a drought. He was in the wrong business. He should give up water and go into wine. The vines had escaped from ordinary cultivation and had fastened themselves on to every available wall and tree, reaching to the top of the tallest branches, enveloping them in luxuriant cascades of green and purple. Small white faces of Bacchus, made of marble to ward off evil, with perforated eyes and mouths, hung motionless in the still air, peering from the