Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  A little while later she confessed to him, ‘I’d been telling myself to give up.’

  Varius found that the pleasure at the touch of lips on his was overwhelming, but he felt strange afterwards, a kind of dry quivering in the nerves that he couldn’t name. He thought it would wear off.

  But it did not. It gathered to a horrid and familiar restlessness, a fear that wherever he stood or sat or lay down might be a trap, and he could not quiet it by working, as he had done before, because there was no real urgency or difficulty left in the slave clinic now. For the first time he realised how routine his job had become, that he must have been manufacturing a burden of work that was not altogether necessary for some while.

  And after they slept together for the first time it was far worse. He lay awake in her bed, with her warm arm over his chest. The baby wept and screamed somewhere on the floor above, for hours.

  He had never shared the flat he lived in now with Gemella, but unlocking his door afterwards he seemed to expect to walk into their old rooms. He did not quite feel that he would find her there – she would be over in Tusculum, arranging a party perhaps, helping Clodia with a speech. Clodia would be working her hard, as ever. He would sit on their bed and wait for her to come back, trying to decide if he should tell her what he’d done. He went in and found himself in tears because it was not the same, because Gemella wouldn’t come home. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he said, aloud.

  Because he knew this wasn’t reasonable, he carried on, although he managed to control things so that they were never in his flat together, only Octavia’s.

  He grew preoccupied with wondering why she wanted him, why she was, apparently, in love with him. She knew the gist of the events around Gemella’s death and Marcus’ disappearance. Everyone knew. Varius’ picture had been screened on longvision over only a few days – not enough for people to recognise him in the street – but often his name would do it, and if not, they only needed to hear what his previous job had been, that his wife was dead, and then they would remember. It was a fact he hated. He could feel people knowing, whether or not it showed in the way they treated him.

  As for her, why should she have liked him so much when all she knew about him was that his wife had been killed, that he had first been said to be a murderer, then not; when – he thought resentfully – that was indeed the main fact of his life. And was that attractive? Perhaps to her it was. In which case the whole thing was ghoulish and unhealthy. He found himself thinking about this more and more; at first only when they were apart, but later in her presence, too. For it seemed to him the only explanation – that she liked the idea that something horrible had happened to him, that she found him romantic because of it. When what he had meant to be was simply a conscientious, happily married civil servant. When what he manifestly was now was unjust, ungrateful and malicious – because look at the way he was thinking about her.

  She did not ask about his past – not that part of it, anyway. Sourly he wondered if she was hoping that he would break down and volunteer everything dramatically, weep and wail. He found it increasingly hard to say anything to her at all.

  Gemella had been dead now longer than they had been married. The thought was intolerable, but intolerable also was the fact that it didn’t seem to be true. When he slept he kept waking up as he had woken in the prison hospital. All the time that had passed since then was a delusion. He was still there. It had just happened. She had just died. And all the rest of it still to go through.

  He did not know how he, or anyone, managed to breathe in their sleep. It seemed to require such a conscious exertion of will, like working a stiff pair of bellows, day in and day out, without the possibility of rest.

  He now neither believed that the affair with Octavia could be salvaged nor wanted to do it. He had said nothing to her of what he was thinking. But it was so constant, and the most ordinary elements of conversation – where shall we eat? What did you do today? – felt so unnatural and needed so much huge, physical effort, that he supposed it was bitterly obvious, that she must have expected something like this. But apparently not. She was shocked; her eyes sparkled with tears, which she tried to conceal at first but had to give up, because it was a long time before she would stop trying to retrieve something of him. She mentioned Gemella by name for the first time, she guessed that perhaps he felt guilty, but that he shouldn’t, he was not, it would change …

  No, No, he said. It would not.

  ‘All right,’ she conceded at last. ‘Then I understand. But I do want to see you, at least – after all, we have no choice, we live next to each other. We were friends, before.’

