Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Varius did not even try to get to his feet. The only sheltered place they had a chance of reaching was back in the little alley between the impassable brick wall and the smoking back of the barracks, although that would not stand for very long. He crawled towards it. Even if they could go no further, somehow it didn’t seem like failure. He saw that Sulien was still alive, and heading the same way, faster than he was. He dragged himself behind the vestiges of the barracks, pitched down onto his side, and turned his face to the wall.

  *

  For a week Una had been clinging to her small foothold in the Imperial Office and meeting rooms of the Palace, veiled in deliberate mousey blandness, her eyes usually inoffensively lowered. Sometimes she did minutely useful and tedious things for Glycon, forcing patience on herself, so that she was scarcely noticeable and caused only occasional sparks of unease in the senators and generals that came there, when watching, listening, she forgot to keep herself hidden and hunger bared itself on her suddenly conspicuous face. To her secret frustration, she had not seen Drusus all this time: he seemed to have retreated to his father’s house, from where he had sent Marcus a single, slapdash report on his work on the fire reports. And for seven days there had been nothing from Nionia, but an icily polite acknowledgement of Marcus’ offer, and with each day of silence the strain on Marcus rose like a tide, like hands joining the pull on a rope. He had done as Varius had said and set no limit by which they must respond, and now it seemed that Una was the only one left who did not tell him that he must do that, at least, if he would not resolve that it was already too late.

  Probus was in Arcansa, telling Marcus from the long-vision on the wall about the state of the ravaged town, about the news from Roman spies, when Marcus heard an arms factory had been bombed at Veii, and was still burning. Una felt a strange ripple travel down her body, a cold system of collapsings and reinforcements, tendons stiffening as others went weak, her knees bracing against the sudden tug down towards the dense carpet. And she saw that Marcus had not realised yet. Abruptly, and with a curt absence of explanation, he turned off Probus’ screen. Then he went to the wall, slammed the panel violently shut against the longvision and said to her, ‘Then there will be a war.’

  ‘Sulien is there,’ announced Una, her voice grating and thick.

  Marcus turned to her, eyes widening slightly as at something that simply defied sense.

  ‘Sulien is there, with Varius.’

  Marcus glanced away instead of holding the look. It was too unreasonable; there was no room or time. He said, quite confidently, ‘They will be all right,’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They probably weren’t there. I’m sure they can’t have been. Was it definitely today they were going?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Una, through her teeth, frightened by a gale of rage at him. It was not the first time that she had felt afraid that she was not entirely to be trusted with Marcus, that one day she might recklessly damage or smash him and not notice what she had done until it was too late, but it had never been so immediate or piercing. In another moment she would hate him for caring at least as much about Varius as about Sulien.

  Marcus, still convinced that they would have to be all right, wanted to comfort her, but she jolted away, saying with dangerous patience, ‘I’ll try to find him.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he promised rashly, half guilty now that he somehow couldn’t feel the torment she did.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course you can’t,’ said Una, unable to keep the sneer out of her voice, moving for the door. But Glycon came through before she reached it, pale excitement on his face, and told Marcus, ‘Caesar. We’ve got contact from the Nionians. It’s Prince Tadasius.’

  Despite herself, Una froze, staring at Marcus, wanting to see what would happen. ‘Fine, tell Salvius to come,’ said Marcus mechanically, and stopped breathing for a moment as he walked to the longdictor. This news brought on a little of what so far he had not felt: it was suddenly more possible that Sulien and Varius could have been at the factory. He settled the longdictor circlet on his head. He tried to think what to say, and found it felt right scarcely to speak at all. He didn’t know why. With as little expression as possible, then, he said, ‘Yes?’

  He had not heard Prince Tadahito speak before, and so, although he noticed, and was a little daunted by his command of Latin, he did not know that the fierce note of near-joy in the exercise of skill that Faustus had heard was absent this time.‘Caesar. May I say I am sorry to hear of the Emperor’s illness.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marcus, flatly.

