Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  At one point he woke up from a chaotic nightmare of hammers and fire and lay tense, shuddering a little, but feeling the addictive tang of adrenalin in his blood. He was impatient that it was not morning, that he was still bitterly tired, and had somehow to get back to sleep. He must speak to Marcus as early as he could the next day. He knew it was a presumptuous thing to do, to ask for a job he’d rejected, but he was so excited by the idea of it now, by the talks in Bianjing, by being free to do more than beg men like Proculus for poor little scraps of change. He was aware of the clinic too, but now it seemed to him like it had in the beginning: a good, unlikely thing, and because of that he could leave it.

  *

  In the clinic, Una stalked restlessly for a long time, up and down the stairs, out to the lobby, peering past the Praetorians into the street. As she watched from an upstairs window, an hour after the streetlights went on, a figure walking past caught her attention, glancing once at the building, at the uniformed men standing on the steps. It was a young man, dipping in and out of shadow as he walked – she could not tell if he matched what Sulien had told her of the men in the apartment block. But his casual, unremarkable progress down the street set suspicion blazing in her nerves – she remembered moving that way herself, running past the vigile station on the Thames, determined to take everything she needed from a single glance at it. And she felt his concentration on the building. She was certain he had wanted to know if Sulien was still alive, and if he was here. And he had understood what the presence of the Praetorians meant. Another guard stood on the landing near Sulien’s door, but by the time she’d got him to the window there was no one to point out – the man had gone by, and as she tried to describe him she realised in frustration how there was absolutely nothing distinctive in what she’d seen of him. She had not even been able, in the monochrome light, to tell the colour of his clothes or hair. It was hard even to make her sense of urgency explicable. All the man could do was tell the other guards to watch for such a vaguely described person approaching the clinic again. Una ran out and up the street, knowing she would recognise that mind if she came close again. But she did not, and though, back in the clinic, sprawling uncomfortably in a chair for hours, she barely slept, nothing else happened, all that night.

  The pain in Sulien’s arm and side, and the various little burnt streaks on his skin had been hushed to a resentful murmur, but still, sleep kept eroding away from above him, too, like dry soil over roots. Of course he was afraid that the people from the Subura, or whoever they had been working for, would look for him again, but it was not so much the fear that kept this rattling of protest shaking him awake, but a terrible, vertiginous bafflement. He kept straining his memory of the few minutes they’d spent in the vast workshop, trying to hold the image still to look deeper into the hot darkness to count the people, study their faces, find something about them to remember. He even felt guilty for having hated Proculus in what must have been his unrecognised last minutes, because he could now picture a family for him, and a mitigatingly blinkered life – and then he veered back to loathing him for keeping all those people in that murderous pit. It was intolerable not to understand this. Naturally he wanted to know who had done it, but almost only as a corollary of knowing the reason for it. And the two things – the attack on him, and the explosion – he kept jamming them together and prising them apart, always recoiling from what seemed like the easiest way of connecting them: that both were attempts on his life. No, it was inconceivable. Surely no one would ever do that, destroy so much, kill a thousand people just to get to one? You would have to be mad.

  [ VII ]

  THE GHOST

  He had, at least, the possibility of a chance, lasting perhaps a week, perhaps longer. It was bad luck that Sulien had not been killed at Veii; still, for now he was not at the Palace. Drusus decided it was worth trying again to talk seriously to his uncle.

  Drusus had taken a lovely villa on the Quirinal hill, everything in it as new and perfect as an egg. It had suitable rooms for Amaryllis, who had been conveyed across from Byzantium with the rest of his things. The clean freshness of the house had soothed him at first but then, within only a day or two, and for reasons he could not define, it had made him feel isolated and panicked, and needing the girl too often. So he had hastily constructed a party, lavishing money on it for a hectic variety of food and drink, for musicians, and gilt-skinned dancers and prostitutes. The long night passed for Drusus in a strung-out haze – of continuing nervousness as much as alcohol – and it shook the house into a foul-smelling ruin of trampled rose petals and vomit, which strangely seemed to be what he’d wanted, although the mess was such that he’d had to move back to his father’s house while the slaves cleaned it up. Both during this time, and in the fortnight or so on the Caelian before he found the villa, his father kept trying in small, anxious, dog-like ways to look after him, to make him happy. Drusus was aware of these little things – Lucius’ quiet enquiries about what he wanted to eat, about his health – and he thought cynically how belated and stupid it was, and yet he was confused to realise that he rather liked it too, that it was pleasant to be tended to in this way. He did not even mind Lucius gently asking him if he had any thoughts of getting married. ‘I’m sure one of these days I’ll get round to it,’ Drusus had said, truthfully enough. There was no particular reason why a wife should inconvenience him.

  Once – much more timidly, fear of his son so cluttering his speech with half-stifled syllables that Drusus could barely understand what he was saying – Lucius tried to pick up the conversation about being Emperor again, but Drusus, gradually reassembling some sort of hope, some sort of plan, was no longer in the mood.

