Rome Burning (8 page)

He rubbed his eyes and complained, ‘I’m wiped out.’ He’d been awake since before dawn, and when the peremptory call from the Golden House came – followed within minutes by a Palace car – he’d been about to walk the little way to his flat in Transtiberina and fall for a while onto his bed. His friends – students, apprentices, other young doctors, actresses, and, perhaps, Tancorix – would be in a wine bar somewhere, wondering where he was, but he was too tired now to worry about it much.

‘Then go to sleep. They’ll give you a room,’ said Una.

‘No.’ He had left Faustus barely two hours before, before there had been time for Marcus to visit his uncle, so Sulien had not seen him. ‘I want to see Marcus. Keep me awake.’ But by now he had sunk from a sitting position to sprawl limply on the carpet, eyes half-closed, and he grumbled when she obediently prodded his arm.

‘Today I took an oath—’ said Marcus, on the screen.

‘Sulien,’ asked Una, softly. ‘How long is this going to last?’

Sulien pulled himself up onto his elbows, slowly. He did not answer at once. ‘The Emperor will get tired very fast, much too tired to work,’ he said. ‘He’s lucky in that he doesn’t seem to have lost any speech as such, but ordering his thoughts as he wants – he’ll find that difficult. It’s hard to explain. And he
can
recover. But it’s hard for me to know how much, or how fast, and it’s always possible it could happen again.’ He recited this off pat; he’d been saying it all day.

Una frowned at the lack of a clearer answer, even though she hadn’t really expected one, but she nodded silently. She knew Sulien wasn’t keeping anything back. And even that wary suggestion of an indefinite amount of time meant something, she told herself. It meant no less than a year. But the upper limit …?

Marcus’ face vanished.

A grating little cry of anger and grief scraped through her teeth. She stood up, abruptly, and muttered, ‘Oh, damn him.’

‘Who?’

‘The Emperor. Why can’t he die properly?’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Sulien, dismayed.

‘All right, why can’t he die or get better and leave us in peace? Either way would be better than this. For everyone.’

‘Poor man,’ demurred Sulien, uncomfortably, looking away from her. He was pretty sure Faustus would be dead if not for him.

‘“
Poor man
,”’ echoed Una, half with scoffing irony, half with a kind of experimental openness to contrition at what she’d said. She drooped a little, wearily. She conceded, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Sulien also got to his feet. They weren’t children in a hiding place. The soft carpet under them glowed darkly with silks. Across the walls spread the coppery fresco of an orchard, the falling russet leaves touched here and there with real gold. Tending golden apples on a fragile bronze tree, the Hesperides crouched: gilded, secretive nymphs guarded by
the low muscular length of a coiling dragon, rippling and cramped in its gold and auburn scales. Quite inconspicuous on a peak far in the background, Atlas could just be seen, bowed beneath the weight of the sunset sky. Two London slaves should have no right to be here. And even if Sulien had little capacity to feel out of place anywhere, he knew his sister did.

He asked, ‘Will you stay here, with Marcus?’

‘Yes,’ said Una, her voice suddenly flat. ‘At least as long as I can.’

‘As long as you can? What do you mean?’

For a second her face seemed to flicker open, painfully and involuntarily, as she met his eyes, but then she looked away, at the room, and ran her finger over the arched back of a chair, trying to pinch a sardonic smile onto her lips. ‘Well, I’ll manage. At least they keep it clean. They obviously know where to buy decent slaves.’ She held out the dustless finger, dropped it, then scrubbed at her face. ‘Hundreds and hundreds of them.’

Sulien approached her, quietly. ‘I just talk to them. Tell them where you come from. It’s better that way.’

‘But you have something to say because you’re
doing
something. You can tell them about the clinic. What can I say to them? “Hold out, it’s all going to change”?’

‘Why not? When you were in London, when you were working in those places – if someone who’d been a slave had said that to you—’

‘I’d have thought she could stick it. I’d have thought, you’re out of it and I’m not, fine, but shut up and leave me to it.’

Sulien sighed. ‘Is that what people think when I talk to them?’

