Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘She’s a slave?’

  ‘Yes. And I didn’t really keep in touch – not this last year, anyway. She would have liked me to. But he sold her to the Maecilii. Or gave her to them. They’re in the Senate; he always wanted to get in with them.’

  ‘And their estate was burnt,’ said Sulien, remembering reading of it.

  ‘So you knew? I didn’t know – it was weeks ago and I didn’t even realise. I never look at the news.’

  ‘She might be fine,’ said Sulien, weakly.

  ‘I know. I tried to find out but no one would talk to me.’ Her face creased again with a new spasm of tears. ‘Because they know Epimachus and I’m some – tart, they’ve got no reason to tell me anything. I don’t know what else I can do. So …’ She wiped her eyes again, and smiled theatrically. ‘I look like a wreck now.’

  Sulien went and put his arms round her, enjoying the act of comforting her as well as the pressure of her body; it made him feel warmer, more solid, more real. A handful of times since she’d come to Rome, – well, three times, of course he knew the exact number – they had fallen into her bed or his, laughing, excited and alarmed by the knowledge that no one was going to stop them, nothing was going to happen. He felt now like spending all his money on wine, watching her body soften and relax through a gathering haze of warmth, dragging her home through the streets. It seemed almost the only sane thing to do, they would both feel better. But he had to go back to the clinic for another six hours, and there was her little girl, whose presence had worried and embarrassed him after each of those nights. These barriers seemed intensely unreasonable to him just now, although part of him still knew that it was as well they were in place. They’d never spoken of what had happened, beyond making shy jokes while they dressed, and it had never led to anything further; he’d felt always, really, that he’d made a mistake, and had only barely got away with it.

  He was not sure what Tancorix felt, but finally she moved away, and said, ‘Are we going, then? I’m never living in Veii, we’ve established that much.’

  Sulien stood up, reaching for the hooded jacket slung over the back of his chair. ‘I wonder if Atronius lived here,’ he said quietly. ‘Or further out – I don’t know where.’

  Tancorix sighed, arrested in the motion of picking up her bag and turning away from the table. She looked at him. ‘The man who did it?’ she asked, patiently.

  Sulien shrugged. ‘I don’t know if he did it. I’ll have to wait for the vigiles to find that out, if they ever do. If I knew one real thing, it would be better.’

  *

  Wherever Faustus was, it was all fluid, all in constant, dappling motion. And he was dissolved into it, no more solid than anything else, less steady than the people who swam and bobbed nearby, recognisable now, chattering softly. The pain had gone on and on and on for a long time, but it had been absent just as long. He did not think this melted region was the only state of things, or that it would always be this way. He might only be asleep. Some time he might harden into dry land.

  Once or twice, indistinctly, he’d asked for Marcus and Drusus. Makaria, scared and worn out, was not sure what it meant, of how she should answer. She said warily, ‘They can’t come. You remember, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I remember,’ said Faustus furiously, much more clearly than before, so maybe it was true, maybe he did. At any rate he seemed more himself, and angry with her, for hours afterwards.

  *

  Drusilla Terentia climbed the prison steps lightly, trying to draw herself in and upwards as she walked, as if it were possible to keep her full weight from ever resting on the stained concrete. There was a bad smell – inadequate cleaning fluids and male sweat – that had struck her almost as soon as she’d forced herself, tight-lipped, through the gates. It was an insult, it was rubbing it in, placing him here. They might have been content with trampling over his name and hers, and shut him somewhere private, that much had been done even for Tullia. He was at least away from the mass of the prisoners; still, following the oily-looking guard, she’d been compelled to pass rows of cells, and the men were there even if she did not look to left or right. Some of them had seen her, some of them had shouted out, jeering. Even if they didn’t know who she was they knew she should not have to be there.

  ‘Mother,’ said Drusus unsteadily, rolling at once off the bed and flying towards the bars in a single move. Already he’d lost a lot of weight; his skin was papery, his lips cracked. He tried to blink away the tears that came into reddened eyes. His mother looked at him and felt exhausted. ‘Can’t you let her in?’ demanded Drusus of the jailer who’d led her up the steps.

