Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

Varius and Sulien scraped fruitlessly at the fence, and another furrow carved itself through the air, shockingly close to them and low to the earth, so that they both had to drop to the ground, trying to shield their heads. They looked at each other helplessly.

  Sulien had no conscious sense that he had given up – the idea would have shocked him, but he could not see what they could do, and he was still surprised, even exasperated at the pain, when Varius started trying to drag him to his feet again. ‘What?’ he muttered.

  ‘Back there. That thing could have knocked the wall down.’ Varius was steering him back towards the barracks again. ‘It was low enough. It must have done.’

  ‘All right, in a minute,’ Sulien wanted to say, but the words scared him as they formed. He gave an almost irritated grunt and made himself plod along beside the wall again. It seemed stupid to be heading back to where the last missile had flown, and he felt he just could not bear to fall over and have to get up again, and it was bound to happen.

  The barracks roared as they were consumed, a shapeless heap of glowing timbers under a lush fleece of velvety red fire, rising to high thready peaks and thick unreeling fibres of smoke. The mass had collapsed and spread against the wall, so that there was no way between and they had to veer further into the open, blinking, with a fine smarting pain growing on their skin like sunburn. Sulien went on trying to ignore the absurd closeness of the danger, and even sang erratically to himself, almost soundlessly, occasionally hearing a tuneless note through some fluke of the heat-blown air. The pain in his arm was growing hotter and more jagged from launching himself down so many times, from having to crawl. Varius, beside him, kept having to slow down so as not to leave him behind, and once, when they had skirted round towards the perimeter again, harassed him out of a doze he was alarmed to realise he’d allowed himself. Varius was shouting in his ear, ‘The wall is down. Come on, you can go to sleep in a minute.’

  And it was down – the wall sloped to a pyramid of blackened rubble, and beyond it a trough cut across a road, into a rank of buildings and ended in a quarried pit. But still, the shattered wall was six foot high at its lowest point, a stupid, easy little height, and not even a sheer barrier any more but a crumbled hill – but Sulien’s first thought was only how much it was going to hurt getting over it.

  They made painful, awkward, flopping progress up the wall, like singed frogs up a bank. Sulien felt warm rivulets of blood feel their way along his skin inside his clothes, as the soaked cloth fell away from the wound, and the clamping pain. He thought grimly, never mind. Never mind.

  There was another long shower of crushing noise and fire.

  On the other side of the wall the churned ground was scattered with burning scraps, and the very existence of this way out proved how they were not safe. They wove haphazardly down the centre of an empty road. Sometimes they had to stop; Varius was aware again of the taste of smoke and fumes in his mouth, and the small fund of extra strength burning off like an oil. His lungs squeezed bitterly until, leaning in an open doorway, he was forced to spit out a blackish paste onto the dust.

  They noticed noises other than the factory’s roar quite suddenly, as if they had only just started. The air was violent with hoots, and whistles, the bells of the vigiles’ trucks, somewhere close. Finally they began to see a few people, rushing ahead of them, clutching or dragging things – money chests, pictures, a battered longvision – either trying to save their possessions from the fire and looters, or looters themselves. Sulien and Varius watched them run, as if they were far further away than they were, unreachable. But a little way after that, when they came across a wavering crowd, standing and crying and looking back the way that they had come, they turned and saw how far the mast of fire and smoke rose into the sky. It was like a signal to stop moving; after that, they could do nothing but collapse onto the cobbles, and wait for help.

  It seemed that many of the shivering people in the street were not fleeing the explosion but gathering to watch it, wanting to do something, even though the vigiles and ambulances were coming. Varius was surprised at how swiftly Sulien and he were lifted up, helped into a shopkeeper’s van, the driver and his wife both fiercely, effusively concerned about them. The man drove too fast, whenever there was a space to do so in the Roman traffic, and kept telling them almost argumentatively that they would be fine. The woman climbed into the back beside them and stroked Sulien’s hair away from his forehead, nearly in tears, wanted to hold Varius’ hand, making him flinch as she touched the burns. It occurred to Varius that there was something absurd, greedy about all this, and at the same time he found it moving and unexpected, and couldn’t speak. Sulien, lying on the floor of the van, felt drowsily obliged to answer and reassure the woman; he kept murmuring wearily, ‘I’m all right.’

