Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Meekly, Lucius receded. He sat humbly on the edge of his couch, poked a dish or two aside on the table and appealed timidly, ‘Drusus. Drusus. It’s very nice that you’re in Rome. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Everything,’ pronounced Drusus, simply. ‘Everything is the matter.’

  ‘Is Titus very ill?’

  ‘You don’t care anything about him,’ Drusus remarked.

  ‘I do,’ ventured Lucius.

  ‘How can that statement be reconciled with your actions?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Lucius in a whisper, shifting in his seat like a scolded schoolboy. He raised both his hands to his face and peeked over them, wide-eyed and afraid. It was quite natural and instinctive to him now, and yet the sort of gesture a shy child would cultivate on purpose, to try and seem endearing, so as not to be hit. Drusus hated the sight of it. Above his hands, under the tumbled white hair, Lucius’ weak green eyes begged: Please. Enough.

  And Drusus gave way to it, as somehow he always did; there was sour kindness that suddenly and inexplicably overcame him when dealing with his father, and would not let him go beyond a certain point, to list the consequences of his cowardice and lies. Or tell his secret.

  He summoned a slave to get him a fresh glass, poured himself wine and stretched out resignedly on his side, pillowing his head on the crook of his arm, his fingertips on the back of his head vaguely stroking his own hair. ‘He’s not as ill as I expected,’ he said. ‘His voice sounds odd when he talks. He can’t walk, though.’

  ‘Poor Titus.’

  ‘Yes, poor Titus. Although I’m sure he would recover better if he hadn’t put himself in this position with Marcus. Because Marcus is certainly throwing his weight about; the gods know what’ll be left when he’s finished. It’s a travesty.’

  ‘Do you really want to be Emperor so very badly, then?’ asked Lucius, with audible pity in his voice.

  ‘What else is there?’ answered Drusus, dully.

  Lucius looked almost as if he would cry. ‘But there must be plenty – oh you could just – Drusus. Why do you want to do that? Terrible. And so dangerous! Why would you put yourself in harm’s way? Oh dear – I would hate it if anything happened to you.’

  Drusus shot an indignant look at him and wanted to cry out, ‘Do you think nothing has happened to me so far?’ Always, always his father had been a weight on his life. Through his childhood, he and his mother had lived in a mute community of shame; but the humiliation she felt – understandably, given what she thought she’d signed up for, marrying a Novian – extended to Drusus too. It always had, as far as he could tell. Certainly things had gone badly wrong by the time he was two years old.

  Drusus had thought it would be a wonderful blessing if Lucius was not mad. But it was like the gifts of the gods in the myths – to Cassandra or Tithonus – a literal yet malicious granting of what was asked for: to get his wish, not in the form of a metamorphosis, or miraculous cure, but in the discovery that his father had only used the family blight of insanity as a cover to retreat from his name, from his marriage, from his small son. And he had kept this up nearly the whole of Drusus’ life. Drusus had discovered the truth – walking in on Lucius and Ulpia repulsively half-undressed – only when he was nineteen, the age Marcus was now.

  But the shock and betrayal – although they continued, even nine years later – had somehow made an intimacy between the two of them that had never existed before, incomplete and defective though it was. For years Drusus told no one the truth about Lucius, and then only Tulliola – silent partly from mortification, but partly from a bitter, unexpected feeling of duty and pity.

  He contented himself now with saying, ‘Not everyone feels so compelled to dodge responsibility, Dad.’ Lucius hung his head. ‘In any case. The oracle told me I was to be Emperor,’ went on Drusus quietly. ‘You will not tell anyone that.’

  Strange thing – in this Drusus did trust his father, who nodded earnestly and offered, ‘Then you don’t have to worry.’

