Rome Burning Read Online Free Page B

the Wall nor the treaty is strong enough to protect us. And this is not just a matter of our territory in the West, sir, it’s a question of whether we’re willing to let Nionia overtake us as an Imperial power. Because if not, this could be our last chance to stop it.’
    ‘Wait a minute,’ said Faustus—and could see that something had gone wrong; he hadn’t said it properly. He rose from his seat and tried again. ‘Just wait.’ He made for the hidden door because he felt it was the room that was wrong: the beautiful green room was so full of detail, and of the past, a minute or two anywhere else and he would be all right again. He reached the door, but fumbled at the familiar handles among the painted foliage.
    ‘Sir,’ Glycon was saying, coming towards him, his voice full of concern
    Then abruptly the door opened, and before his foot could fall in the doorway the impact came; a huge, soundless thud, a detonation so total that he could not immediately tell that it was within the walls of his own skull, for it knocked half the floor away, so that he stepped off the remaining ground into dark air, and fell.

AXE AND RODS
     
    Una could bear the sun here, where the sea blunted it a little. She was sitting with her legs drawn up protectively into the square of shade under a paper parasol on the stones, the folds of her white swimming dress stiffening around her with salt water. The dark island dropped straight down into the water with no softening of its slope. Here beneath the water it hollowed into a deep bowl, green and purple-red with floating leaves, and also there were spherical dark anemones, blood- or jewel-like and faintly sinister, fixed to the rock. Sometimes she lifted one of the books beside her, although even in the shadow the sunlight turned the pages dazzling, sometimes she watched Marcus swimming. Her pale skin had not burnt, nor did it turn a clear brown as Marcus’ had; it only, very slowly, picked up what looked to her like a faint tinge of dust.
    Marcus’ usually muted blond hair had been warmed to gold and amber-yellow, near the temples especially; the hair on his body had turned paler and brighter still. She knew that when he left the water, as his skin dried, it would look as if there was thin gold sand near this shore, instead of only rock.
    They would probably never again be closer to being alone together than this: at a tactful distance out there were a few Praetorian boats buzzing in circles round the island, more at the tiny port, and Marcus’ cousin Makaria would have her own bodyguards at the vineyard, although Una was not planning to go there.
    She looked out and everything shone, the water, Marcus’ wet hair and skin, and, subtle as smoke, a little silver drift of narrow fish, only visible when they turned and caughtthe light. It was as if she were watching them fly; it hardly seemed natural to her that water could be so transparent – it looked less substantial almost than air, not dense enough to support either a fish or a man, and if it could it was barely within reason, almost a cheat, a joke, that she should be there to see it.
    They were not far from the slave market at Delos.
    The books scattered around her were history books, Cossus’
Rome and Nionia
, and the older works, the Livy and Plutarch that Marcus wanted her to read, hoping that they might make her a little more forgiving of Rome. She could read as fast as anyone else now, though always with a furtive, defiant tension somewhere under her ribs, a sullen fear that there was too much lost time to make up. Marcus and the other students in Athens were reading new things all the time. Knowing she felt like this Marcus had persuaded one of his own tutors from the Academy to visit her every week, but although he tried to hide it Una knew the tutor didn’t really understand what he was doing there, what the point was. And she had turned stiff, inarticulate, moody, so that he had not even thought her intelligent. She