Domina Triumphans

Chapter 1: August, 79 AD, Campania, Italia

The noonday sun rose, searing, in the skies over Baiae, a popular vacation spot for Rome's elite and anyone else who could afford it. Bathers lolled on the beaches and tourists streamed into the shops and eateries of the town. At this time of day, everyone wanted to be either indoors or close to water. In his villa overlooking the city, Senator Iullus Bricius pushed aside the pile of letters, memos, petitions, and other odds and ends on his desk. He was sick of all of it. A tall, lanky man with grizzled, curly dark hair and piercing brown eyes, he wanted nothing better than to retire and go home to Gaul.

He stood up ftom his desk to stretch his back and legs. He was thirty-nine, and a Senator only because of his family's position in their ancestral Province. Or because, and this was his working theory, the damn Emperors in Rome kept killing everybody else and had few other options. Needing to move around, he left his praetorium, or office, and walked down a side colonnade into the garden. From here, he had a sweeping vista of the bay and a distant volcano towering on the shore opposite. It had been shooting plumes of smoke and ash for weeks. The idiots in the towns below, mostly Pompeii and Herculaneum, assumed it was Vulcan at work in his forge, too content and busy to be upset about anything. Bricius, a Celt of the Arveni tribe and descendant of both Vercingetorix and Mark Antony, had another idea. Gobbanos was pissed off and planning a nasty surprise. As he looked toward Vesuvius, the top of the mountain suddenly disappeared in a column of smoke and ash, billowing straight into the sky in the shape of giant mushrooms.

"Oh, shit!" Bricius shouted.

He yanked open the garden gate, crossed an alley, and got the attention of a gardener on the neighboring property. The man opened that gate. Bricius ran past him along a rock path toward the kitchen entrance. He pawed the door open.

"Primus! Uncle Beaky!"

He charged through the kitchen, hoping his relatives on the maternal side were home. A houseman found him.

"We're seeing it, My Lord," he said. "Come with me."

He led Bricius to the vestibule of the home, where seventy-six-year-old Ex-Consul Julius Antonius, called Beaky, and his son, Legatus Marcus Antonius Primus, stood looking at the same cloud, which was growing in intensity. Julius made up his mind.

"Marcus, I need you to get to Messala. I'm ordering the evacuation of Stabaiae, Baiae, and Misenum. Everyone needs to fall back on Capua or Cales. Iullus, get to Capua and then to Cales, let them know to expect refugees and open their public buildings. Move!"

"Don't go home," Primus said to Bricius. "We can use our horses here."

Glad that he still routinely wore braccaes or trousers, closed boots, and a shirt-like tunic as a proper Celt always did, Bricius followed Primus to the stables. Both men's training kicked in as they saddled and bridled horses and vaulted aboard. Bricius found the main road out of town and nudged his horse to the gallop as the ash cloud picked up intensity behind him.

...

The earth rumbled and a shelf of knick-knacks fell forward with a crash, sending shards of glass and pottery across the tile. Flavius Messala, a former Legate and now City Magistrate of Baiae, lurched out of his nap and stumbled into the corridor as the earth below continued to rumble. He had felt earthquakes before, including one in Syria over fifty years ago. He ran outside and looked across the bay.

"O, Good God!"

Others were seeing the same thing and beginning to panic. Messala, now in his seventies, put years of training to work. He called some vigiles or town constables.

"Get everyone off the damn beach!"

He got the attention of an Aedile, or city administrator who lived in the domus or house across the street.