Una looked at him quickly, suddenly remorseful. ‘No. You’re different.’ Then Marcus came and had to knock on the locked door; they let him in, apologising, and saw that he looked exactly as he had on the longvision screen, which startled them, although of course they should have expected it.

Just before the broadcast Marcus had gone at last to see his uncle. He came in thinking that he had to tell Una and
Sulien what Faustus had said, quickly, because Una would know in a minute, anyway. He’d forgotten what he looked like until he saw the flicker of surprise on their faces. He pulled the gown off and threw it messily onto a chair, hugged Sulien – but he kept on the ring because despite its weight he’d already forgotten it was there.

*

Faustus had fallen asleep even before Marcus had left the room. When he woke he made Makaria show him a few minutes of Marcus’ speech before the longvision screen somehow dazzled him and he was knocked unwillingly again into sleep. But later he eased open his eyes slowly and peered into the hushed room. Half his body lay beside him, a weighty jumble of aching wood, the wreck of trees after a hurricane.

Marcus, sitting by his bed, had asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ and Faustus repeated sourly, ‘How do
you
feel?’ He was disgusted by the altered sound of his own voice; his tongue seemed to push against a dry barrier in his mouth, expecting every moment to clear it, but failing.

Marcus had looked confused and concerned, perhaps suspecting Faustus was parroting him mindlessly. ‘I mean,’ said Faustus, rankling at the idea, ‘how are you taking to it? They’ve given you the axe and rods and everything, the ring, all of it haven’t they – are you enjoying it?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Marcus.

‘Have to enjoy it a bit, or you go under,’ remarked Faustus, although he knew he was wasting time; he could feel that he had perhaps fifteen minutes to get anything serious said, before the obliterating exhaustion overtook him again. ‘Oh, you’ll be all right.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Too young though. I want Makaria and Drusus to help you.’ Makaria gave an exclamation of surprise at this, but Faustus ignored it. ‘And that’s only fair. Got to try and be fair to Drusus, considering everything.’ Because of course he knew how hurt Drusus must have been, when he named Marcus as his heir.

‘All right,’ agreed Marcus, though he felt a little stir of
trepidation at the mention of Drusus. Marcus had barely seen his other cousin in the three years since the end of his time in hiding: a strained conversation on the long-dictor – both of them pointedly skirting the fact of Faustus’ decision – Drusus congratulating Marcus that his health was no longer in question after the horrible days he’d spent in the Galenian Sanctuary; an exchange of greetings at one of Faustus’ birthday parties, that was all. Drusus was almost never in Rome now.

‘And I know you’ve got all these plans, like Leo,’ burst out Faustus suddenly. ‘But you’d better remember this is a, this is a, this time is – what with the war …’

‘There isn’t a war yet.’

‘I
know
,’ said Faustus, in almost a hoarse cry, and lay for a few seconds, glowering mutely. ‘But you can’t – knock it all sideways, not when things are like this.’

Marcus was silent for a while. ‘You mean slavery, don’t you, Uncle?’

‘It’s all very well. I don’t want to get back and have to deal with the mess,’ said Faustus, as bullishly as his crooked voice would allow. ‘Do what you like when you’re Emperor, but you’re not yet.’

‘I know I’m not,’ Marcus assured him quietly, though he was feeling more and more anxious. The truth of it was he thought Faustus was right. Rome could not bear the pressure of a possible war and the huge changes he wanted to make at the same time. He weighed what Faustus had just said and decided it was, intentionally or not, a warning: ‘I don’t want to get back and have to deal with the mess’. If Marcus outlawed slavery and if, during the aftershock, Faustus did indeed take power again, he might simply permit it once more. And then – Marcus wasn’t even sure he could imagine becoming Emperor after such a failure, but if it did happen, how could you begin again, how would Rome tolerate it?

But he remembered himself asking Varius, ‘How do I know I’d ever do the things I think I would? Perhaps it would always seem too difficult.’

*

Thinking stiffly over all this, it occurred to Faustus that he could just have given it up. ‘Even when I get better, I won’t take back the ring or the rest of it.’ That would make things easier for Marcus.

