Rome Burning (11 page)

Yet he was taller than Marcus, and the straight outline of his face seemed a little clearer or firmer for being framed with dark hair and eyelashes. The smile pulled higher on one side, as it seemed to do for all the Novians – on the right, in Drusus’ case – and the lips were just as full, but Drusus’ mouth was a long, firmly moulded double ripple, moving to a kind of deep peak at its centre. The large, heavily
lidded eyes were not grey-blue like Marcus’ but green, like Faustus’ and Makaria’s, and for the moment he was the more handsome, because his whole face was lit with ebullient well-being. He was slightly, becomingly flushed.

‘Everyone says you were very good on the longvision,’ continued Drusus. ‘I wish I’d seen it, I was travelling. But I’m here now. It’s so good to see you! It’s been too long, we shouldn’t have let that happen. But I wish it were in happier circumstances – such terrible news!’ But he said all this so fast that his expression had no time to shift into appropriate sorrow.

Marcus patted his cousin’s back and said, ‘It’s good to see you too,’ but he was unpleasantly startled by the embrace. He could not remember seeing Drusus either so happy or so friendly towards him, and whether or not it was an act, he was taken aback by the cheerful force of it.

Una was startled too, because Drusus seemed not in the least uncomfortable, and the weird good humour was not only unforced but seemingly bottomless. Drusus was brimming with it: she could see nothing else in him, not guilt, not even jealousy.

Drusus noticed now that one of Marcus’ hangers-on was incongruously young and female, and looking at him. He asked merrily, ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is Una,’ said Marcus, stepping back from him a little.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Drusus lightly, looking at her once and briefly wondering why he had wasted curiosity on such a mousey, unattractive person. He felt mild scorn and pity for Marcus. If he had not known she had been a slave he would have looked at her quite differently, and yet this was not in the least because he considered slave-girls untouchable, of course not (there was Amaryllis) – quite the opposite. Because he knew the young woman had been a slave, he expected a higher standard of beauty from her. If Marcus was going to amuse himself with a girl like that, why choose such a pallid one when he could have got something so much better – anything he wanted?

Involuntarily he drew the comparison: he saw Amaryllis’ fresh face, and winced.

‘Yes,’ echoed Una, smiling prettily. She looked away from him politely but went on concentrating, trying to probe after the flash of a face that had shot through the contentment, but it dived and vanished with bewildering speed before she could touch it, like a fish dodging the claws of an osprey.

She had expected that it would be easier to tell if he was a murderer.

Marcus walked away from the hall, feeling a slight, unexpected depression, as if he’d wanted something more from the occasion. Most of the slaves’ lives would probably not be much different now, he reflected. Really it was because of that he’d been able to do it. Still, Una murmured to him, ‘Thank you.’ They were already perfecting a way of talking to each other in short, whispered bursts that were not detectable even from quite nearby, because the movements of their faces were minimal, and they kept walking without turning to look at each other.

‘I wanted to do it. I couldn’t work here otherwise,’ he said. This was true, but what he had done was also a kind of present and apology to her and to Sulien nonetheless.

‘But when you are Emperor, then you
will
do it then?’ she’d insisted the night before, when he’d told them what Faustus had said.

‘Yes, I promise,’ he’d answered. ‘It was because of this my parents were killed, and Gemella – and us nearly – and I was stuck in that place in Tivoli. Of course I won’t give it up.’ He’d felt ashamed of mentioning the time in the Sanctuary alongside three deaths – he’d been there less than two days, but he still remembered it as far longer. The drug in his blood had stretched the time unrecognisably, and the horror had been total.

He glanced at Una now, because he was aware of a small abstracted frown on her face, and though she’d said only two words, her voice sounded odd, too, faintly laboured, as if it required a deliberate allocation of effort. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

Her frown deepened thoughtfully and she took a breath to
answer, but she let it out silently as Drusus pushed forward to walk beside him.

‘Was the journey horrible, Drusus?’ Marcus asked.

