‘Don’t,’ she said, involuntarily curt, remembering Sulien’s advice and adding clumsily, ‘We both used to be slaves.’ She saw how the reminder made his misery worse. And already he was so sorry for her.
‘I … I have a message. That is, Aulus from Transtiberina wants to speak to you, as soon as possible—’
‘About my brother,’ she finished, blankly enough, sparing him. She could see he had nothing more to tell her. And she could also see that he was sure Sulien was dead, or just perhaps, about to die.
‘Yes,’ he said, wretchedly. ‘Will you … will you come with me?’
She followed him wordlessly, reduced to one paralysed truncated plea in a rigid body: silent stammerings of ‘No’, ‘Please’ and ‘Not after the factory’. But of course after the factory, that was the point – they’d had a good warning something was wrong, of course it hadn’t gone away. He shouldn’t have persuaded her to leave; she should not have let him; she should not have left. She walked feeling that she could not think, but it was not true, she could supply innumerable terrible things that could have happened to him.
She didn’t question where they were going at all. It was as if she were being guided through an entirely unknown house. Finally she seemed to emerge, as if she’d been walking with her breath held and her eyes shut, to realise they’d climbed to the top of the Palace, among dim, cluttered, gentle rooms, and that it was quiet.
The boy showed her towards a door that led into a long, irregularly shaped room, in which all she saw was the longdictor, built into a desk at the far end.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked, almost in a whisper, because these were the first words either of them had spoken since they’d entered the Palace.
‘Thank you. No,’ she said, faintly relieved that he seemed to be going to leave. Drusus had been right in a strange way, she didn’t want a spectator to what she thought was about to happen.
She remained immobile, outside the room until he skulked guiltily away. Then she forced herself in as if the desk was a marathon away, as if she had to pace her strength to reach it. She was halfway across the room when some warning, something other than the agonised apprehension about Sulien, began trying to bat and flutter at her, moth-like, and at the same moment she heard footsteps pounding closer, outside the room. She turned just as the door, which she’d already pulled to, banged shut, with an instantaneous grinding click, as the lock moved.
*
Drusus had raced, panting, across the top floor, at first throwing open doors, in an anguish of urgency and frustration, gritting his teeth at failures of his memory, but quickly he made himself act methodically. Of course if she wasn’t in her rooms, it was probably because she’d decided to lose no time in moving against him; she’d have gone after Marcus. Oh, if she’d already left … Drusus felt another attack of terror, but it was not worth distressing himself, he must work on what he could. Most likely the boy wouldn’t take her too far from the central stairs. And he would surely have chosen the best of the possible rooms. At first, simply looking for function rooms with longdictors, Drusus narrowed the potentials to four, and in two of those he found to his fierce relief that the old, heavy longdictors were dead. Of the final pair of rooms, one, he saw at once, would be far better for his purposes, and it felt more likely too – it was larger, lighter, its furniture a little faded but still handsome, and indeed someone must have been here fairly recently, for on the desk was a vase full of flowers only just wilted.
Drusus had charged in, scrambling to do what was necessary, terrified that Una and the servant would come and find him there in the midst of it, and when it was done he ran out with his arms full of hasty plunder, the vase included. He flung everything into the other room, which – rejoicing that he’d told the operator that Una should be the one to make the call – he then eliminated by finding its key hanging on a hook near the doorway and locking it. He went back to the place he had chosen, took the key from there as well, and then fled down the hall, looking for a safe vantage point on the trap. At last he crouched, trembling, concealed in the doorway of a dusty office, about a hundred yards from the tranquil room. And though he ached with hatred and fright, the next thing that had to be done did not seem difficult to him. Una would be too busy worrying about her brother to notice much anyway, wouldn’t she? But until she appeared, until she was inside the room and alone, he must be camouflaged. He mustn’t think.