  ‘My father wished me to speak to you at once.’

  Marcus was silent.

  ‘We are aware of what has happened in Veii today. Of course the munitions factory would be an obvious target in the opening of a campaign against Rome. You are likely to believe you are under attack by my country.’

  Still Marcus said nothing. Una continued to hover, her face a hard, white, lipless mask, helplessly watching him and unable to move. In as minimal a way as she could, she tested the idea that the small buzz of speech she could just hear from the longdictor could be a noise made by Sulien’s murderer.

  ‘We had no involvement,’ said the Prince, emphatically. ‘I assure you. We did not do this.’ There was a faint pause, and he continued, ‘I wish to respond to your message of a week ago – we are willing to discuss Terranova and Tokogane, as you suggest. We hope that war can still be avoided. We agree that it would be best to meet in Sina, rather than in Roman or Nionian territory.’

  Marcus lifted his eyes to Una on a kind of sharp thrill that broke down into excitement, distrust, and worsening fear that Sulien and Varius might be dead. ‘Rome will need more than your assurances to me,’ he said.

  From his face Una understood the sense of what he said, but not the words. Of course, until now the conversation had been entirely in Latin, but now Marcus had spoken in slow, careful Nionian.

  Marcus was not entirely sure what he was doing. If he was simply trying to compete with Tadahito, he was going to fail. He had been taught Nionian since his early childhood, and he was reasonably fluent now, but he didn’t have the Prince’s obvious talent, and the awareness of that would probably trip him up if he tried to talk at length – he would have to think too much about the language, not about what he was saying.

  But there was a confused pause at the change of language before the Prince answered in Nionian, demanding, ‘Why would I contact you if we were responsible?’

  ‘There could be many reasons.’

  ‘None as far as I am concerned!’ insisted Tadahito. ‘Do you think I would lie? Either this is an accident or you are being manipulated – do you want to start a war on those terms? We would not act and be ashamed of it afterwards.’ He was speaking increasingly fast, so that Marcus began to miss words here and there.

  ‘My generals are on their way to advise me,’ said Marcus at last, grimly imagining Salvius’ response to all this. ‘But I know exactly what they will say.’

  ‘That you should not believe me.’ The indignation did not leave the Prince’s voice, but it had grown tired, depressed.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Marcus.

  ‘And do you?’

  By now Marcus understood his own instinct to switch languages. It was nothing to do with anything he could say in Nionian himself. Listening to Tadahito speak naturally, his voice bared of the subtle lacquer of proficiency, the tightness and strain in it became more audible, the feeling far easier to gauge. Even if he had to work harder to keep up with the sense, it was as close as he could get to doing what Una could, eavesdropping on the thoughts. He did not respond to the Prince’s question, even though the truthful answer was: ‘Yes.’

  Instead he said, ‘They will need proof.’

  ‘How can one offer proof that something has not happened?’ asked the Prince, sounding at once angry and helpless.

  ‘You can disown it on longvision. You can say what you’ve said to me to your own pe
ople.’

  ‘In Nionia, the Imperial family do not appear on long-vision,’ said the Prince, in Latin again this time, audibly trying to keep scorn out of his voice that the Romans did. ‘Romans cannot understand this. But it does not happen.’

  Marcus did not press this, or resist the change back to Latin. ‘Fine. I’m not interested in humiliating you. Use whomever you like. I don’t care how it’s done, so long as it’s clear.’

  ‘It will be done. Is this sufficient?’

  ‘No.’ Of course it would not be enough, and not only for Salvius, not for anyone.

  As he spoke, Una snatched a sheet of paper from the desk. The thought was cold and deliberate enough, although without the passion of dread, she would not have had the nerve to scrawl it down in furious jagged capitals and thrust it at Marcus: ‘WALL. TROOPS BACK.’ She was shocked at her own intrusion even as she extended her arm, and saw Marcus read it and glance up at her in surprise, still more shocked when he nodded, saying into the longdictor, in Nionian, ‘Move your troops back from the wall.’

