Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Faustus’ breathing had become hurried, but he began, ‘Drusus. I know you want …’

  ‘No, it’s not personal, really! I know you feel that everything he went through will help him, somehow, when it comes to it. But as for now – after all, Uncle, whatever he may be capable of in the future … Can you think of an Emperor who came to power that young and turned out well?’

  ‘Marcus is not Emperor,’ said Faustus with surprising clarity and force.

  Drusus felt at once nervous and encouraged. In truth, his idea of what precisely he was trying to do had been somewhat clouded so far – he couldn’t expect Faustus to alter his will and make him Caesar after only one conversation, when Drusus had never managed to persuade Faustus even to let him have the governorship of Terranova. But he did not need that to happen all at once. As things were now, it seemed to him that it would not be very hard, or even take very long, perhaps only two or three attempts, to get Faustus either to instate him as Regent now, or else to take the power back himself. And in the latter case, his uncle would need help for some time to come.

  ‘But he can do whatever he likes, all the same,’ he said. ‘Did you know he freed all your slaves, only this morning?’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Faustus with a little jolt, ‘I told him …’ His breath came quicker still, and his face was greyer than before.

  The door clicked open behind Drusus, making him start unpleasantly, and blood warmed his face. He turned and saw a tall young man – very young in fact, with a lot of disordered warm brown hair, and widely-spaced, much lighter brown eyes in a handsome triangular face that seemed designed to look guileless and trusting, and just now, did not look trusting at all.

  ‘You must be Drusus Novius Faustus,’ the stranger said. As an obvious afterthought, he executed a slapdash bow towards the bed, but he did not lower his eyes from Drusus’ face as he did it.

  Faustus uttered a vague rumble of recognition and fell back on the pillows.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Drusus, motionless, unable to think how to react, unsure if the alarm he felt was even justified. He turned stiffly towards the bed and asked with automatic, defensive haughtiness, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘’S the doctor,’ answered Faustus glumly, as the young man announced his name.

  ‘Sulien.’

  ‘What’s happened to the usual doctor?’ enquired Drusus, in as light a tone as he could muster. If it was just credible that a boy so young could be some kind of doctor, he still could not understand what he should be doing treating the Emperor.

  ‘He saved my life,’ announced Faustus, adding morosely, ‘For all the good that’s worth.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Uncle,’ said Drusus mechanically.

  Sulien pushed the door wider and asked pleasantly, ‘Your Highness, will you come out here, please?’

  Drusus felt intensely reluctant and thought of refusing, but he must not; it was not safe to leave without knowing what the boy had heard. Which might after all be nothing. He followed.

  Sulien shut the door. ‘You can’t come and talk to him like that,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean by that? Were you eavesdropping?’ demanded Drusus.

  Sulien looked back at the unsettling approximation of Marcus’ face, and was surprised by an intense urge to hit Drusus, which was as strong as if he’d found him trying to attack Marcus physically. A night Sulien hadn’t believed he would live through had ended in this very room three years before. Drusus couldn’t know what it had been like, he had just been calmly trying to wreck everything for which they had struggled, for which Dama had perhaps died. Yes, Sulien had listened. He had heard everything.

  He said, truthfully, and as forbearingly as he could, ‘There is a good reason why he’s in here and not downstairs. He could easily have another stroke. He’s not strong enough to run an Empire, or to think about it. It’s dangerous for him. In any case, I need to treat him now.’

  ‘I’ve come a long way to see my uncle; if I really have to leave now I’ll come back later,’ said Drusus, in a tolerably conciliatory manner.

  ‘No,’ said Sulien. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No,’ repeated Sulien, emphatically. ‘You can see him when I say.’

  ‘What are you thinking, talking to me like that?’ breathed Drusus, genuinely taken aback, so that his voice sounded almost gentle and diffident, ‘You cannot give me orders. How dare you? I am part of the Imperial family – the only person who can speak to me that way is in that room.’ And he jerked his head at the door to the bedroom.