  *

  Una rode through Rome in a slender Palace car that sliced its way through the traffic at ruthless, comforting speed. She was appalled at how quickly the fog of smoke became visible above the city, when the factory was still miles away. Bars of pressure gathered in her head, eyes, chest. She would have refused to cry here in any case, but she both wanted to and felt it physically, oppressively impossible; the grip that encased her whole body would not allow it.

  Finally they could drive no further; the traffic had become an impenetrable mass. There were two enmeshed currents of people and vehicles: one coursing away from the disaster, and a second, fainter but definite, towards it. Una leapt out of the car and ran in the direction of the smoke without a backwards look. Soon, however, she reached a second impasse, a bottleneck of people trying to get in or out, and a line of vigiles trying to push the desperate incomers back from the empty streets behind them.

  A vigile officer shoved her dispassionately away. That could not have happened in the Palace. Jostled among dust-coated strangers, the Golden House seemed as distant and vague as if she’d never set foot there, while the street felt real and concrete, as if she’d been here before, often, and had finally come back. She began to say to the soldier, ‘My brother’s in there,’ and realised what a useless thing it was to say here. She stood back a little and looked around. Crying people, she observed, impartially. She thought, cry if you want to, go on, other people are. It was like trying to breathe while being strangled; for less than a second she managed a kind of double spasm, a choking noise, and heat and meagre wetness in her eyes that would not spill, before the sobs crammed themselves ruthlessly back, like screws of abrasive paper being shoved down her throat. The attempt only made the pressure and rawness worse.

  She turned mechanically, paced back through the crowd and pressed gently on a front door as she passed it. It was locked; she ignored it and moved on to another. She walked calmly through a tattered little room, seeing nothing in front of her, and out again into the street beyond. The solitude was startling after the throng. She ran along a little way and shouted, ‘Sulien,’ but the roar in the air and the shriek of the alarms drank up her voice. It was useless, she’d known that really. She remembered hiding on the prison ferry and knowing the second Sulien was pushed on board, before she could see him, even after all that time. There was no chance of that now even if Sulien was alive – the ring of damage around the wrecked factory, framed in scattered and shaken people, was too wide.

  The scouring tightness in her eyes grew worse, although they remained stingingly dry. She looked up and watched orange belches of flame in the tower of smoke, and a warm snow of ash fluttered against her face. The rage with Marcus had spent itself, as she had known it would, and she wished now that he could have been with her. It would have been good now, as it had not been before, to be told that Sulien simply could not be dead. The Palace still seemed so unreachably far away that she felt as if she might never see Marcus again either.

  She noticed slowly that she had an indistinct sense of people ahead somewhere, closer to the factory – were they trapped?

  But as she tried to focus one of the vigiles saw her. She’d come to a helpless st
op, standing in the middle of the road and staring, and she stood out not only because of that, she realised, but because her clothes were all wrong, her heather-coloured dress, although it was spattered with cinders now, was too impractically decorative for her to be fleeing a home near the factory. She said hoarsely, ‘There are still people there, help them,’ as the man grabbed her shoulder with a snort of irritation, and steered her back through the cordon. She didn’t resist.

  It took her an enraging length of time to find the car again in the crush. She gave the driver taut instructions and sat rigidly in the back, trying to picture nothing but whiteness.

  By the time she reached the clinic her prediction that Marcus would hear first if Varius and Sulien were alive had come true, but he’d had no way of reaching her. Una marched stiffly through the doors and a sudden hand on her arm made her body jerk, as if she’d been burned, and sent a vein-flooding shudder rocketing through her, which it took her a second to identify as relief.

  Aulus, whom she must have seen fifty times before but for the moment could not recognise, was saying with strange impersonal tenderness, ‘Una, he’s here, he’s not badly hurt. He’ll be all right.’ Una looked at him blankly, slowly deducing who he was. His round face was soft and honest with shock. ‘We thought they were both dead,’ he said, unsteadily.

