Rome Burning Read online

  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.

  DELPHI

  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.

  It was not that he did not have friends, not exactly that. But even if he really began to feel close to someone – Laureus, for instance, half-asleep on his sofa among the wreckage of a party, admitting drunkenly that he couldn’t think about anything except the woman his brother had married and managing to make it sound funny. Drusus had laughed at him, but without wanting to, because for that moment he was delighted by how fond he felt of Laureus. And he had wanted intensely to offer the confidence back, almost just for the sake of fair exchange. Of course he could not. He must not say why and how much he missed his home, what he’d wanted, whom he’d loved.

  He had a girl, too: ‘Amaryllis’ was the name she’d come with, though that was probably only a marketing gambit. He did not know what she called herself, and never used any name for her, or told her anything. As always when loss and panic hit him, he wanted her now, but he told himself, as he always did, that he wouldn’t go to her, because he knew she did him no good. She was a vice, a habit. For most of the time he didn’t want her in sight; she barely saw him except when he was most angry and distraught, so naturally she was afraid of him. But she wasn’t so badly off, he considered. Most of the time she had only to take care of herself. He even kept away from her as much as he could. And he – he wasn’t ugly, was he?

  Of course, now, he did go and find her in the study, where, for all the time he didn’t need her, he kept her looking busy, tending needlessly to unimportant papers. He pulled her up the stairs and to her room, paced outside her door while she got ready, shoved through the door while she was still pinning up her hair, pushed her down on the bed. They did not speak.

  Afterwards he fell asleep, with her awake in his arms for a little while, but when he woke he felt worse, as he had known he would. ‘You’re really disgusting. You really are,’ he kept repeating to himself silently, puzzled, wondering.

  It had not been easy to find her. It had taken months, repeated trips to all the markets – Delos, Sardis, Side – endless agitation and disappointment. Of course, the chances of finding something even adequate were small enough in themselves, for what he wanted was so singular, but it was harder because he didn’t dare to explain very clearly. A clear, sweet, calm face, with cream-coloured skin. Darkly-fringed eyes. Black hair long and thick enough to be wound up into a high peak, and then pulled down again.

  But she scared him, in some ways. For one thing, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, part of him was always rubbing anxiously at the idea of her, terrified that someone would see her and guess from her face and hair what had happened, what he had done. He was afraid someone else would see the clothes that he wanted her – just briefly, occasionally – to wear. He would have liked to believe she was slightly slow-witted and incapable of guessing herself. That was another reason that he didn’t want her to talk.

  For he did not want the substitution to go any further than looks, he didn’t want her to do anything to imitate Tulliola, not even – especially not – to say ‘I love you’. For one thing her voice was nothing like Tulliola’s. And every time he slept with her, afterwards the resemblance would be more sickening than anything; he would realise how all the time he had been noticing all the many other things that were wrong, his body involuntarily measuring the texture and contours of hers – hips, waist, ribs, breasts, collarbone, the distribution of hard bone and soft flesh. She was slightly too tall. She was younger, yes, very young and fresh and all the things the trader had said she was, when Tulliola had been a little older than he was. There was a faint olive note to her skin – because after all, how rare to be as milk-skinned as Tulliola but with such dark hair. And Tulliola’s hair had not been quite so straight. ‘Amaryllis’ might perhaps be partly Terranovan, though the plaited spiral he made her twist her hair into would leave an acceptable wave. Her jaw, the bridge of her nose – of course really there was not a single feature that was actually the same.

  And even if she had been a perfect replica, what a strange thing to do, how horrible really. What would Tulliola think of him if she knew? But he cou
ld only manage to ration himself, he couldn’t stop.

  But this time, abruptly letting go of Amaryllis and standing up, he knew whom he could tell.

  On the magnetway it would have been possible, though exhausting, to reach Rome in a single day. But, unlike Marcus, he had no one hurrying him back – there was no practical reason, he thought bitterly, for him to go at all. So there was no reason why he should not stop in Greece overnight, cross into Italy through the tunnel under the Hydruntum Strait the next morning.

