Arena (29 page)

The first insula on the street was now alight from lower floor to top. As I ran on, hunting that voice that had called to me, I saw an infirm old woman limned in a crumbling window on the burning tenement’s top story. Even as she implored the hundreds milling below for help they could not give, the timbers under her feet buckled. She sailed into space, howling madly as her body burned and burned.

I ran with the tide of panicked animals that had once been men and women. Those who faltered were trampled. The street rose still more steeply, bending to the left ahead. Just at the point of the bend the last of the row of insulae on my left bulked up against the fire-reddened moon.

From that building the scream came again, one of many now, but I knew it was Acte’s.

Ruthlessly I thrust a man out of my path, another. I fought around an overturned produce cart and stumbled in a slime of spilled cabbages. Armor gleamed in the firelight outside the insula toward which I was running. Two figures fought with a third.

“Acte, I’m coming. Fight them, Acte, I’m —”

A man lurched against me. I kicked him aside just as the trio of figures vanished within the tenement.

If I had deceived myself, imagined her cries, I still had no choice but to follow. Either Tigellinus
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and the tribune had her somewhere in that tenement, and had heard my shouts and hoped to escape me in the warren of apartments, or she was lost, and they too, somewhere else in the red pandemonium the night had become.

I plunged inside the black halls of the building.

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FEAR-CRAZEDmen and women washed around me like a human river as I climbed the creaking stairs. The fire’s redness through windows was sufficient to light the interior dimly, flinging grotesque shadows on the walls. I seized a woman rushing by.

“A Praetorian and another man, with a woman. Have you seen —?”

“Let go, let go! In another few moments this building will be burning too!” She clawed at my hand, foam on her lips.

“I saw them,” a man cried, thrusting by. “The Praetorian’s hunting for the roof, the fool. Like she says, this place’ll be a pyre.” And he proceeded to knock the hysterical woman out of the way and race down the crowded flights to safety.

“Acte, where are you?”

My throat was raw from screaming above the gabble of voices.

“Acte — answer!”

I had reached the fourth story and was racing toward the fifth and last, these upper floors all but deserted, when I heard a man’s curse, and the moan of a woman.

Firelight seeped through the open doors of the tiny rooms where whole families had dwelled together. I glimpsed the sweaty sheen of Tigellinus’ cheeks at the top of the stairs before I saw the rest of his body. A sword glittered in his hand. Acte’s face was a white blur in the darkness behind him.

Before I’d gone half up the last flight, Tigellinus began lopping back and forth with the blade, thinking my anger would carry me straight into its path. Suddenly Acte leaped at him.

“Hands off me, you street whore, you!” he howled, slapping at her.

I cleared the last few steps, seized his arm and broke his sword-wrist over my knee.

The Sicilian reeled against the wall. He bounded back, pudgy fingers closing on my neck before I could strike him. My exhaustion, the effect of the fight at the Circus and the long run up the street, had weakened me. I could not get in the swift, sure stroke to kill him.

His breath smelled rotten. His eyes bulged in the dancing red reflections. He backed me against the crumbling stair rail. Under fat, his fingers were metal-hard, and the power born of desperation was in him.

Harder he strangled, throttling sense out of me, harder,harder —

Acte tore at his shoulder, his neck ineffectually. My sword hand was behind his back, in an awkward position. I hacked at his left ribs. He darted out of the way but hung on to my throat with that death grip, grunting now, short savage grunts of fury. Leaning his weight against me, he bent me backward to throw me over the rail.

Spots of unnatural light danced in my eyes. At such close range I was unable to work the sword up for a strike. Each time I cut at his hip or his side, he was ready, dancing out of the way. My head swam. One more constriction of his hands, or two —

A door crashed open on the landing. Armor gleamed.

“Tigellinus, it’s no use trying the roof. The jump is too wide for —”

“Help me!” he shrieked. “Help me finish him!”

I had a strange, twisted view of the tribune’s face as Tigellinus wrenched my head back and forth, back and forth. The Praetorian seemed too startled to make sense of what was happening.

“We’ll never get out,” he moaned. “We’ll never get out.”

