Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘It is nothing to do with that,’ lied Kiyowara, piously and loudly, earning a roll of the eyes from Kato. ‘I should always be disturbed by expressions that … could be construed as disloyal. Although I am sure you cannot have intended it so.’

  It was not only the Romans and Sinoans he was worried about, as Kato must surely know: it was perfectly possible that Tadahito wished to spy on them as well as for them.

  Kiyowara had phrased the reproof as tactfully as possible, yet he wouldn’t have been surprised if another man had grown angry. Yet Kato, for all his fierce unpredictability and outspokenness, could be almost preternaturally slow to take personal offence. He smiled again. ‘I believe His Majesty can look forward to victory over our enemies, that’s all,’ he said, without acrimony. ‘It’s strange if that’s disloyal.’

  Lord Kiyowara sighed.

  ‘It makes you uneasy because you don’t have the same confidence,’ went on Kato, almost tenderly. ‘It’s true they have greater numbers. Fleets more volucers than we do.’ Naming these deficiencies so openly was itself enough to make the others uneasy, but Kato seemed oblivious to it. ‘Still – I promise, it will all mean nothing.’

  ‘Of course strategy counts for more than brute strength,’ agreed Lord Kiyowara wearily.

  ‘Not just strategy,’ said Kato.

  ‘Oh,’ said Taira derisively. ‘These mythical weapons,’

  This time Kato did bristle. ‘I have seen the first tests. There is nothing mythical about it. Another year and it will be ready for combat. And as you say, strategy is an important weapon, we could certainly hold our own that long; by that time we could have Rome in retreat already. And then, before there could be any chance of it developing into deadlock or the tide turning against us, we would strike with a force like an invisible hammer, a hammer to level armies and cities two hundred miles away. In the near future, explosives will be virtually obsolete! We will use them to prepare the ground, if that!’

  ‘I don’t mean to doubt you, Lord Kato,’ answered Taira drily. ‘And yet it seems to me that I have been hearing how this miraculous thing was on the brink of being ready for years.’

  Kato sat, tight-lipped and incensed, as if at first he could not trust himself to speak. ‘When we are dealing with such new devices, my Lord, some failures are inevitable,’ he answered at last. ‘To have the technology perfect well in advance is a luxury we can rarely rely on. But when the call comes, when the need is real, my people will rise to it.’

  Lord Mimana looked at his knees. Something about the way Kato had said ‘my people’ affected him uncomfortably, even if there was nothing logically wrong with it.

  Tadahito and Marcus went on talking. That the lords had missed a section of the conversation was unimportant. Although it seemed unlikely anything else significant would be said, they were recording it – unaware that there was another listener, and that Tadahito had another reason for keeping Marcus so carefully to Nionian.

  *

  Una had expected to be ignored while the ceremony and the banquet went on; instead she had been entertained and looked after for hours. She had watched a play, which she could not follow despite the little Latin synopsis someone had handed her, but which she enjoyed well enough because the actors wore glittering, architectural costumes, yet still managed to break into pyrotechnic bursts of acrobatics. She had been rowed out, shielded with parasols, in a painted boat on the square lake. She had been fed little steamed sweetmeats and handed cups of the leaf-infusion that had never become popular in the Roman Empire except in the most unconventionally fashionable circles, so that although Una had read of both Eastern powers’ devotion to it, she had never seen or tried it before. She was slightly disappointed. The golden liquid was barely distinguishable from hot water, hot water which just retained a scent like smoke, or woody earth, or subtle flowers. She had expected some stronger, more titillatingly exotic taste.

