Savage City (6 page)

Una pulled roughly free of his hand as he caught at her shoulder, but came to a standstill a few feet from Marcus. ‘I wanted to look at him, that’s all,’ she said, in a flat, almost normal voice.

She looked down to the paper in her hands and began straightening out the creases she had made. Stiffly she handed it back to Makaria. ‘Is this going to happen?’ she demanded. ‘Who’ll make this happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Makaria. ‘I’ll try. I will try.’

Una’s mouth quirked bitterly, then her face went blank again.

Sulien stammered, reluctantly, ‘Who’s—? Who’s going to be . . .?’

‘Salvius,’ said Makaria. ‘He said Salvius.’

Sulien found that though he’d asked, for now he barely cared who the Emperor would be – except that to think of Marcus, lying there in
agony and knowing what was coming, and still planning, for afterwards . . .

There was a sharp
whirr
and a clang of metal as at last the vigiles finished cutting through the beam. Sulien watched as two of them strained to lift the remaining section and let it fall on the paving beside the body, the sound loud and ugly as it struck the stone. Una did not look, but flinched, hard.

Makaria suggested quietly, ‘Perhaps you should go home.’ She added, ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t say that,’ muttered Sulien, reaching to put his arm round Una, who started moving briskly before he could touch her.

He hurried after her. The cut-glass lamps in the passage had gone out, leaving dim emergency lighting coating the frescoed walls like disinfectant. Ahead, Una was a colourless shadow, walking unsteadily but very fast, her head down and her hair hanging forward. Even when Sulien caught up with her he couldn’t see her face.

Without looking up she murmured, very quietly, ‘You ought to stay.’

‘What?’

Una gestured blankly at the wall. ‘Could help people.’

‘Oh . . .’ Sulien slowed, hampered by a moment of tired, half-incredulous guilt, then shook his head and strode on. ‘I’m not going to leave you alone.’

‘I’m better on my own,’ said Una in a chilly, remote voice.

Sulien tried to stifle an unexpected and unreasoning sting of hurt.

Una sighed, and he could see the effort when she turned her face towards him. More softly, she said, ‘I’ll meet you later.’

‘No, Una—’

‘I’ll wait for you at the bridge.’

Sulien began to feel an urgent dread of letting her out of his sight. He was afraid to examine it too closely. ‘There are other doctors. Let’s just go home and—’ And what? he thought. What would they ever do?

‘You’re different. There’s too many people hurt.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Una said, still distant, but certain.

Sulien felt strangely unnerved by this, as automatic trust, that of course she must be right about him, jostled alongside a disconcerted conviction that no, he’d been telling the plain truth: he didn’t care. But he couldn’t muster any argument that would stand up.

‘An hour,’ he said, unhappily. ‘I’m not— I won’t stay any longer than that.’

Una said nothing, just walked even faster than before, and when
they reached the gates and shuffled through the scrum of Praetorians and vigiles into the crowd beyond, he lost her immediately.

In the ambulance, Drusus kicked into consciousness as if out of a nightmare. A bright crest of pain burned on his head, and more studs of pain were scattered across his back and along his arm. Gasping, he asked, ‘What happened to me?’

Someone tried to hold him down, hushing him. ‘Try to keep still.’

‘I’m all right, somebody tell me—’

‘Let us make sure of that before we worry about anything else, all right, sir?’

‘No, I have to— I have to—’ He had a sense of electric urgency so strong it was almost terror, and it shouted in his throbbing head:
Now, now!
as he repeated, ‘What happened?’

But he began to remember: an explosion overhead, a cataract of glass pouring in, like the understanding that had struck the very moment before:
glass on the ground
. . .

He knew his left arm was broken, he recognised the sensation of bone grating on bone when he moved it. Something was wrong with his knee. His right hand came away from his face coated in half-clotted blood. His skin was cold. But he remembered the heat of the chamber beneath the temple, at Delphi.

It could have been worse. He’d known worse.

