Free Rome Burning by Sophia McDougall

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 chemicalresin, 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