Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Salvius hesitated only for a moment. This can’t be allowed, he thought. If Drusus Novius won’t then I must. I can’t complain if I don’t even try. And he said brusquely, ‘Your Highness, I don’t mean any insult to Eudoxius, but didn’t the Emperor mean you to share the burden of your position with your cousins, to some extent? And wouldn’t this be an obvious occasion?’

  Marcus was silent for a second. Eudoxius smiled in embarrassment as the others turned their eyes to Marcus in startled expectation. Marcus looked at his cousin and said in an irreproachably friendly voice, ‘But I hope you’ll come with me to Sina, Drusus. Of course our uncle knew I’d need your help. But you can’t help me if you’re not there.’

  Such a possibility had never occurred to Drusus. He raised himself up a little, tense. If he refused an offer that sounded so reasonable, in front of everyone, it would look bad. He said lightly, prevaricating, ‘Well, distance means so little these days. We can speak face to face at the touch of a switch, if ever you did want to talk to me. What is the time difference? Eight hours?’

  ‘But it’s hardly the same,’ Marcus objected blandly, still smiling.

  Drusus shifted restlessly on the couch. ‘It’s not for me to comment on General Salvius’ suggestion, but perhaps in your absence, and at such a critical time, the people might be reassured to know that a representative of their Imperial family remained in Rome.’

  ‘It’s generous and honourable of you to consider staying for that reason,’ said Marcus warmly, giving an excellent performance of taking his cousin’s words entirely at face value and being fondly impressed by them. ‘But there is no greater challenge than this facing the entire Roman nation, and if you stay here you will not be part of resolving it. And I would like you to be.’

  ‘Come on, now, Marcus,’ said Drusus, in a low voice, like the first, quietest growl of a provoked dog.

  ‘You will come, won’t you?’ urged Marcus, all relaxed blond generosity.

  ‘Well – I …’ He felt trapped. Marcus had deliberately trapped him. Drusus cast about for a way of saying anything but yes, and managed to shrug, attempting to make a kind of joke of it. ‘Well, whatever I think you should do, you do the opposite, so …’ He cast a grim, humorously knowing look at the men around the table, adding breathlessly to them, ‘You know how it is – in families!’

  ‘I know we disagree,’ said Marcus, calmly. ‘And I can’t always act as you want me to. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth your telling me what you think.’

  Oh, the shameless liar, thought Drusus, his pulse quickening, and he exclaimed, ‘Hardly. You have done everything you can to gag me, and the Emperor himself. In his own Palace.’

  Everyone was looking at him now, and as well as alarm Drusus felt a reeling pleasure at being seen that way, as if each pair of eyes on him lent him a little dangerous weight and force. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I know my uncle would want to see me, and you have made it impossible. Isn’t it true that you’re keeping him in the dark about all these things you’re doing?’ He glanced at Salvius and felt faintly steadied by the concern he saw in his face. He forced himself to calm down a little, made his voice more level and plausible. ‘I tried to see the Emperor this morning. I was prevented from speaking to him alone. You made sure of that, didn’t you?’

  Again there was silence as Marcus considered what to do. He was aware that this had never happened before; never had there been such loud hostility between them, and least of all in public. And though Marcus was the one in power, and Drusus was so agitated and indignant, Marcus could sense that there was a risk here, and Drusus did have some advantages – not least that he was, largely, telling the truth. He swung himself to sit upright. ‘Yes, I did, Drusus,’ he answered. ‘Because when you last went to see him, your aim was to make him believe he’d done the wrong thing choosing me instead of you.’

  ‘I did nothing of the kind!’ cried Drusus.