‘My family?’ he asked, tentatively, hearing his voice shake. He
was
afraid, of not being ready, and he could recognise this as a terrible day, even if it meant the resurrection of his hopes.

No one would tell him. But with this flood of adrenalin in his veins, Drusus began to think he already knew.

Salvius and his family were also at the Games. His son Decimus was sitting beside him and when the bomb went off Salvius hurled himself down on top of the boy as instantaneously as if he’d been expecting it. Noise bulldozed across the Colosseum; his daughters’ screams were the closest, spraying forward on the explosion’s surge, and Salvius had reacted so fast it took him a moment to remember the orange flash somewhere on the left of his field of vision. He heard the roof groan, then a sequence of heavy impacts pounding across the arena, and he tensed over his son as shrapnel rattled down into the seats. Decimus felt sparrow-fragile against him, his heart racing beneath ribs narrower than Salvius’ fingers. Salvius shouted, ‘Stay down,’ as sharp fragments bounced from marble and brick and sprayed like handfuls of pebbles on his back.

It slowed and stopped. Salvius raised himself, keeping Decimus down. His wife, curled on the paving next to him, was cautiously lifting her head, and Salvilla, their youngest girl, was clinging to her, beginning to cry. ‘Come on, you’re not hurt,’ he said gruffly, checking her over with a glance. Letting go of his son, he looked for his three elder daughters and their husbands, who had been seated behind him, calling, ‘Is anyone hurt?’

No one had worse than shallow cuts. Salvius looked across the arena – and saw the wreck of the Imperial box, the devastation around it. ‘Gods above,’ he whispered.

They were in the best seats, almost at the base of the terraces. Salvius looked back and up the slopes of seating to see the aisles over-flowing and a landslide of people bearing down on them. Around the shaft of rain that hung above the arena, the roof shuddered and strained. He pulled his wife and Salvilla to their feet and turned to his eldest son-in-law. ‘Into a line, quickly. Magnus, lead the women out, Fulvius and Albus on either side. I’ll be behind you.’

The pressure was building on all sides as nobles and senators pushed and shoved, and Salvius, aware of the weapon at his side but not yet reaching for it, turned and snarled, ‘Are you Romans? Will you disgrace yourselves? Keep steady.’ He realised with a swell of mingled pride and exasperation that little Decimus was trying to struggle towards the back of the column, to Salvius’ side, face alight with the desire to prove himself. Salvius shoved him forward, growling, ‘With your mother.’

The worst moment came when they were almost outside, the crowd oozing slowly through one of the archways, when he lost sight of Decimus beneath the heads of the mob, and he couldn’t hear any response above the din when he called his name. But when finally he reached the open air, the crowd pulsing around him, he saw the little column of his family, still moving ahead: all there, and together.

Salvius scanned the sky and rooftops as his family hurried through. To his relief the rank of Patrician cars was still waiting at the Sacred Way entrance, behind the gathering ambulances and vigile vans. Salvius could see his driver standing outside their vehicle, staring in horror at the oncoming crowd. His expression lifted a little when he saw Salvius.

Salvilla was still weeping and sniffing, but Salvia Prima already had an arm round her little sister and was murmuring, ‘Now, then, don’t give the swine the satisfaction. You’ll make everyone think it’s worse than it is.’

‘What about Philia and Lysander and Psyche?’ quavered Salvilla. The family had taken some of the household staff to the Games; of course they’d been seated in the uppermost tiers with the other slaves.

‘They’ll be fine,’ said Salvius firmly. ‘It will just take them a little longer to get out, that’s all.’

‘It was over the Imperial box,’ said Magnus, quietly.

Salvius turned to watch a convoy of ambulances and Praetorian cars slide through the crowd and round the Colosseum, towards the private entrance the Imperial family used. He felt an unbidden rush of hope, followed by an immediate backwash of guilt. May they all be safe, he thought conscientiously.

