Rome Burning (28 page)

*

Una slunk quickly through the Palace, her shoulders raised as though she was trying to avoid detection, like a trespasser. Her alarm was more than she could reason away. Not just at the delay, but at how near Drusus still was. She wondered if, in default of Marcus, she should try to explain to Faustus what she knew. But from what she knew of him and his current state, she didn’t think it would be easy to reach him in the first place, or that persuading him would save any time. And she knew Drusus had tried repeatedly to visit the Emperor; what if he tried again? She could not stand another encounter with him – the thought made the revulsion itch and shiver across her skin again. And the fear, she thought severely to herself. Even if it wasn’t rational, she might as well call it by its name.

She went into Marcus’ rooms – she didn’t think of them as being in any way hers – and locked the door, thinking,
there
, now control yourself. She sat down stiffly on a chair, but at once found herself on her feet again, stalking restlessly back and forth. Passing the mirror she saw her face looking hard and agitated, flushed by the heat, and she distracted herself
briefly by washing her face and repairing her make-up. And it was now that she found the Imperial ring, looking small and unimportant, lying by a basin of Sinoan porcelain. She looked at it blankly. Marcus must have taken it off to wash his hands.

She turned on the longvision to see his face, talking about Bianjing and Cynoto, to reassure herself that he was still alive. Drusus could have done nothing to hurt him in the past ten minutes. She was aware of servants passing from time to time a few rooms away; still, the room felt isolated. There was no reason to think she needed any defences at all, and yet the lock on the door did not seem enough. She didn’t like the fact that anyone looking for her would come here first. She wanted to be out of the Palace altogether.

She went into the next room and lifted the longdictor circlet to talk to the stewards’ office in one of the outer buildings of the Palace. ‘I need to go and meet Caesar when his speech is finished. Can you send a car to the Septizonium?’ she said uncomfortably, knowing that she would not be refused, but feeling ashamed of asking, compromised. She would have preferred to simply vanish out of the Palace and into the anonymity she’d felt in the Veii street, but it did not work like that. Arriving in a Palace car, she could be pretty sure of getting through to Marcus quickly.

Still, she felt easier for knowing what to do, and she sprang to her feet with a sudden burst of unnecessary energy. But she stood for a second more, as if she had forgotten something, and then, before unlocking the door and flinging it open, she seized the gold ring, and plunged it into the pocket of her dress, gripping it there. She would give it back to Marcus when she reached him. In the meantime, it could act as an amulet, a little shield.

*

On instinct, Drusus raced towards Marcus’ apartments, but that wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough – he needed something to use against her. But he had something already, she’d given it to him herself even as she was working to trap him, priding herself for it, the little bitch. He ran into a guest room where there was a longdictor hanging in a niche
on the wall, snatched up the circlet and pressed it fiercely onto his head as if it were a helmet, as if he were arming himself. He entered the code for the palace’s longdictor exchange, tightened his throat, preparing to make his voice a little softer, to alter its rhythm, and said, ‘I’m calling from the Transtiberine Slave Clinic. It’s very important. I need to speak to Una the freedwoman, you know who I mean? It concerns her brother.’

The young slave – no, not a slave now, Drusus kept forgetting – answered, ‘Leave your details and I can see that your message reaches her in due course.’

A little spurt of inspiration rose through Drusus. He did know something about the clinic; he’d had his men watch Sulien for a good week, before Veii. ‘I understand you have procedures to go through, but she knows me, my name’s Aulus. I work with her brother, Sulien. I’m happy to wait while she confirms who I am. But this is
very serious
. I … I can’t believe I have to do this.’ He said the last words – which after all, were true – in a shaken mutter, as if to himself; and deliberately he let out an unsteady, audible breath. It was easy; he wanted to sound as if he’d had a shock, and he had.

‘Well, I’ll see what I can do, sir.’

There was silence while, in the exchange office, the young man tried the longdictor in Marcus’ rooms, and then, when that failed, someone called across the room to him to say that Caesar’s girl had asked for a car a few minutes before, and must be on her way to the front gates.