  ‘No one is to go in,’ said the man calmly.

  Drusus gritted his teeth against a cry of rage. ‘What do you expect her to do? Look at her. In the gods’ name, what’s wrong with you?’

  But the man said nothing more and Drusilla Terentia stood there and did not protest.

  Drusus drew back a little from the bars. When she first appeared he had been unable to check a downpour of feeling – panicked relief and childlike longing – but after the first few seconds, looking at her and remembering the facts, he controlled it, straightening his back. ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ he said. ‘It’s been weeks. I kept sending messages.’

  ‘I am not used to this,’ said Drusilla. She was dressed in black as if she’d been bereaved. Her face and greying dark hair had been hidden by a veil, which she lifted as she entered the room. Was she in mourning – for him, or for whatever son or life she might have had instead? Perhaps yes, Drusus thought, but not deliberately. It would be her perverse idea of deflecting attention from herself. If she had to come here she would have preferred to do so wrapped in impenetrable fog, invisible and blindfolded, so that even she could not see what she was doing. She looked in fact more stylish than usual, darkly elegant, which would again be unplanned. She was still a good-looking woman, although when she put on jewellery – she never wore make-up – it was seemingly with some other intention than looking attractive, an obscure form of obedience to some internal State.

  There was a chair. She did not sit.

  Drusus caught his breath with anger at what she’d said, and explained through gritted teeth, ‘They won’t let me write any letters. There are people I must contact and it’ll have to be through you. I’ve been waiting all this time.’

  ‘I hoped it might have been cleared up by now. Or that you might at least have been out of this – hole.’

  ‘Yes, well, I wouldn’t choose to inflict it on you,’ snapped Drusus bitterly.

  ‘Why have you, then?’ cried his mother suddenly, shaking.

  Drusus tried not to flinch, but he could not speak; the air was banged out of him. He had not known she still had the power to do this to him. She never could have if he had been free. Finally he whispered breathlessly, ‘I didn’t do any of those things. They’re lies. They’re lying about me. You … you do believe me, you must, Mother.’

  ‘Of course I believe you,’ said Drusilla, scathingly. In fact, it seemed too likely that he’d been the lover of that creature, Tulliola, and from there, if Drusilla had allowed herself to think it, she might have concluded that he must have known what was happening, more than that, he must have caused it. But she did not think of it. Though she looked at her son with, for the moment, acute, undisguised dislike, no one could compel her to turn her attention that way. She insisted, ‘But at least in here you’re spared knowing how we’re being talked about. Why did you get yourself into this? Don’t tell me you were an innocent bystander. You must have been doing something with that girl. I don’t want to know what.’

  ‘Una?’ said Drusus, unsteady with shock, flushing with hatred at the mention of her. ‘You think I—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear,’ announced Drusilla again flatly, looking at the wall.

  ‘She’s a lying whore,’ said Drusus. ‘You think I’d want to lay a hand on her?’

  ‘Well, either way, it’s done, no
w,’ stated his mother, lowering herself after all with slow distaste onto the edge of the chair. She almost never spoke of Lucius and so she did not say, And wasn’t your father shame enough? But the silence bore the same weight as the words.

  Drusus had also dropped back, sitting on the bed with his head bowed, so that Drusilla felt an intensification of resentment, ebbing in and out of unmixed pity. Probably he did not even know how much he resembled Lucius when young – a heightened, intensified rendering – although she could see herself in him also; a queasy mingling of them. Still she was aware how people might have looked at him and envied her a son like that, how tall, how handsome he was, even faded as he was now. There had never been anything wrong with him in that way.

  He raised his face at last, even paler now, inky pools under his eyes, the dark needles of emerging stubble seeming to injure the frail skin they pierced.

  ‘After the trial will they kill me or just keep me here – do you get any sense of that?’ he asked calmly. Drusilla closed her eyes, letting out a long breath. Drusus took a little heart from the sound of grief. He said, ‘The trial will be the worst thing of all, you realise that. The Empire will talk of nothing else.’