While Tigellinus’ attention was diverted, I brought the sword behind his back again and lashed downward. He stiffened. His left hand loosened an instant. The blade had only nicked his leg, but in that second when his hand relaxed on my throat, I pulled back, then rammed the sword
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forward and gutted him.

Tigellinus whipped his hands down to stop the blade even as I struck. The twin edges sliced through the palms of his closing hands. The point went into his bowels. He dropped, the last light of sense dulling in his eyes.

Gasping and aching, I left the sword in his belly and stumbled toward Acte.

“Hurry. Down the stairs. The light’s bright. The lower floors must have caught already —”

“I can’t,” she whispered, shuddering. “My legs won’t move. I can’t go.Cassius! ”

She was staring beyond me, into the pitchy shadows where the Praetorian had disappeared. I heard a crazed cry, broke away from her, spun just in time to see Julius, somehow jarred out of his daze, lunge at me with the gory sword still leaking droplets of Tigellinus’ blood.

I ducked and hit my shoulder against his armored belly. The blade skimmed over my head. I heaved him up. He shouted in terror.

Next thing I knew, I was standing at the stair rail while below, a scream and a crash of wood blended together. He had fallen at least two flights.

Ruddy light danced down there, a mysterious hot well of it in which figures moved like scarlet wraiths. The heat had grown almost unbearable. Acte was crying hysterically. I tried to talk to her, pleaded with her to lean on me and walk. She fought me, scratching.

I was not sure I had strength to make it down to the street myself, let alone with a burden. But I picked her up bodily and slung her over my shoulder and began staggering downward.

When I reached the fourth landing I saw the flames had spread into the first floor and were climbing upward. Faceless men scurried in and out of the apartments, laden with cheap goods.

The looters gave me no notice though, bent on their carrion’s work. Somehow I managed to lurch down to the second landing with Acte on my shoulder before I remembered the tribune Julius.

Was he dead? Or had he escaped? He knew I’d killed Tigellinus. If he’d fled into the streets, my life was worthless.

I turned and started upward to the landing where I’d seen him fall. A vigile, one of several swarming on the stairs, grappled at my arm.

“Go down, you imbecile! Let your goods burn! Save your life and your wife’s while you can.”

I did as he commanded. I ran toward the flaming street door with several vigiles following. Just before I stumbled out into the smoke-laden street, I had a glimpse into an open apartment on the main floor to my left hand. The walls of the chamber were afire. Smoke curled along the floor. In the floor’s center, a featureless body blackened and smoked. Nearby lay breastplates, a helmet and one greave whose emblems were unmistakable — Praetorian.

Sucking the scorching street air into my lungs, I shifted Acte to my other shoulder. I shoved through the mob, away from the burning building. Julius had apparently made it to the first floor, but a looter had struck him down.

The vigiles were clearing all the insulae hereabouts as the fire advanced. I staggered along wearily, buffeted by people, my hearing so dulled by shrieks and trumpet-blasts and the crackle of flames that the whole scene became meaningless.

Yet some instinct to survive kept me on my feet. The hundreds fleeing became thousands.

Companies of fire fighters from as far away as hamlets on the rural plain outside Rome appeared with axes and ladders and their pitifully small buckets. The fire now claimed the sky from horizon to horizon.

By the miracle of some strength I never knew I had, I came to my senses to find myself standing at the gate of my own house.

Dawn grayed the heavens, sultry red and palled with smoke. Acte lay across my shoulder, her face streaked with soot and tears, unconscious.

I reeled inside the house, shouting for the slaves. None answered. They had either rushed out to watch the fire or escaped to freedom.

I climbed with Acte to an upper sleeping room whose door had a bar. Gently I laid her on the
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stone couch and pulled away the blood-soaked rags. Her bruised breasts stirred ever so slightly.

She lived.

For how long she would continue to live, I did not know. Who could say how long any of us would live? The fire covered the entire western section of the city, having moved outward from the Circus Maximus in a huge half-circle. Even on the heights where my house stood, smoke blew thick in the air. I was weary beyond caring.