  The Palace women who had been assigned to keep her company spoke only a little Latin; Una had learned a smattering of Sinoan in the camp in the Holzarta gorge, and some more from Marcus and his wealth of books, but it did not amount to much, and the few words she attempted evidently came out wrong, for they did not understand her. So they had been communicating by smiling, and it worked fairly well. But she had been politely smiling so long, carefully mimicking them, so as not to do anything too ridiculous. They fussed over her as if her outlandishness were entrancing and precious; they giggled, and Una tried dutifully to giggle along with them, feeling that their kittenishness was, at least in part, a deliberate mode of correct behaviour which she should, perhaps, also follow. But without language it was difficult, and although, when necessary, she could produce the kind of convincing display of gushing sweetness she had used when talking to Drusus, it did not come without effort. She could feel the women’s thoughts burring and rustling, loud and yet incomprehensible, although she did know that some of them found her appearance hilarious. They were very hospitable; they treated her as what they reasonably assumed she was, a nobly born concubine.

  Even if she’d had the language, what terms could she have used to explain the difference, and what would they have thought if they knew where she’d really come from, the muck she’d scrambled through before she got to them?

  She had enjoyed the novelty of it all. And yet, as it went on, she felt hard and heavy and out of place, like an angular stone, a lump of granite or flint dumped inexplicably on a bed of silk. They had been sent out to play like children. And the men had their own games and rituals, but finally they would begin to make the first tentative feints at unpicking the conflict between them. Did she want to be among them? Yes, but she was aware it was not a very reasonable wish; even if all barriers of sex and birth could be done away with, she was not yet nineteen – what right would she have? As much of a right as Marcus, it occurred to her, with just a trace of sourness, while she wished it would come to an end so that she could see him. A strange tension and rawness fluttered urgently over her skin and in her throat when she looked towards the gardens and the Emperor’s hall, as though she were itching to say something, yet did not know what.

  But now at last she was alone, in the garden of the inner mansion Marcus had been given, the roofs of the Palace glowing icily around her in the warm, magnolia-stained air, and she relaxed again into almost untroubled happiness.

  Marcus was looking for her. She had been impatient for his arrival, but she did not move or call out to him. It was suddenly lovely to extend the waiting, and she remained still, sitting upright and self-contained but basking, ready for him to find her.

  She was sitting by the ornamental pond, looking at the reflections as if she hadn’t noticed his approach, but he knew that she was pretending, and that she knew he knew. Going along with the game, he stood still and watched her.

  Since he’d come back to the Golden House to find what Drusus had done to her, every time they met after any separation he’d felt his pulse leap painfully, with dread rather than with desire, as if this were the last time he could expect to see her safe. Even when they were together and everything was fine, he had got into a habit of watching her with furtive anxiety or distrust, as if she might be badly hurt in some way, even dying, without realising it, or without having told him.

  Now again he felt an unreasoning flow of relief, as if something terrible might have happened to her, but finally, now she was so far from Rome and from Drusus, the gripping fear had gone. Yet it had left the sight of her sharpened. The familiarity of her face and body was not stripped away, but scoured, made luminous, so that it seemed wonderful that she was just the same. There were glossy lilies on the black surface of the pond at her feet. Once, days after their first grim meeting, cold and filthy, they’d smashed their way into an industrial greenhouse in a Gallic field; they had looked at each other across a shallow pool of farmed lilies, the first snags of attraction stinging between them as he noticed for the first time the grace of the wet limbs emerging from the damp ch
eap clothes. She was more beautiful now than she had been then; he could see with new, transparent exactness how beautiful she was in her silver dress.

  She went on sitting there as if absorbed in watching the reflections in the pond, but she could not – or chose not to – prevent the pleased smile spreading slowly across her face.

  Come on, then, look at me, thought Marcus, and still for a little longer she put it off, and at last raised her eyes to him innocently, as if she’d had no idea until now that he was there, although she was obviously holding back laughter, and to maintain the pretence he had to do the same.

  Una went into his arms, close but brief; she looked into his face, but she did not kiss him, there was a continued pleasure in delay as well as a faint smart of suspicion that someone might be watching. She went past him, inside. There was so much red in the bedroom, lustrous red cabinets painted with gold, red glass lamps. The bed itself was like a little internal room, its pearwood walls carved with leaves reaching into a high fretted canopy over the low mattress.