  ‘I have never believed that. Everything is stacked against me, everything is designed to keep it from happening. Who is going to change that if not myself? I can’t even make my case to Uncle Titus, you realise. It’s a disgrace, the things going on behind his back. Ah …’ Another tide of despair rushed over Drusus and he let himself slip lower on the couch and wrapped his arm around his face. ‘There’s this kid of a doctor. He listened to everything I said. And now he’ll tell Marcus, so I can’t even … You see, they know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve put him there as a spy. They’re making sure I can’t let the Emperor know what’s really happening. Perhaps he’s even keeping him ill …’

  And he stopped, turned quickly onto his back, and looked up at the murky ceiling, staring as the thoughts came. Softly he muttered, ‘Sulien.’ For he had only been thinking resentfully aloud, but as he heard the words he had spoken, he knew they must be true. For it was only now, suddenly, that the name meant anything to him. Sulien.

  Drusus tried to remember what he had heard three years before, and it was difficult, for he had been too sick at heart to take in anything to do with the disaster. But now he thought: Yes, the people who broke into the Galenian and got Marcus out. Sulien was one of those. He was another slave. But wasn’t he supposed to have been a kind of magician from London? Drusus ran over the conversation in Faustus’ rooms, and thought it was possible he’d heard the faintest shadow of an accent. It must be the same person, and it was no coincidence that he was as young as Marcus; they were friends.

  Of course, if you were in Marcus’ position, that was what you would need – a means of controlling Faustus for as long as the regency lasted. And once you had that, you had more: a means of making it last, or bringing it to a succession, as you saw fit. Of course you would do that. Drusus would have done the same himself.

  There was no hope, then, that the boy would not think it his place to tell Marcus what he’d heard.

  Drusus gave a short laugh and, sardonically, because there was no reason not to, he explained the substance of these thoughts to his father. It was odd, but although he had just realised that things were even worse than he had supposed, he felt less wretched than before, not so powerless. If nothing else, he knew what he was up against.

  FURNACE

  For the first time, Sulien began to wish the weight of heat held in the taut blue sky would erupt into rain. He was usually oddly impervious to unremitting sun, and could walk about in the full glare of it as if he’d grown up in desert heat and not the dampness of London. If it were not for the drought he would hardly have understood why anyone should want it to stop. But there had been more fires; a power plant had gone up and ignited a knot of streets. The number of dead would have been universally horrifying if they had not mostly been slaves. And each fire was clean of any certain sign of sabotage, every single one had immaculate credentials as an accident. But there had been so many now that the idea of arson was spreading. Separatists, or Nionian agents, or a revolutionary sect that wanted to tear down Rome for the sake of it … Sulien began to fancy that the hot air carried a faint taste of burning, a delicate smog of siege and mistrust.

  It must have been affecting him more than he had thought. It must be only that. One night he had walked Tancorix home and she had stepped a little closer to him and taken his arm, with a movement of the eyebrows to make obvious that this was partly ironic, and had said, ‘Oh, look. You’ll fight for my honour, won’t you?’

  ‘Isn’t it too late to fight for that?’ answered Sulien. They skirted dexterously around a little heap of fresh dog shit deposited precisely in the middle of the narrow Transtiberine street.

  ‘And whose fault would that be?’ said Tancorix. Automatically she darted a look at him that began as expertly flirtatious and then, as she remembered, grew more doubtful. They crossed a little forum around a temple of Ceres, bright and crowded as noon although it was halfway towards dawn, full of people conducting various kinds of business. A g
roup of African musicians were playing electric harps and zithers with an air of slightly frantic single-mindedness, trying to outdo a serene Arabian flautist in the opposite corner. A woman tried to sell Tancorix one of five tamed sparrows, perched in a dutiful huddle on the outstretched stem of a rose. Moving past, shaking their heads, Sulien and Tancorix moved out of the square of man-made light, into darkness again.

  She said, ‘Anyway, someone’s following us.’

  Naturally they both assumed she was the one being followed – for, shadowy in the haphazard streetlights, there did seem to be a man walking behind at a distance of fifty yards or so. It surprised neither of them, nor were they particularly concerned. Tancorix was living in a small plot of social land hacked out by disgrace. Singing in inns and cauponas, she boosted the money her former husband gave her for the daughter he said might very well not be his. Tancorix did not really have a very good voice, although it had got better with persistence and bravado, but she was so proficient at handling and directing her beauty, like a team of horses, that she got on well enough. Sulien liked watching her perform. Their friendship, his pleasure at the sight of her, were more lightly touched with memory and strange guilt, when she was on a little stage and he was slightly drunk.

