Rome Burning (23 page)

‘I’ve got to stay here,’ she muttered, and explained about the attack on Sulien in the Subura.

Marcus made a sound of sympathetic shock and asked, ‘What, does he think it was connected with the factory?’

‘He can’t make any sense of it and neither can I. How
can
they have anything to do with each other? But how could they happen on the same day otherwise?’

‘Well – the place is still burning, the vigiles haven’t had a chance to investigate. It wasn’t bombed from the air, whatever else. We don’t know it wasn’t an accident. Varius said how dangerous it was there.’

‘We do know. It just can’t have been,’ said Una.

Marcus sighed, uneasily. ‘Stay with him, then, and I’ll send an escort of Praetorians for as long as he needs them.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I wish I wasn’t shut up here,’ he said.

Una listened unhappily to the faint sound of his breath, knowing he wouldn’t have much time to talk, unwilling to turn off the longdictor. At last she said, ‘The Prince did give in, didn’t he? You will go to Bianjing?’

‘Yes. But you’ll come too, won’t you?’

Una smiled into the unseeing air. ‘If I think Sulien’s safe.’

Varius was in a little room on the first floor. To Una’s surprise he was not in the narrow bed that stood against the wall, but standing in the centre of the room. As he got up, a jolt of astonishment at the day had caught him in mid-step and held him motionless, making an incongruously vivid, expectant look hover over his exhausted face, so that he looked as if he’d been waiting for her. His burns had been dressed and he was wearing a combination of borrowed clothes and his own, the new garments strange and inconsistent against the singed ones. So far none of the staff would condone what he was doing by helping him get any shoes.

‘You can’t be meant to go yet,’ said Una.

‘I hate hospitals,’ replied Varius. He’d found that when he spoke in a deliberate whisper the soreness in his chest was less and his voice sounded closer to normal.

Una gave a strained, incredulous smile. ‘But you
work
here.’

Varius’ mouth flicked into a small, answering smile. He amended: ‘Hospital rooms. I don’t mind inflicting them on other people.’

‘But will you be all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Varius, abstracted surprise just audible in his muted voice. ‘I feel sure.’ He’d been told about the remaining risk from the smoke in his lungs, but he felt, crackling over the ache and shock in his bones, a subtle electric confidence that it wasn’t going to kill him. He had to get home and think, he kept telling himself, and then correcting himself dutifully, feeling the dead fatigue throb through his body – no, not think, sleep. But he couldn’t sleep or think here.

‘You saved Sulien’s life. Thank you,’ said Una, fast but very clearly and formally, as if she were projecting her voice
across an auditorium, and then added abruptly, ‘That is, I don’t know how to thank you.’

Her face was grave and official, but Varius saw how the words made her shake. ‘I – it was just lucky I wasn’t knocked out at the start, that I had a chance,’ he said lamely. He felt almost dismayed, not exactly at being thanked, but at the fierceness of it, and at not knowing how to answer. Nevertheless, he was not sorry she was there. She looked brittle and pale and surely didn’t want to be alone, and he discovered that, for now, neither did he. They stood and talked clumsily for a little while – she told him about Marcus’ agreement with the Prince – tentatively proving that something as normal as that was possible. He found he wanted to lay a hand on her shoulder, and did so, even knowing it would hurt. Sharp heat glowed through the dressing on his skin.

The door had been shut while the doctors had examined him, while he’d changed into the borrowed clothes. When Una went she left it open – deliberately, for his sake. Varius saw this and felt a quick flaring of indignation – at her knowing, at his own usual feeling of respite – and then it went out, leaving a flat calm. Well, even if he was always like this, what harm did it do, to him or anyone else?