  ‘You have to remind me,’ she murmured, pained.

  ‘I have to prepare you. You will have to face it.’

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ moaned Drusilla to herself.

  Drusus watched her suffering face and thought bleakly, it’s only the disgrace, or almost only that. If I’d asked for a blade to open my veins, you would have brought it without question, wouldn’t you? You would even have come here sooner. He wanted to say this aloud, accusing her, but did not think he could stand to hear it confirmed. Instead, coming to the point, he asked, ‘Is Salvius in Rome, or did he go away to Bianjing?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘You will have to find out,’ said Drusus. ‘If he’s in Bianjing you’ll have to write to him. And someone you can rely on completely will have to carry the letter all the way, we can’t risk it being intercepted. But if you can go to him yourself, then you must.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? Do you imagine he can help you out of here? It’s an impossible thing to ask of him. I can’t do it.’

  ‘No. No. You mustn’t ask him that. You mustn’t even hint it,’ said Drusus fiercely, coming as close to her again as he could. ‘I’ll tell you what to say.’

  ‘No, Drusus,’ said Drusilla. A faint heat stained her cheeks.

  ‘You only have to ask him to talk to me. I believe that he’ll come. I’ll tell you what to say and you have to repeat it exactly. You must do it or any life you or I value is finished.’

  He sat back, and Drusilla Terentia again looked at him with helpless weariness, as at some enormous task, a quarry of paper to be covered in close lines of handwriting, a whole soiled city she had to wash clean – something so endless and impossible, something for which her whole life would so plainly be insufficient, that she could not even lift her hand to begin it.

  *

  Cleomenes unlocked the door to Atronius’ flat, saying, ‘There. You can have ten minutes. And I shouldn’t be doing this, so don’t get too talkative about it. But I don’t know what you expect to find. There’s nothing left here.’

  There was only one room. For more than a week, since the desolate trip to the factory, Sulien had been anticipating this, talking Cleomenes into it, waiting for the time to come. But stepping inside he felt immediately foolish and disappointed. He had not hoped to find anything tangible, no real evidence the vigiles might have missed. But he’d thought there might be trace enough of the man who’d lived here soaked into the place to tell him whether it was true – and what it felt like, then, to be such a person. But Cleomenes was right. The flat was not perfectly blank, there were a few signs of interrupted life that the landlord or the next tenant would have to clear away. But the walls were white and bare, and wherever he looked, Sulien saw nothing personal, nothing that showed a choice made. There was only absence.

  ‘It’s not just that the boys stripped everything out,’ said Cleomenes, behind him. ‘It was pretty empty to begin with.’

  ‘Does that mean anything? That he had so little?’ Sulien turned round slowly, trying to read the vacant space. A single window showed only a square of wall. On the cramped kitchen counter that occupied one corner, a half-empty bag of shrivelling onions sagged, and a few flies spiralled weakly over an unwashed pan. Near the bed the vigiles had left open a scuffed chest, which they’d almost emptied: an abandoned pair of thick shoes sprawled in the bottom beside a fallen cotton tunic, clean and blandly ordinary. He said, ‘There’s just enough that you can’t be sure he planned to leave.’

  Cleomenes shrugged. ‘Well, you could say, he didn’t need much, he knew what he was here to do. Or you could say, he never had a chance to make his mark: he’d only been here a few weeks and now he’s dead, poor bastard.’ He was leaning with folded arms against a wall, watching with unsurprised sympathy as Sulien wandered dejectedly across the narrow floor. The ferocious daubing of sunburn and ginger freckles over the robust features of his large, sceptical face was even more violent after this summer. He was thirty-nine now, and a commander in the vigiles, and though he had nothing to do with the factory case, or what had happened to Sulien in the Subura, Sulien had been fairly sure he could get the favour out of him.

  Sulien was still picking despondently over the sparse vestiges in the room. He said, ‘How’s Alexander?’