  Sulien scowled, losing what patience he’d had. ‘Look at it this way,’ he retorted. ‘He’ll never change his will if he dies now, will he?’

  Drusus parted his lips, but his power to speak seemed to escape soundlessly between them, like a thread of steam. He had gone pale. Sulien felt a moment of satisfaction at this, followed by a slight and ill-defined anxiety. He left Drusus standing there and went into Faustus’ room.

  *

  ‘If I go over to that factory, can I use you as a threat?’ asked Varius, as they went back into his office. Without even thinking about it he crossed the room to adjust the windows.

  ‘If that will help.’

  ‘Of course it’ll help.’

  Marcus said, ‘It looks as though the clinic’s running well, at least when you don’t have Praetorians barging in.’

  ‘Oh, it is, it is,’ agreed Varius, faintly wearily. But he smiled at Marcus. He was surprised at how glad he was to see him, forgetting that he was always nervous in advance of any meeting between them and this was always what happened. The hampering sense of other people’s knowledge was naturally worse with those whose lives had also been extruded through the autumn of three years before. This was why, although he’d seen Cleomenes perhaps four or five times since his release, they couldn’t really become friends. Only Sulien was exempt from this, because Varius was used to him being part of the clinic, and because although Sulien had been there that last night in the Golden House, it was hard to believe that someone who seemed so uncontaminated could have had anything to do with such times.

  But Marcus was the centre, the cause. It was not that Varius had ever blamed him, for he had done nothing, but the simple fact was that if it had not been for him, Gemella would still be alive. And Varius had tried to protect him, and instead had almost caused his death. He knew Marcus didn’t consider him responsible for that. Marcus had said to him, some weeks after his return to Rome, ‘But I would have been killed if I’d stayed in Rome, I’m sure of that. And I would have stayed if you hadn’t made me go.’ He had also said, ‘I think what happened to you was torture, all of it.’ It had not been a conversation Varius had wholly wanted to have. He’d badly needed to understand how Marcus had survived, and he hadn’t been able to bear listening to the official version on the longvision. But he had not wanted to give an account of the time after he’d driven back to Rome, nor to hear what he knew Marcus would say: that he had done nothing wrong. What he blamed himself for was not so much the moment of betrayal, because yes, it was true, by that point there was no plausible way out – but that he had not stopped it from coming to that. He just should not have been there.

  Nevertheless it did alter things that Marcus was one of the few people to whom he’d found himself telling the full truth – although on the condition that they didn’t talk of it again. And it did count for something that Marcus was the only other person who’d been there when Gemella died. What had happened to them both had been, at certain points, parallel, and it still seemed to defy sense that they were both alive.

  ‘And the world?’ he asked now.

  Marcus attempted to smile and said, ‘That’s not going quite so well.’

  ‘It never does,’ said Varius. ‘I don’t know that it’s meant to. So long as it goes on supporting life to some degree you can’t be doing too badly.’

  ‘I’m doing my best.’ Marcus looked, for a moment, wan. Three years before
, Varius had thought of Marcus as a child. In general he no longer did so now, but Marcus’ age seemed to slide back, briefly, leaving him looking defenceless.

  ‘I’m sorry it had to happen to you like this,’ said Varius, quietly.

  ‘It’s what I want to do. Not yet. Not with things this way. But still …’ Marcus shrugged a little. ‘I’ve told Salvius we’re not bringing in more troops in Terranova. Do you think the Nionians will talk to us?’

  Varius considered, and sat meditatively on the edge of his desk, interested. ‘I don’t think they could be sure of gaining much from this war. I doubt they’re eager for it.’

  ‘Salvius is, Drusus is. There must be people like them in Cynoto.’

  ‘Rome still has the advantage, and may lose it. That’s at least part of the reason Salvius feels so strongly. I think the Nionians would prefer to avoid fighting us. That doesn’t answer your question, though. The risk isn’t only in their intentions, or in yours. It could be just some little mistake. A detail you don’t see in time – you can lose everything over some stupid little thing.’