Drusus only knew that the voice came back and said, ‘She’s not in the Imperial suite. But I might be able to find her,’ which was exactly what he had hoped for.

‘Oh – good, thank you. Yes, please hurry,’ said Drusus, in continuing, earnest distress. ‘Wait. What are you going to do? Where is she going to take the longdictor? Does she have a private room?’ He was pretty certain she did not. Marcus wouldn’t have to hoard her away furtively, as he himself had to with Amaryllis.

‘No, not exactly,’ the voice said. ‘She’ll speak to you from Caesar’s apartments, or the gatehouse, I suppose, if it’s that urgent.’

‘Oh. No, no. You don’t understand. Look – don’t repeat any of this to her, because it’s better if I tell her everything – but it is very bad news.’ He made a snagging, agitated little sound, nearly a sob. ‘I don’t even know how I’m going to tell her, but I want to try and make this easier for her. That’s the least I can do. You have to help me. If people are going to be running in and out – even Caesar himself …’

‘He’s addressing the Forum.’

‘Even so.’ He paused, the next part was difficult to phrase – if he was unlucky, or if he was not careful, he’d get only a promise of compliance and no information. ‘She really shouldn’t hear this somewhere she has to worry about the slaves eavesdropping. I mean the servants. It should be somewhere private. Is there somewhere like that?’

‘Yes,’ the young man answered. His voice was beginning to catch some of the unhappiness in Drusus’. ‘That should be possible. Except …’

‘What?’

‘If it’s bad, shouldn’t someone be with her? At least, nearby?’

‘No,’ said Drusus positively. ‘I can tell you from personal experience.’ His voice shook with intensity, a little internal scoff at what nonsense this was vanishing out of his memory as he spoke, so that it almost seemed true.

‘All right, I’m sorry,’ said the operator dejectedly.

‘Then where?’ asked Drusus, softly, as if it were just a reasonable question, as if the answer could not fairly be kept from someone who was plainly distraught. There were two or three places he was hoping for above all, another few that would be riskier, but still possible.

The man sighed. ‘Well, I was thinking, we have some older offices …’

‘An office?’ said Drusus doubtfully.

‘They’re not really used as offices any more. It’s more like a little function room. It’s quite … peaceful, anyway.’

Drusus let his eyes close, feeling a moment of rest. He knew the Golden House. Since Faustus had built the glazed oval towers that framed the Palace, the old rooms on the top floor, where the lesser Palace officials had once been packed, had ceased to have much use. They might have been
given over to slave quarters, except that they had access to the Palace roof, where Faustus had meant to make a garden around the blue dome. But the garden had never appeared, and the old offices had been reduced to a number of almost untouched reception rooms, decorated with the excess of treasures and gifts from the rest of the Palace, where occasionally a visiting governor might still hold a meeting or take a guest up the stairs to look down on the city. Not many of them would still have working longdictors.

‘Fine,’ he said shakily. ‘Thank you. When she’s had some time, I’m sure she’ll be grateful for what you’ve done for her. I am, anyway. I’ll be waiting to talk to her as soon as she’s ready.’

‘How can she reach you?’

‘It’s all right. She knows the code. Thank you again,’ said Drusus. And he turned off the longdictor, dragged off the headset and ran. He had only a few minutes to find and prepare the room.

*

Una walked towards the high barricade of the Septizonium as fast as the swaddling heat would allow her. Already she felt the relief of leaving Drusus behind, that she was out of his reach.

But, like a memory of a mistake reluctantly surfacing, she began to realise someone was coming after her – not Drusus, nor anyone she knew – but someone who knew that, against his will, he was going to harm her.

She turned round and stood waiting stiffly, as a boy about her own age approached. He said, ‘Madam,’ and bobbed a bow which made Una recoil a little in embarrassed, apprehensive dismay.

‘Don’t,’ she said, involuntarily curt, remembering Sulien’s advice and adding clumsily, ‘We both used to be slaves.’ She saw how the reminder made his misery worse. And already he was so sorry for her.

