Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘We’ve got the whole of the future to fight them,’ answered Marcus.

  ‘No,’ said Salvius categorically, but did not elaborate, so Marcus went on.

  ‘But we could never get back to here. Or even if we could, there’d be so many dead already.’

  ‘There are four hundred dead today,’ said Salvius desperately. ‘And if we hesitate after this, it won’t be forgotten. It isn’t only Nionia. Provinces could revolt. Think of what happened in Mexica; there’s always India. We are only strong if they know we’re strong, we’ve always relied on that.’

  ‘You make it sound as if we’ve always fought every possible war,’ said Marcus. ‘You know we haven’t. This is what I’m going to do.’

  Salvius muttered, trying to make the best of it, ‘At least it gives us more time to prepare.’

  ‘No,’ said Marcus. ‘That is, of course you must do what you need to protect the people in the territory, but no more than that, not huge numbers of troops moving in.’

  This time Salvius just stared at him, appalled.

  ‘Otherwise meeting them would be meaningless. They would mirror what we did. There’d be two armies looking at each other across the Wall, waiting. How could either we or Nionia believe they would walk away again? It would become inevitable. I’ve studied this …’

  But no, he shouldn’t have said that, thought Una, and Marcus realised it himself at the same moment, and they couldn’t prevent their eyes from meeting, both of them knowing that he shouldn’t have justified himself at all, shouldn’t have reminded Salvius of the Athens Academy where Marcus had been only days before. Of course he didn’t have any experience of war, as Salvius had already implied. He was not even twenty years old.

  Nevertheless, Salvius said nothing.

  *

  Una and Sulien watched Marcus’ broadcast together, sitting on the floor, ignoring their surroundings while the heavily beautiful apartments that would be Marcus’ opened out around them like a rich flower.

  They’d locked themselves in, they didn’t exactly know why.

  ‘He looks different,’ said Sulien.

  Una’s shoulders shifted upwards in a taut shrug, and didn’t lower again. ‘He knows what he’s doing. He’s all right.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Sulien, glancing at her cautiously and then back at the longvision. As casually as he could, he added, ‘How about you?’

  Una’s gaze at the screen turned warningly blank, fixed. She said levelly, ‘Knew it was coming eventually.’

  ‘But not so soon. Not like this.’ He knew it was stupid to feel responsible. ‘I’m just … sorry.’

  Una twitched her head and gave no answer beyond a faintly disapproving grunt.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Your voice,’ she answered unexpectedly. ‘What are they doing to you here?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my voice,’ said Sulien.

  ‘Yes there is. When I was last here you still sounded a little bit like you might be my brother. I come back and you’ve turned into a born and bred Roman.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ he protested, the British note suddenly pushing to the surface of his voice. Una looked at him and felt her face slipping into a grin. He hardly thought about having grown up in a different country. If he remembered any other place as mattering to him it wouldn’t be London – it would be the camp in the Pyrenees, and the journey there. His accent had begun to change very early, the vowels and stresses moulding to the shape of the sounds around him as pliantly as wax, before he’d been in Rome even a year. But she knew two weeks spent talking to no one except her would have colonised his voice as completely as rennet in milk, except that the process would be entirely reversible.

  ‘Anyway, I can’t help it.’ Though it did seem embarrassing to be so malleable. ‘So what if I do sound Roman? I like it here.’

  And yet it was almost not a question of liking Rome; he fitted it as easily as into air, so that it no longer really occurred to him whether he liked it or not.

  Una considered him affectionately, but with mild wonder. ‘You’d like it anywhere.’

  Travelling in or out of Rome, on the Appian or Ostian Way, the crosses by the roadside would still turn him sick and shaky, and his fingers would move involuntarily to the vulnerable skin of his wrist. But he wouldn’t have been safe from that in any Roman city.

