Gates of Rome

CHAPTER 61

AD 54, Subura District, Rome

Sal was struggling to breathe. A thick pall of smoke from the fires above them had descended to fill the courtyard.

She had Maddy. Or rather Maddy had found her and was even now leading her by the hand through the churning sea of bodies. Five minutes ago the fight had settled into a stalemate; the looters held at bay in the rat run by the constant barrage of projectiles from above.

But now things had descended into a confused, misty chaos. The smoke from a dozen fires on the first and second floors had become a choking blanket. Macro’s tenants were now no longer concerned with keeping their looting neighbours out of the apartment block, but instead were struggling with each other to escape the burning building.

Sal was jostled and bumped from all sides, nearly losing her grip on Maddy’s hand as they became funnelled into a press of thrashing bodies. The rat run: five minutes ago it was a bottleneck that was proving to be their saving grace; now it looked like becoming a death trap for them.

Above her, amid the churn of smoke, she heard the crackle of flames taking hold of the building. ‘Maddy, we’ve got to get out! We’ve got to find a way out!’

‘I know!’

She had no idea where the others were. Last she’d seen, Liam and Bob had been manning the second barricade, successfully holding back the baying mob. But that was ancient history now. There were no more ‘attackers’ and ‘defenders’, not any longer, just a couple of hundred people fighting with each other to escape the building through a passageway littered with obstacles and bodies.

They heard a loud crack of snapping wood from above, and then a moment later, the balconies lining one complete side of the quadrangle came tumbling down through the smoke into the courtyard. An avalanche of blackened, smouldering slats of wood that exploded into a shower of sparks and embers that set fire to the tattered linen sun-awnings around the courtyard. Through a gap in the smoke, Sal caught sight of a woman with a child in her arms, trapped in the corner beside their two ponies that were rolling widened eyes at the flames around them; she and the animals were imprisoned inside a collapsed scaffolding of wooden poles.

The woman’s eyes met Sal’s — the only person now looking back into the courtyard. She was screaming for help. A fleeting moment, then the smoke closed on her and she and her child were gone. Items of burning clothing, embers from drapes and privacy screens and a million and one flammable household possessions were starting to rain down on the crowd that had completely plugged the rat run and were going absolutely nowhere, setting hair and more clothes on fire.

‘Help!’ Sal screamed. ‘ HELP! ’

Her voice was lost beneath a hundred others screaming the very same thing in Latin.

She couldn’t see Maddy now. She still had hold of her hand, but their arms were twisted over the back and shoulder of some old man carrying a screaming toddler, piggyback.

‘Maddy!’ she screamed.

‘I’m here!’

We’re going to die. We’re going to choke to death or burn.

Her mind flashed with memories of that day — the last day of her life. Standing in the ruin of that stairwell with the others on their floor who’d spilled out of their apartments. Her Mamaji and Papaji, like her with ghost-white faces of dust. The air thick with powdered concrete and toxic fumes. She remembered the choking, the panicking, being terrified. Then that sound, that end-of-the-world sound… a deep rumble like an approaching train, the floor trembling beneath their feet. Gasps, cries, screaming; a desperate collective horror that didn’t allow them even a few seconds of stillness — a goodbye moment. A whispered farewell that might, just might be carried on some spiritual ether to those it was intended for.

And then Foster… extending a hand, offering her, just her, a way out.

Oh jahulla, not like this. Don’t let me die like this.

‘BOB!’ she screamed. ‘LIAM! HELLLLLPP! ’

Liam looked at Bob. They were watching people pour out of the rat run on to the avenue. Not a fleet-footed escape but a molasses-like spill of the staggering, crawling, coughing and retching. People clambering desperately over a growing bed of collapsed bodies.

‘That was Sal’s voice!’

Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative.’

‘Ah, Jayzus… we got to go in and pull her out!’

‘You must stay here, Liam,’ said Bob. He turned towards the clogged exit.

‘No! I’m comin’ with — ’

An iron grip held Liam’s wrist. He turned to see Macro. ‘Let your friend go, lad.’

Liam struggled to shake him off. But the Roman’s grip was far too insistent and strong. ‘Let him go, lad… if he’s truly made of stone, then he’ll live.’

Liam watched as Bob carelessly bulldozed his way through the emerging people and disappeared into the smoke spewing thickly out of the narrow rat run.