  It was a sweaty climb in the heat, up past the treasuries of Delphi, but he did not feel his journey at all.

  Far out on the sea, the sun had just thawed into a slick of fluid red, and Delphi was lighting up like a thick crust of many-coloured lava poured down to the sea. There were huge inns, and – for those who could not afford the true oracle but wanted some version of the experience – fortune-telling complexes, where one could play an electronic version of the Sinoan Book of Change, or consult crystal-gazers. Drusus could hear faint screams of excitement from the stadium above, invisible from here except for its lights, where perhaps a horse race was going on. And, from the slopes below, some of the sprawling bath houses projected great water slides, winding down the mountain side and decked, in the evening, with coloured lamps, so the pilgrims to Delphi could speed deliriously past the city’s sights, all the way down to the bay. Above Drusus – beyond the treasuries and the sudden stillness of the temple of Apollo itself, above the stadium – the mountainside was dark and pure for a little way, where it rose too steeply for human business to cling on. But right on the ridge of Paranassus itself, a line of hidden boilers suddenly disgorged a great screen of steam high into the dark blue air, and upon it a huge row of floating letters of light appeared, and pulsed, and changed colour – beaming the command out across the Gulf of Corinth: VISITATE ORACULAM PERPETUAM.

  He should have made an appointment, waited for days or even weeks, as he had done meekly enough before; but this time his name and his money were enough to let him bulldoze through all that. Naturally he had a few bodyguards with him, and a pair of pilgrims, picking their way down the steps, recognised him and took his picture, though they would have got no more than a resentfully twisted pair of shoulders, a lowered dark head.

  So close to the shrine itself, the relentlessness of Delphi softened a little – there were more temples, and no more places to buy holy water in bottles shaped like Apollo’s lyre. Nevertheless the way was nearly choked with self-promotion: outside the treasuries statues of athletes, politicians, magnates – and Drusus had met many of them– jostled close to the road, quite without order or design, grand as each work was. Some of the most recent were sculpted in chemical resin, with gleaming moist eyes and hair that stirred in the warm wind, and were shockingly lifelike, except that Drusus knew that paunches had been evaporated and jowls ignored. Images of his own ancestors should be here somewhere, near the top. Not all the figures were human; some were tributes from cities and provinces. Drusus passed between a pair of rampant bronze lions, snarling at each other across the path – nearly mythical beasts now. Drusus didn’t know how much lions had really looked like that, or how big they had been, for the arenas had swallowed the last of them, and tigers too, two centuries ago or more. But Drusus had seen wonderful things done with Arctic bears, and of course with arena hounds. And once in a flooded arena he had seen men on flimsy little rafts, armed with spears and pitched against sharks.

  He was supposed to tell the attendant priest his single question in advance, but all he’d say was, belligerently, ‘I want to know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘Nothing more specific than that?’

  ‘No. If there’s anything in all this, then she’ll know what I need to know.’

  ‘I can interpret what she says for you. If you want it can be taken down, it can even be put into verse for you to keep.’

  ‘No,’ cried Drusus through his teeth, recoiling. He was already so impatient and overwrought that the priest’s offer seemed like a deliberate insult or attack. ‘Either I’m alone in there with her, or I go now. If you want my money you’ll stop pestering me.’

  The priest subsided obediently and Drusus watched with distaste while the man cut the throat of a shivering kid, averted his eye as it kicked, tapped his foot fiercely until they had finished with it and let him stride down into the chamber under the temple.

  ‘You were wrong,’ he said violently, at once. ‘You remember what you told me? You got it wrong or you lied. You lied, didn’t you? Do you realise what you’ve done? Really it’s because of you …’ He stopped, shocked at himself. He’d been about to accuse her of Tulliola’s death – and he could have gone on and blamed the others’ on her as well, Leo and Clodia, Gabinius, and that woman – he couldn’t remember her name – Varius’ wife. Usually, if he thought of these deaths at all, he considered them as immutable as if they had always already happened: acts of history, moving like a god, above human power or responsibility. It was only Tulliola who had been lost – sacrificed. The Sibyl could repeat what she’d heard, like anyone else, couldn’t she? And at that it seemed ridiculous to think that she could know anything about the future, that she had ever made him believe anything.

