Queen of the Ashes

by Kelli Johnson

By the time Pia tied the last tarp over the entryway, ash had already begun to sift down in earnest. It fell in spurts, like flour tossed by a careless hand, the kind of mess you scold yourself for not anticipating, once the buns are in the hearth. The dogs skittered beneath her, nails clicking on the paving stones, anxious still from the excitement of the morning. Or else from the occasional neighbors scurrying by, cloaks swept over their noses and mouths, hastily wrapped bundles of belongings swinging from the crooks of their arms.

She pulled on the linen secured to the portico, to test the strength of the knots, then stepped back to admire her work. And that’s when she saw it: a word carved into the window frame, the pale, fresh wound of a knife.

‍ ‍Harlot.

Pia’s throat tightened. She pressed her thumb to the wood, as if she could smooth away the letters like frost from a mirror. They were rendered crudely, child-like even. She could picture the impish delight crossing the person’s face as they carved that oversized T, as if this—her home, her marriage—were all pieces in some perverse game.

She let her heft fall forward, forehead pressed against the wooden beam. Of all mornings, she lamented. Of all the days the mountain could have chosen to clear its throat and spit black phlegm into the sky…

The ground shuddered again. Not terribly; the dogs didn’t even bark. More like a muscle had twitched beneath the skin of the earth. Not like this morning, when Valens stood there in the doorway, dressing her down with his usual accusations.

Her husband was a jealous man, raised by jealous men. Pia had been fielding his suspicions for years—since the moment they were married, in fact, before she’d ever known the feeling of a man’s palm on her cheek, besides her father’s in rebuke. Or soft lips, parted, on the hollow of her neck. What it meant to be cherished. In some respects, she still didn’t know these things.

Pia often wondered if Valens would ever run out of people to unite her with in his mind. Sometimes it was a tradesperson: the wine merchant, the tanner, the fishmonger. More often than not, a friend of his, here in their home at Valens’ own invitation. The specifics of each new accusation made little difference, and Pia had learned to ignore them. To file them away in one big jar marked wayward wife in her mind, where they could melt together and lose their edges.

Today, it was the neighbor two doors down, Secundus. A handsome, married young man, between Pia and whom perhaps a total of ten words had passed.

Pia had been able to talk Valens down from his tirade surprisingly swiftly. As if his body had accepted the routine of their fights and simply longed to move past this one and get on with the day.

Then, the mountain exploded.

Valens had looked from the plume of black billowing in the distance, then slowly, back to her, his face alight with a terrible certainty.

“You’ve brought ruin on us all,” he said.

The words pelted her like pumice stones. Before she could reply—before she could even reach for her stola—he had scooped up both children, one under each arm as if they were sacks of grain, and bolted into the street.

Pia rushed to the doorway, but her family had already been swallowed by the crowd of neighbors spooked from their homes, surging toward the gates, toward the sea, to get a better look at Vesuvius. At that moment, part of her was relieved that Valens had chosen to simply flee the scene, rather than demand more answers. Quiet would soothe him. Quiet, he could not turn against her.

***

An hour later, Pia stood once more on the threshold, the tarp flapping behind her like a sail at high sea. Ash settled into her hair, flaked her eyelashes. She closed her eyes and listened to the cacophony of voices riding the breeze. She waited for her husband’s returning footsteps, for him to bark an order she could obey. She waited to hear mama! cried out in Primigenia’s wispy voice from high on Valens’ shoulders, her daughter not yet old enough to walk on her own. She waited for her stoic son, Felix, and his fingers pulling at her skirts, signaling he was hungry, or bored, or constipated. Presenting his mother with some problem she could fix.

Tears began to well beneath her eyelids. Pia closed the door and sat on a wooden chair, in front of the forgotten dough she’d been kneading that morning. The room still smelled of her children, of milk and sleep and sticky fruit.

In the corner, the two dogs had sought refuge in one another’s russet folds. Pia watched as the younger terrier licked the crusts of sleep from the elder mastiff’s eyes. Without this daily ritual, Pia knew, the old hound would not be able to see very well as the day wore on.

“I’d give anything for love like that, you know,” she told them. They perked their ears at the comment, momentarily, before becoming a puddle of sleep.

Pia’s gaze travelled upward to the lararium, the niche set into the wall where she used to stand and pray. The little muraled gods watched her with their painted smiles, cups raised in celebration while a serpent coiled beneath them, fat and fertile. She could still smell the smoke from yesterday’s incense, though it had not been she who lit it. She searched their faces for comfort, for some sign that they understood her grief, but years of dust and fissures and smudges had rendered them cold in their abstraction.

Leant on the shelf beside the incense dish was a broken piece of plaster, part of a larger, unknown fresco, depicting the face and torso of a copper-haired woman.

Valens had found it right before they were married, cracked and half-buried in the Stabian baths, during the cleanup after the latest earthquake. After prying it free, he had rushed to Pia’s father to formalize their engagement, and presented her the partial portrait in lieu of a ring.

“She looks like you,” Valens had said, smiling at his own resourcefulness. Pia had agreed initially. The copper curls, the long nose, the hooded eyes… right down to the pale blue ribbon she had often worn around her neck as a girl. “Uncanny!” her father had exclaimed, patting Valens on the back.

But years of scrutinizing this fragment had brought more of its story to light. A man must have been painted beside her, just out of frame, for there was an arm—disembodied, muscled—wrapped around the woman’s waist, fingers digging into her ribs as if to hold her back… Once she’d recognized the frenzy in this woman’s eyes, Pia could extend the portrait in her mind, the right foot already lifted, toes pointed toward escape or ruin.

