Rome Burning (32 page)

‘Yes. But we have to,’ said Marcus, firmly – but looking fragile to Makaria, so that she felt a rare twinge of almost
maternal pity for him, as she’d felt on sporadic occasions when he’d been a sweet and anxious child.

She had been, unconsciously, pacing about: swinging her shoulders, almost stamping – like a boy younger than Marcus was now, she thought, catching herself doing it. She made herself stop. ‘I’ll do it, if you want,’ she said tersely.

But as they walked to Faustus’ apartments, she remained in such a state of enraged panic for her father, so frantic with the certainty that Drusus’ betrayal of him was as good as another murder, that she was almost irritated as well as relieved at how patiently Faustus seemed to take the news. Since the morning he had been feeling a little better, he had been sitting near the window eating figs when they entered. The colour left his face as he listened, but still, he was affectionately impatient with Makaria as she faltered through the facts. ‘Come on, come on, spit it out,’ he said.

When everything was told, Faustus could feel his heart speeding, a thin, dry buzz. But he was aware of Sulien’s tactful presence; he could see, with mingled annoyance and pity, how they were all looking at him, anxiously, as if at a dropped glass in mid-air, and he dragged ineffectively at his numbed body, trying to lift it higher and straighter in the chair. ‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve always known he wanted to be Emperor. It makes sense of things. I suppose … there was always a chance of this.’

‘We didn’t want to tell you this, when you’re ill,’ said Marcus.

‘But you had to. Of course you did. Of course you did,’ said Faustus, gently. He wanted to say something to Marcus about Leo, but couldn’t. ‘He … killed Tulliola himself?’

‘Yes,’ said Marcus. ‘He must have got men of his on to her guard. Of course we’ll try and find out what happened.’

‘I spoke to him a few hours afterwards,’ said Faustus, wondering. ‘I remember it. He said how sorry he was.’

‘He’s scum. He’s not a real Novian. Drusilla Terentia has a lot to answer for; the gods know there’s nothing of
us
in him,’ spat Makaria, trembling.

‘I don’t know if that’s true,’ murmured Faustus, sadly. Or he tried to; he realised that yet again he had not made himself understood.

Later, when they were walking away from the room, Marcus felt for a moment almost cheerful with relief. He said to Sulien, ‘That wasn’t as bad as I thought.’

Sulien didn’t answer. His right hand had strayed to his left wrist.

‘She’s all right,’ murmured Marcus.

‘Of course she is,’ said Sulien quickly, with a faint, odd bristle of defensiveness in his voice. ‘I know. But if she hadn’t been, Marcus. And we wouldn’t even have known why, I never even thought of someone trying to … kill her.’

‘No one did. I certainly didn’t. I should have done, if you want to blame someone beside Drusus.’

‘It’s not that,’ murmured Sulien. His eyes were half-lowered, distant. But then he raised his face and looked at Marcus with sudden, jarring urgency. ‘There’s something wrong. All the time. This happening to Una just …
proves
that. I
know
it, all the time, I can’t talk myself out of it. The people from the tower block, and whoever killed all those slaves: we don’t even know if they’re the same people, but they’re still there, somewhere, and whatever they did it for, they still want. And I can’t get used to it.’

‘We’ll find all that out,’ said Marcus. Sulien shook his head a little, impatiently, as if Marcus had not quite got the point. ‘Look, it’ll be all right. Of course you’re on edge. This happens after Veii – anyone would be.’

Sulien’s mouth pulled into a tight dubious grin. ‘I’m not like this, I never have been. I don’t know why I never have been, if I feel like this now.’

‘You still often think about the cross, though,’ said Marcus softly, and indicated Sulien’s fingers, still smoothing his wrist.

Sulien looked down at his hands, which sprang hastily apart, as if of their own accord. ‘It thinks about me,’ he mumbled, and then, at Marcus’ startled look at him. ‘Oh, I don’t know what I mean by that. It’s different.’ He thought for a moment and went on, ‘It’s different, because even when it was happening, I knew what I was supposed to have done. I knew exactly why they were taking me to the cross. It was all in the open. Not like all this. And your cousin – that was just out of nowhere. Or that’s how it seemed.’