But he couldn’t believe that no one in that box had been hurt, and even at the best, there were steps that had to be taken at once, and it was clearly impossible the Emperor would be able to do so.

He kissed his daughters briskly. ‘Go home as fast as you can,’ he said. ‘I have to get to work.’

‘Will there have to be martial law?’ asked Decimus passionately, climbing into the car.

Salvius laughed. ‘In some form, probably. You be good.’

And minutes later, in the strategy room at the Palace, Salvius did indeed place all military units in the Empire on high alert, order curfews in all the major cities, cancel all public gatherings and start patrols in Rome’s streets and airspace. After he’d deployed infantry around the Palace, the Senate buildings and the various Fora, General Turnus asked uneasily, ‘Is it certain we have the authority for this?’

‘If the Emperor is unhappy with anything, of course he will countermand it,’ answered Salvius, ignoring a moment of uncomfortable disingenuousness.

From the other side of the room Memmius Quentin called out in a kind of frustrated howl, ‘Do we have any word on the Family yet?’

And Glycon was suddenly at Salvius’ elbow. Salvius hadn’t noticed him enter the room; the cubicularius always moved so unobtrusively, even amid all this noise and motion. But up close he was unexpectedly dramatic, his face pale and damp-skinned, his limp hair dishevelled, his eyes bloodshot and sunken.

He said thickly, without elaboration, ‘The Imperial Office.’

Makaria was standing beside her father’s desk. Her arm was in a sling, and though the dust from the Colosseum had been washed from her face, her hair was still thick with it, and it was hard to imagine what her filthy clothes must have looked like when she had first put them on. Salvius was not sure whom he’d expected to find in the painted garden. She looked startling and ominous here, like the spirit of someone walled up alive. But she stood as upright as a soldier, and Salvius felt an odd stirring of pride, a faint, vicarious echo of what he’d felt for Decimus and Salvia outside the Colosseum.

She cleared her throat, and said, ‘My father and my cousin— my cousin, Marcus, were killed today.’ And it was clear she was trying to keep her voice steady, but it twisted away from her and she had to catch her hand to her face.

‘Oh—!’ Salvius was simply and wholeheartedly horrified. He even had an immediate impulse to put his arms round her, which was unthinkable. ‘Madam, I’m so sorry—’

Makaria shook her head several times, and breathed deep before continuing, ‘My father was . . . he was killed outright. Marcus wasn’t. He— He . . . I put the ring and the wreath on him. He knew what was going on. He was Emperor. Marcus named you as his heir.’

No shock of battle, no unexpected success had ever robbed Salvius so completely of himself. At first it was almost a mercy that he did not know what to do or say, because that kept him in place, looking at her
gravely and quite unable to stir, when otherwise he might have been – what? Lifted into the air, while this riot of incredulous excitement and bafflement pealed through him and bells deafened him?

It had reached and passed the point when he must respond and all he could manage was, cautiously, ‘You are quite sure . . . quite certain that was his intention?’

‘You don’t imagine I would hand away my family’s birthright if I were in any doubt?’

‘Were there other witnesses?’

‘Some of the guards. The medics. Yes.’

Salvius felt the continued pulse of delight, utterly unseemly in the circumstances, throbbing through the ringing of something he refused to name as fear. It was not that he had any sense that he was not fitted to be Emperor, nor that he’d never contemplated it. For a long time he had believed he would do better than Faustus or Leo, or, in recent years, Marcus himself. As the crisis with Nionia drew in, he had nursed something between hope and dread that one day it might be necessary –
justified
– to take power himself. Only if it were justified, he had always told himself, uneasily; only if Rome were in danger and someone had to act. But that Marcus, who had fair reason not to like or trust him, should have given this to him, in the last moments of his life . . . What was he supposed to do, right now, stranded so far outside the margins of what he’d considered possible?

And Faustus’ daughter was standing there in tears, and he thought of charming, ambitious, infuriating Leo, four years dead, and now his only son – the line gone, over.