“I think you’re Helen,” Pia murmured, as she often did.

Helen of Troy, whose face launched ships and burned cities. Or perhaps not Helen at all, but some other woman caught up in scandal and violence.

She knew her husband viewed this gift as the pinnacle of romance, from the way he told the tale of its acquisition to his guests. And to his son, whose mouth tightened with pride whenever his father spoke. Pia, on the other hand, thought it looked like a kidnapping.

A tiny mote of ash drifted through the room and landed on the frantic, painted woman’s cheek. Pia wiped it away with her sleeve. Shouts echoed in the streets outside. She looked through the window, at what she could make out of the darkening sky.

“Maybe what’s fomenting up there does have something to do with me,” she murmured.

At that, a memory rose unbidden. Fire, screaming, horses snarling as their masters cracked whips against flesh… the riots at the amphitheater, twenty years earlier. Hurrying through the chaos, hands clasped with her father’s, searching for her mother’s bright blue dress in the night. Finding it yanked high over her prone body, sprawled on the limestone, her chest caved in.

There hadn’t even been much blood, Pia remembered suddenly. As if her mother’s heart had given up the task of pumping the moment she’d been crushed. Just given out, like this life was nothing.

It was shortly after that loss that Pia had met her future husband, run into his arms like a mullet into the surf. He had no land, but loved his work at the magistrate’s office, and she mistook that zeal for the passion she sought, the kind that would distract her from her gnawing grief.

Yes, Valens spoke of taxes and land-grabs and titles with a heat he never brought to her bed. None of it related with the meat of life, she thought: with the way a heart thuds when a child curls into your breast; with the cry of a bird loosed from its cage; with the taste of rainwater dripping from your lover’s hair in the night.

***

‍ ‍Secundus. It was ridiculous how much you could dream up about someone you knew nothing about, after they showed you the briefest act of kindness.

It had been another hard day for Pia—the children recovering from fevers, Valens away on business, the roof leaking after yesterday’s storm. The fierce winds had knocked their rainwater collection barrels over, and so Pia braced herself to make the long trek to the nearest public fountain, which would be mobbed, or else further down to the stream bed.

A clay jug straining from each hand, she had stepped out of her home and immediately met the eyes of Secundus across the way, raking the soil in his front yard. He waved her over.

“Here,” said Secundus, indicating the buckets of fresh water with which he was gardening. “No need to tire yourself.”

“Thank you,” she rasped, and her burdens seemed to sprout wings and take off from her shoulders. At Secundus’ smile, she said again, “Thank you.”

After she’d accepted the water, she looked up toward her own house and found Felix leaning out onto the windowsill, watching her.

She could see in his eyes that he was already against her. He was his father’s prince, would tell him everything, even though there was nothing to tell…

And so husband and wife had argued. Valens threw every nasty insult he could think of at her, while Pia held her tongue. She could have kicked back. Her husband had his own proclivities, after all. All those lingering stares on the girls selling figs on the corner. But did Pia ever complain? No, she let Valens wail on about honor and duty and women’s inherent duplicity until he was purple in the face. Pia wondered sometimes whether, in punishing her, he had hoped to burn the lecherous thing inside him as well.

But a woman is easy to blame. She is the jar of shelled chestnuts your fingers cinch around when you reach blindly into the pantry, ready to be tossed into the fire and raked over blistering coals.

***

As evening fell, the dogs began to whine. They had spent too long in a silent, empty house and missed the pandemonium of the children. Pia went to the window again. It was hard to tell how much ash was still falling, with the night sky obscuring everything.

“It will blow over,” she told the dogs, told herself. “It always does.” She peered down at the hostile word carved into the window frame. From this vantage, it was plain to see how it had been done from inside the home, not out. That was why the letters elongated as they progressed.

Her young son’s little arms could only reach so far.

‍ ‍Yes, it was Felix. Pia swallowed her sob, refusing to entertain this betrayal. This small, terrible mirror of the man her son would become.

She went to the hearth and removed the bread from the cast iron, wrapped it in cloth, to keep it warm for when her children and husband would return. Bowing her head before the lararium, she relit the charred incense and intoned a prayer to her little fresco shard.

When her daughter returned, she would scoop Primigenia up in her arms and tell her a story about the copper-haired woman—a new story, bereft of kidnapped Helens or snaking arms or fearful backward glances.

“That’s your grandmother,” she would say, pointing to the fresco. “She lived a grand life indeed.” Not a woman felled by a drunkard’s dagger, no, nor one trampled by a cart during a riot caused by men and their senseless anger. Instead, she would be an adventurer, and right before she was about to fall into a trap of quicksand, a kind stranger reached out and pulled her by the waist to safety…

Maybe that would be enough, Pia hoped. Maybe such a story would lodge itself in Primigenia like a seed, inspire her daughter to seek more from this life than Pia herself had dared. To set her own terms and roam farther than this doorstep before she, too, found herself trapped by men and their small fears. Perhaps the story could teach her to call out danger when she saw it, and imagine escape before it was too late.

Outside, the ashes kept falling. Fine, thought Pia, let them bury me up to my neck. Queen of the Ashes. So what if the gods were smears and the men fled like frightened children? Her daughter would do better—have a full life, once the ashes of this one were swept away. Pia would make sure of it.