Marcus grimaced and asked, ‘Did you want me to have him killed, too?’.

Sulien was faintly surprised both at the question and, when he thought of it, at the fact that he hadn’t taken one side or another. Shouldn’t he be wanting to kill Drusus himself? But Drusus, already locked in the Palace cells, his actions revealed and explained, seemed removed from the need for anger. He might have been a dangerous machine that had been deactivated. ‘No, not really. You really wanted to hurt him, didn’t you? But he’s already done so much to you. And he’s part of your family. Of course you hate him.’

*

In the pale cell under the Golden House, Drusus felt like a wasp, battering out its life against a window pane: each separate second was so desperate, so horrifying, that sometimes his brain clenched upon itself and he thought he wanted to kill himself, when really he wanted anything but that, at all costs he wanted to live. Sometimes he clutched for comfort at the Sibyl’s promise about his death – but there was no comfort, there was nothing he could bear the thought of. He reeled from corner to corner of the room, in a continuing agony of disbelief, still loathing the fact of having been handled, of being thrown in through the door, of terrible wordless loneliness.

He had no idea how long this had gone on, when he saw that a man – dark-skinned, about his own age – had appeared behind the pane of thick, latticed glass in the door, and was watching him impassively. The man stood neutrally, very still, his hands loose at his sides, with no expression on his face, or at least none that Drusus was capable of reading. Drusus froze, unconsciously ceasing to breathe, even though he was long past recognising Varius. For what seemed like a long time they both remained unmoving. Drusus was slightly crouched, drawn together like an animal, as on the other side the man watched and watched, intently, like a scientist, and the gaze became unendurable and finally, without warning, Drusus flung himself into a forward sprint, cannoning into the glass, his fists raised, screaming so that his throat felt ragged, ‘Get
out of here! Get away from me!’ And without even knowing who the other man was, he would have burst through the glass and torn him apart, if he could.

He could not have said what he expected; he had no sense of the future any more – but it was dreadful to him that Varius did not react at all. He remained exactly where he was. All that happened was the contempt showed more clearly in the cold stare, so that Drusus, shuddering, realised dimly that contempt was what it was.

Varius understood, intellectually, why Marcus had wanted never to be near his cousin again. Perhaps that wasn’t so different from the way he himself had felt about Gabinius – or would have, if Gabinius had lived much longer. But he had felt he
must
come here, to look at Drusus with his new knowledge, even though he did not know what he expected to see – nothing that would reveal any new facts about Drusus, or make any more sense of him than they already had. And yet in some way Varius did sense how intangible people almost always were to Drusus, how hard it was to believe they persisted when he even shut his eyes or turned his back, that it was all but impossible for him to connect a name that figured in his plans with a solid human, standing in front of him. Varius could see that Drusus didn’t recognise him, although he had seen him a handful of times, and moreover must have known of him, must have agreed with Tulliola as to what was done.

The door that led up into the Palace was open behind Varius; nevertheless, the weight of the huge building pressed on him as it must on Drusus. It was impossible for Varius not to remember, to share the feeling of being shut in. Still, he stayed on and on – perhaps it was only a kind of endurance game, another minute, and another. He did not exactly indulge in any fantasy of what he would do if, say, he could bribe his way into that room. Not exactly that, although he probably could have done it – he could almost certainly ignore Marcus’ decision and take Drusus’ life – but only at the cost of wrecking his own, something that might once have seemed a reasonable trade, but did not now. And yet he continued to study Drusus, weighing him up, some part of himself quietly calculating what would happen, what it
would take, if the barrier between them suddenly disappeared. And this went on until Drusus suddenly ducked away from the window, hiding, hating himself for it, and didn’t know how much longer Varius stood there, a few feet away from him. He stayed huddled on the ground against the door, grateful despite himself that the door was there, that the glass couldn’t be broken.

