“Is everyone safely away?” Crassus asked, riding up to the pumps. He remained mounted to be sure that the crowd could see him.
“Crassus! What are your men doing? They’re destroying my buildings!”
“Compose yourself, Septimus Florius. They’re following my orders.”
“Your orders?! Are you crazy, man?! My apartment house is burning!”
“We can’t have the adjacent buildings ignite, now can we? No, of course we can’t. Now tell me, Corvinus, does the whole complex belong to you?” The fat landlord nodded frantically, wiping sweat from his forehead with a perfumed kerchief. “The whole block? Oh dear,” Crassus said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to save them all.”
“If you’d stop talking and start doing something…”
“You’re quite right, of course. Men, man the pumps!” With well-rehearsed choreography, Ludovicus and his team flew into action, adjusting regulators, shouting at each other, tightening connections, checking hoses, readying the buckets and doing… nothing.
“Septimus Florius,” Crassus said thoughtfully, “it occurs to me that no matter how successful we are, at least two of these insulae, possibly three will be forfeit. I am devastated that I could not get here quickly enough. I will make it a point to address this neglect of civil responsibility in the Curia. I feel personally responsible. Awful, just awful. Perhaps the best thing now is for you to cut your losses. It’s not really my area of expertise, but I would be willing to take this block off your hands for… say… eighty thousand sesterces?”
“Pumps two, three and four primed and ready, sir!” shouted Ludovicus. The first hose team approached the smoking apartment house while the pikemen continued to destroy the buildings on either side, pulling debris away from their incandescent neighbor. Two other groups of Crassus’ slaves hauled the rubble away to a safe distance almost as fast as the pikemen could create it.
“What? What?!” squealed Corvinus. “I don’t want to sell my buildings. I want you to save them!”
“Wait a minute!” Ludovicus shouted. “We’ve lost pressure!” As he spoke, there was a dull thump from the top floor. Wooden blinds blew out of two corner windows in a shower of sparks, and flames exploded out the smoking holes. There was a sharp intake in hundreds of lungs as the crowd quickly pressed back against the storefronts opposite the fire. Corvinus slapped pudgy hands to his face, pushing his fleshy lips out like a beached fish.
“Goodness!” Crassus exclaimed. “I was afraid that would happen. I don’t think it’s possible now for me to offer full price. The best I could do… he sighed laboriously, “would be sixty thousand.”
“I think we’ve got it now,” Ludovicus called.
“Sixty thousand?! They cost me over a hundred.”
“And I have no doubt you squeezed the most from every sestercius. Although, I hear they’re doing marvelous things with concrete and fired bricks these days. A little more up front cost, but well worth it, I should imagine.”
At that moment, one of the firefighters closest to the building called out. “I heard something! I think someone may be inside!”
Immediately, Crassus dropped his play-acting, leapt off his horse and grabbed a torch from an onlooker. “Stay back!” he yelled to Ludovicus. He dashed across the unpaved street into the building. His men stared at each other in disbelief. Ludovicus didn’t know what to do. If he turned the pumps on the burning floors, the weight of the water might cause the already weakened structure to collapse on our master. If he ran in after Crassus, he’d be disobeying a direct order, and his back would bear witness to his insubordination. He settled on selecting several men with full buckets to wait with him a little closer to the doorway.
Crassus had given me no such order. I gave Ludovicus a look that said ‘watch the money.’ He nodded and I jumped off the cart and raced to follow my master into the building. I bypassed the tabernae on the ground floor, knowing we had only moments to search the upper floors. Crassus was already at the top of the stairs. Smoke hung in the deserted hallway, and the air was thick with the smell of burning wood as I joined him.
“Vulcan’s prick, man…!”
“I’ll take the left,” I shouted above the roaring and ran down the narrow hall. I might get a beating for it later, but at least now I could honestly say I never heard my master give me an order to leave. I was relieved to hear the thump of Crassus’ boots heading in the other direction.
I ran into each apartment, calling out as loud as I could. With little furniture and only one or two rooms, they were easy to search. The second floor was empty. Crassus met me at the central stairway; as we bounded up to the next floor he threw me a glance but said nothing.
The heat grew alarmingly with each step. By the top of the landing, we could no longer stand. Fire flowed in waves across the ceiling of this hallway like an upside-down river. Crassus threw his cloak over his head and motioned for me to do the same. We called out again but it was almost impossible to hear anything above the noise of the fire and our own racked coughing. It was like inhaling the smoke at the top of a clay oven. There was a constant, deep rumbling over our heads. I remember thinking how ironic that it should remind me of pounding surf. If there had been anyone on the fourth floor, they were gone now.
These thoughts took but a second. We inhaled a lungful of air through the fabric of our cloaks and scrambled down opposite ends of the hallway, crouching low. The cenacula on this floor were empty as well. The heat from above pressed down on us like the hand of Hephaestus, forcing us to crawl. It was too hard to hold onto our torches, so we abandoned them. Looking for survivors was no longer our mission. Now our task was simply to make certain we would be counted among them.
We were scrambling toward each other on our bellies through thick, slowly curling smoke. Like me, Crassus held his cloak over his head with one hand and dragged himself forward with the other. His clothes were ruined, his face soot-stained, his eyes tearing. Another strange thought struck me: at this moment it would be hard to tell us apart.
My lord reached the stairwell just ahead of me. It couldn’t have been more than a second that he hesitated, waiting for me to join him so we could descend together. That’s when a section of the floor above came crashing down. A smoking plank hit Crassus in the back. It knocked him down the stairs to the lower landing. The hole in the floor above exposed an inferno. It wasn’t bravery that made me leap from where I stood to the landing below. I was moved urgently and instantaneously by the overwhelming instinct to get away from that searing heat. Crassus was dazed and struggling to his feet as I landed hard, tripping and falling onto him. We tumbled down to the ground floor, rolling over burning wreckage.
Miraculously, neither of us was badly hurt. My arm had smacked into a piece of burning wood and my sandaled feet would take some time to heal, but nothing seemed broken. Crassus’ cloak was smoldering. I unhooked the jewel-studded fibula that held it around his neck and tore it off him. The second it landed on the ground in a smoking heap, I dove for it again, ripped the clasp from the smoldering fabric, rose and handed the golden disk to Crassus. He looked at me in amazement and laughed out loud.
“Did you hear that?” I shouted.
The sound came from our right. “Anyone there?!” we called.
A thin voice answered, “In here.” It came from a barbershop whose entrance opened on the lobby where we stood. We moved quickly into the shop and I saw that Crassus was limping. The store was empty. The voice called again and we could tell that it came from above us. A wooden ladder led to the loft found in almost all these small shops.
Crassus grabbed a rung but I said, “ Dominus, allow me.” I indicated his injured leg. He stepped aside and I climbed up through the trap door in the ceiling. In the smoky dark I could barely make out the narrow, cramped sleeping quarters of the old man who lay shaking on a pallet in the corner.