Pompeii: City on Fire (38 page)

It was about more than the election now. About more than even his sister's freedom. Perhaps it always had been.

The pull of God was strong on his heart tonight. All that Jeremiah had spoken over him seemed words from a prophet. It was for him to rise up against evil, to wield the sword of God against it. Trusting in God, not himself. Willing to fail, praying to succeed. Had he been chosen? Could he believe the old man's words?

It seemed hours until they reached the path that led to the front of the house. Perhaps it had been. A weariness he had never known washed over him. He paused before the buried front garden, unequal to the task.

Ariella drew up beside him, panting. "What is it?"

It was growing harder to breathe, the sulfuric odor thickening the air. "I do not know if I can do this."

She seemed to feel it, too. It was not merely the exhaustion. The house seemed enveloped in a special darkness, a settled dread that wormed its way into his soul.

"Evil." Her voice was low, perhaps angry.

He looked at her eyes, tried to read her expression beneath the ash-coated mask.

She watched him. "Can you feel it?"

He turned back to the house. If he had needed confirmation that the battle about to be waged was more than man-against-man, this was it.

Holy One, go before me.

The prayer strengthened him. A piece of his soul lightened, as though a candle had been lit. A tiny flicker at best, but enough to guide him onward. He lifted his sword toward the house. "Are you ready?"

She did not answer at once, perhaps finding her own strength. But then she was climbing upward, toward the peristyle. Ever the warrior.

Inside the house, the atrium's garden and floor mosaics had been erased. Only a sea of rocky ash greeted them. It tapered down at the edges, to the roofed colonnade surrounding the atrium. They slid down the pile to the empty walkway. It was a relief to be on firm ground. His calf muscles twitched with the strange solidity.

Ariella hurried ahead of him. "The cells are this way."

They twisted through the silent house. How could she remember where to go through this labyrinth? It hurt his heart to think of her first-hand knowledge of Maius's special cells.

Ariella slowed as they neared a smaller peristyle porch on the west side of the house. Torchlight flickered against the columns and Cato could hear voices coming from the room that opened onto the porch.

She turned to him, held a finger to her lips beneath the mask. "The entrance is past the triclinium here. But there is someone present."

A laugh echoed to them.

Maius.

Ariella's eyes flickered her fear and confusion. Could the man truly laugh at such a time as this?

A slave turned the corner suddenly. He bore an empty tray and stopped short when he saw the two. Cato moved quickly. He grabbed the man, twisted behind him, and covered the slave's mouth with his hand. His back slammed the wall and he held the man fast. Ariella lifted her sword point to the slave's chin.

Cato hissed into the man's ear. "Do not make a sound." The slave nodded and Ariella signaled with her eyes that she was ready to hold him to it.

He eased his hand off the man's mouth. The slave took a gulping breath but said nothing. Ariella held him against the wall while Cato pivoted to face him.

"Is Maius alone?"

The slave shook his head.

"Who?"

"His daughter."

"Anyone else?"

Another shake of the head. "He is feasting."

The words were offered as an explanation, but they only explained that Nigidius Maius was either a fool or a madman. Perhaps both.

Cato pushed him toward the hall. "Go. Take anyone you wish and flee the city. He will not have need of you again."

The slave hesitated a moment. Cato was unsure whether it was loyalty to Maius or a desire to fight alongside Cato that held him, but then he was gone.
Speed and good health, my friend.
He drew Ariella close and spoke in whispers. "I will deal with Maius. You find Portia, bring her out."

She nodded her understanding.

"Ready?"

Another nod.

He touched her face above the mask, traced a line under her eye. Then he strode ahead, to the opening of the room. He felt Ariella slip behind him, toward the entrance to the lower levels.

Maius did not look up at once. He reclined on a couch with Nigidia beside him and a table filled with excess before them. His distraction gave Cato a fleeting moment to absorb the scenes of horror painted on the triclinium walls. He took in the story at once, the terrible mystery rites of a young girl's initiation, the horror on her face before, and the resignation after. The sight filled him with something he could not at first name.