  ‘Like what?’ prompted Marcus.

  ‘You’ve said we won’t prepare an attack against them while this is happening. You had to. And obviously they’ll have to make the same promise before we can enter talks with them or your position here will become untenable. Stipulations like that do matter. But they can come to matter too much. People grow fixated with them in situations as tense as this. If there was, say, a military exercise – and the message cancelling it didn’t get through – or even if there were a general really trying to sabotage things, we could find ourselves at war, without either you or the Nionians truly wanting it to happen, because of something that doesn’t really matter at all. A few men moving a few miles.’

  ‘What should I do, then?’ asked Marcus. He had seen Varius’ bearing alter indefinably as he spoke, becoming subtly more alert and engaged.

  ‘You shouldn’t let it become a sequence of ultimatums in the first place,’ began Varius, enjoying the flow of thought, but then stopped. ‘Why am I giving you advice on this? And Marcus, I’m very glad to see you, but why are you here?’

  ‘Because I do need advice,’ said Marcus. ‘I’d like you to come to the Palace as soon as you can, as my advisor.’

  Varius leaned back a little into the sunlight from the open windows, and became hard to look at, masked. Marcus, watching him, supposed he must be surprised, because of the time it took him to answer, but then some silent limit passed and it became clear that he must be deciding how to say no.

  ‘Thank you for the offer,’ he began finally.

  ‘Why are you turning it down?’

  ‘I have no experience of government,’ said Varius.

  ‘You expected to have, once.’

  ‘Yes. In very different circumstances. As an extension of the job I was doing then. I’m in another line of work now.’

  ‘And you’re bored with it,’ said Marcus.

  There was a pause, and Varius’ face surfaced from the light, looking faintly alarmed. ‘No, I’m not, why do you say that?’

  ‘I’ve just turned up and you’ve got time to see me.’

  ‘Marcus. You can have people executed now if they don’t make time to see you.’

  ‘I promise I won’t do that often,’ said Marcus, smiling, though he felt another flash of mute shock, as at the first sight of the ring that was now on his hand. ‘Anyway, Sulien said you were bored.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Varius. ‘Is he unhappy about the way I’m doing things here?’

  ‘No, he just said you looked bored.’

  Varius sighed. ‘Well, it’s true, the place does more or less run itself now,’ he confessed. ‘But I’ve been thinking of setting up another one, so—’

  ‘We could do that. You wouldn’t have to scrape up the money. You could have it.’

  ‘Are you offering to fund a clinic for injured slaves on condition that I agree to work for you?’ asked Varius impassively, after a moment.

  Marcus gave a helpless little laugh. ‘No. I suppose I’ve got to do it now I’ve said it. But look, Varius, I’m not stupid, I know I’m too young for this.’ He waved the hand that wore the ring. ‘Even if I wasn’t, perhaps it’s too much power for one person anyway. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let Drusus have it. So, this is much more than the job you’d have had with my father. It is power. You must have wanted that once.’

  Varius said flatly, ‘I made a decision that I would have nothing to do with the Palace, ever again.’

  Marcus hesitated. ‘Those people are gone, Varius,’ he murmured carefully.

  ‘Are they? All of them? Are you sure?’ asked Varius, in a low, grim voice, not looking at him.

  ‘All right,’ said Marcus. ‘No. No, I’m not sure. But I’m very sure you’re not one of them. I know you’ve got good reason not to trust the Golden House, but so have I. But I do trust you.’

  Marcus had got Varius to look at him, and even smile, at bay. Then he lowered his head and asked, as if of himself, ‘What can I say to that?’

  But this was not quite an acceptance, even if it was obvious to Marcus that after all he was tempted.

  ‘Varius, there has to be someone I can talk to openly. I can’t get this wrong, whatever else I do. And if you tell me something – if you think I’m doing something wrong, I’d know you didn’t have any other motive for saying so. I could believe you.’

