Dream Master

LATER, IN HIS room, Cy took out his notebook and wrote down ‘Find Lauren’s tie’. He gazed dejectedly at his scribbled writing. No wonder Mrs Chalmers and everyone else complained about it. He could hardly read it himself. He climbed into bed and propped himself up on his pillows. Beside him he placed his own piece of dreamsilk. It was quiet and nearly translucent. There was almost no energy there. That meant he would have to wait for a little while before trying to go back to Pompeii and rescue the Dream Master. Meanwhile he really should do some work on his school project. Which shouldn’t be too difficult now that he had Lauren’s notes.

Cy began to brighten up a bit. Volcanoes were very interesting and the eruption at Pompeii seemed particularly exciting. Also, he thought as he opened up the box file that Lauren had given him, the more he knew about Pompeii the easier it would be for him when he returned to help the Dream Master. Cy took out a folder and saw that inside it was a map. He put the folder to one side and opened up the map. It was a plan of the ancient city of Pompeii!

Cy drew in his breath. This would be very useful! He shoved everything else down to the end of his bed and began to study the map. There was a main road, the Via Stabiana, running from one end of the city to the other. Cy followed the line of the road with his finger. And the Via dell’Abbondanza intersected it, making a rightangle fairly near the Barracks of the Gladiators.

‘Via dell’Abbondanza.’ Cy read the street name out loud. That was where he had first met Rhea Silvia and Linus. In a shop in the Via dell’Abbondanza. What did that street name sound like? ‘Bonanza!’ It seemed a good name for a street full of shops with goods of every kind from all over the world. Cy scrambled across his bed and got the dictionary from his bookshelf. They were going to study the Romans next term and Mrs Chalmers had told them that lots of words in use in many of today’s languages came from Latin. Cy looked up ‘Abbondanza’ to see if there was anything that looked similar, and saw ‘abondance’, which was listed as being French for abundance. So Mrs Chalmers was right. It wasn’t just English, there were French words that came from Latin. Cy felt a bit like a detective as he tracked the meaning through the dictionary. Eventually he found ‘abundant’ – and then all its meanings: ‘copious supply; great amount’. It was a good name for a shopping street, better than naming them after local councillors, Cy thought, as they did today.

Cy looked at the city plan again and began to search for Linus and Rhea Silvia’s house. He tried to recall the streets that he’d run along with Linus, how they had passed the Temple of Isis beside the Theatre and the Odeon before coming back onto the main road. He lifted his notebook and began to draw a map, marking with a circle the area where he believed their villa was. Next he looked for the Amphitheatre. It would be a building with a circular shape like the Colosseum in Rome. At last he found it. It was more of an ellipse and was situated at the furthest corner of the town, right at the end of the Via dell’Abbondanza.

‘Porta,’ Cy muttered. Why were so many of these places called ‘porta’? ‘Port . . .’ It wasn’t a port as he knew it, because that would mean it would be situated by the sea, or on water at least. And these couldn’t be, as they were all round the city.

‘Port . . .’ Cy kept his eye on the map and flicked through the pages of his dictionary. ‘Port’ – he found the word in his dictionary and groaned aloud. There were half a dozen different meanings listed! This was the trouble with language, thought Cy. Just when you thought you had a grasp of it there was always more.

‘It’s too complicated,’ he had complained to Mrs Chalmers one day when she had asked him to wait behind to copy out extra words while she marked exercise books. ‘I know that you’re trying to help me, but it’s not worth all this effort.’

What’s to be wonderful? thought Cy as he read his dictionary definitions. He stumbled down the list, which included his first known meaning – a port by the sea – and then a type of wine – a drink, for heaven’s sake! Cy’s finger stopped as he found what he was looking for. ‘Port – a gate or portal in a town or fortress: from the Latin porta – a gate.’ Below that was: ‘Portal – any entrance, gateway, or doorway, especially one that is large and impressive: from Latin porta – a gate.’

Cy went back to the city plan. At the opposite end of the Via dell’Abbondanza was the Porta Marina. Now that last word he did know. A marina was to do with boats. He went back to his dictionary and found the word and its meaning – ‘a docking facility’ – so he guessed that the Porta Marina must be the gate which led to the harbour and the Mediterranean Sea. His eye wandered back along to the place where the road crossed the Via Stabiana. At the bottom of the map, near the Porta Stabia, were the barracks where the Dream Master at this very moment was waiting to fight for his life. Cy shivered. He let his eye follow the Via Stabiana back up to the top of the map, where the road left the city – the road which headed inland and northwards towards the mighty city of Rome. The name of the gate leaped out from the page: ‘Porta Vesuvio’.

He didn’t need any dictionary to help him translate that. Vesuvius was the mountain in Italy which had once been an active volcano, a very active volcano. His grampa said it had been erupting when he was there during the Second World War. After the fighting in the Western Desert, Monty and Grampa had led the Eighth Army across the Mediterranean to Italy, and there, Grampa said, ‘was old Vesuvio, crackling and thundering like nobody’s business’. But it hadn’t been such a huge explosion then. The most famous was ages earlier, in ancient times.

Cy wondered if Linus or Rhea Silvia would remember anything about it. How great would that be! He would have the best description in the whole class of a volcanic eruption if he could hear some first-hand accounts of what had happened! When he returned it would be the first thing that he would ask Linus. As Cy read a bit more a restless feeling began to come over him. It was a warm August night but he drew the duvet cover around his shoulders.

There were drawings showing the volcano spouting fire, smoke and molten lava. Hot ash and deadly fumes were pouring down the hillsides. The eruption had been so vast and so awful that almost everyone had been killed. The city had been buried under the ash for centuries.

It must have happened after Linus and Rhea Silvia’s life there, Cy reasoned, if the city had been covered over and lost for more than a thousand years. He remembered his conversation with Linus as they had taken the short cut at the Odeon to the gladiators’ barracks. Linus had known of some kind of disaster at Pompeii, but it was not a volcanic eruption that Linus had spoken of, but an earthquake.

Cy looked again at his book. It gave a few details about the earthquake at Pompeii and said that it had happened in AD 62. Cy knew that Rhea Silvia was seventeen years old because he had heard her tell Lauren that this was her seventeenth summer.

Cy snapped the book shut, lay down in his bed and closed his eyes. His stomach was beginning those painful cramps that he knew so well, when events in life began to grow too big for him to handle. Now he knew that he must get back to Pompeii as soon as he could. This problem was so large that he dared not even think about it, let alone write it down.

If Rhea Silvia was seventeen years old and she had been born the year of the great earthquake in AD 62, then the year that she and her brother and the Dream Master were living in at Pompeii at this very moment was AD 79.