  Tadahito let out an affronted breath, ‘You expect us to surrender?’

  ‘No. Move them back as far as the nearest towns. The people should still feel protected.’

  ‘Why should we have to make such dangerous amends for something we did not do?’

  ‘Asking me to believe you did not attack us today is just as large a request.’

  The Prince was silent for a moment, then he asked, ‘How do I know you have not done this to yourselves to bring us to this point?’

  Marcus had been, if anything, surprised by how calm, or at least controlled, he’d felt so far. He was aware of his hands shaking slightly and had them hidden on his lap, as if the Prince was in the room and could have seen them, but it seemed like a trivial natural phenomenon, unconnected to him. But now he was unprepared for the hot anger that struck at him like nausea that he had to clamp his jaw against – a sudden sharp impression of exploding buildings and screaming people that had been completely lacking so far. ‘Because two of my friends were at that factory,’ he said. ‘And nothing’s been heard from them.’

  He saw Una start, anguish wrenching at her face. She pulled the paper back and scratched out, barely legibly, ‘If they’re alive you’ll probably hear before I do. I’ve got to go anyway,’ and fled.

  Alone, reading the note as the Prince hesitated, Marcus realised that a callous part of himself had judged that, as he’d been measuring the feeling in Tadahito’s voice, it was no bad thing that Tadahito would have heard the anger in his own. It must have sounded convincing. He wouldn’t have had a good answer if Sulien and Varius hadn’t been at the factory. Again he felt sick.

  *

  Someone urged him to wake up, and after delaying for a little while, Varius did. Deep and perfect as his unconsciousness had felt, he left it behind easily, as if he had merely been asleep. He knew at once where he was, and what had happened. His ears whistled, he felt the burns flare when he flexed his hands. And there was a heat and a pain in his lungs, but still they filled and emptied, smoothly enough. He observed the brickwork, in which the patterns of cracks, the shadows cast by the desiccated weeds at the wall’s base seemed so intricate and extraordinary, so specific, that a long second passed before he could look away.

  Smoke was fast pushing between the slats in the listing wall of the barracks and the heat was growing intolerable. There was another deep blast, and the ground shook. He looked at Sulien, who was sitting beside him, propped loosely against the wall. Varius hadn’t seen him clearly since the explosions began, and he was shocked. Sulien’s face was a streaked monochrome, marbled with grey and black and colourless underneath it, except for the redness of his eyes. One hand rested lightly on the ground beside him, carefully still. With the other he’d been gently tapping at Varius’ face and shoulder to wake him, but as Varius lifted his head he withdrew his hand and placed it cautiously over the dark circle of blood that spread across his side. At its centre a snapped blade of stained wood stuck out through his clothes.

  He looked back at Varius with half-shut eyes and said lazily, ‘Why have you lost your shoe?’

  Varius, somehow compelled to answer by the startling pointlessness of the question, gestured at the sheds, and then they fell for a while into a kind of sign language; talking seemed tiring and unpleasant to both of them, as their own roughened voices sounded thin and distant to their overloaded ears.

  Sulien turned his hand outward slightly from his chest, towards Varius, palm up: thank you. Varius shook his head, pointing first at the turmoil of light and noise on the other side of the barracks, and then, in questioning horror, at the blood on Sulien’s side.

  Sulien closed his eyes and nodded slow, absent-minded reassurance. The wound wasn’t so bad in itself, the splinter hadn’t gone in very far, but the pain and slow seeping blood were enfeebling. He’d tried to will the bleeding at least to stop, but whenever he moved the split points stirred and cut into him again, and he couldn’t pick the sliver out; when he’d plucked gingerly at it he’d only caused hideous snagging pains in the flesh which he could barely find enough strength to blunt. And his left arm was broken, halfway between the elbow and shoulder, and the edges of bone had been jolted away from each other during Varius’ fight to get him out of the shed, though at least they hadn’t sliced through the flesh. The break hurt calmly, with a cold ache. He felt unable to do anything about it. He had been afraid that Varius, lying motionless against the wall, might float quietly deeper into unconsciousness and stop breathing, as the soot and dirt settled in the little passages of his lungs. It had been all he could manage to drag himself across to him, concentrate on making sure that the other man’s damaged airways were at least adequately clear. Varius looked no better than he did – his face too was stained with smoke and the brown skin leached of blood to a dusty, dried-earth colour, his hair singed.