  So they parted at her door with the usual faint awkwardness – a glancing kiss, like friends. Sulien walked on, alone. His flat was in a tall, shabbily handsome building whose faded, powdery blue walls emerged from aggressive rainbows of graffiti at its base, towards the rear of Transtiberina, right under the sudden steep peak of the Janiculum hill. Sulien turned a few corners, following one raggedy uphill street after another. A black curtain of hanging creeper, lovely in daylight, fell draped between buildings. Sulien crossed beneath it, and beyond there was no light at all except the low, electric glare of the sky. It was strange how often, how abruptly, in Transtiberina, one could pass from light and activity into exposed solitude and darkness.

  Sulien found that he had fastened one hand around the wrist of the other. He was absolutely certain that footsteps had been quietly accompanying him since he had left Tancorix, and that, although he could see no one, someone was watching him as he unlocked the door of his building. He shut the door behind him with a little shiver of relief.

  He slept badly. Half his friends said you needed a set of earplugs to get a decent night’s sleep in Rome. Usually Sulien was adept at shutting out the nocturnal sounds of Transtiberina – the inexplicable bangs and thuds in the streets outside, the strange, isolated yells, the barks of dogs – but that night they all seemed louder and closer, while the feverish summer heat soaked into the sheets.

  In the morning, however, he barely even remembered the fear any more than he remembered what he’d dreamt that night, the daylight itself seemed such a strong repudiation of it.

  But three days later, on the steps of the bath house he saw a man heading in as he came out, quite unremarkable-looking and surely not the same as the figure on the street that night – and yet Sulien felt that he had seen him more than once, between the clinic and here. But if he had – on the way after all to a public building – what of it? He could not think what was wrong with him.

  In the clinic, Bupe, the girl from the arms factory, lay propped in a narrow bed and stared with her remaining eye. She had screamed with pain and horror for a day, but was now still, her maimed face dull with a terrible lack of surprise. The yellow was gone from her skin now, and though the wound still looked horrifying, Sulien was sure he could make the flesh heal straight, force the tissue not to form itself into fibrous knots; she would hardly be scarred. But of course the eye socket would stay empty, and there was nothing he could do about the missing hand and thumb.

  ‘So I could still be a whore,’ she said grimly, when he told her about her face.

  Varius, progressing moodily through the ward, was almost relieved by the rare twinge of real shock he experienced at this.

  He said, ‘Bupe, we’re going to Veii; we’re going to stop them doing this,’ but then suppressed a grimace of displeasure with himself. Why should he think that would comfort her? Even if they could stop it, what good was it to her?

  Bupe’s visible eyelid lifted slowly. ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ she said flatly. And she asked Sulien, because Varius had strode away in a frustrated sweep, ‘When are you going to do that?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  Bupe looked at him and uttered a bitter little scoffing noise. ‘There’s no point with those places,’ she announced.

  Sulien said nothing else, but Bupe brought back the tension that had dogged him for the last few days. He thought of Una, because Bupe reminded him of her in a way; they were almost the same age, and there was something else, a level, bitter certainty they both had, which troubled him.

  Later he went after Varius, insisting, ‘There’s got to be something for her. There’s no rule that says her life has to be ruined. Is there? There have got to be things she could do. The factory should pay for doing that to her. They could help her. At least she’s free, in a way, isn’t she?’

  It was true, in that no one would want her as a slave and officially, she hardly existed.

  Varius only forced a nod. In fact he couldn’t imagine a future for Bupe that seemed both tolerable and plausible. A weary quarrel resumed in his head: This is no good, it went. Better than nothing, came the answer, dully. Such a fraction above nothing that you might as well stop. He did not want to say this to Sulien. He did not want to make other people believe it.