  Her own accent was the same as ever, although only out of a kind of tone-deafness, she thought, rather than any deliberate effort to keep it. But she was sometimes confused by a furtive nostalgia for Britain, for London, where she’d suffered so much. It was not that she’d ever been fond of the feel of the air there – different from anything she’d found on the European mainland – or the shape of the ground under the city; only that they’d imprinted themselves on her as being the essential state of things. There was no reason ever to go back. She and Sulien had no family except each other. (Although this was not true, their mother was presumably still alive, but Una never wanted to think of her, would have dug the very idea of such a person out of her own memory if she could.)

  And whenever she went into Rome she always drew herself up a little, combatively, as if wanting to remind the place that she was working under a truce with it, that was all.

  They fell quiet again, watching the screen. Marcus alluded lightly to his parents, who had been loved. Una knew that there was very little he could say, nothing firm about Nionia because there was nothing certain yet. He could only look and talk and act as if it was all right, as if it was right that he should be there, making wordless promises with the rhythm of his voice and the expression on his face. He could not have been more than a few hundred yards away, but watching him on the screen, that was hard to believe. The ring, hastily narrowed as Glycon had promised, was steady and visible on his hand, and the purple robe that had been hung over the new formal clothes was very dark, almost black, made of rough dense silk that stood around him in carved folds, constructing his body into extra, illusionary height and breadth. His hair had been trimmed and smoothed. He could have been five or six years older than he really was, or else of no specific age – young in a burnished, lacquered-over way, not raw or susceptible. He was not wearing the gold wreath, but it lay symmetrically on the desk in front of him, in the very centre, so that his body rose above it, in a column.

  Of course they had known Marcus’ face long before they met him. They could remember staring at him while he was asleep, that first night after finding him, that longvision face intruding into real life.

  ‘Well,’ said Sulien quietly. ‘This is what he was brought up for.’

  But the difference in Marcus alarmed him. He felt almost as if it were something he had inflicted upon him

  When he’d first gone into the room where Faustus lay, the gilded space had been crowded with what seemed to Sulien’s tired eyes a welter of important men, although some in fact were slaves, indistinguishable for a moment in the general shock from the secretaries, Palace doctors, and even senators. More or less all of them were shouting at or around Sulien as he tried to concentrate, and they didn’t all obey him at once when he told them to leave; one he even pushed physically from the room. Once he was alone with Faustus, lying with his face slack, still uttering a long rustling snarl, Sulien had emptied his mind of everything but his job: salvage work, trying to save a life. But when that was done he’d felt as if he had a decision to make, as if he were about to do something terrible to Marcus – and to his sister.

  Really it was no choice of his, all he had to do was report how things were: that Faustus was alive, but that if Glycon – who had brought him there – had thought that Sulien could immediately wipe the injury out of Faustus’ brain as if it had never been there, then he was wrong. But he had waited for a minute, as if hoping something else would happen, something to stop him, and he had watched Faustus with an attack of the too-acute pity that he often thought was a bad and amateurish feeling in any kind of physician. It was no good to get s
o bleeding-heart about things. In this case, for example, the pity for Faustus had become as intense and as indistinguishable from the idea of Marcus as if they were both mortally ill. He had left the room and said, ‘Yes, get him.’

  He rubbed his eyes and complained, ‘I’m wiped out.’ He’d been awake since before dawn, and when the peremptory call from the Golden House came – followed within minutes by a Palace car – he’d been about to walk the little way to his flat in Transtiberina and fall for a while onto his bed. His friends – students, apprentices, other young doctors, actresses, and, perhaps, Tancorix – would be in a wine bar somewhere, wondering where he was, but he was too tired now to worry about it much.

  ‘Then go to sleep. They’ll give you a room,’ said Una.

  ‘No.’ He had left Faustus barely two hours before, before there had been time for Marcus to visit his uncle, so Sulien had not seen him. ‘I want to see Marcus. Keep me awake.’ But by now he had sunk from a sitting position to sprawl limply on the carpet, eyes half-closed, and he grumbled when she obediently prodded his arm.

  ‘Today I took an oath—’ said Marcus, on the screen.

  ‘Sulien,’ asked Una, softly. ‘How long is this going to last?’