  ‘Is there another city somewhere near here?’ asked Una. She shivered slightly; the cooling machines had stripped the air of heat with over-scrupulous vigour.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, kissing her. He gathered her back into his arms, pushed her between the screens of the bed. She let herself fall back onto the embroidered cover, and lay stretched out, one hand resting drowsily on the pillow beside her, but her face and voice were as guilelessly thoughtful as if she simply had yet to notice his lips and hands warming her, his progress with her clothes.

  ‘It wouldn’t even be a separate city, really – just the ugly half of this one. For the cleaners to live in, butchers, the undertakers … It should be bigger than this place. And it can’t be far, but we didn’t see it. It could be on the other side of the Yellow River. But it must be somewhere – like a shadow …’

  Marcus murmured a perfunctory answer now and then, as he loosened the silk cords at her waist. The dress would have come off within seconds if she had helped him, but she still lay as if calmly oblivious, and the cords looped two or three times around her body, not tight, but inaccessible where they crossed at her back. Instead he slid a handful of the silvery cloth upwards, from ankle to hip, baring one leg, leaving the other covered; he separated the layers of the dress above her breasts, kissing the revealed skin. He felt her body arch a little, but she carried on talking dreamily and intelligently, as if the one-sided conversation was the only thing of interest to her at present. He knew at any moment he could ask her to stop, demand her undisguised attention, but that would be to forfeit the game, which was, apparently, to see how long she could keep this going.

  ‘I read about Junosena. Only a concubine to begin with. I wonder how – I wonder if she meant to get hold of power right from the start, or if … But you didn’t see her, did you?’

  He plucked again at the strings of the dress, and her clothes fell open at last, spread lapping around her naked body, her arms, still in the wide rumpled sleeves, lying loose and outflung. Only the green and silver necklace she wore remained fastened, and still glittered at the base of her throat, incongruous above her bare breasts. He stroked her, running a hand in a slow uncoiling spiral down her body, from her lips, over the hard necklace, down to where one thin knee still rested lightly over the other, up again. Una had fallen silent but was still passive, still not conceding, though the half-hidden smile widened again, and he could feel the small, uncontrolled betrayals of her body. He lowered himself closer to her, his still-clothed weight resting half on her, half on the bed, confident she was losing.

  Then, because she’d been waiting for a moment when he’d be too absorbed to anticipate the trap, she flung him over in a sudden ambush, triumphantly pinning him on his back, her face gloating as if she’d won a fight. Her open robe hung over him, enclosing them both as she pulled roughly at his clothes, far quicker and more abrupt than he had been undressing her. ‘Aren’t you beautiful?’ she paused to demand, almost severely, as he lay there breathlessly, laughing up at her. Una rose upright for a moment, one hand going from his body to her own throat, deftly unclasping the necklace so that it slipped down to fall from her breast onto his skin, the links of metal warm from her flesh. The silky tent of the dress collapsed around them again as she lowered her head to press her mouth to his skin, printed kisses on him, covered his body with hers.

  *

  Watching through her spyglass, Noriko had seen him enter the garden. She saw the lady sitting by the pool, not yet realising Marcus Novius was watching her. She did not understand why the strong feeling inscribed so clearly on the prince’s face should seem to include such relief. Although she had been watching him long enough to know otherwise, she could almost have thought he had rushed back here to find that some terrible news about his lover wasn’t true.

  Well, there must be some reason, and she did not need to know what it was. But something else became obvious to her, in the confidence with which the pale lady looked back at him, in the depth of familiar happiness between them: the lady was not simply a favoured lover – she was the only one, Noriko was certain of it.

  She was perhaps two hundred yards distant from them, standing in the shadow of a great bronze urn. She drew closer, keeping the spyglass steady, training it from one face to the other as the young woman rose and went into the prince’s arms, and again a physical twist of anticipation and misery churned through her. She drew closer.

  A voice spoke just inches behind her, and struck like a pickaxe to a sheet of glass. ‘You’ve been caught much later than you deserve, no thanks to your own competence.’