  But when he went back to the Golden House, his hopes of Faustus came to nothing. He thought at first that he would not be allowed to see his uncle at all. Finally, the calmly obdurate doctor let him in, but would not be persuaded to leave the room and scarcely even troubled to disguise the fact that it was Drusus, not Faustus, that he was there to watch. ‘I’ve had clear instructions,’ he kept repeating. Faustus might still have countermanded all of this, but he sat listlessly in a chair and seemed reluctant to notice his nephew’s urgency. His voice was thick and embarrassingly difficult to understand, but evidently he noticed Drusus’ dismay and the irritable grimace on his face was clear enough. He made no effort to prevent Drusus from being hurried from the room.

  Drusus wandered bleakly into one of the Palace galleries. It was the feeling of being laughed at that rankled more than anything, and he was tired. It was still early but the light soaked the room with gold heat. Drusus stared heavily at a vast canvas of Oppius – the first Novian Emperor, rising in an heroic and foolhardily exposed stance atop a primitive armoured vehicle, in the act of subduing the Nionians in Abenacia. His arm was aloft and a great sweep of cloak soared from his shoulders into the snowy sky, like a flag or a pair of red wings, flooding a quarter of the canvas. Drusus found the image vaguely uplifting and encouraging, and wondered if Oppius was the one that had first gone mad. No, presumably not, or surely the dynasty wouldn’t have gone any further and Drusus would not be standing here now. Would not even exist, in fact. What a strange thought that was.

  Of course he knew the outline of the madness story, but he had managed to avoid ever hearing it told very clearly. By the time he would have been old enough to understand, Drusus and his mother already had good reason not to want to think about it: Lucius was ill, or so they had believed. Drusus could remember when he was perhaps ten – and he could look down from here, and see the very place in the gardens where it had happened – Leo cornering him and hectoring him, wanting to tell him some myth of sin and retribution. Drusus had felt that Leo was trying to make a cruel point about his being Lucius’ son, or perhaps punishing him unjustly for making the two-year-old Marcus cry, when that had been nothing to do with him. He’d fled, persecuted and miserable, to look for his mother.

  He had another reason to be here now: he was suppo
sed to go to a meeting about the peace talks, about who was going to Bianjing, who was staying. While Drusus did not really feel like going after what had just happened, he knew he must not let himself get downhearted too easily. He needed to speak to the one other person, beside himself, that the picture had made him think of. So he calculated which way Salvius was likely to come, and waited, and as the senators began to gather, fell in with him on the way to the banqueting hall in the room full of mirrors. Salvius was striding along with his head lowered, his body visibly tense with a forboding that looked close to despair.

  ‘I’ve just been in the gallery,’ Drusus announced.

  Salvius, transparently uninterested, uttered a preoccupied sound.

  ‘I was wondering what Oppius would have made of all this,’ said Drusus, allowing a little fatalistic humour into his voice. Salvius looked at him sharply and Drusus concluded sadly, ‘About what you do, I should think.’ And because he needed to for this conversation, Drusus felt what he knew Salvius felt: stark terror for Rome at how recklessly Marcus was gambling with it. But he remained half-aware that, despite everything, he still had faith that everything would come out as it should. The peace talks were a nonsense, a sideshow, but at least they would get Marcus away from Rome.

  Salvius laughed dejectedly, which Drusus could see was a relief to him, and said, ‘He’d feel able to do something.’

  ‘Then perhaps that’s a lesson,’ remarked Drusus.

  These words caused a small shock of mingled excitement and alarm in Salvius, before he even had a chance to decide what Drusus meant. It touched the edges of what he’d felt before, on the volucer, holding the axe and rods in his hands, the confused and painful thoughts about what constituted treachery. But Drusus didn’t go on and his expression stayed casual. With relief, and yet reluctantly too, Salvius decided that it had probably meant nothing.

  Drusus had left a second for this to happen. His instincts had told him not to look at Salvius after he spoke, not to make what he’d said seem too significant, so he could only hope that Salvius had reacted as he wanted. He said companionably, ‘Well, you should know what’s going on, even if I don’t. Are they saying who’s going to take the reins while he’s in Sina?’

  ‘I think it’ll be Eudoxius. Almost certainly.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘It’s a good choice, in the circumstances,’ said Salvius unhappily.

  ‘You could have done it,’ suggested Drusus.

  ‘I would have been very surprised by that.’

  ‘So would I, to be honest, the way things are going now. But you might have expected it, if the situation were different.’ Drusus walked beside Salvius silently, aware that there was no need for him to say anything more, that his presence was enough. Eudoxius was a senator from Armenia. Drusus could see perfectly well why Marcus had picked him, and it was true, he was a good choice. He was patient and intelligent, but he had risen to the Senate through slow, unassuming effort, and was now about Faustus’ age; he was unlikely to succumb to a sudden bout of ambition. He would manage, without being a threat.

  ‘Of course,’ said Salvius after a moment, becoming uncomfortable. ‘You – you have the best claim of all, really. The Emperor would have wanted—’

  ‘Wants,’ corrected Drusus, very mildly, very softly.

  ‘He’s said so?’

  ‘My uncle? Do you really think he’s given a chance to say anything?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Salvius, sounding urgent and concerned.

