He groaned quietly, in protest. No, Varius wouldn’t have wanted to go to the Games, he reasoned. Except that he was Marcus’ advisor, his friend – perhaps he’d kept him company. He might have been carried out of the box before Sulien arrived. Or perhaps he would not have been in the box itself, but somewhere nearby . . .
Sulien knocked back the rest of his drink, and called Varius’ flat. He fidgeted as he waited, half-hoping that Varius would not answer, because he did not know what he was going to say if he did.
Varius did not answer. Sulien left it for a few restless minutes and tried again. This time the line was busy, as it was on all his attempts afterwards. He was reassured at first, before he realised it might be that others were trying to reach Varius too. He closed his eyes and thought longingly, I don’t have to do anything more today. I can’t.
But he wasn’t going to get away with that; he couldn’t shut out the possibility that Varius, who had dragged him out of the fire at Veii, might need his help as badly as Marcus had, and Sulien was, again, leaving it too late. And even if he was safe, Sulien was growing increasingly certain that he should be the one to tell him about Marcus – or at least say something to him, be there for a while, if Varius had already heard.
Hesitantly, he picked up the longdictor circlet again, tried Varius once more, just in case, and then called Tancorix. She sounded frightened and excitable. ‘Sulien! Are you all right, have you heard about the Colosseum? Calliope was there and—’
‘Yes,’ interrupted Sulien baldly. ‘Marcus died.’
There was a confused pause. ‘Marcus Novius?’
At least she would not be personally hurt; she had never met Marcus. So Sulien did not listen to whatever she said next but rested through it, just waiting for her to finish speaking. ‘Can you come here?’ he asked. ‘I have to go somewhere and I can’t leave Una alone.’
The basilica housing the Department of Information was only a couple of hundred yards from the gates of the Palace, closer still to the Colosseum. Drusus’ car pulled up outside and he said to one of his slaves, ‘Go ahead and tell them the Emperor is coming.’
He closed his eyes, feeling fear thrill through him once more, heady and pure and almost sweet, like a ringing high note of a song. Here again he might be on the point of walking into humiliation, failure – perhaps even death, if Salvius had discovered where he was and what he was doing. He had walked out of the Palace as soon as the wreath was on his head, pausing only to study himself with elation and unease in a mirror he passed. But they had bowed, everyone who saw him – just servants, but it meant that he did not look an impostor, he did not look ridiculous. It meant that people could understand he was showing them the truth.
His slaves opened the doors for him. The atrium was full of startled, uncertain people, hastily gathered, some still hurrying in at the back, and they all bowed at the sight of him. He saw bewilderment and shock on many of their faces as they bent forward. But they did it, regardless. Drusus felt their attention flow into his bloodstream like a painkiller and held himself up straight with greater ease.
He said, ‘If you were not already aware of what has happened today, of what Rome has lost, then my presence here must make it all too plain. I wish I were meeting you in other circumstances. But we must show the cowards who did this how strong we remain. I need a longvision crew at once. And I need you to be ready to clear the airwaves.’
Varius witnessed nothing stranger than heavy traffic as he drove back into Rome. He didn’t speak to anyone on the way into his flat, could see nothing from his window but rain over the Aventine streets. He had stood in the rain at Gemella’s grave for some time, but his drenched clothes had partly dried in the car. He flicked on the longvision while he tried to decide whether it was still worth changing, but did not really look at it for a while. Militantly cheerful music and a voice droning on about the patriotism and commitment of the women dancing to it filled the flat and Varius only noticed the message on the screen when the sound had grown irritating enough for him to make the effort to turn it off.
An incident at the Colosseum. Salvius had called a session of the Senate. Varius felt his waterlogged clothes suddenly icy and heavy on his skin, even before he’d made conscious sense of what he was reading.
There was a scale of possibility, and a number of plausible culprits, but he already knew the nature of what had happened. Not Marcus, he thought fervently, knowing that it was; it had to be: Salvius would not be calling sessions of the Senate if either Marcus or Faustus were in any position to do the same thing.