  Sulien pulled himself up onto his elbows, slowly. He did not answer at once. ‘The Emperor will get tired very fast, much too tired to work,’ he said. ‘He’s lucky in that he doesn’t seem to have lost any speech as such, but ordering his thoughts as he wants – he’ll find that difficult. It’s hard to explain. And he can recover. But it’s hard for me to know how much, or how fast, and it’s always possible it could happen again.’ He recited this off pat; he’d been saying it all day.

  Una frowned at the lack of a clearer answer, even though she hadn’t really expected one, but she nodded silently. She knew Sulien wasn’t keeping anything back. And even that wary suggestion of an indefinite amount of time meant something, she told herself. It meant no less than a year. But the upper limit …?

  Marcus’ face vanished.

  A grating little cry of anger and grief scraped through her teeth. She stood up, abruptly, and muttered, ‘Oh, damn him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Emperor. Why can’t he die properly?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Sulien, dismayed.

  ‘All right, why can’t he die or get better and leave us in peace? Either way would be better than this. For everyone.’

  ‘Poor man,’ demurred Sulien, uncomfortably, looking away from her. He was pretty sure Faustus would be dead if not for him.

  ‘“ Poor man,”’ echoed Una, half with scoffing irony, half with a kind of experimental openness to contrition at what she’d said. She drooped a little, wearily. She conceded, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  Sulien also got to his feet. They weren’t children in a hiding place. The soft carpet under them glowed darkly with silks. Across the walls spread the coppery fresco of an orchard, the falling russet leaves touched here and there with real gold. Tending golden apples on a fragile bronze tree, the Hesperides crouched: gilded, secretive nymphs guarded by the low muscular length of a coiling dragon, rippling and cramped in its gold and auburn scales. Quite inconspicuous on a peak far in the background, Atlas could just be seen, bowed beneath the weight of the sunset sky. Two London slaves should have no right to be here. And even if Sulien had little capacity to feel out of place anywhere, he knew his sister did.

  He asked, ‘Will you stay here, with Marcus?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Una, her voice suddenly flat. ‘At least as long as I can.’

  ‘As long as you can? What do you mean?’

  For a second her face seemed to flicker open, painfully and involuntarily, as she met his eyes, but then she looked away, at the room, and ran her finger over the arched back of a chair, trying to pinch a sardonic smile onto her lips. ‘Well, I’ll manage. At least they keep it clean. They obviously know where to buy decent slaves.’ She held out the dustless finger, dropped it, then scrubbed at her face. ‘Hundreds and hundreds of them.’

  Sulien approached her, quietly. ‘I just talk to them. Tell them where you come from. It’s better that way.’

  ‘But you have something to say because you’re doing something. You can tell them about the clinic. What can I say to them? “Hold out, it’s all going to change”?’

  ‘Why not? When you were in London, when you were working in those places – if someone who’d been a slave had said that to you—’

  ‘I’d have thought she could stick it. I’d have thought, you’re out of it and I’m not, fine, but shut up and leave me to it.’

  Sulien sighed. ‘Is that what people think when I talk to them?’

  Una looked at him quickly, suddenly remorseful. ‘No. You’re different.’ Then Marcus came and had to knock on the locked door; they let him in, apologising, and saw that he looked exactly as he had on the longvision screen, which startled them, although of course they should have expected it.

  Just before the broadcast Marcus had gone at last to see his uncle. He came in thinking that he had to tell Una and Sulien what Faustus had said, quickly, because Una would know in a minute, anyway. He’d forgotten what he looked like until he saw the flicker of surprise on their faces. He pulled the gown off and threw it messily onto a chair, hugged Sulien – but he kept on the ring because despite its weight he’d already forgotten it was there.

  *

  Faustus had fallen asleep even before Marcus had left the room. When he woke he made Makaria show him a few minutes of Marcus’ speech before the longvision screen somehow dazzled him and he was knocked unwillingly again into sleep. But later he eased open his eyes slowly and peered into the hushed room. Half his body lay beside him, a weighty jumble of aching wood, the wreck of trees after a hurricane.