It did not seem to him a matter of becoming calm, or vanishing from himself into emptiness and peace. Instead he tried to freeze solid every flicker in his skull, and sat staring inflexibly down the passage at the open door to the trap, barely breathing, as if all his existence was in the surfaces of his eyes, two little curved oval plates, which seemed hard and inorganic, like the glass eyes fitted into the heads of statues.
He kept himself like this, rigidly indifferent as she appeared with the servant at the other end of the passage. He saw her wait for the boy to leave, as if it meant nothing to him, as if they were both only flat, indistinct figures on a longvision screen.
And then she was in the room, and he was launching himself towards it, the hard little key gripped in his hand, his arm already outflung to reach the lock. He turned the key with a burst of incredulous joy, and ran on at once for the next flight of stairs that led onto the roof.
*
Una stood absolutely still. The room, which had been an irrelevant haze around her anguish, wiped itself into clean, violent focus. She looked at the desk – she had been glaring at the longdictor from the second she’d entered the room, but it was only now that she saw that it had been smashed, the pieces of the headset laid carefully back together. Unable to find any kind of blade to sever its cord, Drusus had swung the circlet furiously against the wall until it shattered. She observed to herself drily, relieved, as if she’d simply fallen for a practical joke, Well, Sulien is all right.
She felt strangely unwilling to move, to make a sound, because in this first clear moment, all the terror for her brother so suddenly erased, it felt as if all that was facing her was a purely intellectual problem, that she was a disembodied mind appraising an abstract framework of facts. When she had to go towards the door, or call for help, awareness of her flimsy body would force itself and its preposterous vulnerability back upon her attention.
She went and pressed on the doorhandle – not repeatedly, she knew what had happened – to feel the heaviness of the door, to measure if she had any chance of forcing it. No, definitely not. She stood with her back against it, looking at the room. She could see from the depth of the windows how thick the walls were. And she felt silence spreading around her through the Palace, for what seemed like miles.
She clambered across the desk to get at the window, hoping only that she might be able to make herself heard through it, for there was certainly no way of climbing down from this height. But the window was locked, moreover it was made up of many little leaded panes; she wouldn’t be able to break an opening, at least not with just her fists.
And there was nothing else she could use; she knew the next stage must be to look for some kind of weapon, and, she became swiftly certain, the room had been deliberately stripped of them. There was not a paperweight, not a lamp. There were two chairs against the desk, but both were so heavy and unwieldy that it would have taken all her strength just to manhandle one of them across the room. Una pushed one over onto its side, dismayed at the surprisingly weak, insulated thud it made as it fell. Still, she knelt beside it, and began to use the wooden back to knock on the carpet, lifting it and letting it fall. ‘Help,’ she shouted, grimly, into the swallowing floor. Her voice sounded stagy and forced, as if it frightened her to confess, in all sincerity, to how powerless she was. It made no difference. No one heard her.
She got up onto her knees and began ransacking the drawers of the desk for something with a little weight, with a sharp edge – and now her frustration began to kindle the first little glimmers of actual fe
ar, her fingers started, infuriatingly, to shake as she turned out only limp handfuls of yellowing papers. Nevertheless she began to question her instant assumption that this was Drusus, that he somehow knew and that he meant to kill her. If that was right, why had he locked her in, why hadn’t he come straight into the room to do it?
Then she pulled open what she had assumed was a cupboard, a narrow door set into the wall beside a stiff, high-backed couch, but behind it she was startled to find a cramped flight of stairs, leading upwards to a square of blue sky.
Una crouched on the floor, looking up at it, silent, more afraid than before. It was impossible that the person who had led her here so carefully could have overlooked this; it was not an escape. Someone was waiting for her there. But why did he want it to happen up there, where she would at least be in the open, where it was even possible that someone in one of the towers would see that there was a struggle going on?
