Household Gods
Vindolanda, in the ninth year of the Emperor Hadrian
The crate had come north with the rest of the prefect’s baggage, and Titus was the one who had to open it.
Three months of transport had done what three months of transport always did. The wax on half the tablets had cracked in the cold, and someone in Gaul had let rain into the wagon, so the wood underneath had swollen and split along the grain. His orders were simple. Sort what could be saved, note what couldn’t, and burn the rest before the damp bred mould that would ruin the good tablets stacked beside them. It was the kind of work given to men who could read and write and had nothing more urgent to do with the skill, which described Titus exactly, and had for eleven years.
He worked through the crate methodically, tablet by tablet, laying the salvageable ones flat on the trestle and stacking the ruined ones for the fire pit outside the record office. Household accounts, mostly. Grain measures, a dowry inventory, two letters from a woman in Puteoli complaining about the price of oil. Nothing that belonged to a prefect’s family looked like anything but paper, in the end. Numbers and names and small griefs, the same as anyone’s.
He had the next tablet in his hand and was already reaching for the discard pile when the name stopped him.
Popidius Celer. And below it, in the same careful hand, a second name he had not heard spoken aloud in forty-nine years and had never once stopped hearing in his own skull.
Aemilia.
He set the tablet down on the trestle as if it had grown suddenly hot, and then picked it up again because setting it down had accomplished nothing. The wax was old, the kind that had been recut and rewritten so many times the surface had gone the color of a scab, and beneath the visible layer of writing he could see the ghost of an earlier hand pressed into the wood itself, where a stylus had gone through years before. He read it three times before he let himself believe he had read it right the first time.
It was an inventory. A record of goods received, twelve items, a household shrine among them, described as the bronze Lares of the house of Popidius, two figures, the larger missing its left hand. And beneath the list, a note in a second, rounder hand: Received of Munatius Priscus, on behalf of the lady Aemilia, widow of Popidius Celer, formerly of Pompeii, now resident at Puteoli. Payment rendered in full for the recovery.
Titus had grown up without a mother he could put a face to. He had grown up, in fact, without much of anything he could put a face to, which was the entire shape of his life and the reason he wore an auxiliary’s belt instead of a legionary’s, despite being born a Roman citizen in a Roman town. The eruption had taken the census rolls along with the town, and a five-year-old boy pulled half-blind from a street full of ash could not produce witnesses to his own birth. Cohors I Tungrorum had taken him anyway, eventually, when he was old enough to hold a spear, because auxiliary units were less particular about paperwork than legions were, and paperwork was the one thing that eruption had made sure he would never have.
He had told himself for forty years that his mother had died in that town. He had built his life on the flat, useless certainty of it, the way a man builds a house on a foundation he has never actually tested, because testing it seemed worse than trusting it.
Puteoli. She had gone to Puteoli.
He read the tablet a fourth time, checking the date scratched into the corner, doing the arithmetic without wanting to. Thirteen years after the mountain. Thirteen years, and she had been alive to pay a man named Munatius Priscus to dig her house out of the ash and send her back whatever the diggers found worth carrying.
Titus’s commanding officer at Vindolanda was Gnaeus Munatius Bassus, prefect of the cohort, a man who spoke of his grandfather’s shipping interests in Campania the way other officers spoke of ancestors who had died well in battle.
Pompeii, the twenty-fourth day of August, in the first year of the Emperor Titus
Chrysis had been beating the dust out of the winter blankets on the roof terrace since before the sun cleared the ridge of Vesuvius, and she noticed the mountain before anyone else in the house did, because she was the only one looking at it.
A thread of cloud rose from the summit, thin at first, the kind of thing a person might mistake for smoke from a shepherd’s fire if the mountain were not a mountain and fires did not climb straight up for that long without bending. She watched it thicken for the length of time it took to finish one blanket, and then she went down the ladder and told the steward, who told her to get back to her work, because the mountain smoked sometimes and no one in the house had ever seen it do more than that.