He was so tired by the time he reached home that he might have almost admitted it had been foolish to insist on leaving the clinic. But once in bed, though he kept feeling sleep float luxuriously close, at the last second, he would draw back from it, his eyes springing open, his heart pumping fiercely, and he’d think,
no, not yet, just a few more minutes
– as though the real luxury were being awake. He must remember to tell Marcus what he suspected he’d learned about Salvius. And then he wondered if anyone he’d seen for the first and only time that day – the jaundiced women crossing the yard, the strained female clerk, Proculus, any of the ranks of tense and silent slaves in the workshops – if any of them were still alive. The thought made him start on the bed, and he stared into the dark, where, of all the things he had seen that day, it was something so ordinary – the section of dull brickwork he’d noticed when he’d first woken behind the burning sheds – that hung before his
eyes as if on a bright screen. If he had been a good enough draughtsman he could have produced a perfect copy of the pattern of cracks and dry stems and shadows. By the time he finally let himself slip into confused dreams he’d given up trying to explain to himself what it had seemed to mean, but it was as if seeing it had not been a function of his eyes, but something pure and total – the precision of the world, the shock of chancing upon himself still among fragile, solid things.

At one point he woke up from a chaotic nightmare of hammers and fire and lay tense, shuddering a little, but feeling the addictive tang of adrenalin in his blood. He was impatient that it was not morning, that he was still bitterly tired, and had somehow to get back to sleep. He must speak to Marcus as early as he could the next day. He knew it was a presumptuous thing to do, to ask for a job he’d rejected, but he was so excited by the idea of it now, by the talks in Bianjing, by being free to do more than beg men like Proculus for poor little scraps of change. He was aware of the clinic too, but now it seemed to him like it had in the beginning: a good, unlikely thing, and because of that he could leave it.

*

In the clinic, Una stalked restlessly for a long time, up and down the stairs, out to the lobby, peering past the Praetorians into the street. As she watched from an upstairs window, an hour after the streetlights went on, a figure walking past caught her attention, glancing once at the building, at the uniformed men standing on the steps. It was a young man, dipping in and out of shadow as he walked – she could not tell if he matched what Sulien had told her of the men in the apartment block. But his casual, unremarkable progress down the street set suspicion blazing in her nerves – she remembered moving that way herself, running past the vigile station on the Thames, determined to take everything she needed from a single glance at it. And she
felt
his concentration on the building. She was certain he had wanted to know if Sulien was still alive, and if he was here.
And he had understood what the presence of the Praetorians meant. Another guard stood on the landing near Sulien’s door, but by the time she’d got him to the window there was no one to point out – the man had gone by, and as she tried to describe him she realised in frustration how there was absolutely nothing distinctive in what she’d seen of him. She had not even been able, in the monochrome light, to tell the colour of his clothes or hair. It was hard even to make her sense of urgency explicable. All the man could do was tell the other guards to watch for such a vaguely described person approaching the clinic again. Una ran out and up the street, knowing she would recognise that mind if she came close again. But she did not, and though, back in the clinic, sprawling uncomfortably in a chair for hours, she barely slept, nothing else happened, all that night.

The pain in Sulien’s arm and side, and the various little burnt streaks on his skin had been hushed to a resentful murmur, but still, sleep kept eroding away from above him, too, like dry soil over roots. Of course he was afraid that the people from the Subura, or whoever they had been working for, would look for him again, but it was not so much the fear that kept this rattling of protest shaking him awake, but a terrible, vertiginous bafflement. He kept straining his memory of the few minutes they’d spent in the vast workshop, trying to hold the image still to look deeper into the hot darkness to count the people, study their faces, find something about them to remember. He even felt guilty for having hated Proculus in what must have been his unrecognised last minutes, because he could now picture a family for him, and a mitigatingly blinkered life – and then he veered back to loathing him for keeping all those people in that murderous pit. It was intolerable not to understand this. Naturally he wanted to know who had done it, but almost only as a corollary of knowing the reason for it. And the two things – the attack on him, and the explosion – he kept jamming them together and prising them apart, always recoiling from what seemed like the easiest way of connecting them: that both were attempts on his life. No, it was
inconceivable. Surely no one would ever do that, destroy so much, kill a thousand people just to get to one? You would have to be mad.