  He said that he was sorry, he didn’t think this was possible. Afterwards he was not sure if this had been sensible or if he’d just rejected a reasonable human thing. She looked so grief-stricken; he was again baffled that he could have meant so much to her.

  But when this was done, though there was a mild relief at one less effort to make, it went on: an unfluctuating torrent of nights where he felt his pulse go and go and go and wanted to slot his fingers between his ribs to hold it still. The only comfort was a kind of bleak satisfaction at Gabinius’ expense. He thought, there, you bastard! You were wrong, I knew you were.

  After eight months, it was better again, although he was not sure why or how. But he couldn’t train himself again to leave doors alone. In a way he was glad of the heatwave; everyone had to have all the windows open if they were to sleep, not just him. Although really he did not need an excuse for doing as he liked, there was no one else to consider.

  He had only just turned thirty. He could not quite let himself say, I will never marry again. I will never even touch another woman again. But he wanted to, in a way, to say this once and for all. It would be a relief.

  An hour before, he’d heard from the Palace that Marcus was coming to see him, if that was convenient, but he didn’t know why. On the excuse of going to see if Marcus had arrived yet, he went downstairs, past the patients waiting in heat-weakened huddles in the lobby, out into the sunlight.

  *

  Drusus more or less dragged Makaria into a side room. ‘I didn’t expect this of you,’ he began.

  ‘Well, why not?’ asked Makaria.

  ‘Because you’re not a child!’ cried Drusus, and broke off, flushing, his eyes widening at the mistake he’d almost made. It was absurd, but he’d almost added, ‘You’re not a woman!’ as he would have done if he’d been having this conversation with a man. For he had genuinely been talking to her as simply another person. It would have been, as far as he was concerned, an involuntary compliment to her in that she seemed partially exempt from the normal requirements for dealing with women.

  He mumbled instead, because he had also been thinking resentfully of Marcus’ mother, that so much of this was her fault. ‘You’re not Clodia.’

  He surveyed his cousin anxiously. It was not that she looked like a man, of course, but, despite the plainly Novian and handsome features, despite the natural and unconscious manner of authority, she did not look like the kind of woman one might expect to meet in the Golden House. Her skin was very tanned, and so she looked, perhaps, older than she need have done. Her stiff short hair, the same colour as his own, spread in a fan around her face. She was square-shouldered and neither slim nor plump, but angularly sturdy-looking. Behind her the wall was hung with glowing Scythian tapestries, an Indian carved plaque of a blue-skinned Apollo Krishna among nymphs. Against this background Makaria’s clothes – a straight, calf-length skirt, a loose tunic – looked weird and anomalous, being obviously expensive if looked at in any detail, but coloured and shaped like peasant’s clothes. She wore a plain gold chain and little round amethyst earrings, and she might have been a farmer or perhaps a colonel in the army.

  Really she was a farmer. The thought depressed him. The real reason he had not expected any difficulty from her was that he could not remember a conversation about politics or warfare in which she had been more than
sullenly noncommittal.

  Makaria said, ‘Look, I used to try not to get worked up about the Wall, because there wasn’t a thing I could do. And I never thought people would really be this stupid when it came to it, but apparently they are.’

  Drusus made an effort not to snap back angrily at the insult. ‘Makaria. Sooner or later there’s bound to be a war whether we like it or not; all we’ll manage to do now is postpone it. And then when it does come it’ll be worse; more people will die. But we can win now, and afterwards—’

  ‘What, are you saying it’ll all be over in a flash and we’ll scarcely notice?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And everlasting peace afterwards? Well, I suppose if you managed to kill everyone, that would be true in a way.’

  ‘No, but think of Tupia, or further back, Persia – they’re integrated now, aren’t they? Stable. That is what Terranova needs to be – what the world needs to be. Look, we are really the ones your father meant to stand in for him, aren’t we? To keep an eye on Marcus. So, for his sake we can’t keep telling him different things.’

  ‘I can’t pretend I think you’re right if I don’t,’ said Makaria.

