Free Rome Burning by Sophia McDougall Page A

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 hadseen, 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
,
novissimi
–
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, hervoice 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.
    ‘It wasn’t a question at all, I wanted to make you answer for last time,’ snapped Drusus, and then, thinking uneasily of what she’d said about