Sibyl had never seen a man disembowelled before. She hid Lucania's face in the folds of her own ruined garments and swallowed down horror. Arm bloodied, sword bloodied, face and armor spattered with gore, Charlie gasped out, "Can you hold the torch?"
Sibyl simply nodded and held out one hand. "Hold tight, little Lucky," she whispered to Lucania. "Hold real tight." Sibyl clung to the horse's mane with one hand, drawing Lucania close in the crook of her arm and trying to tuck her dress around to form a pocket, then took the torch in her other hand and held it aloft for Charlie. She ignored the pain in her lower body. Ignored the fatigue which shook through her arm in almost no time.
Keep it high enough to do some good, she told herself fiercely again and again, fighting the pain of burning muscles in her arm. What you're going through is nothing. He's got to walk the whole way. On a ruined leg. Sibyl received fleeting, ghostly glimpses of running figures, panic-stricken faces. Heard cries for help, cries for lost loved ones in the darkness. Refugees carried their valuables and their families tucked into anything that would roll, or ran on foot if they had no other transportation. Helter-skelter, they all fled for the false security of the seaside town.
Sibyl shut her eyes and tried to close her mind to the images her memory insisted on producing: whole-body burns, blackened skin slipping off, blistered lungs and throats... . And two thousand years later, infants discovered abandoned in their cradles, women's bones found clutching those of their children, slaves and soldiers and bejeweled patrician ladies, hapless skeletons huddled together for safety which, ultimately, none had found.
How many more had died out in the farmland, slaves and peasants whose skeletons would never be unearthed?
For an aching passage of time, all Sibyl could do was hold back tears and the terror that their own skeletons would be among them. The one thought she clung to was that Charlie had found them. They were together. Whatever happened, they were together.
It was slim consolation, at best, but it was all she had.
Herculaneum, when they finally arrived—hours later, battered, bruised, exhausted—was in a state of panic. There was actually daylight, of sorts, over the town. The ashfall was blowing southeast, with very little falling on Herculaneum. Roof tiles and partially collapsed walls littered the streets. Sibyl craned around for a glance at Vesuvius and shuddered.
The umbrella-pine cloud hovered above the city, rent with flashes of red, yellow, even bluish fire. Glowing stones hurled aloft by the volcano shot upward, then arced outward and fell onto Vesuvius' upper slopes. They looked like insane bottle-rockets plummeting down out of the blackness.
Frantic householders hauled cartloads of possessions from some of the damaged houses. In front of others, men openly jeered at those who fled, scoffing at the danger. Arguments she overheard as they passed reminded Sibyl of hurricane watchers too foolish to leave the coast for shelter. Nothing would happen to them, so why miss all the fun?
"Look at it, the whole cloud's blowing toward Pompeii... ."
Others, panic-stricken, implored the gods to save them and ran for the sea. Sibyl's head throbbed, with a headache born of too little water, too much pain, and far too much fear. Her throat was raw from swallowed smoke and ash, too raw to call out warnings which wouldn't have been heeded, anyway. She shut her eyes to blot out images too stark to bear.
When the ground shook again, so violently the street cracked underfoot, Sibyl screamed. Charlie's horse screamed, too, and reared so sharply he dragged Charlie completely off the ground. Sibyl felt her tenuous grip on the mane slip, slide away—
The landing jarred everything in her. Charlie's helmet clattered away across the paving stones. Lucania fell on top of her, wailing in terror. Charlie battled the panicked horse. Someone nearby helped Sibyl to her feet, braced her while Charlie fought the horse down again and held him.
"Get back in the saddle!" Charlie yelled.
"Hold Lucania! I can't climb up while I'm holding her!"
She handed Lucania over to her father and started to haul herself up. Another earthquake hit. The street cracked farther open. A nearby wall crashed down. Charlie's horse screamed, a high, piercing sound—
Then dragged Charlie into the crowd, beyond Sibyl's view.
"CHARLIE!"
She ran after them.
Another wall collapsed, pouring rubble into the street between her and the fleeting horse.
"Oh, God, no, please..."
She climbed over the rubble.
In the distance, blocks away already, she could just see the panicked horse and—flopping awkwardly beside it, trying to keep up—Charlie. He clung to Lucania with one hand while the horse dragged him by the reins wound around his arm. Then the rubble shifted and more of the wall started to topple. Sibyl flung herself sideways, down, away.
By the time she was able to scramble after them, Charlie had utterly vanished into the crowd.
Numb with shock and horror, Sibyl ran—limping—in the direction Charlie had gone.
"Have you seen a soldier with a runaway horse?" she gasped out to people she passed.
A few pointed out a direction; others just shoved her aside. Sibyl kept running. Always, he was just a little farther ahead or down a twisting, rubble-choked side street. She couldn't catch up. Pain in her lower body reminded her with every jolting step that she'd been violently raped and beaten just hours previously. The bruises were beginning to stiffen.
"Charlie!" she sobbed uselessly, knowing he couldn't possibly hear her this time.
She had to pause for breath. Sibyl leaned drunkenly against a none-too-steady wall and sucked down filthy air through the filter of a torn piece of her gauze dress tied around her lower face like a bandanna. Her whole body shuddered. The streets were far more crowded than Sibyl had anticipated. Roman towns—including Rome itself—went to sleep virtually with the chickens. This evening, in doomed Herculaneum, a party atmosphere like a mad Mardi Gras had seized the city.
Citizens and slaves, like the revellers in a story by Poe, drank and laughed and chased one another in lunatic circles while red death loomed above their heads. She wanted to shout warnings and understood with a wrenching pain something she'd never guessed about time traveclass="underline" people never changed.
How much time was left?
She set out again, asking about the runaway horse, the soldier carrying a baby, and was told, "That way, several minutes ago." Charlie and his runaway horse were headed toward the Decumanus Maximus. Wineshops did brisk business as patricians and plebeians gathered on street corners and beside fountains to talk about the volcano and debate the dangers. As she half ran, half stumbled past, Sibyl overheard snatches of conversation.
"... lots of times the ground's rumbled. And look at that quake we had twelve years ago, when the Magna Mater was damaged. I tell you, nothing will come of it..."
"... Tillerus and his family have already gone, slaves and all, spent a hundred-thousand sesterces for a fishing boat, I tell you, can you believe that stupid fool... ?"
"... wife's been screaming at me so long, I came out here to get drunk..."
"... never saw anything like it in my life, let me tell you, and I didn't get these white hairs overnight. Of course it's beautiful, never saw anything so awesome in my whole life. I'm going to sit right here all night and watch it, so pretty against the night sky, probably never see a thing like this again before I die..."
Sibyl wanted to cover her ears.
The Decumanus Maximus was a solid throng of people. Along the porticoed side of the street, vats of hot oil in the sausage vendors' stalls sizzled and spread the scent of frying meat into the night air, disguising the brimstone stench lingering like rotten eggs.