  Drusus gave up on her with a little sigh of exasperation. He went into the south-west of the four glazed towers that rose from each corner of the Golden House, and took over the offices that had been Leo’s. In disgruntled obedience he had the fire reports brought to him. He lifted a page and held it before him, staring at the picture of a blackened room, the husk of a villa for a moment or two, before casting them down in fury. He strode out of the room to go and see Faustus.

  *

  Varius found that Marcus’ arrival had thrown the clinic into unintended chaos. Someone had tried to rush in from outside, and the Praetorians shoved him back, shouting furious protests, onto the street. Marcus cried, to little seeming effect, ‘What are you doing? Is there someone hurt? Let them in!’ It was finally one of the Praetorians who brought the patient in, for the man had been carrying something – someone – draped awkwardly over his shoulder, and abruptly he managed to unload the motionless body into the guard’s arms and then fled, swearing with rage.

  For a while the Praetorian had to hover, reluctantly cradling the incomplete bundle of bones, before the doctors came with a stretcher and he could lay it down with an involuntary, revolted backwards step. Varius understood, because as well as the ripped and burnt flesh, what he had been holding was so filthy – Varius could guess already that the scalp and clothes would be seething with lice – that it was a moment before the eye could even judge the figure’s sex. But it was a woman, or a girl; her age difficult to guess because she was so thin, and because the deep brown skin of her face crumpled and split into a terrible bedlam of raw pink and ash white, which whorled across her cheek and the torn pit of her right eye. There was an odd bloom of bright yellow staining the black hair and the flesh – where it remained intact. Her left hand, with its missing thumb, was gloved in the same violent colours. The right arm descended below the elbow into a dark spray of wet rags, and stopped. There were patches on her chest and sleeve where her clothes seemed to have melted onto her skin.

  Varius saw Marcus and Una flinch. He knew, and would advise anyone that came to work in the clinic, that you must not let cases like the mutilated girl touch you too closely. He found this easier himself than, in a way, he would have liked. He was certainly angry. But whatever else he felt at such spectacles of pain seemed to be happening too far off to be properly detectable, like the movement of a windmill in the distance. He didn’t feel as if he was useful to this girl, despite the fact that he was the one who’d raised the clinic. He was not a doctor. There was nothing he could do for her.

  ‘Veii,’ he said. ‘Again.’ He turned impatiently to the Praetorians. ‘Who brought her here?’

  But the man was gone.

  ‘What’s in Veii – a factory?’ stammered Marcus, transfixed as the girl was borne out of sight. He felt sick.

  ‘Yes, it produces girls with no hands and no eyes,’ said Varius starkly. More evenly he explained, ‘Veii Imperial Arms. The detonators go off while they’re packing them – all the time.’

  The first time he’d seen a slave’s skin stained yellow he’d thought it must be some kind of jaundice, but it was the explosive powder, which not only dyed the skin, but raised sores on it too.

  ‘At least someone bothered to bring her here. It won’t have been the factory. They know damn well we’re here, but they still just dump them outside the gates. They don’t tell us.’

  Part of the clinic’s purpose was to stop slave-owners from doing this, to leave them no excuse – no reason. Many of the patients were house slaves, who were often treated comparatively well by their owners and came in with normal illnesses or after ordinary accidents. But the casualties from the factories were so much worse that often the proprietors evidently saw no cause to expend even small amounts of time on slaves that they plainly could not use again. Veii had always been the worst, but in the last two months or so it seemed to have been getting worse still; the injuries were even more horrific, and more frequent.

  Una said, ‘Sulien’s got to come back here.’

  Sometimes Varius saw Una at the clinic, for she would come round to meet Sulien; but he did not know her well. She seemed less uncanny when he saw her with Marcus. Alone, waiting for Sulien in the lobby or sitting outside on the steps, with her pale face and hair and her black eyes, she remained faintly disturbing. The first time he’d seen her, in Faustus’ rooms at the Palace – an unexplained dishevelled girl lying asleep on the Emperor’s couch – she’d woken up and turned into a kind of apparition announcing that it was Tulliola who’d killed his wife.

