Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Sulien heard how intensely silent the room had become around Drusus, who added almost lightly, ‘The Sibyl wouldn’t tell me if she could be stopped.’

  ‘You never told anyone,’ muttered Makaria. ‘You’d have told someone if that really happened.’

  Drusus shook his head, ‘It was impressive enough at first, but I confess it didn’t stick in my mind long. I’d gone in simply as a tourist and there seemed no sign of it coming true. Then years later I wondered if it could have meant Tullia, in which case the threat had passed – although it didn’t seem quite right. But that day in the garden, I remembered what I’d seen since Marcus brought her to Rome.’

  ‘I’ve seen it too,’ said Salvius. ‘From when I first laid eyes on her. She’s everywhere. In almost every meeting, she’s there watching. She knows everything that goes on in the Imperial office; she’s in the Sinoan Palace now. People hardly notice she’s there; they don’t realise that she listens to every word they say. She reads everything. What legitimate reason can she have? Or did you intend that to happen, when you gave that boy all your power?’

  There was such restrained, thunderous anger in his voice that Faustus started a little, like a schoolboy at the shout of a headmaster, and only after he’d meekly shaken his head, did he remember that the rebuke should have enraged him.

  ‘Marcus allows it because he’s besotted with her,’ remarked Drusus. ‘She has more power than a girl of her background ever can have hoped for. She’s quite addicted to it now. She’s tightening her grip.’

  ‘And she needn’t look far for support,’ said Salvius. ‘She has a Palace full of former slaves. The boy from the longdictor exchange – even if he wasn’t in on it from the beginning, how could he refuse to confirm what she said? Gratitude would demand that much of him. He knows to whom he owes his freedom. Your nephew freed the lot of them for her sake; he scarcely even hides that.’

  ‘I’d have done better to wait – I know that now,’ resumed Drusus. ‘I should have talked to you. But at the time – it was a compulsion, I had to find her. I felt sure that if it was true I’d find some proof of it. And I was right, I did. I went up towards Marcus’ rooms, and from the far end of the passage I saw her coming out. She was hurrying, she was ready to do something – I could tell from the way she moved. And I followed her. She didn’t notice me – or she seemed not to. Maybe it was all a trap. She went up onto the top floor, those rooms that are hardly ever used. I couldn’t think of any reason she should have for going there. She shut herself in that room and I heard her through the door, talking into the longdictor. But she wasn’t speaking Latin. I’m not good at languages, not like Marcus. But I think – I certainly believed at the time – that it was Nionian.’

  Makaria scoffed, ‘She’s probably barely literate; I don’t believe for a second she knows Nionian.’ This time she sounded more confident in incredulity, allowing Sulien fractional hope.

  ‘She wouldn’t advertise it, would she?’ said Drusus. ‘Whatever else, I won’t underestimate her intelligence again. We don’t know who this gang in the mountains were, what she picked up there. And maybe I am wrong, maybe there was some other reason for what I heard. But I went into the room, and she knew what I believed, and what I would say. And I think she had already feared I might be a threat. She wasn’t going to run the risk. I still – I’m staggered by how quickly she decided what to do.’

  Makaria frowned silently down at the floor. Drusus had begun moving around a little now, not nervously but deliberately, occupying more space. For emphasis, he allowed another pause, and, helplessly, Faustus spoke. He asked, ‘What did she do?’

  Sulien’s breath went out of him and for long seconds did not come back.

