by Alex Scarrow
But now things had descended into a confused, misty chaos. The smoke from a dozen fires on the first and second floors had become a choking blanket. Macro’s tenants were now no longer concerned with keeping their looting neighbours out of the apartment block, but instead were struggling with each other to escape the burning building.
Sal was jostled and bumped from all sides, nearly losing her grip on Maddy’s hand as they became funnelled into a press of thrashing bodies. The rat run: five minutes ago it was a bottleneck that was proving to be their saving grace; now it looked like becoming a death trap for them.
Above her, amid the churn of smoke, she heard the crackle of flames taking hold of the building. ‘Maddy, we’ve got to get out! We’ve got to find a way out!’
‘I know!’
She had no idea where the others were. Last she’d seen, Liam and Bob had been manning the second barricade, successfully holding back the baying mob. But that was ancient history now. There were no more ‘attackers’ and ‘defenders’, not any longer, just a couple of hundred people fighting with each other to escape the building through a passageway littered with obstacles and bodies.
They heard a loud crack of snapping wood from above, and then a moment later, the balconies lining one complete side of the quadrangle came tumbling down through the smoke into the courtyard. An avalanche of blackened, smouldering slats of wood that exploded into a shower of sparks and embers that set fire to the tattered linen sun-awnings around the courtyard. Through a gap in the smoke, Sal caught sight of a woman with a child in her arms, trapped in the corner beside their two ponies that were rolling widened eyes at the flames around them; she and the animals were imprisoned inside a collapsed scaffolding of wooden poles.
The woman’s eyes met Sal’s — the only person now looking back into the courtyard. She was screaming for help. A fleeting moment, then the smoke closed on her and she and her child were gone. Items of burning clothing, embers from drapes and privacy screens and a million and one flammable household possessions were starting to rain down on the crowd that had completely plugged the rat run and were going absolutely nowhere, setting hair and more clothes on fire.
‘Help!’ Sal screamed. ‘ HELP! ’
Her voice was lost beneath a hundred others screaming the very same thing in Latin.
She couldn’t see Maddy now. She still had hold of her hand, but their arms were twisted over the back and shoulder of some old man carrying a screaming toddler, piggyback.
‘Maddy!’ she screamed.
‘I’m here!’
We’re going to die. We’re going to choke to death or burn.
Her mind flashed with memories of that day — the last day of her life. Standing in the ruin of that stairwell with the others on their floor who’d spilled out of their apartments. Her Mamaji and Papaji, like her with ghost-white faces of dust. The air thick with powdered concrete and toxic fumes. She remembered the choking, the panicking, being terrified. Then that sound, that end-of-the-world sound… a deep rumble like an approaching train, the floor trembling beneath their feet. Gasps, cries, screaming; a desperate collective horror that didn’t allow them even a few seconds of stillness — a goodbye moment. A whispered farewell that might, just might be carried on some spiritual ether to those it was intended for.
And then Foster… extending a hand, offering her, just her, a way out.
Oh jahulla, not like this. Don’t let me die like this.
‘BOB!’ she screamed. ‘LIAM! HELLLLLPP! ’
Liam looked at Bob. They were watching people pour out of the rat run on to the avenue. Not a fleet-footed escape but a molasses-like spill of the staggering, crawling, coughing and retching. People clambering desperately over a growing bed of collapsed bodies.
‘That was Sal’s voice!’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative.’
‘Ah, Jayzus… we got to go in and pull her out!’
‘You must stay here, Liam,’ said Bob. He turned towards the clogged exit.
‘No! I’m comin’ with — ’
An iron grip held Liam’s wrist. He turned to see Macro. ‘Let your friend go, lad.’
Liam struggled to shake him off. But the Roman’s grip was far too insistent and strong. ‘Let him go, lad… if he’s truly made of stone, then he’ll live.’
Liam watched as Bob carelessly bulldozed his way through the emerging people and disappeared into the smoke spewing thickly out of the narrow rat run.