Righteous anger.
His chest swelled with it and it burst from his mouth in a shout of rage. "Gnaeus Nigidius Maius! The Holy One has looked down on your acts and has passed judgment!"

Maius's head jerked up from the table, his mouth still stuffed with grapes and his eyes wide.

Cato stood at the center of the room's opening, his stance wide and his sword raised. A tremor shook through him, deeper and more profound than any earthquake.

Surrender.
He gave it all in that moment—all the responsibility he felt for his sisters, his mother, for Ariella. All the commitment to free Pompeii of Nigidius Maius, to free the world of all injustice. It was not his battle, it was the Lord's.

And he was full of something new, something with power and glory, a strength he had never known, a freedom from bondage. He was a sword wielded in the Name of the only Just One.

And in that Name, he had no doubt of victory.

Maius struggled to his feet, lifting his bulk above the cushion and stepping back against the triclinium wall, beneath the fresco of the lounging Bacchus. Nigidia did not move, and Cato sensed in her a fearsome dread, of the ending of both the world and her father. There had been guilt at leaving her earlier. It would not happen again.

Cato expected Maius to cower in fear, as he was unarmed. He had been naïve. The man's face filled instead with amusement. And then laughter, such as they had heard in the hall, filled the room.

"I should have known you would come. You cannot leave a thing undone, can you, Portius Cato? Even on a day such as this." He gestured toward the darkness outside. "When everyone with sense is indoors. Still you come, always the rescuer."

"The mountain will kill us all, Maius. I am taking Portia with me."

"Are you?" He pulled Nigidia to her feet and wrapped an arm around her. Then turned his eyes to Cato and stared him down, his bushy brows drawn together.

Cato swallowed, trying to free a tightness in his chest. Around him, the frescoes blurred as though viewed through water, then seemed to come to life, to swirl around the room. Wispy satyrs playing their pan pipes, a nymph suckling a goat, the leering Bacchus. Evil personified.

Have I gone mad?
Did Maius see the apparitions? Nigidia's face blanched and she ducked and swerved, still gripped by her father's right arm.

Maius opened his mouth, but did not speak at first. When he did, the words seemed to stream from his mouth in a torrent, as the flames now poured from the mountain above them. "Come to me now, Jupiter! Heed my call and deliver me! Strike down my enemy. Accept my many sacrifices and grant me favor. Venus and Mercury, I call on your mighty power!"

Cato raised an arm, but his strength faltered. His limbs were weighted with the force of Maius's words.

Fight. You must fight.

No. You must surrender to Me.

The words were not his, they were spoken into his heart. He gave himself to the words, to the Word, who opened his mouth and spoke for him. "'If you say, "But we did not know," does not He who weighs the heart perceive the truth? Does not He who guards your life know it? Will He not repay each person according to their deeds?'"

Maius wavered on his feet, took a step backward.

"'The wicked are like chaff that the wind blows away. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.'"

The words were not his own. Never had he even heard them spoken. He was a mouthpiece only, a willing tool in the hands of a mighty God.

This is what it means to be a champion for God.

"Nigidia." He looked into the girl's frightened eyes, her gaze skittering around the room in terror. "Nigidia, look at me." She focused on him at last.

"We are leaving now. Come to me."

Maius's lips drew back from his teeth and a hiss like that of a snake rushed from him. The unnatural sound filled the room, but the man did not move.

"Nigidia, now." He spoke to the girl as a father to a daughter. Her own father did not release his grip on the girl.

"What are you doing, Portius Cato?"

"I am taking the only good thing you have, Maius. And I am leaving you to the demons you worship, to be judged along with them."

Nigidia did not take her eyes from him. He nodded slowly, passing his strength to her, willing her to move. And then he saw something shift in her blue eyes, saw freedom unfold in her expression, and knew that she had passed through the unseen veil herself, into the arms of a Savior, mighty to deliver. Her head lifted to the beams above her for a moment, and a smile broke across her face like the coming of dawn in this impossibly long night.

