Savage City (38 page)

‘Did you know?’ asked Drusus, scanning her face. ‘Who told you? You are not to receive information without my sanction.’

‘This might teach you that you cannot always control what people know,’ said Makaria.

‘Who told you?’

Makaria continued to watch the horizon as if he wasn’t there.

‘Tell me,’ demanded Drusus.

‘A man from the village. He’s gone now,’ said Makaria, ‘on the ferry. I don’t know where he went, or who told him.’

Drusus grimaced. ‘Then you know of these claims she made in court? We’ve been questioning the Praetorian who was there when Marcus died.’

‘He was a good officer,’ said Makaria softly. ‘He helped.’

‘Yes, yes, no doubt. Is it true, then, that there was a piece of paper?’

‘That?’ said Makaria, with a harsh, miserable snort. ‘You’ve come all this way over some nonsense I scribbled down to comfort him when he was dying? He wasn’t rational – he was in pain. I’d have said anything he wanted. I might just as well have sung him a song or told him a fairy story.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I have no idea. I had other things on my mind that day, or have you forgotten what it was like? Maybe I dropped it in the Colosseum, I don’t know. If you haven’t found it in my rooms in the Palace I’m sure it’s long gone.’

Drusus had the house searched. He and Makaria sat stiffly drinking wine in the central hall, Makaria occasionally flinching and sighing while the Praetorians crashed from room to room. They opened the safe to expose jewels Makaria never wore, upended tables and chairs, emptied drawers and chests, dumped out boxes of papers from the library study and library, shook through the pages of every book. Drusus wondered uneasily about the practicality of searching the rest of the island, interrogating the villagers. Someone might know where it was; they would confess if they were frightened enough.

And yet could his men ever hope to check every inch of an island that must cover thirty square miles? Even under watch, Makaria would not have needed much help to hide something her guards hadn’t known existed. And she might be telling the truth, and the paper might have been long since lost or destroyed.

‘What would you do if you found it? Even if you tore it up with your own hands, would it really make any difference?’ asked Makaria, exasperated. ‘I wouldn’t be scared of a scrap of notepaper if I were you. But if that girl’s put doubts in people’s head about you, I don’t know what you can do to get them out.’

‘The people have no doubts about me,’ said Drusus.

A woman came out from one of the rooms, apparently driven into the open by the upheaval. Her long red dress was so plain that for a moment Drusus took her for a slave, but seeing him she dropped an unthinkingly aristocratic curtsey and he saw that there were tiny rubies in her ears and she wore a plain gold chain around her neck, very like one that Makaria wore herself. She was perhaps halfway between his age and Makaria’s. Unbound wiry black hair hung to her shoulders, and her black eyebrows and long Greek features gave her handsome face a slightly severe cast, at odds with her actual expression, which was self-conscious and faintly apologetic. Her skin was suntanned, her body solid and robustly graceful.

‘This must be Hypatia,’ he said. He had had no inkling of the woman’s existence until taking the throne and turning this sudden scrutiny on his cousin’s life, but the Praetorians had told him that not only did Hypatia share Makaria’s home now, she’d been living with her for the last ten years or more. Drusus extended a hand. ‘Come and sit down.’

Hypatia obeyed, smiling apprehensively. She asked, ‘Will you be staying here tonight, your Majesty?’

‘I think so, yes,’ said Drusus.

‘Hypatia is— She manages my household and my accounts. I prefer to have a woman do it,’ announced Makaria, a little abruptly. She avoided looking at her friend.

A Praetorian emerged from the aula and said, ‘Would you come to the longdictor, Sir?’

Drusus came back into the room a minute later, and beamed at Makaria and Hypatia, who had remained sitting at a distance from each other, in oppressed silence. He announced, in wonder, ‘It’s extraordinary – we’ve got them both. The brother – Sulien – he as good as handed himself over. You’ll never believe how they caught him.’

Now Makaria looked stricken. She tensed for a moment, as if to rise from her chair, before slumping back and biting off whatever appalled response had come to her lips. She took a grim swig of her wine while beginning to blink rapidly against tears.