Above screams for help they could both hear the crackle of flames eagerly devouring the apartment block. Smoke, now growing a dark grey, pumped energetically out of seemingly every small window. The yellow-washed, clay plaster facade over the building’s clay bricks was beginning to crack under the heat and crumble to the ground in chunks. Bricks and brittle mortar too… breaking, crumbling and falling, like the decaying flesh of a dead body; a body decomposing in fast forward, rendered from living flesh to skeleton frame in minutes.
Liam’s weary, oxygen-starved legs buckled under him and he sat down heavily in the middle of the cobbled avenue, dropped, like a sack of coke off the back of a coalman’s cart. He wasn’t alone. The avenue was thick with others slumped on their knees, lying on their backs, gasping to fill their lungs with clear air.
Macro squatted down beside him, his eyes glistening with moisture. ‘Stupid,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Stupid, stupid people.’
They heard something collapsing deep inside the column of smoke. Perhaps a wall giving way, filling the courtyard with fractured fragments of heat-shattered clay brick and glowing spars of charcoaled scaffold poles.
Liam felt his cheeks grow wet, tears creating two clean paths down his soot-blackened face.
They’re dead in that. For sure. All of them.
The deafening clatter of collapse somewhere within the smoke ceased, to be replaced by the growing crackle and roar of flames. The stream of people crawling, staggering out of the smoke had become a dwindling trickle, one or two dropping as they emerged. Surely the very last likely to step out of the pall. As certain as he’d ever been about anything, Liam knew the rest of the poor, unfortunate souls caught up in that death-trap space were either suffocated by now, burned to death or buried.
His vision, blurred with tears, became a kaleidoscope of refracting stars and spears of light. He felt a hand lightly on his back, patting him gently, and the deep grunt of Macro’s voice far away offering a soldier’s ill-phrased words of comfort.
But all Liam could do was hear his own choice of words. Hardly any more comforting.
They’re gone… and it’s just me now.
Just me.
Selfish words, he realized. Selfish to grieve at being left alone like this. To cry like this just for himself. Maddy, Sal and Bob… not just friends, but family — more like family in truth than the faint photo-album memories he had of a mother and father, uncles and aunts.
Macro’s hand was still patting him.
If he’d had a greater presence of mind, been stronger, quicker, smarter… he should’ve reacted sooner. Left the stand-off over the barricade and gone to find the girls. There could have been a way out for them. They could have found another way out.
Macro’s hand was thumping his back more heavily. Not a flat pat, more like a fist. Hardly a comforting, soothing gesture. He realized the bud in his ear was calmly, insistently telling him something, telling him what the old Roman was now bellowing loudly, repeatedly.
‹ Look. Look. Look!›
Liam did. Wiped muck and tears from his eyes. His blurred, refracted vision cleared. He saw what he expected to see: the thick column of smoke spiralling up from the skeleton of Macro’s building and an avenue of soot-covered bodies.
But then he picked out the thick, round-shouldered outline of a bull charging towards him. Not a bull… it ran like a human on human legs. A minotaur, then.
No, not a minotaur. Those weren’t horns on top — he could make out that much. He wiped his eyes again and realized Macro, stil
l pummelling his back, was cheering hoarsely.
The minotaur, an enormous black creature, came to a halt in front of Liam. Hefted two blackened humps — what he’d mistaken for horns — from its shoulders and on to the cobblestones, where both began to wheeze, cough and retch.
‘Minor burns and abrasions. There may be some minor scorching of the trachea and nasal passages. This will heal. But they will both be all right,’ rumbled the minotaur.
Behind them the complete front wall of the apartment building collapsed backwards in on itself, sending a mushroom cloud of sparks, ember and ash up into the sky.
‘Unlike your property, Lucius Cornelius Macro,’ added Bob.
Just then they heard the clack of standard army-issue, nail-soled sandals on the cobbles and the approaching rattle and clatter of armour and harnesses.
Macro turned to look up at Fronto. ‘You might have come a little earlier!’
Fronto gazed at Macro’s retirement investment, fully ablaze now. ‘It’s like this right across the whole city. Riots in every district.’ He turned to Maddy and Liam. ‘Cato sent me to get you.’