By the fourth hour it was doing more than that. The cloud had become a column, dark at its base and pale where it flattened out high overhead into a shape like the crown of a pine tree, and the light in the courtyard had gone the color of old bronze. Aemilia came out into the atrium with the boy on her hip, and stood looking up through the roof opening at the sky, and did not tell Chrysis to go back to work.
“Get the strongbox,” Aemilia said. “The tablets, the seal, the household gods off the shrine. Everything that fits in the box, in the box.”
Titus was two years old and did not understand why his mother’s arms had gone rigid around him, only that they had, and he began to cry the way children cry when they feel a fear they have no words for yet, which made Aemilia’s arms tighten further, which made him cry harder.
Chrysis took the boy from her so Aemilia’s hands would be free, and felt him quiet almost at once against her shoulder, the way he always did with her, and she carried him with her while she worked, because there was no one else to hold him and the box would not pack itself. She wrapped the bronze Lares in a linen cloth first, the larger figure and the smaller, the ones that stood on the shrine in the corner of the atrium every day of her life in this house and asked nothing of her except a pinch of salt and a coin of wine at the new moon. Then the tablets, the household accounts, the marriage contract, the deed to the shop three doors down that Popidius Celer rented to a fuller. Then the jewelry Aemilia handed her without looking at it, because Aemilia was looking at the sky.
By noon the ash was falling. Not smoke, not cloud, but small hard stones the color of pumice, rattling on the roof tiles like the beginning of hail and then like the middle of it, gathering in the corners of the courtyard in drifts the depth of a hand.
Popidius Celer went out to find a cart and mules and did not come back.
Vindolanda
Titus did not sleep that night, though he lay on his cot with his eyes shut long enough that the man beside him, Bassio, stopped asking if he was well.
In the morning he went back to the record office before the duty roster called for it and pulled two more crates from the stack against the wall, the ones marked for the prefect’s household and not yet opened, because if one tablet had survived the burning fifty years should have given it, others might have too. The chief clerk, an old Batavian named Verecundus who had seen every kind of soldier come through his office and had stopped being curious about most of them, watched him work for a while and then went back to his own ledger without comment.
He found the second tablet by midmorning, folded inside a bundle of shipping manifests that had nothing to do with it, as though someone had used it once as a spare sheet of wax and then forgotten what was written underneath the top layer. It was a full accounting, in a clerk’s hand, not Munatius Priscus’s own, listing what the recovery expedition into Pompeii had actually brought out of the house of Popidius Celer over the course of eleven days of digging through the hardened ash. Silver plate. A gold armlet. Two more strongboxes besides the one already noted. A marble table leg. Forty-one items in total, valued at a sum that made Titus’s mouth go dry when he converted it in his head to a soldier’s yearly pay.
Twelve items delivered to the widow Aemilia at Puteoli, the first tablet had said. Forty-one items recovered, the second one said. The difference between the two numbers did not need a clerk’s training to understand, though Titus had a clerk’s training, and it told him exactly what he was looking at. A man had been paid to dig a grieving woman’s house out of volcanic rock and had kept most of what he found, and had sent her twelve items and called it recovery, and had likely told her, in whatever letter accompanied the shipment, that this was everything the ash had left him to find.
Titus thought about the fuller’s shop three doors down, and wondered whether he was inventing details his mother had never told him, or whether some of it was memory surfacing now that the door to it had been kicked open. He did not know. He had been two years old. He had a scar on his left knee he could not account for and a fear of enclosed spaces he had never examined too closely, and until yesterday he had believed these were simply things about himself, the way a man believes the shape of his own face without needing a mirror to confirm it.
He copied both tablets that afternoon, his own hand small and even on a fresh wax leaf, working at the trestle with the crate lids propped to hide what he was doing from anyone passing the doorway, though he could not have said from whom, exactly, he thought he was hiding it. Bassus was his commanding officer. Bassus’s grandfather was, on the evidence of two pieces of wax an old soldier had nearly burned by accident, a man who had defrauded the survivors of a buried city, families already stripped of everything they owned, for a further profit on top of the one he was already charging them to dig.
He put the original tablets back exactly where he had found them, in the order he had found them, and told Verecundus he had finished the sorting and the rest could go to the fire.