  Una felt such a slap of shock that she forgot her meek disguise and looked up to stare Drusus in the face with frank amazement. She knew he was lying. But only because Sulien had told her what he’d witnessed. If she had walked into the room knowing nothing of what had happened, she’d have been sure he was being honest. All she could see in him was real outrage, no little scattering of escaping truth. He believes it himself, she started to say to herself. And that was nearly true, it was adequate as a shorthand. But it could not be quite right. What had really happened could not be lost to him beyond recall. It was rather that the past seemed to have no existence outside himself. It could not compete with his commitment to the words at the moment of saying them, a commitment so total as to pass for belief.

  ‘I think it’s understandable that you did,’ went on Marcus. ‘I know you’re afraid I’m mistaken over Nionia. I know how anxious you are not to risk Rome’s strength. I do understand. But you can’t go behind my back like that. He’s too ill in any case.’ He lowered himself down again on the couch, appealing mildly, ‘If something I’m doing displeases you, just come to me.’ He meant most of this. But he had his own capacity of manipulation, and right now he wanted to keep Drusus angry.

  Drusus found he was on his feet, retorting furiously, ‘You know well what good that would do!’ and he strode away from the table, towards the gardens. Before he even reached the steps he realised with a hot blaze of self-hatred that this must have been exactly what Marcus was hoping to make him do. But by then it was too late to go back.

  Marcus felt relieved, watching the senators’ unease at the confrontation turn to nervous laughter, but he was left slightly shaken, and before that had subsided he felt a whisk of movement at his side and turned to see Una spring lightly to the floor and follow Drusus, almost at a run.

  [ VIII ]

  DUEL

  Drusus walked fast, inhaling the powdery rose scent on the warm air. He began to remind himself that Salvius might still be a good ally, but he didn’t want to think, he didn’t want either to reassure himself or dwell on the damage he’d just allowed. He only wanted to be further away from Marcus.

  ‘Your Highness, do come back.’

  Drusus half-turned and the mere sight of Una, tagging behind with an eager conciliatory smile on her face, was exhausting to him. He let out a sigh that was almost a plea and went on walking. She pressed on after him.

  ‘Please,’ she persisted, her voice urgent but very gentle, soft-timbred. ‘Please don’t leave things like this.’

  Drusus grimaced towards the heavens, uttering a harassed click of the tongue; it seemed to him not only unfair but distasteful that he should have to detach this pest from himself, but he struggled to be as careful as he could. Being rude to Marcus’ mistress would not help matters. He said, with stilted patience, ‘Thank you for your concern. I would prefer to be alone.’

  Una dallied, allowing him a head start as they crossed a paved yard bounded with azaleas, down steps into a sunken lawn. The sun blazed, stinging her eyes, and she let the soft expression slip from her face, marching faster again to match his pace at a distance of perhaps fifty feet, structuring what to say to him as he reached an avenue of umbrella pines. Entreating him to come back to the meeting was a good reason to keep close to him for a while, but she was working for more than time. She was composing a way of talking about Leo and Clodia.

  Drusus half-realised she was still behind him but he couldn’t entirely believe it; he expected at each moment that if he ignored her, she must go away. And as she did not catch him up, he sank into himself and the warm sunlight and forgot about her. As he walked, the panicking desperate song of the blackbirds in the arched, steel-skeletoned aviary grew louder and more beautiful, almost drowning out the low crooning of the city below the Palatine hill. Drusus let himself in, hearing the rattle of startled wings as they burst up into the trees. He sat down on one point of a crescent-shaped marble bench. There were all kinds of birds, the blackbirds for music, but there were others far more exotic: bright birds from the tropics, tiny hove
ring birds like warm malachite-green bees. But he didn’t feel like looking at them, he sensed the troubling motion in the air through closed eyes.

  When he opened them he found with a light, hallucinatory shock that Una was sitting opposite him on the other point, leaning a little towards him, perfectly still as if she had materialised there. He had not heard her footsteps.

  ‘There is still time,’ she said.

  Drusus looked at her numbly, without answering. Una remained in exactly the same position, propped on the one hand that she’d slid towards him, her head a little tilted. Leaning like this not only looked sympathetic but kept her head at a self-effacing level lower than his.