Because, she answered herself rationally, if she died falling from that height, it would be less immediately obvious, less certain that it was murder. And in any case, they were close to the dome, they would probably be pretty well screened from view. But down here, presumably, he’d be forced to beat her to death, or strangle her. So perhaps she would do better to force him to come down the steps, where she could be sure of leaving her body as proof of what had happened.
A real cramp of horror ran through her.
She renewed the search for a weapon even more feverishly – there was a shelf of books, all far too light, and the drawers in the desk wouldn’t come out of their grooves. But she had decided that even if it meant doing as he wanted, she would soon be going up those steps, she would walk onto the roof to meet him rather than stay here and wait.
In the end she took one of the jagged fragments of the longdictor. It was as slight and breakable as everything else, but there was a length of cord dangling from it, and though the broken points would not kill or disable – unless perhaps she was lucky enough to strike an eye – still they might draw a little blood. There was a sick, cold hollowness in her stomach and in her bones, as she stood up and moved towards the little door. But at least she wanted to leave some marks on him.
*
The flights of stairs from the top floor rose onto the roof in occasional miniature turrets. Drusus stood against the wall, waiting. For a while he managed to keep himself in the solidified, suspended state he’d used to hide himself from her before, but as time passed and she did not appear, he began to feel tremors of impatience and anxiety. Was it possible that she could have got out?
Then with no warning, for she had moved as quietly as she had in the aviary, she burst through the open door away from him, but he lunged and dragged her into his arms. And though they were instantly, bitterly struggling, there was a tiny calm moment of recognition between them, when they looked each other in the eye and he almost forgot the harm she’d done and planned to do to him, and found a fractional peace in the fact that she knew about Tulliola, about Leo and Clodia. In another minute there would be again no one else who knew those things. For the moment they understood each other pretty well. For he also knew about her, and she understood that too.
But as he pushed her towards the low parapet, all his horror of her returned. She drove all her weight back against him, kicked, stamped at his feet. She had something sharp in her hand which she jabbed at his face, barely missing his eye, so that he felt a scraping pain where his cheek joined the lower lid, and for a horrible moment he thought she’d got a knife. As he struggled to contain her, she put up her hands and somehow managed to join them behind his head, and a cord closed on his neck.
But she wasn’t strong. The moment of tightness and pressure was terrifying, but he forced her arms back easily enough, driving and twisting the wrist until he got a sound of pain out of her and the thing dropped from her hand. As punishment for that and for everything, he hit her in the face. She began to scream, a weirdly businesslike, artificial sound, a means to an end. He hated the noise, he hated her for making it, but at no point did she speak to him, promise she’d never tell anyone, beg him for her life. And this also chilled and enraged him that she wouldn’t acknowledge him as a real person, let alone someone who could do whatever he wanted with her. He tugged her to him, her back against his chest, and clamped his hand over her face, marching her forward. He felt the base of his fingers grow damp as she manoeuvred her jaw and lips against his hand in a kind of hostile kiss, sucking a little fold of skin between her teeth and biting, hard. He kept his hand in place despite the pain, but she continued kicking and thrashing in his arms and she worked her sharp little teeth back and forward till the blood flowed. A wince of his hand allowed her to writhe her face free and she screamed again, so he pressed his forearm tight across her throat. He pressed, crushed, feeling her bucking and gasping as she struggled to breathe, and then quite suddenly, she went limp and silent. It was so abrupt that he was not prepared to take her weight and she almost fell through his hands to the paving underfoot.
Una felt herself sink under the changing grip of his hands. It was so hard to hold her breath, to keep her muscles loose and soft. Surprised, Drusus bent to sweep up her legs and swing her into his arms, a weirdly gallant gesture, an aristocrat tending to a lady in a faint. The ease with which he lifted her was appalling. Her eyes were shut; she didn’t know, as he took another step towards dropping her into space, how close to the edge they were. But she twisted quickly, like a lizard, spilled out of his arms, and ran.
