Free Rome Burning by Sophia McDougall Page B

the glass, ‘Oh, I suppose I told the man outside, “I want to know what’s going to happen.”’
    The Sibyl nodded vaguely, but didn’t seem to have listened. She scratched her thigh and watched her moving foot.
    ‘It was, “Will I be Emperor? Still?”’ he admitted at last, softly.
    She sat up, jerking her foot still against the tripod, and looked at him again. ‘And what have I said?’ she demanded.
    He couldn’t tell whether or not she knew the answer, whether she was only trying to prompt him. ‘“Yes,”’ whispered Drusus.
    She shrugged, as if to say, there you are, then.
    Drusus hesitated, opened his lips to speak, but did not. She
had
said that, hadn’t she? He tried to think if she could have mistaken him for Marcus, if there was any other way he could have misunderstood her. Certainly it remained possible that she’d only ever been playing some kind of unfathomable game or joke. But it was only now that he really understood that Faustus was still alive, that his cousin wasnot Emperor but Regent, that there was a difference. Perhaps Faustus would still change his mind – perhaps something more than that would have to happen –
    She climbed down onto the ground, and yawned again. Drusus felt at a loss, seasick both with elation and with the suspicion that he was being practised upon. He did not want to leave yet, he wanted her to reassure him, clearly, lovingly. And he still felt a little like hurting her. But he’d had one question answered, and that was all he was allowed. But as he moved up the steps, something else occurred to him, and he turned back.
    ‘How am I going to die?’ he asked her, abruptly.
    She blinked again and the emptiness cleared in her pale, dirty-coloured eyes; she raised her eyebrows and tilted her head, a faintly disapproving look, as if he should know it was wrong to ask her that. But she answered him anyway, quite normally and conversationally now: ‘In your sleep. Of old age.’
    *
     
    The train sliced through the heart of the Empire, like a flexing bullet, piercing the olive-clothed mountains, or lashing around their flanks like a whip. Drusus sat, eyes unfocused, lips slightly parted, and did not see Greece and Illyricum vanish behind him. In Delphi he had commandeered three of the best-appointed carriages; his guards and the few slaves he had brought with him were divided between the front and rear, but in the centre Drusus was alone, and he barely even noticed the windows turn black when the train slid beneath the Adriatic Sea. No part of him moved except the hand that lay on the oak table, which kept drumming and tapping insistently. Several times, and almost without his knowledge, his forefinger drew out the word ‘Yes’ on the table top, as if in a dry and intangible ink.
    Unmistakably she had said ‘Yes’.
    But I am not stupid, he thought grimly, as if giving an opponent fair warning. He remembered the stories: Nero, still young, being told, ‘Beware the seventy-third year’ and duly expecting a long successful life, when in fact … What else could Nero possibly have thought? It was Galba’sseventy-third year that was meant, but there had been nothing in what was said to let Nero deduce that. So perhaps the warning the Sibyl had given Drusus was equally pointless. But if there is any way I will find it, he promised himself. And at least Nero had been Emperor first. Please,
let
me, he thought passionately. I don’t care what happens in the end, I don’t care if I die, just
please
.
    But she had said he would not die.
    So he meditated on the words of the warning for a while, but at last, with a little frustrated sigh, he decided that it was impossible that he should solve it now; the main thing was only to remember it. She had said, unmistakably, ‘Emperor of Rome’. For the moment it was enough to try to think whether it could be true.
    There was Faustus’ will. But if Marcus were to die in a way that was beyond suspicion – that could not