  Drusus smiled a little, not triumphantly, only as if with regret at what had happened, and quiet relief at being listened to. A moment passed before he answered. ‘First she just walked across the room and locked the door. I was too surprised – I didn’t understand. And then – at first I thought she’d simply gone mad.’ Drusus sounded dazed, bewildered at the memory. ‘I even almost forgot what she’d been doing. I just tried to stop her hurting herself. But when I touched her she went for me. I never hit her, I swear – I just tried to keep her hands away from me. But she was lashing about like an animal, I couldn’t hold her. And all the time attacking her own body as much as me. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Completely fearless, I’ll give her that, too, she didn’t care what she did to herself. She smashed the longdictor and came at me with it, screaming like a lunatic – as if I was trying to kill her. I did push her away – she fell and the desk hit her face. Although of course, she meant that to happen, too. She hardly even seemed to feel it. And then she ran out onto the roof. I feel stupid for not guessing until she’d gone why she’d done any of it! I was just shocked – it had started so fast I couldn’t think. But then I understood. So I went after her – of course I did. Anyway, it was the only way out, she’d taken the key.’ He uttered a short laugh, mocking himself. ‘But I was already too late.’

  It was not only that it sounded true, or his exhausted memory, that made Faustus believe it. It was the choice of either believing Drusus and Salvius, buying their harmlessness with that, or letting them loose with Salvius’ troops behind them and waiting to see what they would do in the same room as his daughter.

  So when Drusus approached and knelt before him again, appeal in his face and pale with all he’d suffered, Faustus put a hand on his hair and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Drusus.’

  Makaria lifted her head and darted towards them. ‘I’m sorry too, Drusus,’ she said remorsefully, and kissed his cheek, so that at Faustus’ feet the two of them looked much younger, like loyal children carved on a grave stelae, siblings.

  Salvius said, ‘They are handing away power in Bianjing. This can’t continue. Something has to be done before the balance swings totally in Nionia’s favour. We want to avoid war – but surely not at any price.’

  Drusus separated himself from Makaria and raised himself to sit beside Faustus, so that he could look into the Emperor’s eyes on a level. He said, clearly, unafraid, suddenly looking and sounding as much like a war leader as Salvius ever had, ‘I would go further than that. I would say we have to accept the times we live in and face it. The Empire has been too static for too long. Borders will always break in the end, inwards or outwards is the only question. Rome used to understand itself and the world better. We did not conquer so many lands out of vanity; it was a matter of survival. This is the signal that we should not have stopped. We can climb upwards, or wait to be knocked down. There is no such thing as standing still.’

  Salvius looked at Drusus with surprised – even faintly daunted – respect. He said to Faustus, ‘At the very least your nephew can’t be left as the puppet of these people.’

  ‘At least that,’ agreed Drusus mildly, and added, ‘The brother should be easy to find, anyway.’

  Sulien, waiting, already numb with disbelief at Drusus’ words, could almost have given a winded laugh at how true that was. The open study was now a helpless little country with no lines of communication or army, a tiny peripheral state to the subdued land outside. And then, suddenly aware of the folded pictures of the factory saboteur in his pocket, the copied ticket with his torn name, he remembered – Byzantium. The tram-ticket with the fragment of his name scrawled on it was from Byzantium, and Drusus had been living there.

  ‘He saved my life,’ protested Faustus, but without conviction, waiting for the denial that must come.

  ‘How can you know?’ asked Drusus softly. ‘Whose word do you have except his? You can’t know how well you would be, if he were not here. He controls you. And all of them – him, and Varius, and that girl, that whole circle around Marcus, and Marcus himself – they all depend on your being ill, or dead, for the power they have.’ He had a hand on his uncle’s arm now; he murmured diffidently, ‘The shock almost killed you when they told you, didn’t it? They must have known that could happen
.’

  Faustus asked sharply, warily, ‘You think Marcus wanted me to die?’

  Drusus hesitated a little, uncertain for the first time of quite how far to go.

  ‘You think they should all be – questioned,’ interrupted Makaria.

  Drusus looked at her doubtfully and said, quietly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘The boy was just here,’ said Faustus, and looked around.

  Sulien, his back to the wall, felt his body ringing like a tapped glass with anticipation of what was about to happen; with disbelief as he heard himself think, as if that was his best attempt at reassuring himself – they can’t crucify me, I am not a slave.

  ‘No, Daddy,’ said Makaria, steadily, heartlessly. ‘That was earlier, in your rooms, don’t you remember?’