‘Oh, hellish, but it doesn’t matter,’ said Drusus airily. ‘But you look awful, Marcus. It must be overwhelming. You didn’t sleep last night, did you?’

‘No, not really,’ Marcus admitted. He and Una had lain all night in each other’s arms, tense, eyes open.

‘No, of course not,’ agreed Drusus regretfully. ‘I want you to tell me how I can help.’

‘All right,’ said Marcus. He stopped briefly to face Drusus. ‘We’ve had as many people die in fires this summer as we lost yesterday on the Wall. We don’t seem to be able to do anything about these forest fires in Terranova and Gaul, and there have been some terrible house fires around Rome, too. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to read the reports. It would help if you could do that: find out if it’s arson, if it’s because of the heat, if there’s something that’s not being done. I wondered if the people who should be working on it have got too isolated from each other. Can you get them together and find out?’

Drusus did not answer at once, although his face remained fixed unnaturally in an expression of friendly eagerness to help. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Of course I’ll do that. But Nionia – what does Salvius say about our next move?’

Marcus turned away again and walked on. ‘Our next move is waiting to see how the Nionians respond to the message I sent this morning.’

Drusus face began to rearrange itself slowly into a detached, quizzical look. ‘Oh?’

‘About peace talks in Bianjing,’ explained Makaria.

Now it was Drusus who stopped in his tracks. He stared at Makaria. ‘Is that even an option at this stage?’ he demanded, and then broke briefly into a run to catch up with Marcus again.

‘Well, obviously it’s an option, Drusus,’ retorted Makaria.

‘And you won’t listen to another view, Marcus?’

‘I
have
, I will,’ said Marcus, with faint violence.

‘Isn’t this rewarding them for an attack against us?’

‘We seem to have killed an awful lot of them,’ interjected Makaria again.

‘It’s hardly a reward,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t know if they’ll even trust us enough to listen. It wasn’t something they were expecting.’

‘Well, how do you know that?’ asked Drusus, sounding very reasonable and adult now. ‘If it’s because they couldn’t have known you’d be in charge, then isn’t that an admission that this isn’t what Uncle Titus would do?’

Marcus stopped again, struggling to sound equally rational, for he felt like shouting, ‘That doesn’t
mean
anything.’ The sleeplessness of the night before was battering his eyes. ‘I don’t know what he would do. I can’t do things for that reason.’

Drusus passed a hand over his face. ‘No, I know you can’t. But there has to be – there must be – discussion. You do need advisors, Marcus.’

‘I know I do,’ Marcus said.

‘I’ve been thinking. We had better meet every morning.’

Marcus began to walk again. ‘I’m meeting someone now, Drusus. I’m sorry.’

‘Well,’ protested Drusus, ‘if you’re having a meeting, shouldn’t I be there? If our uncle has asked me to advise you, that’s an instruction to you as well, isn’t it? Or do you propose to ignore it?’

‘I’ll be back in an hour. This isn’t a Palace meeting. I’m going over to Transtiberina.’

‘Oh, Marcus,’ said Drusus, finally openly exasperated. ‘Don’t waste everyone’s time. Whoever it is, pull him over
here
. He can’t very well refuse, can he?’

‘He might,’ said Marcus, walking ahead with Una, leaving Drusus decisively behind.

But Una lagged along beside him, looking back over her shoulder.

*

Varius was at his desk. There was no breath of air from the windows at his side, and he felt a treacherous little urge to make sure they really were wide open, to go and see if they could be pushed any further. He resisted it. He could
remember opening the windows. He mustn’t start doing things like that, checking things he knew he had done. He did not look up from his work.

The sterilising boiler was broken. They needed – they always needed – more money. He was trying to school himself out of a slight impatient disdain for these tasks. They were not beneath him, as he realised he was dangerously close to feeling. They were important.

In the corridor outside his office he could hear two of the doctors talking in distracting detail, because his door was gaping open too. Sulien and the others who worked in the clinic had learned that this did not necessarily mean he wanted anyone to come in.