Drusus felt limp and dazzled with relief and gladness, all the tension he had felt over Una’s desperate posturing in front of the cameras and some pitiful scrawling of Marcus’ seemed suddenly silly. He said, ‘Well, the games will get the New Year off to a good start this time!’

Makaria’s control broke and she stood up, banging down her glass on the table. ‘Drusus, what is wrong with you – how do you justify any of this? You must know how indefensible it is. Leo and Clodia? Salvius’
wife and children? These two now – did you
want
to be a tyrant? Una and Sulien were the ones who told the vigiles where to find Dama’s camp outside Rome; they did as much as anyone could to try and stop him. The boy tried to save Marcus’ life, I saw it. I don’t see how they could possibly be any threat to you now – and even if somehow they are, can you really believe this is right?’

Drusus frowned, and then looked from Makaria to Hypatia and stared at her, watching a dark blush spread slowly across her face.

He said softly to Makaria, ‘I told you, if you had people you care for here, to be careful.’

Makaria sat down again, cowed, but still she moaned, almost to herself, ‘Can’t you explain it to me, just once?’

‘It’s necessity,’ said Drusus. His expression was very open and frank.

‘For whom is it necessary?’ said Makaria, feeling for a moment as if she might be on the brink of some discovery, for one or both of them: ‘For Rome, or for you?’

But Drusus just blinked and shook his head, looking irritable and puzzled.

Nevertheless, he let the search continue into the night. The guards were still ransacking the house when Makaria went to bed. She lay in the dark and cried quietly, remembering pressing a key into Sulien’s hand in a little study in the palace, hiding him from Drusus and giving him another year and a half to live. She felt disgraced by her helplessness now; she felt disgraced even by the proximity of Drusus’ blood to her own.

The bedroom door eased open and Hypatia came running barefoot across the room and dived under the covers beside her.

‘What are you thinking?’ whispered Makaria, wiping her eyes. ‘Go back to your room – what if they find you’re not there and come looking for you?’

‘They’ve been over all the bedrooms already,’ said Hypatia, shifting closer and flinging an arm across Makaria’s waist. ‘They’re downstairs. They won’t come back.’

Makaria’s body softened against Hypatia’s but she said, ‘You should go. You should leave on the next ferry. You heard what he said. It’s not safe for you to stay with me. I can’t do a thing to protect you and I couldn’t stand it if he hurt you.’

‘Why do you say these things when you know I won’t leave you?’ Hypatia reproached her, leaning over her and kissing her lips.

Makaria seized hold of her in a kind of rage, impatiently gathering up her nightdress and pulling it off. They moved fiercely and yet with
terrible caution, tense with the effort of keeping quiet, while part of Makaria’s mind reflected that it was one small, mildly ridiculous benefit of the constraints upon them that the secrecy and anguish renewed them as lovers; when they touched now it was earnest, dramatic, nothing of the companionable routine of ten years. Whispered declarations spouted from them when they were alone as if they were naïve, astonished girls, barely knowing the first thing about each other or themselves.

They dared not sleep beside each other, but they couldn’t bring themselves to part yet. They lay there audaciously long, hearing the thuds and footsteps from below grow quieter and more intermittent.

‘If he found it—’ whispered Makaria.

‘He never will.’

Makaria sighed. ‘I’m going to free the slaves we’ve got left as soon as he’s gone. Not that any of us here are very free now, but at least they’ll be able to leave. I can’t be the one to look after that piece of paper and not do that. Although I don’t know what it’s worth, just to keep it hidden, when I’m stuck here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told him it didn’t mean anything. I should have told the truth. I’m a coward; I’m a hypocrite, I should have done everything differently. Oh, I hope Marcus can’t see what’s going to happen to those two – and I can’t help them, I can’t do anything.’

Hypatia smoothed Makaria’s hair in silence for a while. At last she murmured hesitantly, afraid of making it worse, ‘At least . . . at least they’ll be together.’