  Varius, it seemed, had asked to be taken back to the clinic. In a corridor, Sulien was lying on a stretcher held up on trestles. He said to her conversationally, ‘Oh, you’re here,’ but she wasn’t prepared for his bloodless, pain-stiffened appearance and at the sight of him tears did try, finally, to force their way up, but she willed them back, seeing how they prompted Sulien’s eyes also to water, in helpless sympathetic mimicry. Almost at once, he started trying to reassure her, ‘It’s nothing that bad, I should know, shouldn’t I? I can fix it.’ He’d managed a smile of greeting but it slid off his face at once, frictionless as a drop of liquid gas. He said, ‘I thought some of the slaves from the factory might end up here. But they haven’t, have they?’

  ‘They still might,’ said Una.

  Sulien nodded, lightly and reasonably, but his eyes went dull. He didn’t believe it.

  Bearers came to lift the stretcher and Aulus tried to steer her away – they needed to pick the fragments of wood out of the wound. Sulien grabbed at Una’s hand, ‘No, wait, I need to talk to her.’

  There were two things he wanted to tell her: what Varius had done, and what had happened earlier in the day, in the Subura. Una listened with sombre attention.

  ‘What do you think they wanted?’ she asked softly.

  Sulien let his head fall back, his face creasing with weariness and, again, restrained tears of shock. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They’re not going to get near you again.’

  Sulien again constructed a smile that was incongruously sweet on his grey face, as bearers picked up the stretcher and carried him away.

  Una found a silent flight of stairs, sat down and put her face into her hands. She never got much relief from crying; it annoyed her that this concession must be made at all, now the fear was over. She had no patience with the rhythm of it and stopped while she was still shaking and the muscles of her face and chest were still tight. She lifted her head, closing her eyes.

  Sometimes she thought she believed in a single God, because of Dama, and Delir and Lal. She had read more since that time, about other faiths that had long since been blurred or stifled out of existence, enough to notice how often, within the Empire, it seemed to be women and slaves who, being starved of fairness, wanted to be promised there was more to the world, somewhere to go after they died. Perhaps there was no more to it than that, and she didn’t want to be a dupe. Nevertheless, sometimes she believed in God. In the car she had imagined a point of white that began in her head spreading to an infinite blizzard, smoothing the universe. As a slave in London, this was something she’d needed to do daily, or she’d have gone mad. Sometimes she still retreated to it, when she had to. What she saw with shut eyes when she thought of God was like that, but it was a live, fathomless space, rather than empty whiteness. She brooded on this, not so much with thanks – which seemed senseless and irrelevant – as with steady-eyed incomprehension. She continued to feel far more outrage that this had happened at all than gratitude that Sulien was alive. She was furious about his broken arm and the wound and the smoke he’d breathed, and more than that, she was frightened by how much the day seemed to have hurt him. And people had died, for no reason. Still, this unfriendly form of praying calmed her in the same remote way as the silent floods of whiteness did, although it did not wipe out thought. And there was someone that she did want to thank.

  First, though, she went and tried to call Marcus. It was frustrating that whenever she left him at the Palace it seemed to close around him into a baffling labyrinth of pointless formalities and suspicion. It took a long time which scuffed painfully at her nerves, to struggle through it. Marcus’ voice, finally, made aggravating tears harass her eyes again, because she wanted him now even more acutely than before, and they could not get to one another.

  ‘I’ve got to stay here,’ she muttered, and explained about the attack on Sulien in the Subura.

  Marcus made a sound of sympathetic shock and asked, ‘What, does he think it was connected with the factory?’

  ‘He can’t make any sense of it and neither can I. How can they have anything to do with each other? But how could they happen on the same day otherwise?’

  ‘Well – the place is still burning, the vigiles haven’t had a chance to investigate. It wasn’t bombed from the air, whatever else. We don’t know it wasn’t an accident. Varius said how dangerous it was there.’

  ‘We do know. It just can’t have been,’ said Una.

  Marcus sighed, uneasily. ‘Stay with him, then, and I’ll send an escort of Praetorians for as long as he needs them.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I wish I wasn’t shut up here,’ he said.