She dared not look anywhere but at the next stair turret, nor think of anything but outpacing him, but she could feel how huge and bright the sky was, how all of Rome was spread out, imperviously whirring and sighing below this empty, aerial space. The Colosseum, the Circus, above all the Forum where Marcus was, all so close; a pigeon or sparrow, any flying thing set free of gravity, could have reached it in a single plunge.
And he was never more than a few feet behind her; it was only a few seconds before he hurled himself at her headlong, knocking her off her feet, so that the edge of the parapet struck her across the shoulders and she fell sitting on the paving, against the wall, with Drusus crouched over her, his face twisted, his teeth bared with effort and desperation. She had never known this before, she might remember the feel and rhythm of violence as easily as a first language, but never this, such a passion for her extinction. And it was so near now, that a small, unsilenceable voice had begun to quiver through her, admitting, there is nothing more I can do.
Drusus started to haul her up, to push her back over the wall. She continued dragging down, trying to crawl away sideways, to strike at his stomach, his groin; her nails slicing across his arm. Their faces were close and he saw that there was a smear of his blood on her white lips, and it made him feel all the more that he was fighting a demon – she lashed against him like a fury, a harpy – the unfathomable malice he was holding almost more frightening for the spikily frail body that contained it.
And as he succeeded in raising her, in beginning to tilt her back into emptiness, she gave up trying to fight him off or break free, and instead she flung her arms around him, winding herself close and gripping, gripping, so that he felt the insupportable beat of her heart, punching against his own. Oh, please, stop, go away from me, Drusus wanted to plead with her, with that pulse. By now he was longing for it to be over, for the feel of her to be off his skin – he’d expected it to be so much quicker than this. And yet, as the embrace tightened, as her legs clenched around him, he felt a confused throb of physical excitement, not for her, not for her body, but for the ferocity with which she fought him and for the moment, so close now, in which it would all go to nothing, and only he would be left.
She could feel his wild, scared heartbeat as he could feel hers, and she knew what he felt, the anticipation. And she gripped, mindlessly, tighter, trying to will her grasping limbs into being something more than slight muscle and narrow bone, trying to be a vice, a trap, the jaws of a shark. But
of course this could not go on for ever. He was trying to work the loop of her arms over his head, like a tight-fitting garment. Finally, he must get them loose. He would push back her shoulders, her flailing hands would cling to his, to his clothes – that, brief handfuls of cloth under her fingers, would be the sign that it was finished.
So, before it came to that, while she still had a good grasp on him, and with as much force as she could, she threw herself backwards, over the wall.
Drusus, intent on unfastening her, felt himself lurch suddenly forward, and at first cared only how almost her entire body was over the edge, that it was done – and then he felt with a ripple of horrified nausea how he was also keeling, overbalanced. She would not let go; his feet were rising and nothing was keeping him from falling but his thighs on the sharp rim of the wall, he was going forward, forward …
Already her feet were off the ground. The blue sky tipped itself in front of her face, the sun swung up to scream in her eyes. The void broke like a wave against her back, her heavy skull seemed to plunge her downwards like an anchor. Failure, gabbling through her nerves, soared to a high shriek: There is nothing more! This is dying! And really she only cared about two people, but she’d been afraid all this time to think of Sulien or of Marcus; if she did anything like saying goodbye, took one step towards accepting her own death, she’d felt it would knock away any little chance she might still have. But now, as she pitched downwards – any fanatic hope of saving herself scattering – and there was nothing more, she was trapped in her falling body, and nothing she said to Sulien or Marcus would fly out of her to reach them. Marcus might not ever understand that she was giving him Drusus’ death, it was all she could do for him—
In terror Drusus jerked back, let go of her arms to grip the edge of the parapet, finally turning over so that his back was to the emptiness. And, still clinging, still glued to his trunk, Una came up with him – he had no choice but to allow it – so that she was first lying on his chest and then tipped onto her feet, as he sank to his knees, weak with involuntary relief. Una slid free of his body at once.
Rome Burning Page 21