  And Faustus conceded sadly, ‘Oh, yes …’

  In front of them all, Makaria walked without hurry into the antechamber Salvius had marched through. For a good minute, remembering the unease she had felt in Una’s presence, she had wondered if she should not believe her cousin. Wasn’t it sad that she’d had so little faith in her own family as not to defend him, didn’t she owe him more loyalty than that? But even as she felt this she’d known, truly, that it was temporary, unreal. No. There was the memory of panic and guilt as she had thought over what she’d told Drusus; the fact that really she had not needed to be told what he had done. It was true, that was all. And then that speech about Nionia, about the world. That was whom she had sent hurtling lethally towards Una; and having done that she had an absolute duty to keep him away from Una’s brother.

  The servants were gone and the doors at each end of the room stood wide, she was in full sight of Salvius and the soldiers. A pitcher stood on one of the silvered tables: as an excuse for leaving the room, Makaria poured out a glass of water, masking the slender drawer with her body as she slid it open and removed the keys to the rooms from the little enamelled box within. She carried the glass back to Faustus, offering it calmly and said, ‘Have some water, Daddy.’

  ‘I can ask for it if I want it. Stop treating me like an infant,’ said Faustus.

  Makaria smiled a taut apology, and placed the rejected glass on the table nearby, telling Drusus and Salvius, ‘No, I know where to find Sulien.’

  Sulien, still uncomprehending, heard her approach. She entered the little study and, almost without looking at him, put the keys into his hand. He couldn’t even mouth thanks to her; she was already at the desk beside him, searching for a pen and paper so that she could come out of the study with a good reason for having gone in, the address of the slave clinic, and say to Salvius, ‘Here, he works in Transtiberina.’ She knocked the door shut beside her, as loudly as she dared, to cover the sound of Sulien trying the first of the three keys in the lock. She crossed the room to Drusus and her father, brushing the glass of water off the table to give him another chance. She could think of nothing more and she felt that what she was doing was luridly obvious; she was sure that Drusus did not and could not trust her, and she was actually blushing with self-consciousness, her hot face surely beaconing Sulien’s attempts to escape. She should not have been so overtly disgusted so long, she should have been quicker to make a show of being won over.

  She saw Drusus flinch with unexpected violence as the glass broke and scattered across the floor.

  Sulien slid around the door into a gallery, blood pummelling in all the pulses of his body. Trying to simulate unremarkable confidence, he walked blindly forward, and as his head cleared it was almost a relief to feel the segments of knowledge about Atronius and Drusus assembling themselves into order, as though they were merely a number game he’d turned to as a distraction. Drusus would always have needed agents, just as Gabinius had needed men like Tasius, and Drusus would have looked for the same kind of person: discontented, rootless men who were trained how to kill or spy, or who knew about fire, and had lost the right to use those skills in the vigiles or the army.

  Drusus wanted the war, and he had wanted access to Faustus without interference from Sulien. And what were a thousand slaves’ lives to him?

  Sulien reached mechanically for an unobtrusive door, painted to match the fresco around it, and started down a flight of the slaves’ stairs, feeling temporarily protected there. The shrill self-centredness of fear receded enough to let him think with a jab of alarm of Acchan, from the longdictor exchange, the one who’d helped Una – if they lost Sulien they’d find him, round him up, make him say he’d lied.

  He bolted down a few floors, feeling how stupidly vast and overblown the Palace was, how superficial was his understanding of its passages and stairs. He had to fly out, exposed on what proved to be a busy landing among offices, and grab the first person he saw to ask directions, assuming a cheerful, hasty casualness that felt ridiculous.