Maddy, still on her hands and knees coughing up globules of phlegm as black as tar, wiped her mouth and looked up at the officer.
‘You… you can get us in… into the emperor’s palace?’
Fronto nodded. ‘Right now… yes. If we hurry.’
CHAPTER 62
AD 54, outside Rome
Caligula watched the ground, shifting and beetle-black: a thousand crows moving among the dead, more in the sky overhead swooping and buzzing the battlefield.
The dead stretched as far as he could see: the red tunics of dead legionaries; men from the Tenth and Eleventh dotting the olive-green grass of the hillside like wild poppies.
The deed was done before the sun reached midday. Two legions of men broken and routed within the space of an hour. Caligula had watched the battle unfold from the comfort of a wooden platform erected in the early hours of the morning. His small vanguard of Stone Men had formed the very tip of an advancing wedge that had plunged through Lepidus’s predictable chequerboard formation. The Stone Men were soon lost from direct sight in the melee, but their precise location in the press of men was never in doubt; it was the source of the screaming, the source of the greatest amount of movement in the middle of the glistening sea of helmets and armour.
After the brief battle, Caligula could actually trace the path they took by the wake of horrendously dismembered bodies; almost as if someone had gathered up men and bits of men and laid them out like a narrow carpet, a road of ragged flesh, splintered bone and dented metal.
Almost indestructible, those Stone Men, but not quite. Four of them had eventually been brought down by Lepidus’s men. A concerted effort by his archers, leaving them for a moment staggering pincushion figures, like human porcupines, until they’d finally collapsed. But by then, of course, the damage had been done, the legions’ formations were broken and the men were already beginning to turn and run.
Caligula glanced once more at the pitiful sight of so many good Roman legionaries dead on the field, carrion being pecked at by hungry birds. Difficult to savour victory for long when a sight like this was the aftermath. He sighed sadly then turned back round to face General Lepidus, kneeling, stripped of his armour and left with just his tattered and bloodstained tunic.
‘This is what happens… when you decide to take matters into your own hands.’ Caligula’s hand idled on the pommel of his sword. ‘What did you honestly think was going to happen? Hmmmm?’
Lepidus’s eyes were on Caligula’s idling, fidgeting fingers. ‘I… I had no choice. I — ’
‘Well actually, I think you probably did have a choice.’ Caligula pouted disapprovingly down at him. ‘You could have come to me the moment that poisonous old man, Crassus, started sending treacherous little notes to you. You could have presented his letters to me and quite easily proved that I could trust you. But no… you chose not to.’
‘I… Crassus was trying to make me look already guilty! He was wording his letters to make it look like we’d already spoken of… of
…’
‘Trying to kill me?’
Lepidus shut up and looked down, defeated.
‘Even if Crassus’s letters implicated you… you should have come to me. I would have understood. I would have been fair, merciful. Good grief, I’m not a monster, Lepidus.’
‘I… it… I was misled. I was used.’
‘Oh, you were misled all right.’
‘I was frightened.’
Caligula crouched down before the general, lifted the man’s ample chin with a finger and looked him in the eyes. ‘Frightened? Of me? Why? What’s to be afraid of? I only want what’s best for us all, what’s best for all Romans.’
He stood up again. ‘Fear… that was your undoing. You’re nothing but a frightened old man. I should have far better men in charge of my legions.’ He began to pull his sword out of its sheath.
‘Please!’
‘Oh? Pleading, is it? So very sorry now, are we?’
Lepidus nodded vigorously. ‘I… was left with no choice! I had to do something!’
‘They goaded you… coerced you into trying to kill me, replace me.’ Caligula smiled. ‘And clearly you obviously thought you could replace me.’
‘I, no… I didn’t believe — ’
‘I don’t think you were sorry this morning as you presented your legions for battle. I think you were looking forward to the idea of sleeping in my bed tonight, in my palace. Calling yourself emperor. Wearing my robes.’ Caligula laughed. ‘Not that they’d fit you.’