  She said with slightly overstressed clarity, ‘I know you will think it’s very presumptuous of me to come after you. To talk to you at all.’

  ‘No,’ managed Drusus listlessly, enduring her.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said sweetly, smiling again. She shaded her eyes to look at him and drew her legs up beside her as if trying to make herself a smaller target for the sun. She was still comparatively pale after all this heat; she did not look intended to cope under such fierce summers. ‘Please be patient with Marcus,’ she went on after a while. ‘He needs his family. I know how much, because, you see, I don’t have any family except my brother. You must almost be that to Marcus. Especially now the Emperor is so ill.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t think you understand the situation,’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Well, your feelings are very …’ He sighed at how stupid it was. ‘Very natural, of course it should be like that. But it’s more complicated. You should be talking to him, not me. He doesn’t want my help or my – my friendship. I can’t see what more I can offer him.’

  ‘But he just said he wanted you to come with him to Bianjing.’ Drusus repressed a snort and she claimed, ‘This is hard on him. It’s so new, it’s such a burden. If only his father was still alive, he would have been spared this.’ She waited.

  Drusus said, barely bothering to disguise his impatience with her, ‘Yes, it’s very unfortunate.’ And there was a flaring of remembered pain and disappointment, which made Una catch her lower lip under her teeth in expectation, but nothing clearer came and she marvelled again at how little he really seemed to think of it. She let her eyes follow the twitching of a lapis-blue finch near her feet, remembering that she’d made him think of someone, when he’d first met her; there had been a brief comparison with a vanishing face.

  She announced, quietly but decisively, as if laying down money on a bet: ‘Although the truth is, I’m thankful for what happened.’

  ‘To Leo and Clodia?’ asked Drusus, startled, reminded unnervingly of his old, cancelled hope.

  ‘I know it’s wrong. And I’m talking about your uncle – I’m so sorry. But I can’t help it, because otherwise I would never have met Marcus. And I can’t imagine that now. Or maybe I can, but I don’t want to.’

  Drusus nodded, but he shifted on the seat. There was a faint warning in his nerves that something was wrong, that he was in danger, but it was too indefinable to act on.

  Una realised her voice had dipped lower from the innocent, faintly childlike pitch she’d been using, because she was telling the truth. She adjusted it carefully again to say, ‘And I was only a slave, he could do so much better than me. Someone nearer his own rank. Or just someone more beautiful.’

  ‘Now then, you’re a pretty girl. Don’t fish for compliments,’ said Drusus, smiling uneasily.

  ‘I’m not. I mean, I didn’t mean to!’ she said girlishly, laughing artlessly and covering her face, and then quietly baring it again, allowing him to look at her.

  He’d simply been following the humdrum rules of conversation with a young woman, but it was true, to some extent he could see now why Marcus liked her. He had ceased to focus on the fact that she was a slave, until she reminded him of it. Yes, she might be pretty, but certainly she did not compare with Amaryllis. Or Tulliola.

  For a horrible second he could not extricate her, Tulliola, the original, from the surrogate: he saw only a generalised blur of smooth skin and dark eyes. Relief flooded him poignantly as he succeeded, but that made the absence of Tulliola suddenly overwhelming. She had been here in the aviary. She had been so near.

  Una tried not to show anything, not to catch her breath or let her eyes widen at a little jolt of victory, and for a moment could only manage to freeze totally, not breathing at all. She did what she could to relax her body and face, to ease herself back, but for some seconds couldn’t get her mind to work, she could only stare at the birds, inanely smiling, as she tried to think how she could go on. To cover the silence she had to reproduce the shy laugh again, beginning, ‘Anyway …’ But she was still at a loss. And at the same time, she saw clearly how private it was here, how far away she was from anyone. But why should she not be safe? She still couldn’t be certain he’d done anything worse than wanting Tulliola; even if he had, he didn’t feel anything more dangerous towards her than boredom and a faint unaccountable unease, which she was doing everything she could to control.