He had, at least, the possibility of a chance, lasting perhaps a week, perhaps longer. It was bad luck that Sulien had not been killed at Veii; still, for now he was not at the Palace. Drusus decided it was worth trying again to talk seriously to his uncle.

Drusus had taken a lovely villa on the Quirinal hill, everything in it as new and perfect as an egg. It had suitable rooms for Amaryllis, who had been conveyed across from Byzantium with the rest of his things. The clean freshness of the house had soothed him at first but then, within only a day or two, and for reasons he could not define, it had made him feel isolated and panicked, and needing the girl too often. So he had hastily constructed a party, lavishing money on it for a hectic variety of food and drink, for musicians, and gilt-skinned dancers and prostitutes. The long night passed for Drusus in a strung-out haze – of continuing nervousness as much as alcohol – and it shook the house into a foul-smelling ruin of trampled rose petals and vomit, which strangely seemed to be what he’d wanted, although the mess was such that he’d had to move back to his father’s house while the slaves cleaned it up. Both during this time, and in the fortnight or so on the Caelian before he found the villa, his father kept trying in small, anxious, dog-like ways to look after him, to make him happy. Drusus was aware of these little things – Lucius’ quiet enquiries about what he wanted to eat, about his health – and he thought cynically how belated and stupid it was, and yet he was confused to realise that he rather liked it too, that it was pleasant to be tended to in this way. He did not even mind Lucius gently asking him if he had any thoughts of getting married. ‘I’m
sure one of these days I’ll get round to it,’ Drusus had said, truthfully enough. There was no particular reason why a wife should inconvenience him.

Once – much more timidly, fear of his son so cluttering his speech with half-stifled syllables that Drusus could barely understand what he was saying – Lucius tried to pick up the conversation about being Emperor again, but Drusus, gradually reassembling some sort of hope, some sort of plan, was no longer in the mood.

But when he went back to the Golden House, his hopes of Faustus came to nothing. He thought at first that he would not be allowed to see his uncle at all. Finally, the calmly obdurate doctor let him in, but would not be persuaded to leave the room and scarcely even troubled to disguise the fact that it was Drusus, not Faustus, that he was there to watch. ‘I’ve had clear instructions,’ he kept repeating. Faustus might still have countermanded all of this, but he sat listlessly in a chair and seemed reluctant to notice his nephew’s urgency. His voice was thick and embarrassingly difficult to understand, but evidently he noticed Drusus’ dismay and the irritable grimace on his face was clear enough. He made no effort to prevent Drusus from being hurried from the room.

Drusus wandered bleakly into one of the Palace galleries. It was the feeling of being laughed at that rankled more than anything, and he was tired. It was still early but the light soaked the room with gold heat. Drusus stared heavily at a vast canvas of Oppius – the first Novian Emperor, rising in an heroic and foolhardily exposed stance atop a primitive armoured vehicle, in the act of subduing the Nionians in Abenacia. His arm was aloft and a great sweep of cloak soared from his shoulders into the snowy sky, like a flag or a pair of red wings, flooding a quarter of the canvas. Drusus found the image vaguely uplifting and encouraging, and wondered if Oppius was the one that had first gone mad. No, presumably not, or surely the dynasty wouldn’t have gone any further and Drusus would not be standing here now. Would not even exist, in fact. What a strange thought that was.

Of course he knew the outline of the madness story, but
he had managed to avoid ever hearing it told very clearly. By the time he would have been old enough to understand, Drusus and his mother already had good reason not to want to think about it: Lucius was ill, or so they had believed. Drusus could remember when he was perhaps ten – and he could look down from here, and see the very place in the gardens where it had happened – Leo cornering him and hectoring him, wanting to tell him some myth of sin and retribution. Drusus had felt that Leo was trying to make a cruel point about his being Lucius’ son, or perhaps punishing him unjustly for making the two-year-old Marcus cry, when that had been nothing to do with him. He’d fled, persecuted and miserable, to look for his mother.