Rome Burning (3 page)

She choked and cried out, backing away into the bedroom.
She groped towards the window, at first only for the air that now seemed clean and cool. Then she looked down and saw the thick red flames, gushing like a liquid, like blood, upwards out of the lower windows. Her brother and sister-in-law, and their children – they were out, weren’t they? She could see dim figures in the garden, but there was no light except that of the fire.

She could not climb down or jump. Her rooms were on the third floor, out of the family’s way. She had not meant to end up surviving on goodwill like this, but she’d always lived in this house, and now, even as she leant out, calling for help, she wanted to weep with grief for it, for the
things
, furniture her parents had bought, pictures—

A rich fountain of black smoke, fast and bloated, rolled up to her window from below and forced her back into her bedroom.

The vigiles, surely, must be nearly here.

She stood for a moment, coughing, clasping her hands near her face, and then plunged through the burning doorway into the other room. Down near the floor there was still some air, though her palms and knees were seared at once. She crawled into the cavern of heat, whimpering with pain and horror, and at the sight of her possessions blazing – hidden in the drawers of the burning writing-desk – her bundles of
letters
. Some of them thirty years old, some of them she could almost never bear to read over, but they were terribly important, necessary.

She could not understand how the familiarity of the room’s shape could be burning away with everything else, how hard it was even to remember the way to the door, but she saw in despair that even if she reached it, it would be no good; of course the stairs would be impassable with flame. And she could not breathe; the fire encroached towards her from all sides, it steered her, so that she had to scramble backwards again, and could barely make it into the bedroom once more, in pain, her hair already singed and eaten to rags by the fire.

But this room too was soaking with heat and poison; she could not even try to get near the window again: the curtains were moving murderously and dropping away in
flakes as they burned. Flame was beginning to pool on the ceiling.

‘If there is ever a fire, don’t hide, children die in fires because they hide from them.’ Her parents had told her this. She crept under her bed. It was decades since she had been a child, and there was nowhere else to go. She lay there on her stomach and saw the carpet steam or smoke. She could feel that she would probably lose consciousness soon, and was afraid that even if the vigiles came in now they wouldn’t find her; they wouldn’t know she was there.

But nothing was ever found of her. She was dead before the orange flame burst from the floor, from the bed, before the roof fell through, crushing the shell of her body into black crumbs of bone that later could not be told from those of the slaves, or even, at first, from the scorched chips of plaster and wood.

The heat exhausted Faustus, heaped viscously over his body, gripped his head, a bottling, fermenting feeling. It was hard to think clearly, but the month’s meetings kept multiplying, swelling: there were forest fires, more this year and worse than any he could remember, huge red flotillas, crescent-shaped on Terranova, advancing on tall sails of smoke towards the cities on the west coast. And also in Gaul, and even in Italy itself, to the north. And Nionia – how serious the threat was, how fast it was growing – just for an hour he should be allowed to forget it all. But he could not, and at nights he could not sleep.

His eyes pulsed redly against his shut lids.

The woman trying to rub the ache out of his shoulders was young, with long dark hair which sometimes he felt whisk against his skin. Not really like Tulliola, except in that. A slight pleasure glowed in his scalp as her fingers moved up into his hair, but the tiredness had only retreated from her a little, she could not do more than touch the surface of it.

He felt a very faint, very perfunctory excitement, mingled with a stronger boredom at the knowledge that, if he wanted, he could turn over, reach for her. He was the Emperor, she would have to …

But he did not want to. Because of Tulliola, and because he was so tired.

There was a slight noise, a tap, a warning, recognisable clearing of the throat at the door to which Faustus uttered a vague grunt of mingled assent and protest, knowing at once that it was Glycon, his cubicularius or private secretary. The girl draped a towel over him, and he raised himself,
embarrassed, not by his nakedness, but by the slowness with which he did it, the little groan that escaped him, a creaking ‘mmm …’ His eyes were still shut.