‘I … I have a message. That is, Aulus from Transtiberina wants to speak to you, as soon as possible—’

‘About my brother,’ she finished, blankly enough, sparing him. She could see he had nothing more to tell her. And
she could also see that he was sure Sulien was dead, or just perhaps, about to die.

‘Yes,’ he said, wretchedly. ‘Will you … will you come with me?’

She followed him wordlessly, reduced to one paralysed truncated plea in a rigid body: silent stammerings of ‘No’, ‘Please’ and ‘Not after the factory’. But
of course
after the factory, that was the point – they’d had a good warning something was wrong, of course it hadn’t gone away. He shouldn’t have persuaded her to leave; she should not have let him; she should not have left. She walked feeling that she could not think, but it was not true, she could supply innumerable terrible things that could have happened to him.

She didn’t question where they were going at all. It was as if she were being guided through an entirely unknown house. Finally she seemed to emerge, as if she’d been walking with her breath held and her eyes shut, to realise they’d climbed to the top of the Palace, among dim, cluttered, gentle rooms, and that it was quiet.

The boy showed her towards a door that led into a long, irregularly shaped room, in which all she saw was the longdictor, built into a desk at the far end.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked, almost in a whisper, because these were the first words either of them had spoken since they’d entered the Palace.

‘Thank you. No,’ she said, faintly relieved that he seemed to be going to leave. Drusus had been right in a strange way, she didn’t want a spectator to what she thought was about to happen.

She remained immobile, outside the room until he skulked guiltily away. Then she forced herself in as if the desk was a marathon away, as if she had to pace her strength to reach it. She was halfway across the room when some warning, something other than the agonised apprehension about Sulien, began trying to bat and flutter at her, moth-like, and at the same moment she heard footsteps pounding closer, outside the room. She turned just as the door, which she’d already pulled to, banged shut, with an instantaneous grinding click, as the lock moved.

*

Drusus had raced, panting, across the top floor, at first throwing open doors, in an anguish of urgency and frustration, gritting his teeth at failures of his memory, but quickly he made himself act methodically. Of course if she wasn’t in her rooms, it was probably because she’d decided to lose no time in moving against him; she’d have gone after Marcus. Oh, if she’d already left … Drusus felt another attack of terror, but it was not worth distressing himself, he must work on what he could. Most likely the boy wouldn’t take her too far from the central stairs. And he would surely have chosen the best of the possible rooms. At first, simply looking for function rooms with longdictors, Drusus narrowed the potentials to four, and in two of those he found to his fierce relief that the old, heavy longdictors were dead. Of the final pair of rooms, one, he saw at once, would be far better for his purposes, and it felt more likely too – it was larger, lighter, its furniture a little faded but still handsome, and indeed someone must have been here fairly recently, for on the desk was a vase full of flowers only just wilted.

Drusus had charged in, scrambling to do what was necessary, terrified that Una and the servant would come and find him there in the midst of it, and when it was done he ran out with his arms full of hasty plunder, the vase included. He flung everything into the other room, which – rejoicing that he’d told the operator that Una should be the one to make the call – he then eliminated by finding its key hanging on a hook near the doorway and locking it. He went back to the place he had chosen, took the key from there as well, and then fled down the hall, looking for a safe vantage point on the trap. At last he crouched, trembling, concealed in the doorway of a dusty office, about a hundred yards from the tranquil room. And though he ached with hatred and fright, the next thing that had to be done did not seem difficult to him. Una would be too busy worrying about her brother to notice much anyway, wouldn’t she? But until she appeared, until she was inside the room and alone, he must be camouflaged. He mustn’t think.

It did not seem to him a matter of becoming calm, or
vanishing from himself into emptiness and peace. Instead he tried to freeze solid every flicker in his skull, and sat staring inflexibly down the passage at the open door to the trap, barely breathing, as if all his existence was in the surfaces of his eyes, two little curved oval plates, which seemed hard and inorganic, like the glass eyes fitted into the heads of statues.