  ‘Wait,’ said the Sibyl. She had gained weight. She had been heavy before, but her disorderly body now bulged through a shapeless pale-blue dress, somehow unabashedly naked under the cloth. The flesh on her bare legs hung in irregular mottled billows, her skin and dress visibly damp, because the day had been as sweltering as the weeks before it, and the braziers of burning laurel leaves kept the heat alive in the half-light. Her hair stood around her face in a muddy blonde frizz, but the features were harsh, hawkish, proud, an arrogantly curved mouth under vacant eyes that seemed almost the same colour as her skin and hair – a greenish, murky yellow ochre. She was pacing about, ambling barefoot in the dark. She yawned.

  Drusus did not see why he was to wait; she did not seem to be doing anything. ‘Do you even remember?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Emperor of Rome,’ she answered loudly and thickly, and cleared her throat.

  Drusus, despite himself, despite the cynical disgust at her and at himself that he’d felt a moment before, shuddered with relieved joy. For a second a wonderful warm relaxation flowed through all his limbs, and he could almost have sunk to the dark marble floor and fallen asleep at her feet. Then he reminded himself. It must all be a sham. The priests could have told her he was coming; they could have done so even more easily the last time. He was the Emperor’s nephew, it was hardly difficult to guess that he must have had some hope of being Emperor himself. That was why he was always so afraid that someone would see what he had seen, in his girl Amaryllis. He objected, but in a whisper, ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Wait,’ insisted the Sibyl, forcefully, suddenly marching forward and making him start. For several minutes he was obediently silent, but so was she; she climbed heftily onto the tripod, a thin, flimsy-looking thing underneath her, and sat there, looking at him and did not speak. Her head seemed to roll a little on her neck; she blinked, her tawny-sallow face slackening.

  ‘You mean – wait and it will happen? Still?’ he ventured, at last. ‘Not wait now for you to tell me? You mean – wait?’

  ‘There’s glass on the ground,’ she remarked finally, her voice changing and rasping as she spoke.

  Drusus felt another shock, trying to think if anyone could have told her that he’d smashed the jug and the wine glass earlier that day – one of his slaves, his bodyguards? ‘The glass?’

  ‘Wait,’ she repeated, and then, on one breath, dying away to a garbled mutter, ‘What you want it will be you the last one Novius it will come Emperor of Rome you.’

  It was like listening to a recording, it was almost four years since she had said that to him before. Then he thought she was beginning to say his name again: ‘Novius’. And she did say it, many times, but she no longer seemed to mean it as a name, novii, nov
issimi – newer, newest.

  ‘The new,’ she said, a loud voice droning from deep within her chest. ‘The newer newest. The newly come, no Novian but one. The newer branch of Novian stem. No Novian but another comes to ruin you. Save yourself from that, if you think you can.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he pressed. ‘Is this someone who stops me from being Emperor? Because it’s already happened.’ He said this sardonically, as if it were too late even to care, but then asked, much more tentatively, afraid of being heard even by her, ‘Do you mean I can still do something – I can still stop him? My cousin?’

  ‘Your cousin, yes. Against you, afterwards—’

  ‘You told me there’d be no one else!’ protested Drusus.

  ‘No one else left to take what you want,’ she agreed, her voice sounding higher and softer, further off, and almost pitying.

  Drusus shook his head. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Are you warning me about something? My cousin won’t stop me but he will?’ He deliberated, and then observed coldly, ‘Whether this is you, or if it’s something else, a god talking – if you really know what’s going to happen, why should that be the clearest you can put it? But I can see another explanation. You could just be trying to convince me you weren’t wrong before. All this could be – a distraction. Perhaps you’re afraid of what I’ll do to punish you for what happened. Perhaps you should be.’

  She sat passively, solid, unperturbed by this. She let her shoulders slump and her back round. The trance, if that had been real, seemed to be fading, leaving a peaceful apathy behind. She swung one large bare foot. ‘What was the question?’ she asked at length, sleepily.