I barred the door and sank down on my knees beside the couch. I took Acte’s limp hand in mine. I rested my cheek against it, feeling the tiny pulse still beating through her skin.

I must stay awake. The fire might sweep on. Looters might invade the house. To take the chance of losing her again was unthinkable. Stay awake. Stay —

I was too weary. I closed my eyes and slept, with Rome in flames beyond my window.

Nine days and nine nights the great fire burned, consuming everything before it.

On the second morning, I later learned, the Emperor raced back from Antium by chariot to personally direct the activities of the thousands of men engaged in wrecking and trenching whole city blocks for firebreaks. All public buildings and Imperial gardens still intact were thrown open to the homeless. Cities of crude huts and tents sprang up all over the Field of Mars.

Desolation, despair were everywhere.

Looters ran riot after dark. The wails and lamentations of the homeless never ceased in the streets. Only three of my slaves returned. The rest had run away. It didn’t matter. Acte was alive, and revived enough on the second night to say my name a few times and drink a cup of hot wine.

The three remaining slaves were sworn to secrecy about her presence in the house. They readily agreed to keep silent once I showed them the letters of manumission I had written out. They would receive their freedom as soon as it was safe for me to leave the city.

For leave it I must. I had the death of the Praetorian Prefect upon my head, and that of the tribune Julius too.

Hour on end I sat by the couch where Acte slept, comforting her when she roused. I bathed her face and body to remove the accumulated dirt. The bruises on her flesh remained, livid.

The slaves distributed what spare food we had to the needy who came knocking. They brought in reports about new rumors circulating. The rumors said the Emperor himself was responsible for the holocaust which day by day was destroying vast areas of Rome. The rumor-mongers maintained Nero had returned secretly from Antium, set the blaze in the Circus and then retired to the lofty Tower of Maecenas to harp and sing an ode of his own composition entitled “The Sack of Troy.” I listened impassively, my guilt like black pain inside me.

That the stories about Nero were given credence I could believe, since they were probably rooted in his well-known wish to raze the city and rebuild it on a Grecian pattern.

On the eighth day, with the fire nearly under control, Acte awakened completely for the first time.

We sat quietly by the window in the barred chamber. Her hair was freshly combed out, and clean. Her bruised body was concealed by a new stola I’d sent a slave to purchase. From our vantage point we could see the wide pits of black ruins. Here and there embers smoldered, but order had been restored. Many great structures had fallen, including the Temples of Jupiter Stator, Vesta and Diana, the mighty altar of Evander and some buildings on the lower levels of the Palatine. The Forum had been spared, as had the temples and government quarters on the Capitoline.

“That’s my work,” I said to her. “Desolation. Death. Thousands with everything they owned, destroyed.” Through the folds of Acte’s gown I held the sweetness of her waist, drawing strength from the gentle press of her body. “I don’t remember everything that happened under the arches. But I was the one who took down the first torch.”

“Cassius, don’t blame yourself. You wouldn’t have gone there that night had it not been for the actions of evil men. What happened might have happened in a thousand other ways, from a thousand other chance sparks.”

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“That’s not much comfort. All my life I’ll wonder. If Syrax hadn’t driven his knife into the pillar, fallen into the fire, might I have put it out in time?”

“Darling, we’re done with the past. We’re together.”

I held her shoulders and kissed her long. “But is the past done with us?”

“Tigellinus died in the insula. So did the tribune. You told me so only a moment ago. There were no other witnesses. And the Prefect’s death is the only one that would cause the Emperor any concern. He’ll never suspect how it really happened. He’ll blame the fire.”

My heart hardened again. “He deserved to die. You still haven’t told me what happened when he held you a prisoner so long.”

She shuddered lightly. In the glow of a wick simmering in the bowl of oil, her dark eyes were haunted.

“I was kept with the slaves. But I was more than a slave. Forced to do things no slave, even the lowest and meanest, would do. I was forced to —”

Abruptly she shook her head. “No. That’s done with too. Perhaps one day I’ll tell you. One day when we’re free of Rome and I — I can speak of it without trembling.”