He lifted the tip of his gladius up and held it in front of Lepidus’s face. Sunlight reflected off the polished blade, glinting into the general’s eyes.
‘I need better men than you in charge of my legions. Younger, braver men. Trustworthy fellows. Now listen to me, Lepidus, you can go some way towards making amends… if you were to let me know who else, other than Crassus, was involved in this ridiculous charade.’
The general licked dry lips quickly. ‘I… I think my tribune, Atellus, was in on it. Now… yes, thinking about it, yes, I’m sure of it.’
Caligula glanced at the tribune’s body lying in the grass nearby. ‘Well, he’s not exactly going to deny that now, is he, Lepidus?’
‘Others… I–I’m sure there were… Yes, Crassus used to have visits from Cicero… Paulus. Those two — ’
Caligula nodded. ‘Now that’s a bit better. Yes.’ He stroked his nose thoughtfully. ‘I could imagine those two old relics would have been involved somehow. Who else? Hmmm? Any other faces you noticed keeping Crassus company?’
Lepidus’s eyes darted left and right, trawling a racing mind for names… faces…
‘Your palace tribune! The new one!’
Caligula frowned. ‘What? You don’t mean… Cato?’
Lepidus looked up, nodded vigorously again. ‘Yes! He was involved! I… I’m sure of it!’
‘Cato.’ Caligula frowned.
‘Crassus hinted to me… not long ago… said…’
‘Said what?’
‘He said he had someone in the palace… someone close to you. Someone who could get to you!’
Caligula cast his mind back to the few conversations he’d had with the man. The tribune had always seemed professional, reliable, competent. But then…
Your Stone Men, sire… Might I suggest you send them along?… You have my cohort here… to guard you…
Caligula spun round, looking for the praefectus Quintus.
‘Quintus, take your cavalry back to Rome!’ He nodded at the five remaining Stone Men, their olive-green armour spattered with dark droplets of dried blood. ‘Take them with you as well! The tribune of the palace cohort is to be arrested!’
‘Sire?’
‘He’s one of them, Quintus! A traitor! I want him arrested. And I want him alive! Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sire.’
&nb
sp; ‘And have the rest of the Guard assembled to march.’
‘But, Caesar, they’ve just fought! They need…’
Caligula’s look silenced him. ‘Have them assembled,’ he repeated softly.
The prefect nodded, saluted and turned to deliver his orders.
Caligula once more looked down at the man in front of him, an anxious, twitching face, bathed in sweat.
‘Thank you, Lepidus,’ he said absently. And then without much thinking about it, for good measure, he quickly swung his sword down at the general’s neck. Even before the arc of blood had landed on the dry, sandy soil and arid grass of the hillside, Caligula had already turned on his heel and was heading towards his tent to change out of his uncomfortable armour. The march back to Rome would be a morning and an afternoon. They’d be back by twilight, he supposed… if they moved out soon.
Behind him he finally heard the thud of the general’s body keeling over. While all around the orders he’d given to Quintus were being barked down the ranks, followed by the noise of five thousand men scrambling in response.
CHAPTER 63
AD 54, Imperial Palace, Rome
‘I can’t let you in, sir…’ The optio grimaced uncomfortably at the thought of challenging his centurion’s order. He craned his neck to look through the iron grille of the gate to get a better look past Fronto at the soot-covered people behind him. ‘I can’t let them into the palace grounds, sir.’ He swallowed nervously. ‘Standing orders.’
‘Your orders, Septimus lad, are exactly what I say they are. Now open this gate!’
The optio looked unhappily at Fronto. Torn between the dressing-down his centurion looked like he was about to give him and fear of what would happen to him if ever Caligula discovered he’d opened the north-west gate and let in some uninvited strangers.
‘Is this on the emperor’s orders, sir?’
Fronto sighed. He was about to let rip at the optio with a blast of colourful language when Cato appeared beside him. ‘It’s all right. Let them in, Septimus. They’re my property. I just wanted to bring them into the imperial grounds for safekeeping.’