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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 ru
"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 banda
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 travel: 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.
"Please, have you seen a soldier and a baby, a brown horse..."
The man whose arm she'd grasp shook his head. Sibyl kept asking. "That way," somebody finally said, "several minutes ago. Shouting for a priestess of the Magna Mater."
Sibyl swayed. "Thank you..."
As she ran, she tried to listen for her name above the babble of night noises in Herculaneum's streets. Staked out in the entrances to dark little alleyways and slouched beside the winestalls, painted whores did a trade nearly as brisk as the winesellers and sausage vendors. Some of the men looked nearly as scared as the prostitutes. These disappeared into dimly seen doorways to make frantic love, which sometimes could be heard above the street sounds as Sibyl passed hurriedly by. Other men lounged on the streets beside the women and caressed them beneath their short tunicas and joked and teased and plied them with wine until the prices went lower.
Sibyl barely heard music that drifted down from rooftop gardens to mingle with the roar in the streets. She concentrated on watching the shadows and the men in them and tried to ignore the crawling sensation between her shoulderblades. Somewhere just ahead, surely. She risked a call.
"Charlie! CHARLIE!"
Nothing.
Sibyl gained the basilica and paused again to catch her breath in the political heart and soul of Herculaneum. The basilica was where justice was dispensed, from the tribunal seat. Sibyl doubted that either Charlie or herself could find justice from that tribunal seat tonight, not even if the magistrates had kept the court open. If either of them were captured with slave collars locked around their throats, they wouldn't live to tell their story.
An archway next to the basilica led, as had been surmised, into the Forum, which was completely unexcavated in her own time. So much of the city lay in that direction. "Please," she caught the arm of a man coming from that direction, "have you seen a soldier carrying a small child? He has a brown horse and—"
"No. Let go of me, girl!"
He swung the lantern he carried at her. She ducked and ran the other direction, straining to see through the crowd for a tall, red-haired figure with a bad limp. Equestrian statues towered overhead at the entrance to the basilica. A bronze chariot and bronze horses loomed out of the near-darkness. The basilica was closed for the night and would not be reopened for nearly two thousand years.
Sibyl ran past the temple of the priests of the deified Augustus and the Forum Baths, across a narrow street from the House of the Wooden Partition. She asked a group of men standing on the corner and one of them pointed toward the sea. She cut down a side street past the House of the Mosaic Atrium, which overlooked the Mediterranean next to the House of the Stags, with its soaring sun terrace which overlooked the rooftop of the Suburban Bath and the Mediterranean beyond.
And ran slam into a tall man emerging from a narrow alleyway. "Hold," the man cried, steadying her. "You've nearly fallen, there, girl."
Sibyl dragged air into her lungs and glanced up—
Into Tony Bartlett's wide, shocked eyes.
"You!"
Sibyl twisted against his grip.
He hit her.
She landed in a heap at his feet, cringing from another blow. Her traitorous body remembered the beating Bericus had given it, didn't want another...