From the HBT Originals anthology Tales from Fallen Empires, by Evelyn Marlowe. This is a free preview — Part 1 of 3 — narrated version below, with the text underneath if you’d rather read.
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The wax tablet had been scraped clean three times already, and still Severina could not find the right beginning.
She sat at the low writing table in the back room of Julia Felix's property complex, where the light came through a narrow aperture in the plaster wall and fell in a pale stripe across her knees. Outside, the garden was very quiet. That was the first thing she had noticed upon waking—the quiet—though she had not yet found a word for what was wrong with it. The fountain still ran. The water still whispered over its lip of stone. But the birds that usually populated the laurel hedge from first light had gone somewhere else, or nowhere at all, and their absence gave the garden the quality of a painted fresco: beautiful, still, and faintly untrue.
She pressed the stylus into the fresh wax and began again.
Severina to her dearest Marta, freedwoman of the household of Gaius Petronius in Herculaneum, greetings. I write to you on the day before the Vulcanalia, though as you know the festival has been observed already and the month turns strange. I am well. I am busy. I have been told to say both of those things in my letters, so I say them, and then I tell you what is true.
She paused. The stylus hovered. Somewhere beyond the garden wall, on the Via dell'Abbondanza, a cart wheel cracked against a paving stone and a man's voice rose briefly in complaint, then fell away. Normal sounds. The sounds of a city that did not know it was being watched.
What is true is that the ground has moved again. Three times since dawn. Not the great lurching we had in the year of Nero, when half the temples cracked and my old mistress—your sister, rest her—said the gods were rearranging furniture. These are smaller, shallower. They come up through the soles of your feet before they reach your ears, like a whisper spoken into stone. The water in the impluvium shivered this morning and did not stop shivering for longer than I would have liked. A jar of Falernian in the storeroom fell from its shelf without being touched. Julia Felix's steward, Philemon, says it is nothing. He says these hills have always breathed. I have lived in Pompeii for nine years, Marta, and I know what the hills do. This is different.
She set down the stylus and rubbed the back of her neck. Through the open doorway the garden waited in its painted silence. A single brown leaf detached itself from the laurel and fell straight down, no wind to carry it sideways, and that too seemed wrong—the absolute stillness of the air, the heat pressed down like a lid on a pot.
It was the twenty-third day of August, in the consulship of Vespasianus and Titus—though she wrote dates as her first mistress had taught her, by the festival nearest at hand rather than by the official calendar. She was twenty-six years old. She had been freed four years ago upon the death of her mistress Claudia, who had been Marta's younger sister, and who had bequeathed Severina not only her freedom but a small reserve of coin, a silver bracelet engraved with ivy, and an introduction to Julia Felix, the most prosperous property owner in Pompeii, who had needed a literate freedwoman to help manage correspondence and accounts.
It was useful work. It was better than most lives available to a girl who had been brought from the east as a child and raised speaking Latin in someone else's house. Severina knew this. She counted it regularly, like coin.
By the second hour of the afternoon she had crossed the city twice.
Julia Felix's great estate occupied a substantial block between the Via dell'Abbondanza and the rear lanes, its arcade of shops facing the street, its baths open to paying visitors, its gardens running long and deep behind their painted walls. Severina had been sent first to confirm an agreement with a merchant named Salvius near the Triangular Forum, whose lease on a workshop storehouse was due for renewal before the month's end. She walked the Via dell'Abbondanza in the full heat of midday, her palla drawn up against the sun, stepping over the raised crossing stones without breaking stride as she had learned to do in her first weeks here, when everything about Pompeii still required concentration.
The street was busy but not right. That was the only way she could frame it to herself. The fishmonger's stall at the corner of the Stabian baths had its usual flies and its usual smell, and the felt-workers two doors down had their usual noise, and the election notices painted on the walls—The muleteers ask you to vote for Gaius Julius Polybius—were the same notices that had been there since spring. But the dogs that usually lay in doorways had retreated somewhere inside, and the mules at the water trough near the crossroads were restless, ears moving, heads lifting and dropping with a nervous rhythm that their driver seemed not to notice.
A sulphurous smell drifted up from the direction of the wells. Not strong—not the stench of a drain or a bad spring—but present, mineral and faint, like the memory of an egg left too long. She had smelled it before, in lesser degree, during the previous tremors. Today it was enough to notice.
Salvius was not at his workshop. His boy said he had gone to the forum to hear something about the water supply, which had been running low and discolored since morning. Severina thanked him and turned back toward the center of the city, adjusting her route through the familiar grid of streets, past the thermopolium on the corner where a man was eating standing up from one of the round pots sunk into the stone counter, past the bakery where the millstones were silent in the afternoon pause, past the painted lararium on the wall of a wealthy house where someone had left a fresh garland of flowers at the household gods' feet that morning, the petals already beginning to curl in the heat.
The forum opened before her as it always did—the sudden expansion of space that still moved her even after nine years, the wide travertine pavement, the columns of the Capitolium rising at the northern end, Jupiter enthroned above the city in his permanent marble authority. The basilica on the west, its upper windows admitting long wedges of afternoon light. The market building, the temple of Apollo, the covered hall of the eumachia where the fullers and dyers had their guild dedications. She knew every building, every vendor's position, every shortcut. This was her city in the way that a city can belong to someone who was not born in it—by long habitation, by knowledge earned through walking.
She found Salvius near the Temple of Jupiter, in conversation with two other men whose expressions shared a quality she recognized: the careful non-alarm of people who are alarmed. The aqueduct, Salvius told her when she reached him. The Aqua Augusta had been running poorly since the previous day. There were reports from the countryside that springs in the hills had dried up, or changed, or tasted wrong. The public fountains in the north of the city were down to a trickle.
"The earth breathes too much today," said one of the other men, a heavyset fellow with a mason's callused hands. He said it the way people say things they mean to dismiss but cannot quite bring themselves to.
"It always breathes," said Salvius, which was what Philemon had said.
Severina conducted her business. Salvius agreed to the terms of the lease renewal; she would bring the formal contract in the morning for his seal. She wrote his agreement on her wax tablet, noted the witnesses, thanked him, and walked back toward the Via dell'Abbondanza in the early afternoon light.
The mountain was visible from almost everywhere in Pompeii if you looked north. Most people did not look north with any particular attention. The mountain had always been there. Its slopes were striped with the dark green of vineyards, its summit broad and relatively low by the standards of the Apennines, its silhouette so familiar it had long since ceased to constitute scenery and become instead mere background—the way a wall becomes invisible when you have looked at it long enough.
— End of preview. The rest of “The Letter from Pompeii” continues in Tales from Fallen Empires, available now.
Get the full story (and four more) in Tales from Fallen Empires →
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