He might only be hurt – only seriously hurt—
Already he was entering the code for the Palace into the longdictor. For a long while he could not get any answer at all, swearing and pleading into the longdictor’s oblivious buzz. The lines must be jammed. He tried a different code, and this time managed to speak briefly to a shaken young man in the Palace main exchange who was unable to tell him anything more than what was being repeated on the longvision, and whose attempt to put Varius through to Glycon’s office produced only a dead connection.
Somewhere outside he heard the siren of a military vehicle, a muffled loudspeaker. He thought, whatever has happened, perhaps it is Salvius’ work; perhaps this is a coup. For a moment he hoped passionately that it was, because it was possible in that case that Marcus might not have been physically harmed, at least not yet, and perhaps something could still be done.
The next moment he was frightened at having even thought that, as if hoping inadvertently for the wrong thing could wreck any chance of good news. He tried again, and this time managed to extract the information that members of the Imperial family had been injured, someone had been taken to hospital . . . Then there was another long period of standstill which suddenly he could no longer tolerate, and he tugged off the longdictor circlet and rushed out of the flat.
As he started down the last flight of stairs, he saw Sulien entering the lobby below. He stopped dead as Sulien looked up at him tremulously. He was taking a breath to try and say something, and his eyes were red, his skin white and blotchy. It could not have been more obvious what had happened.
Sulien had no idea what he looked like, and so he was unnerved when Varius took one look at him, said, ‘No,’ and sat down on the staircase, staring straight ahead, one hand still tight on the banister.
Sulien ran up the stairs and sat beside him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, and put his arm around Varius’ shoulders. Varius dropped his head without seeming either to hear or feel him, and with a flicker of self-pitying frustration Sulien wondered why he was stuck with these people who wouldn’t take any comfort from being touched, even when there was nothing else. At least Varius was alive, as Sulien had half-convinced himself he wouldn’t be.
Finally he heard Varius say indistinctly, ‘Drusus?’
‘No. No, it wasn’t him. It was Dama. There was a bomb on the roof . . . it was Dama. He was killed too, probably.’
Varius’ last memory of Marcus was only a few hours old. It rushed at him now, and though there was no possibility of holding it off, he was wholly occupied in trying to deflect the full power of it. If he pictured Marcus now, talking to him, vital and younger than bore thinking of, he would say this couldn’t be true, he would ask if there could have been a mistake. The urge to do so was already rising, cutting off his breath. He should – he did – know better than that, and he knew he couldn’t stand to hear the truth repeated. He gasped a little, shutting his eyes under the force of the thought that he should have been with Marcus at the Colosseum, Marcus had wanted him there.
He whispered, ‘Were they all – were all of them—?’
‘No. Lady Novia had her shoulder broken, I think. They took Drusus to hospital. I don’t know what was wrong with him.’ Sulien hesitated. ‘The Emperor – the other— Emperor Titus must have— He must have gone first, because the ring, because Marcus was . . .’
Varius looked at him finally, distracted. He muttered, �
�What?’ then, flatly, before Sulien could answer, ‘Emperor.’
‘He said to end slavery. He did that,’ urged Sulien, hoping there was some consolation in that somewhere, if not yet. ‘He didn’t forget, even when . . .’
Varius hitched in another breath, and stood up. He gazed down the stairs with a look of dangerous, unearthed energy, then turned purposefully and raced back up towards his flat.
Sulien rubbed his tired eyes and followed. Varius hadn’t locked the door and Sulien was in time to see him meditatively weighing a kitchen-knife in his hand before tucking it inside his jacket.
‘Varius?’ asked Sulien cautiously as Varius pushed past him, ‘what are you doing?’
‘You can go home,’ ordered Varius, making for the stairs again. He paused on the landing and looked back at Sulien. Confusion cleared on his face, as if he had reminded himself, with some difficulty, who Sulien was. He said, ‘Thank you for coming,’ and set off.