‘Sir.’

Faustus opened his eyes, knowing the tone of voice. He had of course heard it several times, but worst of all and most repeatedly during the terrible summer and autumn of three years before, beginning with the news that his youngest brother was dead. Then everything with his nephew Marcus, and finally that they had found Tulliola, dead under house arrest.

How should he think of Tulliola now? As little as possible, and not, if he could, as having been his wife. He was so ashamed of her. He did not know why she had done such terrible things, and he never wanted to find out, and she had been so beautiful. He was almost grateful to her for having killed herself. It was better than having to have her executed.

So, his first thought was that, again, he was going to hear that something had happened to one of his family. Marcus, who was his heir now. Or even worse, his daughter Makaria – no, please, not her. Or it could be both of them, they were both in Greece.

‘We need you downstairs,’ said Glycon. ‘There has been a massacre.’

Oh, thank goodness for that, thought Faustus, disgracefully, glad that no one would ever know. He sat up and punitive pain flowed back into his head.

It eased off. ‘What do you mean by a massacre? How many people?’

He felt sorry for Glycon, knowing he would hate giving a straight answer. He saw Glycon flinch, resist the urge to dodge the question altogether and settle on saying softly, ‘The lowest figure I’ve heard was a hundred, the highest was four hundred. Yanisen can tell you more.’

‘This is on the Wall, then, of course?’ Yanisen was the Governor of Roman Terranova.

‘The Wall has been breached,’ said Glycon, just as gently.

Faustus felt a sharp twang of real shock for the first time.
‘The Wall has been
breached
? Are you telling me about an invasion?’

Again Glycon recoiled a little. ‘It’s a matter of the last few hours. It’s very unclear. I wouldn’t like to speculate. But you will need the military options before you: I have General Salvius waiting with Probus, and Memmius Quentin, because obviously the impact on the public will become important very soon.’

‘Good,’ said Faustus heavily. ‘You’d better get, ah …’ For an odd moment he could not get the name to form, either in his brain or on his tongue. ‘Falx,’ he said finally. Falx was an intelligence specialist on Nionia.

‘He’s on his way.’

He walked with Glycon through the Palace. The massage seemed to have done no good at all. He was as sluggish as before. He felt oily under his clothes.

‘We can talk to Nionia through Sina or our trade contacts,’ said Glycon. For eighteen months and more there had been, officially, only bitter silence between Nionia and Rome. The last Nionian ambassadors had been spies, or at least, the danger that they were spies had been too strong to take chances.

‘Sina,’ answered Faustus dully. The light through the gold-tinted glass hurt his eyes.

In the private office the doors were almost invisible when closed: carved leaves obscuring the edges, even the hinges and little handles concealed among the unbroken ivy and clematis painted in fresco round the walls, so that once inside you seemed to be within a large, cool, motionless garden, beautiful, with no way out. But there was a bright flat aperture now in the green wall opposite Faustus’ desk, where the shutters that covered the longvision were folded back, displaying Yanisen.

Yanisen was Navaho, but looked – was – as essentially Roman as the men in the room: dressed in crisp white, his stiff, lead-coloured hair cut short and square above his elegant long face. Terranova was one of the few regions left in the Empire where languages other than Latin still had much currency, but the Governor’s full name was Marcus Vesnius Yanisen, and he would probably have dropped or
altered even the Navaho cognomen, if it had not run easily enough off tongues used only to Latin.

He and Probus should have been preparing what they would say to Faustus; instead they were in passionate argument: ‘If you had given me the resources—’

‘Do you – think – this is – an appropriate time – to be scoring
points
?’ said Probus, in a series of low, dry, furious gulps.

‘I think it’s a time to remember that I’ve been warning about this for years!’

‘Yes, we are all very aware of
that
, you’ve spent less time …’ he swallowed again, ‘actually
doing
anything about it.’

