at that point. I’d swim to Capri if I had to.
When I reached the shore I found… no boats.
“Oh, Hades,” I said.
“Where boat?” Win asked from her perch on my shoulder.
“It’s the middle of the day. Everyone’s fishing in the bay right now.”
“No boat?” she clarified.
“No boat.”
Another massive blast from the mountain shook the Earth and sent me to my knees. Ashes were starting to rain down in force and the sky had darkened considerably. Clouds were forming over the mountain. If prior experience served, lightning would be next.
I shuffled through my options quickly. There weren’t many. “Win, do you know where Torre del Greco is?”
“Tory… ?”
“. . . del Greco. It’s down the beach from here. I need you to fly ahead and see if there are any boats there. I know you can fly very fast.”
“Very fast.”
“Yes. See if there are boats there.”
“You stay here?”
“I’m going to run as fast as I can along the shore. I’d just like to know if there’ll be a boat waiting for me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And Win? If the air gets too bad and you don’t think you can make it back to me, don’t. Just fly off to somewhere safe. I’ll be all right.”
“I come back.”
“Only if it’s safe.”
“I come back.” She zipped off.
I knelt down and removed my sandals. Nobody should ever be forced to run in sandals for any length of time. I wore them because everyone else did, but considering I went something like fifty millennia without footwear, for me they were more of a contrivance than a convenience. Plus, you ever tried running in the sand in wood sandals?
I looked up once again and saw what looked like a giant rain cloud rapidly losing altitude. It was a volley of heavier ashes, and they looked hot. Time to run again.
As I said, my muscles don’t seem to grow in time with exercise. I’m about as strong and fast as I was in the beginning. But I was always a good runner. At one time I had to be. It was how we hunted. There were animals that were faster, sure, but we could run for days without getting winded. (This is why I never understood why everyone made such a big deal out of marathon runners, twenty-six miles is a warm-up.)
I took off down the beach. The sand made the going a little rough, but nothing unmanageable. I would have made excellent time if I didn’t have to breathe. Unfortunately I did, and that became a difficult thing to do when the ash fall really got going.
About halfway to Torre Del Greco I had to stop just to find some air. It was a bit like trying to run while breathing through fifty lit cigarettes. I fell to my knees and cupped my ash-covered hands over my mouth, but when that didn’t make a difference I tried removing my toga and breathing through that instead. This helped. It left me stark naked, but people back then weren’t nearly as uptight about that sort of thing as they are today.
Behind me, I could see that the town was on fire. The second floor of most of the buildings in Herculaneum were made of wood rather than the stone used on the bottom level, and a lot of that wood had surrendered to the hot ash and pumice. I wondered if the people now understood that this was not something to patiently wait out. Probably they would do the same as I did and flee to the water line. Maybe they would be safer there. I was thinking it might be a better idea to find indoor shelter and wait it out, but that was because I was trying jog in an ashtray.
My eyes were burning, so I splashed some water into my face to rinse them. Then I started running again.
When I reached Torre del Greco I found an abandoned shoreline. No boats. No pixie. She’d apparently chosen discretion over valor. And it looked like I was screwed.
Collapsing in a heap at the edge of the water I panted hard and tried to kick loose the sulfur that had nested in my lungs. The water was cool, so I lay down in it and let the tide splash loose some of the mottled grime coating my naked body and soothe what had to be at least a couple of second degree burns on my back. I imagine I looked something like a mud sculpture prior to the finishing touches.
I could still see the western side of Vesuvius from my vantage point, and it appeared things were not going to end well for my about-to-be-former residence. A gush of lava had lipped out of the top of the mountain and was arcing its way right for the city. It moved extremely slowly, but it was most surely moving, and there was nothing that could possibly stop it except the water.
I began to regret my decision to simply up and run. In practical terms, there were horses available. No doubt one or two of the wealthy landowners had thought of this and were now someplace with less airborne ash. In humanitarian terms, I could have convinced at least one or two people to go with me along the shore… so they could die in Torre del Greco, like I was evidently about to. Okay, so following me wasn’t always the best idea. Win certainly must have come to that conclusion.
“Hey! Get up!”
My tinny-voiced pixie had returned. She was hovering above my face and looking quite sternly at me.
“Why?” I asked. “No boats. And, it’s a nice view.”
“Stupid.”
“I’m stupid? You should get the hell out of here while you can, Win.”
“Win found boats.”
I looked up and down the shore again. “Where?”
“Not here. No boats here. Found boats down there.”
I thought about it. “Stabiae?”
“Don’t know.”
“But there are boats there?”
“Yes. Hurry!”
I got back up again and half-ran, half-walked to Stabiae. I wanted to quit a dozen times, but Win wouldn’t let me. (She would have made an excellent personal trainer.) It helped that the closer I got, the milder the conditions got, with the shower of pumice and heavy ash replaced by a light ash shower that wasn’t half as scalding. Still, it was nearly the next morning when I reached Stabiae. Win had been right. There were boats.
We ended up stuck in Stabiae for two more days. Nowadays when you think of a boat you think sailboat or motorboat or rowboat. We had flat, ugly beasts with square rigged sails that were entirely dependent on favorable winds. I made myself fairly useful on board a ship owned by an excitable fellow named Pompanianus, and I got to meet the recently deceased body of Pliny the Elder, but other than that, it was a dull, unpleasant couple of days marred by the intense feeling of impending doom.
When the winds finally smiled upon us, we set out for the open waters of the bay with as many living persons as we could fit on six ships (two owned by Pompanianus, four consisting of Pliny’s fleet). Herculaneum and the landward town of Pompeii were both gone by then. We all hoped that more had escaped death and simply chosen a route deeper inland to flee the mountain.
The ships quickly spread out to take advantage of the winds. As I stood on the deck of Pompanianus’s largest vessel, I looked across at one of Pliny’s smaller ships as it receded from us. On the bow, facing me, was a