Why, when he was so desperately tired, when so much of him would be so relieved to let it go, could he not bear the thought? In fact he was furious; he could have hit someone. He lay there and swore wrathfully, aloud, into the darkness. No, he did not want to! It was too bad! He wouldn’t do it! He had been nearly forty when he became Emperor, but suddenly it seemed to him that between childhood and his accession, he couldn’t remember much. He concentrated, alarmed that perhaps his memory had been damaged, maybe a whole third of his life was gone and he’d never get it back. Makaria’s birth. Disappointment that she was a girl. Her little feet – yes, he could remember it, but it was hard work; he stopped and let his head fall back on the pillow with a sigh, and for some minutes had no choice but to lie waiting, empty, in the quiet dark.

Suppose he’d said he’d stay out of the way. Put out to grass. What then? He sneered at the idea of pottering around in a garden, like poor Lucius – but really all he saw when he tried to imagine a life outside the Golden House was another assault of nothing.

He pictured his nephew, and instead of the worried boy who’d been at his bedside a few hours before, he saw Marcus framed again on a screen with the ring on his hand – and despite himself, Faustus found he was overcome with dislike. A nasty little upstart; a young crook who’d done him out of his power and his health too, somehow. He knew distantly that this was cruel and unfair, that really he loved Marcus, but it didn’t stop him: in his mind he shrieked viciously, ‘Sorry to disappoint you, I’m still here! I’m not dying just because it’s convenient!’ – forgetting that he had been thinking about abdicating, not about death.

At first the fact that his uncle was still alive seemed only a technicality to Drusus; all he understood from the message was that it had happened, his cousin would be Emperor, not him, not even – for he knew what the will said – if Marcus died. He said the expected things and then, when he had turned off the longdictor, smashed the first thing that came to hand, which was a blue glass jug of wine, and he felt a moment of peace at the violence of the sound. There
must
be something that could be done, he wanted to plead. He crouched over the wet fragments, sobbed.

There was no one he could tell how wrong this was; not, above all, the one person – ‘Oh, Tulliola,’ he said, and pain dragged on his chest at the sound of her name, for he hardly ever dared utter it.

He stood up and destroyed the glass from which he’d been drinking as well, but it was too deliberate, there was no more relief to be had that way. There was a mirror over the mantel, and as he turned with another smothered cry, he was arrested by the sight of his own face, knotted in grief, and stared, the expression freezing there. So that is what you look like when you are suffering, he said to himself from far off as if watching through a telescope, as the face untwisted slowly, dully curious, gazed back.

He knew he would have to go back to Rome, but he assumed all that was required of him was a quick, dutiful visit, which would be painful. With Marcus victorious there and the memory of Tulliola, Rome was ruined for him.

He was in Byzantium, staying in a tall, rented mansion. He had always grown bored of houses quickly; he’d never
settled anywhere even in Rome. But there the whole city had been his house, there he’d felt that there was no more need to confine himself in any one part of it than to shut himself up now, in a single room, for ever. He’d moved as he might cross the corridor or mount the stairs. It was true that Rome had a mark, a puncture at the centre of it – the shameful and ridiculous presence of his father, nestled in the Caelian house with Ulpia, coddling the stupid secret that had been inflicted also on Drusus himself. But it was Rome he loved. Now he felt driven wearily from place to place, because nowhere was right; almost every city was an imitation of Rome, but never a satisfying one. So he’d tried peace – beautiful places: the Istrian coast, Gomant in India – and he could see the beauty clearly enough; it would even lift him a little way, but what were you supposed to do in places like that? Within days he would be bored to death and lonely.

Of course he could easily surround himself with people anywhere – other young aristocrats and their lovers or slaves – but they circulated more naturally in a city, they did not turn as stagnant.

He tried calling his mother, but the slave who came to the longdictor told him she was busy and could it not wait until the usual time? For she only expected to hear from her son twice a month, on the ides and the calends. Drusus blurted bitterly, ‘Tell her I’ve got to come back to Rome and I thought she might want to see me, for appearances’ sake.’ But turning the longdictor off he felt angry for having forgotten himself so much – what was the use? And perhaps it was even true, perhaps she really was busy.