‘What’s that knife for?’ Sulien persisted, going after him, helplessly producing much the same friendly, humouring tone he’d used on Una earlier.
Varius slowed a little and looked at him warily, as if not intending to reply, then as he hurried out into the street he said shortly, ‘Drusus.’
Sulien made a sound like a laugh, though not because there was anything funny about it. ‘It wasn’t him. I told you,’ he managed after a moment, but Varius strode on, apparently uninterested in that. Sulien sped up to keep beside him and said, more loudly, ‘He’s not going to be Emperor—’
‘No,’ agreed Varius, ‘he’s not.’
Noriko came running to meet Makaria as she trailed like a sleepwalker back from the Palace baths towards her rooms, a few maidservants in tow. ‘Drusus is here,’ Noriko said, exhaustion and anxiety blurring the Latin words. ‘He has come to the Palace.’
Makaria grimaced unconsciously at having to make the effort to understand what she had heard, then ran a hand through her damp hair. ‘Where is he? What was he doing?’
‘I don’t know. I came to look for you at once. He wished to see . . . my husband’s body. I am sure it is his right; I could not stop him, could I? But I have been told such things of him . . .’
Makaria straightened grimly. ‘Come with me.’
Salvius had returned to the Imperial Office. He still felt a little tentative about using it, but it was the best place for the discussion he needed to have.
‘Only a month ago you were telling me the Onager was nearly ready. You said you were within striking distance of producing a deployable weapon.’
The scientist shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Well, yes, we are certainly on the right track, and I think we’ve made very fast progress, considering how limited our data was at the beginning, and the head start the Nionians had on us . . .’
‘But now you say it doesn’t work.’
‘It will work,’ claimed the scientist cautiously.
‘Vonones, Rome may be at war. We need to be able to win, with or without one of these things, but I have to know which it’s going to be.’
Vonones hunched over a little, unhappily studying his hands. He muttered, ‘I think— I didn’t mean to create the impression— That is, we have definitely made significant breakthroughs, but when I said we were approaching success I didn’t mean—’
Salvius sighed. ‘How long?’
‘I feel we’re very close, but obviously with experiments of this nature it’s impossible to predict the precise timing of results . . .’
‘How long?’ Salvius repeated.
Vonones sighed in turn, spread his palms in his lap and returned to his intense scrutiny of them. He answered, at last, ‘Maybe another year?’
Makaria and Noriko burst into the room. An official at the door had been trying to make them wait until Makaria, sounding so like her father that a shiver played over Salvius’ flesh, barked out, ‘It’s still my family’s house, damn it!’
Vonones got to his feet, startled.
‘You can go,’ Salvius told him, rising also.
Makaria ignored Vonones. ‘My cousin is here, or he was a moment ago, Noriko tells me.’ She struck Noriko’s shoulder for emphasis. Noriko managed a weak nod in confirmation. At Marcus’ side she had had a sense of order that was steadying, if not comforting. The clothes she had put on to watch over him had helped her sculpt a view of herself as Marcus’ widow, doing for him what women had always done for their dead. Away from him her mourning clothes were outlandish and out-of-place, and everything was rushing at terrible speed. She wanted to be in her own country, to lie down on any bed or any floor there and weep for confused grief and pity. She wanted her mother.
But Makaria, though she had clearly been heading for bed and wore only a loose gown over bare flushed skin, was unembarrassed and fierce: ‘I warned you. What are you doing about it?’
Salvius hesitated, alarmed for a moment, then hastily clearing the unacceptable feeling away. ‘Of course he has every right to come here . . .’
‘Salvius! He’s not here to pay his respects, he’s here to do something – and whatever it is, you need to stop it.’
Salvius bristled at being lectured – by a woman, in front of others – but he turned to the longdictor on the desk. He told Glycon, ‘Apparently Drusus Novius is well enough to be out of hospital. I’d like to see him here urgently.’