  Marcus, sitting by his bed, had asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ and Faustus repeated sourly, ‘How do you feel?’ He was disgusted by the altered sound of his own voice; his tongue seemed to push against a dry barrier in his mouth, expecting every moment to clear it, but failing.

  Marcus had looked confused and concerned, perhaps suspecting Faustus was parroting him mindlessly. ‘I mean,’ said Faustus, rankling at the idea, ‘how are you taking to it? They’ve given you the axe and rods and everything, the ring, all of it haven’t they – are you enjoying it?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Have to enjoy it a bit, or you go under,’ remarked Faustus, although he knew he was wasting time; he could feel that he had perhaps fifteen minutes to get anything serious said, before the obliterating exhaustion overtook him again. ‘Oh, you’ll be all right.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Too young though. I want Makaria and Drusus to help you.’ Makaria gave an exclamation of surprise at this, but Faustus ignored it. ‘And that’s only fair. Got to try and be fair to Drusus, considering everything.’ Because of course he knew how hurt Drusus must have been, when he named Marcus as his heir.

  ‘All right,’ agreed Marcus, though he felt a little stir of trepidation at the mention of Drusus. Marcus had barely seen his other cousin in the three years since the end of his time in hiding: a strained conversation on the long-dictor – both of them pointedly skirting the fact of Faustus’ decision – Drusus congratulating Marcus that his health was no longer in question after the horrible days he’d spent in the Galenian Sanctuary; an exchange of greetings at one of Faustus’ birthday parties, that was all. Drusus was almost never in Rome now.

  ‘And I know you’ve got all these plans, like Leo,’ burst out Faustus suddenly. ‘But you’d better remember this is a, this is a, this time is – what with the war …’

  ‘There isn’t a war yet.’

  ‘I know,’ said Faustus, in almost a hoarse cry, and lay for a few seconds, glowering mutely. ‘But you can’t – knock it all sideways, not when things are like this.’

  Marcus was silent for a while. ‘You mean slavery, don’t you, Uncle?’

  ‘It’s all very w
ell. I don’t want to get back and have to deal with the mess,’ said Faustus, as bullishly as his crooked voice would allow. ‘Do what you like when you’re Emperor, but you’re not yet.’

  ‘I know I’m not,’ Marcus assured him quietly, though he was feeling more and more anxious. The truth of it was he thought Faustus was right. Rome could not bear the pressure of a possible war and the huge changes he wanted to make at the same time. He weighed what Faustus had just said and decided it was, intentionally or not, a warning: ‘I don’t want to get back and have to deal with the mess’. If Marcus outlawed slavery and if, during the aftershock, Faustus did indeed take power again, he might simply permit it once more. And then – Marcus wasn’t even sure he could imagine becoming Emperor after such a failure, but if it did happen, how could you begin again, how would Rome tolerate it?

  But he remembered himself asking Varius, ‘How do I know I’d ever do the things I think I would? Perhaps it would always seem too difficult.’

  *

  Thinking stiffly over all this, it occurred to Faustus that he could just have given it up. ‘Even when I get better, I won’t take back the ring or the rest of it.’ That would make things easier for Marcus.

  Why, when he was so desperately tired, when so much of him would be so relieved to let it go, could he not bear the thought? In fact he was furious; he could have hit someone. He lay there and swore wrathfully, aloud, into the darkness. No, he did not want to! It was too bad! He wouldn’t do it! He had been nearly forty when he became Emperor, but suddenly it seemed to him that between childhood and his accession, he couldn’t remember much. He concentrated, alarmed that perhaps his memory had been damaged, maybe a whole third of his life was gone and he’d never get it back. Makaria’s birth. Disappointment that she was a girl. Her little feet – yes, he could remember it, but it was hard work; he stopped and let his head fall back on the pillow with a sigh, and for some minutes had no choice but to lie waiting, empty, in the quiet dark.