Probus was thirty-six, a short but upright man with dark hair and a square face. He was precociously high-ranking, the youngest person in the room, and the most afraid for himself – for it was true Yanisen had often complained to him, as the tension on the Wall grew and the skirmishes got worse. It was also true that Salvius and Faustus himself were just as responsible for refusing Yanisen everything he had wanted, but Probus must know he would be the easiest to blame, if it came to that.

Yanisen opened his mouth, incensed, but cut himself short, seeing Probus react as Faustus entered. The appalled, argumentative look of them brought the ache and the weariness to a peak again in Faustus. The lovely green room felt inexplicably stuffy.

Salvius made him tired too; he was sitting on one of the green couches, scowling at the argument but taking no part in it. He sprang up to greet Faustus with the energy of a charge going off. He was white-haired, but the hair was still thick, and combed to a snowy gloss, and he was as muscular and handsome as he had been at twenty-five. Leo, Faustus’ dead brother, had been similarly careful of his appearance, and yet Faustus did not believe Salvius was really vain at all, as Leo certainly had been. Salvius had simply realised at some stage that to look this way helped him extract respect. He certainly had none of Leo’s loucheness – he seemed to have been happily faithful to his wife for thirty years. Oddly, even though politically they must have violently disapproved of each other, Leo and Salvius had got on quite
well, out of military fellow-feeling, and the conscious shared possession of a certain kind of strength.

Salvius bowed. Faustus took his hand, and felt that though it gripped firmly on his own, it trembled too, but not with fear like Probus’. Faustus looked into Salvius’ face and saw the spontaneous, wounded outrage there, and was surprised. Again he felt rather ashamed of himself; he just did not feel as if he personally had been attacked, when presumably of all people he ought to.

Salvius burst out, ‘That’s the last shred of Mixigana gone, Your Majesty, and frankly it’s been a farce for years anyway: we’ve got no choice but to show we won’t tolerate this.’ Mixigana was the peace treaty that had established the Roman–Nionian border more than three hundred years before.

‘That’s probably the best way to let this out, it makes it clear you’re still in control,’ agreed Quentin, although Salvius did not seem to relish the advisor’s support and glanced at him with minor distaste. Quentin was in his forties but plumply boyish-looking, round-faced, with smooth chestnut hair. He did not look particularly shocked by what had happened.

‘Quiet,’ said Faustus. ‘You may think you know what this is all about, but I don’t. Yanisen?’ It was principally for Salvius’ benefit that he tried to sound forceful, pulled his protesting body up as straight as he could. You’ve got to watch people like that, he felt, deeply and instinctively. The Novii might have ruled in Rome for two hundred years now, but it would never be long enough to be completely certain they were safe; not for any Emperor.

Salvius looked at him broodingly, and he and Quentin subsided. Probus stood and clenched his teeth.

Yanisen nodded. ‘Sir. Our troops came under the kind of attack they’ve experienced many times, especially in the last four years.’

Probus grimaced, longing to interrupt.

‘Where?’ said Faustus.

‘This was in – that is, it began near Vinciana.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘No, there’s no reason you would have done. But it’s in
Arcansa, very near the Wall, close to where it intersects the Emissourita. Of course, our troops retaliated. I think we lost four or five men at this point, sir. You must understand that with all of this – because of the way things escalated, it’s hard to be precise. A detail in armoured vehicles advanced a little way into Nionian territory to disperse the enemy. It appeared they had done so successfully. But on the return they were attacked again. Sir, the Nionians must have reinforced at some point in the last month; it was much more sustained, the numbers were such that the Roman soldiers were all but wiped out. We haven’t been able to recover the bodies.’

‘But that can’t have been a hundred people?’ asked Faustus.

‘No. The Nionians pursued the remnants back. And this is when they fired explosives at the Wall itself. Of course, by this time our surviving troops had called for support, but it didn’t come in time, there was no way they could hold the breach. The fighting spilled into Vinciana. And then, I think they – the Nionians – must have begun simply killing people indiscriminately.’