  Una listened unhappily to the faint sound of his breath, knowing he wouldn’t have much time to talk, unwilling to turn off the longdictor. At last she said, ‘The Prince did give in, didn’t he? You will go to Bianjing?’

  ‘Yes. But you’ll come too, won’t you?’

  Una smiled into the unseeing air. ‘If I think Sulien’s safe.’

  Varius was in a little room on the first floor. To Una’s surprise he was not in the narrow bed that stood against the wall, but standing in the centre of the room. As he got up, a jolt of astonishment at the day had caught him in mid-step and held him motionless, making an incongruously vivid, expectant look hover over his exhausted face, so that he looked as if he’d been waiting for her. His burns had been dressed and he was wearing a combination of borrowed clothes and his own, the new garments strange and inconsistent against the singed ones. So far none of the staff would condone what he was doing by helping him get any shoes.

  ‘You can’t be meant to go yet,’ said Una.

  ‘I hate hospitals,’ replied Varius. He’d found that when he spoke in a deliberate whisper the soreness in his chest was less and his voice sounded closer to normal.

  Una gave a strained, incredulous smile. ‘But you work here.’

  Varius’ mouth flicked into a small, answering smile. He amended: ‘Hospital rooms. I don’t mind inflicting them on other people.’

  ‘But will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Varius, abstracted surprise just audible in his muted voice. ‘I feel sure.’ He’d been told about the remaining risk from the smoke in his lungs, but he felt, crackling over the ache and shock in his bones, a subtle electric confidence that it wasn’t going to kill him. He had to get home and think, he kept telling himself, and then correcting himself dutifully, feeling the dead fatigue throb through his body – no, not think, sleep. But he couldn’t sleep or think here.

  ‘You saved Sulien’s life. Thank you,’ said Una, fast but very clearly and formally, as if she were proj
ecting her voice across an auditorium, and then added abruptly, ‘That is, I don’t know how to thank you.’

  Her face was grave and official, but Varius saw how the words made her shake. ‘I – it was just lucky I wasn’t knocked out at the start, that I had a chance,’ he said lamely. He felt almost dismayed, not exactly at being thanked, but at the fierceness of it, and at not knowing how to answer. Nevertheless, he was not sorry she was there. She looked brittle and pale and surely didn’t want to be alone, and he discovered that, for now, neither did he. They stood and talked clumsily for a little while – she told him about Marcus’ agreement with the Prince – tentatively proving that something as normal as that was possible. He found he wanted to lay a hand on her shoulder, and did so, even knowing it would hurt. Sharp heat glowed through the dressing on his skin.

  The door had been shut while the doctors had examined him, while he’d changed into the borrowed clothes. When Una went she left it open – deliberately, for his sake. Varius saw this and felt a quick flaring of indignation – at her knowing, at his own usual feeling of respite – and then it went out, leaving a flat calm. Well, even if he was always like this, what harm did it do, to him or anyone else?

  He was so tired by the time he reached home that he might have almost admitted it had been foolish to insist on leaving the clinic. But once in bed, though he kept feeling sleep float luxuriously close, at the last second, he would draw back from it, his eyes springing open, his heart pumping fiercely, and he’d think, no, not yet, just a few more minutes – as though the real luxury were being awake. He must remember to tell Marcus what he suspected he’d learned about Salvius. And then he wondered if anyone he’d seen for the first and only time that day – the jaundiced women crossing the yard, the strained female clerk, Proculus, any of the ranks of tense and silent slaves in the workshops – if any of them were still alive. The thought made him start on the bed, and he stared into the dark, where, of all the things he had seen that day, it was something so ordinary – the section of dull brickwork he’d noticed when he’d first woken behind the burning sheds – that hung before his eyes as if on a bright screen. If he had been a good enough draughtsman he could have produced a perfect copy of the pattern of cracks and dry stems and shadows. By the time he finally let himself slip into confused dreams he’d given up trying to explain to himself what it had seemed to mean, but it was as if seeing it had not been a function of his eyes, but something pure and total – the precision of the world, the shock of chancing upon himself still among fragile, solid things.