  Drusus sighed and shook his head. ‘Oh, what does it matter? I thought his intentions were clear from the start. But I don’t know, perhaps it’s for the best – I can’t compete in terms of experience – with you, any more than with Eudoxius. I’m not so much older than my cousin, I know that. I might have listened to wiser people, though. And I think I’d have been slower to believe all these claims of wounded innocence from Nionia than he has.’

  He did look at Salvius now; they smiled at each other.

  *

  The wound under Sulien’s ribs had healed, and he’d made the broken edges of bone knit together far quicker than they could have done alone, but, he explained to Una, it was like paint or glue, dry to a light touch after a few hours, but not perfectly solid. But there was little he couldn’t do with the arm, and the minor caution with which he had to treat it would last only a few more days. And he seemed in good spirits, considering what had happened. He had always been so supplely resilient, like water. Now the flat kept filling with his friends, who dragged him out to plays and races, trailing his embarrassing little retinue of guards with them, or brought wine and got him drunk where he was. Tancorix came almost at once with little Xanthe, who charged around the room trying noisily to entertain Sulien – successfully, it seemed, to Una’s surprise. Still, Una kept thinking of what he’d said about half-set glue: often he would be animated and then, suddenly, lapse away for a few seconds, the muscles of his face sagging, the blood vessels emptying, while his eyes became slow and distant, shadowed as if by smoke.

  It wasn’t only the thought of the slaves from the factory – there were more dead. The glow of the fire had raged like a long dawn over Rome all that night; it had been late morning before the vigiles could control it, and three of them had died. But the missiles that had ploughed into the surrounding streets had killed more; the number had just reached sixty, the latest a father of two children, his lungs scalded. Sulien thought that if he’d known in time perhaps he could have got to the man and saved his life. He spent a day furious that no one had told him. Una couldn’t remember seeing him so angry. He’d been frustratingly slow to blame anybody even for trying to have him crucified.

  And he didn’t know how many others were injured. Sulien kept thinking about pain: about broken spines, lost limbs, scars.

  He started going back to work, but erratically, for specific things he wanted to do: repair Varius’ burns, do what he could to mend Bupe’s disfigured face, although once he was at the clinic, it was difficult to leave; there was always somebody that needed him. He didn’t understand why this tired him so much more than he was used to, when there was virtually nothing wrong with his body. One day he went in to find that Bupe had gone, she’d climbed out of a window overnight, even with her one curtailed hand. It sometimes happened. But this time Sulien felt personally unhappy, as if it were his fault. He’d felt a confused fellow feeling with Bupe and kept being surprised to remember that she’d arrived at the clinic before the disaster at the factory. He couldn’t shake the false memory that that was when she’d been hurt, that she’d been there with Varius and himself.

  He kept trying to remember more – just for its own sake, for the sake of all those dead, not because he really thought there was anything significant he might have missed. Una longed for him to stop, because he was normally so bafflingly good at paring his memory down to the minimum he needed.

  Marcus came to the flat as soon as he could, trying to be anonymous in the simplest of the possible cars, and informal dress, but the memory of him in the purple robe made him look slightly bizarre to Sulien now, sitting on the floor with a chipped wine glass in his hand. His guards along with Sulien’s clogged up the stairs outside the small flat and stood, stern and awkward, by the windows.

  Sulien walked into his bedroom where the one guard actually inside the flat stood watching the street. ‘Why don’t you just come and talk to us?’

  ‘I can’t,’ the man mumbled, embarrassed at being spoken to.

  Sulien shrugged and went back to Una and Marcus muttering, ‘This is ridiculous, how can you live like this?’

  ‘Longer than I would without them, supposedly. But history shows that doesn’t always work,’ said Marcus.

  Sulien didn’t smile. ‘I wish something would happen, so they’d have some kind of point.’

  Una flinched slightly and ordered him, ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Sulien, finding the annoyance he wanted.
‘I mean I don’t need them. What happened – it was probably just …’ But he couldn’t find a conclusion.

  ‘What if they leave and someone kills you? You don’t have any choice,’ Marcus told him, a trace too much authority in his voice for Sulien.

  ‘You can’t say that to me,’ he said. He laughed, but there was a soft leather case for papers lying messily on the sofa beside him and he scooped it up and pitched it at Marcus, with a sharp incredulous smile on his face, striking Marcus’ head harder than he meant to. ‘I don’t care if you’re Emperor, you can’t tell me what to do.’

  Marcus threw the case back, almost as aggressively, saying, in the same grim half-joking voice, ‘I am telling you what to do,’ and they began clumsily grappling. They crashed about a little, their faces both bright with amusement and frustration until the guard from the next room came in at the sounds of violence.

  ‘It’s all right,’ gasped Marcus, as Sulien let him go and threw himself back disconsolately in his chair.

  ‘I could have a gun and let them go home,’ he said. ‘Then, even if something did happen …’ A small chill afflicted him, making him remember the feeling when, years before, he had actually held a gun.

  ‘I have seen no evidence you could hit anything,’ said Marcus sonorously, a deliberate parody of Imperial arrogance this time weighting his voice so that he sounded inadvertently like Drusus.