So he got up now, went briskly to the door and pulled it to. But before he had even reached his desk again he knew it was useless; he had such an oppressive sense of being locked in that he could attempt nothing until he’d turned and pushed the door open again. He even had to walk through into the corridor, smile pleasantly at the doctors – it would be unfair to ask them to be quiet; they were tired, they weren’t doing anything wrong – before turning back.

Oh,
stop this
now, he thought irritably, standing in the centre of his office. These habits that had grown upon him – it was as if someone were repeatedly making an insultingly obvious point, and would not be silenced, no matter how doggedly Varius answered yes,
yes
, all
right
, I understand.

He saw the doctors walk past his door, leaving the corridor quiet, and was able to concentrate again. He arranged for the boiler to be repaired; he wrote a letter.

His wife had died. He had been locked up, interrogated. He had expected to die as well. More than that, he’d been convinced of it, deliberately so; the certainty of death had been a weapon, a tool, a consolation, finally. But then everything,
everything
, he had expected had been overturned. Or had just been wrong, not to mince words about it. The aim of it all of course had been to make him say where Marcus was. And he had done so, in the end.

He was sick of thinking and thinking over it, for
years
now, trying to see exactly how it had been done, how it could have gone differently. He thought of it as like taking
apart an engine, say, or a clock, neatly and methodically, breaking nothing, displaying the separated components, as he had heard torturers displayed their implements at the start of the session. But then, when each part lay tidily, separate, flat – and although all this had been done on the reasonable understanding that it was final – the pieces were somehow made to re-assemble, and they did, and the thing still largely worked. But now in each joint was the proof that this need not be so, that it was not inevitable that the clock, the engine should run. It – he – knew that it could stop at any time. Whenever it liked.

Torture had been one of the things he had expected, which had not happened. Not exactly, not as such. Varius did not think the things that had been done to him qualified. But torture, and the ways he had tried to prepare himself for it, were part of the structure of things now, subtly tangible, everywhere.

So about six weeks into the foreign and inexplicable time afterwards, while he was still navigating the daytime by striding around the city, as committed as if it were a job – it was about then he’d started noticing how difficult it was to tolerate a room for long without clear and certain ways out. But he
had
tolerated it; he had made this
stop
– for months, for more than a year, which seemed to count for humiliatingly little now. He’d given himself no time, to care about windows or doors or the things he’d been forced to know about himself, because he was feeding the clinic. Marcus’ parents had wanted to build a place where ill or injured slaves who might otherwise have been left to die could be treated for free. It had nearly come to nothing after Leo and Clodia’s deaths, and everything that followed. It had been left so fragile, so endlessly and querulously hungry – even more for his time and thoughts and strength than for money. And at first he did not feel that he had much of any of these things, except for time, but the need was so bad that he produced them somehow, although wearily and dutifully to begin with, as if he didn’t really expect anything to come of any decision he made, any sum of money he spent. But the walls went up. The place was real, it worked. Varius had been amazed, even exhilarated. And it occurred to him:
no one needs to be happy, only interested. That is all that’s required. And the excitement and relief at the thought were, for a little while, almost happiness in themselves.

But he kept uneasily remembering what Gabinius had promised him, during the worst time of his life: you will feel better one day. He did not entirely like the fact that the prediction seemed to be right. It was something Gabinius could not be made to surrender, even in death – a wisp of power.

Surprisingly soon after his wife’s death he’d found that people began encouraging him to look at other women, even tried to arrange meetings for him with sisters or friends. When a year had passed – almost the day after the anniversary, it seemed to him – this small mutter of suggestions became suddenly clamorous and insistent. To his outrage, his parents joined in. They would drop a young woman’s name into conversation and start innocently praising her, and then they would make him come to some small party and the young woman would be there. They would try and steer him towards her, leave them alone together. It was the more galling because they really seemed to believe that he did not know what they were doing. Varius resisted, out of fury at first, and later, when he was still angry but more resigned, on principle and out of habit. He reminded himself that his parents were trying to help; he did not always give the others so much grace.