  ‘I hope my sister never worked anywhere like that,’ blurted Sulien.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know?’ asked Varius, slight curiosity briefly lifting his mood.

  Sulien gritted his teeth. ‘I don’t know if I’d know,’ he said. ‘She was in some factories. What she’s told me … maybe it’s all of it, maybe it’s not. Probably not, is what I think.’

  ‘She’s not stunted, she’s not disfigured. She can’t have been somewhere that bad for long,’ said Varius, with contained, deliberate brutality that seemed somehow directed at himself, not Sulien.

  ‘You could tell Marcus you’ve changed your mind,’ Sulien said, recklessly.

  Varius looked sharply at him, so that Sulien half-expected a rebuke, but all he said was, ‘But I haven’t.’

  At noon, Sulien was called to the longdictor.

  The voice was female, hushed, blurred with urgency. ‘… wouldn’t stop kicking him, he’s only eleven. I think he’ll die, oh, you’ve got to come.’

  ‘All right – all right. Can’t someone bring him here?’ He was a little irritated at being called over to say these things, it was not his job.

  ‘I can’t.’ There was an indistinct sound of shouting somewhere, she caught her breath in an audible flinch.

  ‘Then we’ll send someone. Where are you?’

  ‘In the Subura but no. No. I’m not supposed to be doing this. They’ll find out. He won’t let you take him.’

  ‘You mean the owner? We can deal with him. Look, we can help, but I’m going to give the longdictor to—’

  ‘No, I need to talk to you. No. He said he stole – or something – I think he’s mad, I think he might kill me.’

  ‘If it’s that bad then we—’

  ‘No, no, please, if you do that you’ll make it worse, I can manage, he’ll calm down later, he’ll be out, he won’t even see you but please just come I’ll do anything. This is Sulien, isn’t it?’

  Sulien said, ‘Yes, it’s me,’ and then felt an unfamiliar stirring of vague paranoia. ‘Why did you ask for me?’

  ‘I know about you, everyone does. I know you do things no one else can – you can really help, you can save his life. The little boy—’

  ‘I can’t just walk out and—’

  ‘Please, I think he’ll die, he’s not moving – please.’

  Sulien turned off the longdictor, and sighed. He felt somehow that he should not go, but could think of no reason why not. He could send someone else to fetch the child,
despite the woman’s frantic insistence – but it was true, he was different; he could do more, and more quickly. He remembered that he had not complained about being whisked across town for Faustus, and that decided him. He sighed again, and walked out of the cool clinic into the melee of heat.

  His trirota was chained outside the clinic. Sulien winced as he fired the motor, the metal stung with heat even though the machine had been standing in the shade. He crossed the Aemilian bridge, the shrunken Tiber creeping along below, under the gold glare of light, and rode west.

  As he moved into the sudden shade between tenement blocks, for no reason at all, at least unprompted by any sign of something wrong that he could place – he remembered the man on the bath-house steps, the footsteps on the way home from Tancorix’s. He was uncomfortably aware of the dampness on his forehead and in his hair; the shade in the street seemed only a kind of formality of light, it cast a bluish, dazzled haze over his vision, but had no effect on the heat. At the next turn the hot street was emptier, and the shabby high buildings pressed closer together, crushing it. It seemed as if he was being led away from where there were people.

  It occurred to him that if there was a household here who had a slave – two slaves, it seemed – it was strange that they could afford to throw them away so lightly.

  He was a fool to have come alone. He’d said he was going to the Subura, but he should have left the exact address; no one would know where to look for him – why was he thinking like this, in broad daylight? What could he do except keep on?

  The next street was so narrow that it was almost dark, despite the burning strip of blue sky skimming above it. At street level, the walls were ragged and blank, the windows boarded up, the surfaces bare even of graffiti: a torn poster urging the election of an official in a contest two years over, and a young woman standing in the middle of the street, were almost the only signs of human life, as if it was not a street but a split in the earth, naturally formed by rain, or earthquake.