  ‘He’s not too bad,’ answered Cleomenes, shortly, trying to keep his face and voice from softening into dumb, amazed joy. After four months, the sheer incredulity at his son’s existence remained so strong that he could have begun helplessly burbling out his love, to Sulien or anyone. Partly in order to stop himself, although his concern was real too, he said, ‘Is your sister all right? Terrible, what happened. To think that man’s been running around for three years without a care in the world.’

  ‘He’s been caught now,’ said Sulien mildly. ‘And Una …’ Was it entirely all right that she should be able to shrug off what Drusus had done to her, so swiftly, apparently so coolly? He pushed the moment’s hesitation out of his mind and said confidently, ‘Yes, she’s all right.’

  ‘And Varius?’ Cleomenes asked, anxiously. He was always faintly worried about Varius, whenever he met him or thought about him.

  Sulien murmured another reassuring answer. He drifted from the counter to a set of empty shelves, thinking about the unknown man moving through the same air, as if his own body might catch specks of information left behind. By now – and he knew it might only be because he was looking for it – he’d begun to imagine he saw a similarity to the hasty fakery of the Subura flat. The dark blue blanket on the bed reminded him of the one over the dummy on the mattress in the attic room there. But it was not actually the same. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Cleomenes.

  ‘Oh, it sounds like he did it to me. He was well placed for it. The neighbours say they scarcely saw him, very quiet, which would worry me if I was working on this. And it seems like he never had any visitors – he couldn’t have given anyone a meal or a drink, even, he hadn’t got the stuff for it. That doesn’t fit what we heard about him from the factory people – the man who gave him the job’s still alive, and all he can say is how bright and keen he was, not shy at all. And he was one of ours, a few years back. Got kicked out, which he didn’t tell the Veii people, although you wouldn’t expect him to.’ Cleomenes smiled slightly. ‘Finding disaffected officers on the wrong side of the law doesn’t surprise me that much.’

  He looked at Sulien, who made him remember his own disbelief at being in that position himself. Even when his job was safe again, he’d come very close to leaving the vigiles, cursing himself for not seeing sooner what had been so close to him, what he’d been part of. Even now he was sometimes morosely uncertain whether his reasons for staying had really been that good, whether it was honest to tell himself, ‘It would be wrong to leave,
there has to be someone decent left.’ It might only have been that he became so baffled and depressed when he tried to think what else he might do.

  He went on, ‘And forgetting all of that, there’s the simple fact that a couple of weeks before the factory goes up, he arrives out of nowhere, overly perfect and willing for this job that no one really wants, just when they needed a new supervisor because the last one’s gone and had an accident in his car.’

  Sulien turned, startled. ‘He’s dead? I never heard that.’

  ‘No, not dead, but pretty smashed up.’

  ‘And what did you mean, Atronius arrived out of no-where?’

  Cleomenes pulled an untidy handful of printed reports out of a pocket and frowned at them. ‘Seems like he gave them the impression he’d only just arrived from Terranova, which wasn’t true. He first came here …’ he squinted down the sheet, ‘… four years ago. But there’s a lot of time after that still unaccounted for. They reckon he might have been in Byzantium some point this year – illegally, if he was – although not on the strength of very much, I’m afraid, only an old tram ticket from Byzantium. Think they found it here, in a coat or something. But those things can find their way anywhere. Yes, it had a longdictor code written on it. Could just have been handed to him.’

  Sulien nodded. ‘The man who interviewed him – he told the vigiles what he was like?’

  ‘Yes. Effective, apparently. Very tough.’ Cleomenes hesitated slightly, looking away from Sulien. ‘Very hard on the slaves. Had a system of beating the ten least productive in his section – Veii Arms didn’t have the best reputation, I hear?’

  ‘It was terrible there.’

  ‘He seems to have been harsh even by their standards. Well, make of that what you will.’

  ‘What else?’ pressed Sulien. He had not realised how tantalising the sudden draught of details would be. ‘About what he was like? Why would he do this?’