*

Faustus felt he could sense Drusus through the many floors and walls, as he’d been aware of Tulliola, the one night she’d spent in the same cells, three years before. At least there had been work for him to do back then, and he’d been capable of doing it. He was grateful when at last he got the attendants to leave him to himself. He let out his breath in a gasp, beginning to shake, as he covered his face, remembering Drusus’ sympathy as he sat by his bed, then thinking of his own father, and what was left of his three sons. Himself a derelict, blind idiot, stupid enough to let someone as dangerous as Tulliola into the Palace for the most trivial of reasons, gullible enough not to see what was in front of his face. Lucius a wreck for years, and his son a monster. And Leo dead.

But when he woke in the morning, his head astonishing him with pain, in a spinning room, among unrecognisable people, he did not remember any of it.

Noriko watched the Romans coming through the high walls of this foreign city. Even through the moist and heavy air, the slow column of vehicles, blazing with bronze and semiprecious stones, was visible right from the heart of Bianjing. Two broad, straight roads quartered the city’s perfect square, crossing beneath the Palace, cutting across the lake that lay like a square-cut mirror below it, out through the four gates and away across the Yudong plain. Only occasional variations gently disrupted the symmetry: temples and gardens just inside the walls to the north-east, the old shrine-tower of glazed and moulded ceramic brick that they said looked as if it were made of iron, although to Noriko it looked more like green-tinged copper. Around the central cross the finer streets spread in an elegant, geomantic grid of lines and right angles. Every edge as if just sharpened, all ancient, all pristinely new.

Only the guard she had bribed to let her pass knew that Noriko was here, on the upper parapet of the outer fortress of the Palace. Her hand lay on one of the hot, cylindrical tiles of thick, bubbled glass that roofed the lower fort, and of which no two were the same, each modelled with flowers, Buddhas, clouds; the petals and billows outlined with subtle brush strokes of coloured enamel, jewel bright. The detail was only visible this close: the roof swept down away from her and up again, like a wave turned to ice, faintly grey-green and luminous, though not transparent. Riding the cutting peaks at the eaves stood a file of blown-glass dragons, delicately scaled with yellow. All the city was like that, an extension of the Palace itself, the blood red of inner walls just visible behind green, flowered pillars, the steep
curved roofs heavy with ridged and overlapping glass, strict in its uniform beauty. It glared like a diamond.

At night the electric lanterns lit up and glowed through the watery roofs. Inside, the steamy summer air was chilled and fresh. But except for the shrine-towers and the ramparts themselves, none of the buildings rose very high – five or six storeys at the most. On her first day in Bianjing, the polished agelessness of the place, so meticulous and so conservative, had made Noriko feel faintly defensive, without quite realising that was what she felt. Comparing Bianjing with the cities of her home, she felt that it was stiflingly antique, unreal – no one lived here who did not serve the government in some way, there were scarcely any children. But still she was obscurely afraid of finding Cynoto, Nara, Naniwa wanting beside it.

But today the city might have been nothing but a waste of grey brick; its beauty meant nothing to her, she scarcely saw it – only the approaching procession of ornate cars.

She could deflect any questions by pretending her Sinoan was worse than it was. In the plain, dark cotton robe and trousers she was wearing, she could have been one of the maids attending the Nionian Imperial party. She might have lost her way on an errand; the long, tubular, painted letter-case that hung like a quiver of arrows on her back might have held a message between the pavilions, although she did not know what she would do if anyone demanded to open it. But it was difficult, she trusted, to quarrel with the polite incomprehension she would assume.

From a narrow pocket inside her sleeve she took a little silver telescope, only as long as her hand and slender as a writing brush, and studied the convoy. Through the lenses, each vehicle became distinct, separate. Marcus Novius would be near the middle, but not actually in the central car – not quite so clear a target. She deliberated a little, sweeping the focus up and down the line, until she thought she could even guess which of the glittering roofs hid him.

The dawdling pace tormented her. She swallowed drily, flexed palms grown damp with anticipation, and was wrung by a sudden longing to go home. Before she even saw Marcus Novius step out into the courtyard below, a wrench of
nervous sickness made her bend forward, groaning quietly. She could not do this, it should not have been asked of her.