  Varius frowned down at the floor for a while, but when he looked up a detached, alert calm had evened out his face again. He asked reasonably, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because— ’ began Marcus incredulously, after a moment’s speechlessness.

  Varius interrupted, ‘All right. I know why you can trust me. You can trust me to mean well. But that isn’t enough.’

  ‘No, I trust your judgement,’ protested Marcus.

  ‘I can see you do,’ said Varius. ‘But that’s why I won’t do it. I’m sorry.’

  Afterwards, Varius went on with his work, but he felt vaguely shaken for some hours, as if he’d been in a fight.

  Sitting in the gilt cavern of the car again Marcus tried not to let himself wish that the vehicle would turn off its course and, mysteriously, take Una and himself somewhere hours and hours away. It was much worse than the day before, in the volucer, daunted though he’d been then. Of course the Golden House looked bigger from the city below it than it had from the air.

  ‘I can help you,’ Una said. ‘I don’t want to spend all day waiting to see you. I want to be with you. No one will lie to you without me knowing. Glycon doesn’t mind me and I think I could do some things for him, boring things like taking messages, and then that would be an excuse for me to be there—’

  ‘I want you there,’ Marcus interrupted. His face had lifted with a kind of reckless relief, but Una continued defending the proposal almost as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘And I would have to make myself very quiet and dull and hard to notice; you know I can do that. That way I could listen. And – and I want to see it, I want to be there. But I know people will think I shouldn’t be there, and they’ll think badly of you for letting me.’

  ‘No, it’s worth it,’ he insisted.

  Una hoped that this was right. He might have been warier if Varius had said yes, she thought. She smiled back at Marcus, knowing she could be sure now of the time she needed to watch Drusus.

  *

  Drusus lingered in the Palace for a while, sitting paralysed in the glazed tower, again wishing that there was someone he dared talk to. He felt another twinge of unfocused alarm and resentment when he established, by sending one of the guards that had come with him from Byzantium across to talk to the Praetorians, where Marcus had gone. Drusus could probably have found this out quite openly, but this way comforted him a little. Varius: another of the obstacles that had tripped his hopes! Without him, Marcus would be safely dead.

  When Marcus returned to the Golden House, Drusus tried to think of s
ome plan, something to go and say to him, but could not. He went through the motions of carrying out his cousin’s request, and for short spasms he managed to interest himself in the mechanics of fire, but he began to feel as if the Palace was on the point of shattering into glass splinters around him. And so he fled it, back to the quiet Caelian hill, and his father’s villa – or rather his own, for of course he had taken charge of it as soon as he was of age. His father was known to be mad.

  It was a dark nest of barriers: the high, blind outer wall, the thick hedge within that, a buffer zone of land, and then the fort of the house itself – all like several pairs of hands parsimoniously clasped around the coin of the central garden.

  Inside the house was full of marsh-like colours: deep green, a dark, muggy purple; reeds and shadowy willows were painted on the wall. Drusus strode through into the dining room, where, lying opposite each other on the couches, he found Lucius eating an early supper with Ulpia, a pleasant-looking, snub-nosed brunette who was supposed to be Lucius’ nurse, and instead, Drusus thought disgustedly, lived with him as a kind of wife, or concubine, or a nanny.

  ‘Get out,’ he said to her. ‘I want to talk to my father.’

  Ulpia started up, distressed and hesitant, and then darted out. Lucius looked, as so often, scared and saddened, but, as Drusus expected, said nothing to rebuke him. Oh, how every act, every word to him was loaded with a feeble, far-too-late apology! But instead of his usual irritation at this, Drusus felt only deep, lonely weariness. He sat down on the couch where Ulpia had lain, stared broodingly at his father with his chin propped on his fists, then sank his face into his hands.

  After what seemed a long time, Lucius padded silently round the table and laid an awkward hand on Drusus’ shoulder. Drusus let out a sigh that had the ghost of laughter in it and, without raising his head, lifted the hand at the wrist and plucked it away. ‘Don’t be so absurd,’ he murmured, without aggression.