  ‘He can’t be here all the time,’ he told her.

  ‘Has anyone died here because he’s been at the Golden House?’ she asked, and then added unnervingly, ‘They have, haven’t they?’

  Varius was slightly chilled, because the memory of a livid body with only occasional patches of odd, anomalous clear skin, had jumped into his mind. He said, ‘There was a man with burns. From the same place as that girl. I don’t know if Sulien could have saved him, but if he could, then perhaps it’s as well he wasn’t here.’

  He could have explained, he could have spelled out wearily, ‘The man was in agony. He could never have worked again. His life was finished.’ But though Marcus flinched again, Una only nodded slowly.Varius had somehow expected that of her. ‘Don’t tell Sulien that,’ he said to her.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ said Una. She remembered Varius sitting in the centre of Faustus’ rooms, almost motionless in his chair but not inscrutably so, visibly tense and restless underneath it. He was better at it now, she saw. He had learned a kind of strict economy of movement, standing so easily still that you could mistake him for an unusually peaceful man. Most of the time, he barely even moved a hand without it looking necessary – like a well-rehearsed actor.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’ said Marcus to Varius. They went upstairs and Una wandered into Sulien’s empty surgery to wait.

  She returned to brooding over the thought of Drusus: I will know all about you, soon, she warned him, in her mind. She needed more time, that was all.

  *

  Drusus was surrounded by a fresco of birds arrested in flight, hushed by the dimness in the room. He stood in the near-dark over the wide, silk-spread bed and studied Faustus’ face carefully, glad of the chance to examine him while he slept. But there was little obvious sign of his illness, except a greyish pallor. The familiar vision of Tulliola in that bed, beside his uncle, in those arms, that had so often troubled Drusus when she was alive, forced itself upon him. He took and expelled a shuddering, nauseated breath.

  ‘Uncle,’ he said, unable to bear it. He tried to recall the feeling of happy receptiveness to fate that he’d felt only hours before, to clear Tulliola again from his head.

  Faustus stirred and muttered, and Drusus said again, compassionately, ‘Uncle
.’ He sat on the bed and took Faustus’ hand. ‘Do you feel any better than yesterday?’

  Faustus gave a little grunt of helpless disgust. ‘Can’t walk. Can’t move this side.’ Yes, Drusus noticed, when he spoke the drag on one side of his face was much more obvious.

  ‘But you will again. And you’re talking – I thought you’d be worse.’ This was true. And he doesn’t need to walk, Drusus thought in indignation; surely if he can speak that’s enough. Why let Marcus take over everything if it’s no worse than this?

  ‘My voice …’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ urged Drusus gently. ‘It’s fine.’

  Faustus found his eyes were wet. ‘Hardly,’ he said, and to his shame, and increased misery, the word prompted the tears to run faster. He swore, which was still easy enough, because he wanted to explain how his thoughts kept running into a great fist which flattened them, and he could not find the strength to think how to say it; the sense stood like a mountain, smugly unconquered in front of him.

  Silently, Drusus wiped the tears away. ‘Yes, yes it is. Don’t let anyone make you believe you’re weaker than you are, Uncle. Because Rome needs you strong. And as soon as possible.’

  Sudden anxiety cleared Faustus’ eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That I want you to get well.’

  Faustus made an impatient, disbelieving grunt, and queried, ‘Marcus?’

  Drusus gave a long sigh, and passed a hand over his face. ‘Well, I am worried. Very worried. It’s hard to believe he’s only been here a day, with everything he’s doing.’

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Well! He’s what, nineteen, and facing a war of this scale? I … Uncle, I truly fear he’s handing away the safety of the Empire. Of course, he can’t help his age, he can’t help being in this position, but he seems to think he knows better than Salvius, or anyone, really.’