  She tried again. ‘Anyway, your family has done so much for me. That’s why I hate to see this clash between you. And I do know that Marcus feels the same.’ She paused. It was difficult to balance her real purpose and her false one; she was wary of telling too many outright lies which might cause trouble later. ‘You think he doesn’t listen to you, don’t you? But perhaps he would if you listened to him more …’

  Drusus once more gave a tight-lipped nod, but he was beginning to hope earnestly that she would go soon. A moment before he’d been thinking that she was pretty, if not compellingly so, and being alone this long with a dull, well-meaning, acceptably pretty girl, he would normally have at least entertained the idea of what her body would be like, just to keep from going mad with boredom. But he didn’t want to touch her; he didn’t know why. If he had, it would have seemed like the odd, fascinated temptation to lay his hand on red-hot metal or into moving machinery. He could no longer understand why he’d thought her so ordinary-looking to begin with, nor why the slight organisation of bones and skin had begun to seem sinister, diabolic to him, as if a small wisp of evil had fleetingly assumed the shape of a girl and come gently to light on the bench, its disguise slowly evaporating in the sunshine. Something about her must have changed. The expression was still one of diffident appeal, but it had become stiffened, set. Her eyes were really only a very dark brown, not even an unusual colour if her hair and skin hadn’t been so light and washed out; it was only that – a trick of contrast – that made the irises look almost as black as the pupils, the hot colour in the darkness almost red. She did not blink very often. He didn’t realise that he had inched back as, very slightly, she’d closed in.

  She said, ‘You must understand the effect it had on him three years ago, to know that people wanted to kill him rather than let him be Emperor. After that, what could he do but become more … unbending? How can he help but think, If I don’t do what I set out to, then why did I go through all that? It’s difficult to trust people again, Your Highness, with his parents suddenly gone like that – and to know it was because of people so close to him, someone he must have known for years …’ Her voice had become quiet, even, rhythmic. She now exhaled slowly, shaking her head. ‘You know, I can’t understand it. Well – it’s easier with Gabinius, in a way, he was afraid for his business, he didn’t know Marcus. But the Emperor’s wife … Why did she …?’ She sat unmoving, knowing this was dangerous. She didn’t want to give any sense that she suspected him.

  And now he could not help but think of it, though he had cut it out of their story because it did not fit, what counted was that he’d loved her, but now it came: Tulliola sitting beside him on the floor, his body still warm from her touch, but she was hissing furiously: ‘I’ve done everything. For you. Why am I the one paying for it, things I’ve done for you?’ And now there came a hammering torrent of remembered images and touc
hes: the first cool, incredulous kiss – not two hundred yards away from where he sat, but then – oh, he could not help it now – the solitary wonder as the sharp tip of the gold pin he held pierced her heart. Her familiar smooth body struggling under the weight of his. The spilling warmth of her blood against his own breast – and this ache all through him, why did he have to feel this? Why had the baleful thing beside him done this to him?

  It was all he could do to answer, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know her very well.’ And even those intentionally bland words stung him with the unwanted memory of how afraid he had always been that this was the truth.

  Now, careful, don’t behave any differently, Una instructed herself, feeling her flesh beg to recoil, the demand, in the hastening beat of her heart, in all her muscles, to get away. She’d suspected that he’d been part of it, but she’d never had any reason to doubt that Lady Tullia had killed herself. She felt an unexpected strength of revulsion, a sense of contamination almost beyond bearing. She wanted to claw off strips of her own skin, she wanted to wipe off Tulliola’s blood.

  ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t make any difference why – it happened anyway,’ she said, almost airily, not the note she wanted. She smiled harmlessly again, amending, ‘But you don’t need me to tell you about Marcus, you’ve known him all his life. I just … wanted to help.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Drusus, and as he’d hoped, she finally got to her feet to leave.

  ‘Well, thank you for listening to me,’ she said, humbly bowing her head.