Pompeii
By the ninth hour the ash lay knee-deep in the street outside, and the roof over the kitchen had come down under the weight of it, and Popidius Celer’s mother, who could not walk without a stick even on a good day and had refused three times already to be carried, sat in the atrium beside the covered well and said she would wait there for her son to come back with the cart.
Chrysis had the boy on her hip again. Aemilia had him for a while and then Chrysis had him again, the two of them trading the weight of him back and forth without discussing it, the way people share a burden when there is no time to decide who ought to carry it.
“We can’t wait for the cart,” Aemilia said. She was not looking at her mother-in-law when she said it. She was looking at the doorway, where the light outside had gone from bronze to the color of a bruise, purple-black and shot through with a redness low near the ground that Chrysis understood, without anyone telling her, came from fire somewhere on the mountain’s flank.
“I am not leaving this house,” the old woman said, and that, in the end, was the last full sentence Chrysis heard her speak, because Aemilia made her decision in the next breath, gathering her skirts and reaching for the boy, and there was no time left to argue an old woman out of a chair she had decided to die in.
“The box,” Aemilia said to Chrysis. “You have it?”
Chrysis had it, wedged under one arm, the linen-wrapped Lares digging their small bronze elbows into her ribs through the cloth.
“Stay with her.” Aemilia’s voice did not shake when she said it, which Chrysis understood later, turning the moment over during the only hours of her life she would have left in which to turn anything over, was its own kind of mercy, because a shaking voice would have made it a request, and a request could be refused. A level voice made it an order, and orders did not require Chrysis to decide anything at all. “Stay with her, and keep the box safe, and if the house holds, we’ll come back for both of you when this passes.”
It was not true, and some part of Aemilia’s face, for just a moment, admitted that it was not true, and then Aemilia took Titus and went out into the street, into the falling stone and the crowd of neighbors doing the same thing, all of them moving toward the gate that led down to the sea, where boats were said to still be taking people off the beach.
Chrysis stood in the atrium with the box and watched the doorway a long time after Aemilia had gone through it.
Vindolanda
He did not go to Bassus. He turned that decision over for three days, walking it the way a man walks a stone in his boot, unable to leave it and unable to make it comfortable, and at the end of the three days he understood that going to Bassus accomplished nothing he actually wanted.
Bassus had not dug the house out of the ash. Bassus’s grandfather had, before Bassus was born, in a city on the other side of the world from a wall in Britain, and whatever Titus said to him would land on a man who had inherited a fortune and a name and nothing else: no memory of the eleven days of digging, no hand in the count of forty-one items against twelve delivered. An accusation would cost Titus his place in the cohort and would cost Bassus an afternoon of irritation before he had Titus’s transfer papers drawn up to some fort in the Pennine hills where the rain never stopped. The dead did not get their silver back. The old woman by the well did not get her legs to carry her out the door in time, whatever Titus said or didn’t say to a prefect fifty years after the fact.
What Titus wanted, once he stripped everything else away from it, was smaller than justice and larger than himself. He wanted his mother, if any part of her endured anywhere beyond a name on two pieces of wax, to know that the boy she had left with a slave in a burning house had lived. He did not know if that was possible. He did not know if Puteoli had a family in it still that carried the name Popidius, or a woman old enough now to remember a two-year-old with a scar coming to his knee before the scar existed.
He wrote a letter that took him four evenings to get right, because he kept starting it the way a report starts, with facts laid out in order, and it kept coming out wrong, cold, a document instead of a message from a son. In the end he wrote it plainly. He gave his name, and the name of the cohort, and the fort. He said he had been a small child in the house of Popidius Celer near the Herculaneum gate, and that he had been told all his life that the house had no survivors, and that he had found reason, this year, to believe that was not true, and that if the letter reached anyone who remembered a woman named Aemilia, or a household slave named Chrysis who had carried him on her hip through the worst of it, he would count it the greatest debt of his life to hear of it, whatever the news turned out to be.