She stepped aside, Maius's hold on her broken.

Maius flailed out to grab her, but did not move toward her. She sidestepped his clutching hand, staring at it as though it were a foreign object.

Cato held his sword outstretched, pinning Maius to the ground. "'You lifted praise to the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which do not see and cannot hear or understand. You have not honored the God who carries your life and all your ways in His hand.'"

Nigidia seemed to float across the room, until she reached his side and he nudged her to stand at his back.

Maius's chest heaved, and flecks of white dotted his mouth. He glanced back and forth between Cato and his daughter. "You think you have defeated me?"

The election.
Cato smiled. Such matters seemed to belong to another world. There would be no election now. And yet it had never been about the election, had it? He had always been meant to defeat the evil that Maius represented, and this he had done, here in the man's own villa, through a power not his own.

"Not I, Maius. The One True God has defeated you. You and your gods." Again the words that were from elsewhere. "Your gods hold sway over the hearts of the Empire now. But it will not always be thus. A day is coming when even the names of those you worship will be forgotten. Even then, the One God will make His name great, and His people will remain!"

Beside him, Cato felt Nigidia draw herself up, his ally against the evil she had known. Maius saw it too, and the loss of her seemed to steal whatever arrogance remained. His knees buckled and he lurched forward onto a couch.

Cato pulled Nigidia with him, away from the triclinium and toward the hall that led to freedom.

And behind them, Maius began to scream.

CHAPTER 48

Ariella ducked through the opening to Maius's private cells, leaving Quintus to contend with Maius in the triclinium above.

Would she face guards at the bottom? She adjusted her grip on her sword and moved downward on silent feet into the darkness.

The cells were nothing more than a mud hole beneath the house, but the fact that Maius kept such a place spoke much about his character.

Little light filtered down the steps, and no torch extended from the wall socket at the bottom. Ariella felt her way along the narrow channel, tracing the wall with her left hand, while her sword hand remained extended.

There appeared to be no guard. Small wonder, given the destruction that reigned above. If Maius had not dismissed them, they likely fled their posts.

"Portia?" She whispered the name, unsure why she felt the need for stealth, except that the place seemed unholy, as though she tread in the domain of Rome's underworld. She breathed a prayer to Hashem once more and felt His presence.

No answer returned to her. She called for the woman again, then paused to listen for any sign of life. A rattled breathing sounded from beyond.

Ariella edged forward. She had been insensible with rage when Maius had consigned her to his cells, and barely remembered the arrangement of them. That there was no latrine she remembered well, and the smell disgusted and angered her.

She reached a small barred gate, its post anchored in nothing more than solid dirt. The latch would require a key, but she saw none about.

So Maius would leave Portia to die. Not surprising. His grudge against Portia's brother had become much more than personal or even political.

"Portia, are you there?" She drew up close to the gate, and tried to discern something in the dim light. A whitish form on the ground. Ariella heard again the labored breath.

Whether it was the woman she sought she could not be certain, but whoever it was would perish if Ariella did not open the gate.

She searched the murk for a tool, found nothing, and set to work on the dirt around the latch with her sword. Pity about the dullness it would cause, but in the past hours she had needed a shovel more than a sword, and it was the best she had.

The dirt gave way with difficulty, and Ariella felt her neck dampen with the effort. In the end, it was thoughts of Maius, his feast with Valerius, and the beliefs the two men shared that gave her the furious energy to hack without mercy at the latch and the earth that held it. The latch became to her the bondage the two men forced upon others, and her sword the instrument of freedom. A frenzy of redemption swept her and she drove at the dirt again and again, until her hands blistered and her muscles ached.

At last, the latch gave way with a
thwack.
She kicked at the gate. Inside the cell she heard the scuttle of rats and made out a prone body. She bent to the form, felt leg and arm and face, chilled with a fine sheen of sweat. "Portia, I am Ariella. A friend of your brother."