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Using Silver's superior strength to drag it over, Charlie wedged it into place and shored up the mass as best he could, then started digging again. When he uncovered a slim, shapely hand covered in blood and dust, he paused sharply. Her hand? He kept digging, cold and afraid now inside his sweat and pain. It was a woman. The face was beyond recognition. But that long, beautiful sweep of ash-blond hair wasn't.
Not Sibyl. Benigna.
His gorge rose. Frantic, sick, Charlie dug through the rubble, knowing at any moment he would find another, smaller body near her mother. Please, God, please... He found only rubble. Bricks and broken plaster and splintered wood. And then, finally, a dark hole low to the ground, where a fallen beam had wedged in at a forty-five-degree angle across a doorway.
Something moved inside that hole.
"Give me your hand!" Charlie shouted above the terrible noise from Vesuvius.
A trembling hand grasped his. He hauled her out, bent over and awkward, holding herself. She collapsed at his feet, shaking almost as violently as the ground. Torn Egyptian linen, a king's ransom in jewelry...
She looked up. Charlie's gut sucked in, almost as hard as his breath. Despite the makeup, the scrapes and the dirt—
"Sibyl!"
Her eyes widened. Then she was in his arms, just clinging to him, sobbing. He held her close, thanking God she was still alive, alive....
"Charlie, I found her, she's all right, she was so lucky, oh, God, you don't know..."
Sibyl was pulling loose, reaching for something pale on the ground.
Then he had a child in his arms, a wide-eyed, white-faced little girl with red-gold hair and a smear of blood down her brow. Charlie touched his daughter's face with fingertips that shook, then he started to cry, silently, helplessly. His daughter wriggled and tried to reach Sibyl. "Mama!"
"Shh..." Sibyl stroked her hair. "This is your father, Lucania. Your father..."
Lucania, face smeared with tear trails and blood, stuffed an uncertain fist into her mouth. Then peered into Charlie's eyes. "Pater?"
"Yes," Charlie choked out, remembering to speak to her in Latin, "I'm your father. I've been looking and looking for you. Ever since you were born... ."
A tiny, chubby hand tugged at the cheek-piece of his battered helmet. "Miles!"
Soldier...
He let her believe the lie. She was too young to understand, anyway. Charlie felt the delicate little slave's collar at her throat and snarled something incoherent, then used his dagger to snap open the tiny lock. He hurled the collar away into volcanic darkness.
"Sibyl," Charlie said raggedly, "we have to get the hell out of here. Now, before the rest of the house comes down. Here... take her."
Handing his only child over to Sibyl so soon after holding Lucania for the first time was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. Before she could protest, Charlie picked Sibyl up. He grunted in sudden, agonizing pain, then hoisted her to Silver's back.
When the world had more or less steadied under his feet, he wrapped Silver's reins several times around his arm and grabbed his crutch. Then he found the torch and led the horse back through the ruined garden. Charlie ducked under the broken doorway into the house proper, then steadied the gelding through and led him past the shattered atrium. Before he led them into the open again, Charlie yanked off his helmet.
"Put this on!"
Sibyl didn't argue with him. She jammed the helmet over her own head and bent more protectively over Lucania.
Like Joseph fleeing the wrath of Herod, Charlie led Silver out of the villa and fled on foot before the wrath of Vesuvius. Everything in the world he cared about followed mutely in the darkness, tethered to his arm by one slim leather band.
Chapter Fourteen
Feeble light from the torch Charlie carried barely pierced the volcanic gloom. Sibyl could see hardly anything beyond Charlie's outstretched arm—not even the width of the road. Their slow-motion flight, with Charlie limping ahead, felt like waking nightmare. Scores of terrified slaves, small landowners, and rich men like Bericus fled hovels and rich country villas alike, passing them on the road.
A few, Charlie had to fight for their horse.
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 ru
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.