  ‘Can you walk?’ said Varius aloud.

  Again Sulien nodded slowly, and raised his hand to make a leisurely so-so gesture.

  Varius rose unsteadily to his feet, coughing again, his head pounding.

  Sulien said with effortful clarity, ‘Varius. A thousand people.’

  ‘No,’ Varius told him. ‘Some of them must have got out. Come on.’

  Sulien made an ambivalent move of his head. ‘But why? What happened?’ he whispered. ‘Today – I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Think about it later, come on,’ urged Varius.

  He had, once more, almost to lift Sulien, because as Sulien tried to shift his weight it made the muscles around the wound tense so that the tines of wood scraped against them unbearably. It eased once he was actually on his feet, although fans of milder pain opened outwards across his body when he took a step. The simple business of standing up left them both, again, speechless with effort and fatigue. Leaning back on the wall, gasping, Sulien tilted his head back to look up at its sheer height, and the defensive barbs running along its upper edge.

  ‘No,’ said Varius, breathless. ‘Have to try the way we came.’

  Sulien looked out across the blazing and shuddering ground, and felt immobilised with bewilderment as well as exhaustion and fear. But Varius stumbled forward, head lowered, into the open, and Sulien followed.

  The rain of little globules of metal was still falling steadily, and there was no more cover, no way of avoiding the occasional burnt weals flicked onto their arms and backs as the heated beads bounced off them. Larger and more deadly fragments continued to hurl into space, but after a while Sulien concluded it was better to pretend they were not there than to think very hard about dodging them, or you would never move at all. Still, more than once Varius and Sulien either fell or were forced to throw themselves down, jerking the broken lengths of bone in Sulien’s arm, driving the splinters closer into his side and causing renewed agony when he had to get to his feet again. He tried to concentrate on something else and it occurred to him that at some point, either just before he was first t
hrown out into nowhere when the barracks smashed in, or, perhaps more likely, when the most recent explosions had struck him again to the powdery ground, that he’d briefly recovered a strong image of Lal, colourful and lucid – something he’d lost with a speed that had distressed him after she and Delir had disappeared from Holzarta. Though he still kept, in a drawer in his flat, the paintbrush and the bottle of ink from her smashed room in the camp, he could not pretend that he’d been continually haunted by her for three years, but still it saddened him that he could not now pull the sharp detail of the memory back: each feature dissolved as he tried to focus on it.

  The wall joined the fence. Varius had hoped that the frailer metal barrier might have collapsed, or at least have been damaged enough to let them force their way out, but it ran intact until it stretched past an erupting powder shed, which had scattered itself into a wide carpet of fire that extended beyond the fence into the building site on the other side, and was still shaking the ground and kicking flames. It had blown down the fence beside it, but they could get no closer to it or even venture round to see if there was any way out on its far side, without being driven too close to the burning plume of the missile factory. Briefly, through the rolling black smoke, they saw the management building, its pediment hollowed out and cracked, the side wall brought down to show the floors within. Varius began trying to drag and rip exhaustedly at the seam of fence and wall, but the join was too firm, the stakes driven too deep. They called out, scarcely audible even to themselves.

  There was no one to call to; everyone who lived or worked near the factory must have fled as soon as they’d heard the first blast, primed by long unease at the dangerous thing in their midst. The vigiles would surely come, but even if they dared get close enough to the continuing blasts, it was hard to believe that they could find them in time, in so much burning space.