Rome Burning by Sophia McDougall

narrowed as Glycon had promised, was steady and visible on his hand, and the purple robe that had been hung over the new formal clothes was very dark, almost black, made of rough dense silk that stood around him in carved folds, constructing his body into extra, illusionary height and breadth. His hair had been trimmed and smoothed. He could have been five or six years older than he really was, or else of no specific age – young in a burnished, lacquered-over way, not raw or susceptible. He was not wearing the gold wreath, but it lay symmetrically on the desk in front of him, in the very centre, so that his body rose above it, in a column.
    Of course they had known Marcus’ face long before they met him. They could remember staring at him while he was asleep, that first night after finding him, that longvision face intruding into real life.
    ‘Well,’ said Sulien quietly. ‘This is what he was brought up for.’
    But the difference in Marcus alarmed him. He felt almost as if it were something he had inflicted upon him
    When he’d first gone into the room where Faustus lay, the gilded space had been crowded with what seemed to Sulien’s tired eyes a welter of important men, although some in fact were slaves, indistinguishable for a moment in the general shock from the secretaries, Palace doctors, andeven senators. More or less all of them were shouting at or around Sulien as he tried to concentrate, and they didn’t all obey him at once when he told them to leave; one he even pushed physically from the room. Once he was alone with Faustus, lying with his face slack, still uttering a long rustling snarl, Sulien had emptied his mind of everything but his job: salvage work, trying to save a life. But when that was done he’d felt as if he had a decision to make, as if he were about to do something terrible to Marcus – and to his sister.
    Really it was no choice of his, all he had to do was report how things were: that Faustus was alive, but that if Glycon – who had brought him there – had thought that Sulien could immediately wipe the injury out of Faustus’ brain as if it had never been there, then he was wrong. But he had waited for a minute, as if hoping something else would happen, something to stop him, and he had watched Faustus with an attack of the too-acute pity that he often thought was a bad and amateurish feeling in any kind of physician. It was no good to get so bleeding-heart about things. In this case, for example, the pity for Faustus had become as intense and as indistinguishable from the idea of Marcus as if they were both mortally ill. He had left the room and said, ‘Yes, get him.’
    He rubbed his eyes and complained, ‘I’m wiped out.’ He’d been awake since before dawn, and when the peremptory call from the Golden House came – followed within minutes by a Palace car – he’d been about to walk the little way to his flat in Transtiberina and fall for a while onto his bed. His friends – students, apprentices, other young doctors, actresses, and, perhaps, Tancorix – would be in a wine bar somewhere, wondering where he was, but he was too tired now to worry about it much.
    ‘Then go to sleep. They’ll give you a room,’ said Una.
    ‘No.’ He had left Faustus barely two hours before, before there had been time for Marcus to visit his uncle, so Sulien had not seen him. ‘I want to see Marcus. Keep me awake.’ But by now he had sunk from a sitting position to sprawl limply on the carpet, eyes half-closed, and he grumbled when she obediently prodded his arm.
    ‘Today I took an oath—’ said Marcus, on the screen.
    ‘Sulien,’ asked Una, softly. ‘How long is this going to last?’
    Sulien pulled himself up onto his elbows, slowly. He did not answer at once. ‘The Emperor will get tired very fast, much too tired to work,’ he said. ‘He’s lucky in that he doesn’t seem to have lost any speech as such, but ordering his thoughts as he wants – he’ll find that