But he only felt the beginnings of real unease when it became clear that Drusus had left the Palace almost as soon as he’d arrived, and he had not gone to his house on the Caelian. ‘Come on, find him,’ he urged the aides who’d begun filing in without any news of where Drusus was. He was starting to pace a little round the room. ‘Try the Capitol.’
He tried to think where else Drusus might go if, as Makaria was so certain, he was somehow attempting to seize power. Some kind of military base would be the most dangerous possibility – but Salvius had already made the military aware of his own claim, and surely Drusus had never had any serious ties with the army beyond the alliance he had once had with Salvius himself – nothing that could threaten him.
The door flew open as if blown and Glycon almost fell into the room. He stopped, trembling, staring at Salvius, and said, almost with deliberate rudeness, ‘You’d better see the longvision.’
Drusus put his good hand to his face again. He had been meaning to ask for make-up, fretting about keeping the worse side partly out of shot. But he could not afford to waste time, and his sense of the import his injuries carried was changing. He straightened the pallium draped around his shoulders and faced the cameras full-on.
The smashed hole in the roof of the Colosseum glowed behind Drusus’ head like an extension of the wreath he wore. He stood on a slab, part of the fallen wreckage, raised above the small audience of Praetorians and vigiles still working in the ruins whom he had gathered to listen to him speak. They were still uneasy and uncertain, but the presence of the longvision crew had acted as if to corroborate the wreath and the ring and his complete expectation of being obeyed.
He had told them to place cameras outside, too; it was important that it should be completely clear where this had happened, in the heart of Rome.
Without knowing or needing to know precisely what he was going to say, he began to speak.
‘My friends,’ said Drusus, on tens of millions of screens, across millions of square miles, ‘how can I begin? What can I say to you when the sight before you tells of more grief than I can put into words? For the last few hours you have been waiting for news, knowing that something was wrong. Perhaps you do not need to be told the truth; perhaps you were one of those citizens from across the Empire who had gathered in the Colosseum to celebrate my uncle’s reign; perhaps you were here with me in the Colosseum when the bomb went off, and in that case you and I survived this vicious attack together. I have to tell you that my uncle, the Emperor Titus Novius Faustus Augustus, and my cousin Marcus Novius Caesar did not.
‘They were murdered beside me, they who worked so tire
lessly for peace. I know that even in the first shock of grief and outrage, you will not be afraid, because you are Romans. I know you demand revenge. You will have it. If it is a terrible duty to tell you of our loss, and of Nionia’s betrayal, it is worse to have to say that there are a few among us who have acted to shame Rome while our soldiers, doctors and ordinary citizens were giving of their best, to honour her. There is a destructive fraternity, criminals and escaped slaves, who have attacked innocent citizens before now, and they may have been the weapon Nionia wielded against us. And there are those – like General Salvius – who have either colluded with the perpetrators or at best, exploited this crime to further their own ambitions. The full truth will be known; the guilty will be dealt with swiftly, and the dead will be mourned. But my first act as Emperor will be to grant a special donative to our armed forces, including the Praetorians and vigiles, for they richly deserve it for the brave and selfless work they have done today, and the work they will do in bringing our enemies to justice in the future.
‘You can see my face. There is no hiding that, like Rome herself, I have been wounded, and like Rome, I am still here. Romans, if you are in this great city I want you to come to me now. On this terrible day, let me see that you will stand with me against anyone who dares provoke you! Don’t hesitate – I want to meet you now, in our grief and in our determination. And if you are in the smallest village in the furthest province of our Empire, still I want you come out into the streets, together, and show the world what a mistake it is to make an enemy of you.’
For a second after he finished speaking Drusus felt something like a ringing in his ears, then numbness, silence. He stepped down not quite steadily from the rubble and only as he felt the Praetorians’ hands on his back, holding him up, did he really understand that they were applauding.
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you.’ He smiled. He wanted to collapse into the excitement he had created, but there were still things to be done. ‘I’m afraid I have more work for you. There are people I need arrested.’
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