They wouldn’t let him stay in the same cell as Una, no matter how desperately he begged. The air down here felt stiffened and filthy, like a dried-out dishcloth: too thick to breathe, or to see through. Sometimes Sulien heard someone crying out and beating against a cell door and thought it was himself, and then realised dizzily that it must have been some other prisoner nearby – he was simply sitting, staring at the door, and couldn’t move even to flex out the cramp in his legs. The cell was too small for him to lie at full length. There was only a bench to sleep on, and since he’d been there they’d thrown a lump of bread in through the hatch in the door only twice – or was it three times? He thought that was fair, that was all right; you did not want to go out there rested or well-fed, you wanted your reserves to give out as quickly as possible.

At first he’d shouted Una’s name – he wasn’t sure for how long. It was hard to keep track of time, which seemed to move in swerves and
lunges and skips. There was one dull reddish light in the ceiling that blinked and flickered as the building shook, which was nearly constantly, with the pounding of feet in the stands above, the humming of machinery, fireworks, and the irregular thuds of whatever battles were going on out in the sunlight. It was as if the Colosseum were a gigantic vehicle, its hidden engine jolting and steaming, driving endlessly forward over stony ground – and yet, though he felt it through the bricks all the time, he could scarcely hear the sound from overhead, except when it stopped. The tunnels below ground seethed with their own noises: cages on wheels and trolleys carrying weapons or props rattled past the door of his cell, with guards, slaves and stage-hands always shouting to each other, and tannoys keeping a continual relay of summons and instructions: ‘Cleaners to corridor twelve,’ or ‘Medical attendants on standby at the Victory Bay,’ or ‘Provocateurs and katar fighters: this is your five-minute call.’ Only for a few hours at night was it almost quiet, which was both a relief and somehow worse at the same time: his senses glowed with exhausted release even as he shrank in horror from the renewed capacity to think clearly.

But he did think about his life during this time. It took an effort – even now he disliked deliberately looking back; it frightened him. But he thought especially of the last four and a half years, since Una had saved him in London, and measured the worth of them, knew how glad he was he’d had them. And when he tried to imagine what this time would be like outside the Colosseum, knowing Una was alone inside, it seemed worse even than this, it really did. And when it happened, it couldn’t be as bad as crucifixion, it wouldn’t go on as long.

But he wanted to say these things aloud, or something else, something better – to Una; he should have said them in the van, while there was still a chance. But how could he have let it come to this, how could he have failed so totally? And where was Una that even now, in the near-silence, either she couldn’t hear him calling or he couldn’t hear her answer?

The smell of the place was as heavy in the air as the noise, and it throbbed and changed through the day: caustic detergent in the morning over an old unexpunged base of blood, sweat and animal excrement which swelled and bloomed as the hours passed, before slaves raced through the corridors again, dousing the floor and walls with disinfectant and subduing it.

And sometimes he could hear the dogs barking.

It could not be that he had done it for nothing, that each of them would go up to the arena separately, alone. It couldn’t be like that. Nothing could be that cruel.

*

When they came he was as overcome with physical incredulity as if he’d had no warning, no choice. He blurted, ‘No— Please—’ as they took hold of him, and as useless, as undignified as it was, he would have fought them if he could. But there was no strength in him; his arms swung weakly against their grip, his legs wouldn’t hold him up. They half-carried him, his feet skimming and stumbling along the floor, down a passage, up a flight of stairs. They had to jostle him past so many people as they reached the floor above – he could not take in a thing about what they were doing, only that there were so many. Then there was a new, acrid note of hot metal in the bloody daytime smell, and he turned his head to see a man, ludicrously clad in fancy-dress, with a black hood over a beaked mask, heating iron wands in a brazier. Sulien’s mind, reeling, supplied the purpose of the wands: to press against the bodies – his body – to be certain it was dead. He saw the black column of a lift-shaft descending to the crowded floor, the doors towards which they were taking him, and he began to shout again for Una.