He copied the tablets a second time, a clean set with nothing in his own hand to identify where they had come from, and folded them in with the letter, and gave the whole packet to a grain trader named Verus who made the run to Gaul twice a year and knew a man in Puteoli who bought British wool. It was not a fast road south. It was not a certain one either. Titus understood, handing the packet over, that he might never learn whether it arrived, and that this not-knowing was likely to be the shape of the rest of his life, the same shape it had always had, except now it held a name instead of an absence.
Pompeii
The roof went sometime after midnight, though by then no one in the house could have told a physician what hour it was, since the sky over Pompeii had not shown a clear division between night and day for the better part of twelve hours, only degrees of dark.
Chrysis had moved the old woman twice already, first from the chair by the well to a spot under the covered colonnade when the ash began coming down through the open roof of the atrium itself, and then again when even the colonnade started to groan under a weight of pumice no roof in the town had been built to hold. She had the box under one arm the whole time and the old woman’s thin wrist gripped in her other hand, and she had stopped, somewhere in the last hour, being able to feel her own fear as a separate thing from the work of simply moving from one place to the next.
When the roof came down it did not come down all at once. It came down in a long groan and then a crack and then a fall, tiles and beams and the accumulated weight of the day’s ash burying the corner of the room where the old woman had first refused to leave her chair, and Chrysis understood, in the moment the sound reached her, that she had moved the old woman just far enough and not one span farther.
She did not remember deciding to keep moving after that. She remembered the door to the storeroom, low and half-blocked already by drift, and remembered thinking that a doorway that had held for four hundred years might hold a little longer than a room with an open roof, and remembered pulling the old woman through it and setting the box down against the wall and sitting with her back against the box, because there was nowhere else in the small dark space to put herself, and the strongbox at least would not move if the world outside kept coming apart.
The heat, when it came, came all at once, and came from everywhere, the way a wave comes when a person is already standing in water too deep to run from it, and Chrysis’s last complete thought, if it could be called a thought and not simply the last shape her mind took before it stopped taking shapes at all, was of the boy, and whether Aemilia had gotten him past the gate, and whether the sea had still been taking people off when they reached it.
Her arm was still braced against the box when they found her, seventeen centuries later, a hollow in the hardened ash where a body had been, and inside it, unbroken, the bronze figures of the household gods of Popidius Celer, wrapped in linen that had turned, over all that time, to the faint gray ghost of a shroud.
Vindolanda, two years later
No letter ever came back to him. Verus made his crossing that winter and the next, and each time Titus asked, and each time the trader shook his head and said the man in Puteoli had taken the packet and promised to make inquiries, and that inquiries in a port full of strangers took longer than anyone liked.
Titus stopped asking, eventually, not because he stopped wanting to know, but because the wanting had worn itself into something he could carry without it showing on his face, the way an old wound stops aching and simply becomes a place where weather can be felt a day before it arrives. He was transferred, the following spring, to a smaller garrison two days’ march west along the Wall, a routine posting that had nothing to do with tablets or crates or a prefect named Munatius Bassus, and he never learned whether that was chance or whether Verecundus, who had watched him work at that trestle three days running without comment, had said a word to someone on his behalf.
He kept one copy of the second tablet for himself, the accounting of forty-one items against twelve delivered, folded into the bottom of the chest where he kept the few things a soldier accumulates in a life spent moving from post to post. He took it out sometimes, on the nights the wind came down off the high ground hard enough to find every gap in the barracks wall, and read the two columns of numbers by lamplight, not because he needed reminding of what they said, but because the boy who had been carried out of a burning house by a woman whose voice he had never once been able to picture giving orders, deserved, he thought, to have someone read her name once in a while, and say it, and mean by the saying that she had not simply vanished into the ash the way the town’s other twenty thousand names so often did, in the tellings he heard from men who had never set foot within a hundred miles of Campania and spoke of the mountain the way they spoke of any disaster far enough away to be a story instead of a grief.
She had lived. She had lived long enough to pay a dishonest man to dig her house out of the rock, and to send north twelve small things that had once stood on a shelf in her home, believing, as far as Titus could ever determine, that this was the whole of what the ash had left behind.
It was not the whole of it. He was.