Above screams for help they could both hear the crackle of flames eagerly devouring the apartment block. Smoke, now growing a dark grey, pumped energetically out of seemingly every small window. The yellow-washed, clay plaster facade over the building’s clay bricks was beginning to crack under the heat and crumble to the ground in chunks. Bricks and brittle mortar too… breaking, crumbling and falling, like the decaying flesh of a dead body; a body decomposing in fast forward, rendered from living flesh to skeleton frame in minutes.

Liam’s weary, oxygen-starved legs buckled under him and he sat down heavily in the middle of the cobbled avenue, dropped, like a sack of coke off the back of a coalman’s cart. He wasn’t alone. The avenue was thick with others slumped on their knees, lying on their backs, gasping to fill their lungs with clear air.

Macro squatted down beside him, his eyes glistening with moisture. ‘Stupid,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Stupid, stupid people.’

They heard something collapsing deep inside the column of smoke. Perhaps a wall giving way, filling the courtyard with fractured fragments of heat-shattered clay brick and glowing spars of charcoaled scaffold poles.

Liam felt his cheeks grow wet, tears creating two clean paths down his soot-blackened face.

They’re dead in that. For sure. All of them.

The deafening clatter of collapse somewhere within the smoke ceased, to be replaced by the growing crackle and roar of flames. The stream of people crawling, staggering out of the smoke had become a dwindling trickle, one or two dropping as they emerged. Surely the very last likely to step out of the pall. As certain as he’d ever been about anything, Liam knew the rest of the poor, unfortunate souls caught up in that death-trap space were either suffocated by now, burned to death or buried.

His vision, blurred with tears, became a kaleidoscope of refracting stars and spears of light. He felt a hand lightly on his back, patting him gently, and the deep grunt of Macro’s voice far away offering a soldier’s ill-phrased words of comfort.

But all Liam could do was hear his own choice of words. Hardly any more comforting.

They’re gone… and it’s just me now.

Just me.

Selfish words, he realized. Selfish to grieve at being left alone like this. To cry like this just for himself. Maddy, Sal and Bob… not just friends, but family — more like family in truth than the faint photo-album memories he had of a mother and father, uncles and aunts.

Macro’s hand was still patting him.

If he’d had a greater presence of mind, been stronger, quicker, smarter… he should’ve reacted sooner. Left the stand-off over the barricade and gone to find the girls. There could have been a way out for them. They could have found another way out.

Macro’s hand was thumping his back more heavily. Not a flat pat, more like a fist. Hardly a comforting, soothing gesture. He realized the bud in his ear was calmly, insistently telling him something, telling him what the old Roman was now bellowing loudly, repeatedly.

‹ Look. Look. Look!›

Liam did. Wiped muck and tears from his eyes. His blurred, refracted vision cleared. He saw what he expected to see: the thick column of smoke spiralling up from the skeleton of Macro’s building and an avenue of soot-covered bodies.

But then he picked out the thick, round-shouldered outline of a bull charging towards him. Not a bull… it ran like a human on human legs. A minotaur, then.

No, not a minotaur. Those weren’t horns on top — he could make out that much. He wiped his eyes again and realized Macro, still pummelling his back, was cheering hoarsely.

The minotaur, an enormous black creature, came to a halt in front of Liam. Hefted two blackened humps — what he’d mistaken for horns — from its shoulders and on to the cobblestones, where both began to wheeze, cough and retch.

‘Minor burns and abrasions. There may be some minor scorching of the trachea and nasal passages. This will heal. But they will both be all right,’ rumbled the minotaur.

Behind them the complete front wall of the apartment building collapsed backwards in on itself, sending a mushroom cloud of sparks, ember and ash up into the sky.

‘Unlike your property, Lucius Cornelius Macro,’ added Bob.

Just then they heard the clack of standard army-issue, nail-soled sandals on the cobbles and the approaching rattle and clatter of armour and harnesses.

Macro turned to look up at Fronto. ‘You might have come a little earlier!’

Fronto gazed at Macro’s retirement investment, fully ablaze now. ‘It’s like this right across the whole city. Riots in every district.’ He turned to Maddy and Liam. ‘Cato sent me to get you.’

Maddy, still on her hands and knees coughing up globules of phlegm as black as tar, wiped her mouth and looked up at the officer.

‘You… you can get us in… into the emperor’s palace?’

Fronto nodded. ‘Right now… yes. If we hurry.’