  Warm rain flicked against his face as he stepped outside and sped along beside the Palace. The Praetorian escort were waiting for him at the guard-house, still innocently intending to protect him, not knowing yet that they were a threat: he would have to find some other way out. Sulien let out a small gritted moan, a wordless little plea for things to be otherwise, as he dodged in among the smaller buildings at the Golden House’s flanks, beside the towers of blue glass. Briefly, unbearably lost, he nevertheless searched for and found – painfully close to his bodyguards at the Septizonium – the stewards’ office and the longdictor exchange adjoining it. Faces and names, at least, were one strength of his otherwise lazy, cavalier memory. Sulien plunged through the office until he recognised Acchan, a slight young man with soft black hair around an oval face, carrying a box of papers across the room, looking patiently yet intensely bored, until he saw Sulien, lunging at him out of nowhere, grasping his arm and breathing, ‘You’ve got to get out of here, now, come on.’

  Of course Acchan was bewildered, and Sulien was drawing attention to them both, creating a small uproar, but he could see no help for it. Apologising and insisting he dragged Acchan out into the rain and tried to explain, as economically and urgently as possible, what was happening.

  The pines breathed wet, dark scent. Outside, Acchan looked away from Sulien at the golden Palace, and out across the huge drenched city, and turned a few stumbling steps – speechless, uprooted. He did not, at least, doubt the danger; he’d seen Drusus chasing Una towards him, pursuing her like a floe of lava flooding down the passage, almost close enough to consume her.

  He muttered, ‘You’re the one he told me was dead, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sulien had almost forgotten that part of it. He felt uselessly to blame for doing this to him. He confessed, ‘Some of the guards at the Septizonium are waiting for me – I don’t know how to get out.’

  ‘There’s the west gate,’ Acchan said numbly. ‘Have you got a pass?’

  Sulien feared it would mean passing the façade of the Palace again, in the open, in full view, but Acchan led him down an unexpected flight of steps into a long basement corridor that ran beneath it. They said nothing as they approached the west gate; it was small and discreet compared to the high, stark arches of the Septizonium, but still heavily guarded. But no one stopped them passing through, down towards the Julian Forum. He said to Acchan, ‘Is there anywhere you can go?’

  Acchan looked helplessly up at the screens and columns, all running with water, and the streets beyond, rust-coloured in the rain, dazed as a small-town sightseer who’d never set foot in Rome. ‘I’ve been in the Palace since I was twelve. If there was somewhere else to go, I’d be there already.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Sulien, as if undaunted. The other boy’s presence seemed to be forcing his face and voice into an optimism that even he found faintly irritating in himself: he’d just explained how close the danger was and now he wanted to say that it wasn’t so bad. ‘Come with me, then.’

  But he could not go home. He had only enough money in his wallet for perhaps a cheap meal and a couple of short tram journeys. He thought of friends, colleagues, girlfriends, and knew that any of
them would have lent him a floor, a mattress or a side of the bed – and also that he could be tracked to any one of them effortlessly, in hardly more time than it would take him to reach them.

  Una, Marcus, Varius – he wanted more than anything to be able to go to them for help, and also to be able to warn them. And they were thousands of miles east, and – so suddenly stripped of connections – he had no idea how to contact them.

  [ XIII ]

  THE LEVELLED FOREST

  Lord Kato knew that the Go-natoku Emperor could see him, but could not be certain whether or not he could see the Emperor. He had placed an unrolled den-ga screen on a lectern in his rooms, and stood before it with his head respectfully lowered, so that the limited information it offered him was further obscured. His vision was clearest on the dark floor as it stretched to the distant feet of the Chrysanthemum Throne, and the upright figure within it, veiled by the canopy above him. Two flat oval panels, standing on slender ebony stems, were placed in front of him, their carved wooden backs concealing the screens on which, if this were real, the Emperor would be watching Kato in full close-up. He was far off, sitting in shadow; if his lips moved, Kato could not see it. In fact he could see nothing stirring in the long, sparely decorated hall. It could be an old recording, it could even simply be a photograph, and the Emperor might in fact be anywhere – in his private rooms, in his gardens, even in his bath, and yet the clipped, measured voice spoke calmly, in the formal dialect of the court, loud in Kato’s ears – it was, as Kato struggled not to admit to himself – unnerving.