  Noriko almost cried out. It was the caustic contempt in the voice she understood first, as her brain, cringing in shock, limped slowly to translate the Sinoan syllables. Lurching, she turned round.

  At first, instead of a person, she saw clothes: a cone of clothes, a tiered monolith of primrose and red satin, topped, at face level, with a nodding oblong concoction of petals and jewels. Lowering appalled eyes Noriko saw the small, elderly woman who stood engulfed within the edifice, glowering at her. The clever, ferocious face looked tiny below her hair, which stood rigidly in a flat, precarious rectangle a foot high, like a large book or a picture balanced upright on her head. The hair was black, but must surely have been dyed, and it was festooned with fresh flowers, combs, and dangling pendants of pearls, tourmalines and jade beads. The thick coating of make-up on her skin was not merely white, but faintly iridescent, and should have made the woman who wore it look ethereally inhuman, as if the entire face had been fashioned out of pearl. But the paint had soaked into the gullies and pleats in the seventy-year-old skin, so that the crumpled, white-stained flesh was marbled with shimmering streaks and rays, around what must once have been delicately elfin features. Her mouth was like a small, scarlet puncture wound. A cut-out gold flower design had been applied carefully to her forehead. Her upper body was laden with a chainmail of necklaces, draped with plum-sized rubies that must have bruised her chest as she walked. A phoenix in flight spread its embroidered wings across her skirts, which, alone, would have marked out who she was: Junosena, as the Romans called her – the Empress Jun Shen. It seemed impossible that, so ornately armoured in her clothes, she could have moved so soundlessly.

  In confused horror, Noriko bowed clumsily, only from the waist at first, and then realising her mistake, began to drop awkwardly to her knees on the hard paving.

  ‘How dare you violate this Palace and these negotiations?’ shouted the Empress passionately. ‘How dare you conduct yourself this way in my country?’

  Noriko, shaking but reluctant, had finally curled up on her knees with her forehead on the ground. She gestured vaguely at the eastern side of the Palace compound, as if she were lost, stammering in apologetic, hopeless Nionian: ‘So sorry, I can’t understand – so sorry.’

  Scowling, the Empress snatched the telescope from Noriko’s flinching hand, a startlingly rapid, violent move from a woman of he
r age. She brandished it so that instinctively Noriko turned her face aside, expecting to be hit with it. ‘You barbaric idiot! Liar! Must you shame yourself further and insult my intelligence as well? You can’t be stupid enough to doubt I know exactly who you are and what you’re doing.’ She jerked her burdened head at the Roman prince’s quarters, so that the coiffure wobbled and the pendants swung wildly. ‘They may not have seen you creeping around on the ramparts, but I have.’

  Noriko stared stupidly at the paving, which swung and clouded before her eyes. She could not speak.

  ‘Well, I will call my guards and tell them they have failed in their duty, and after they have killed you, they will be punished,’ announced Jun Shen. She was still holding the telescope aloft, like a weapon; it seemed, at the least, she must be about to dash it to the ground.

  Noriko raised her head a little, although still she could not lift her eyes from the ground. ‘You cannot,’ she whispered, trembling, in Sinoan this time.

  The Empress’ eyes narrowed. ‘I can’t have a spy, or an assassin executed in my own Palace?’

  ‘If anyone touches me …’ breathed Noriko.

  ‘Is there a reason you should be spared? Will you tell us all why in front of everyone? Will your so-called Great Lords be able to explain themselves when the Romans discover they have been prey to a Nionian intruder? Your identity and your purpose must certainly be established to everyone’s satisfaction.’

  Noriko closed her eyes in agony, lowering her head again. ‘Please …’ she moaned.

  The Empress snorted, and there was harsh amusement in the sound. She poked Noriko with her foot. ‘Sit up,’ she said disgustedly, as if Noriko should have done this uninvited. Noriko, shaking with fury now as well as fear, obeyed. But Jun Shen’s mood seemed to have altered suddenly and her creased little red mouth lifted into a smile of malign enjoyment. She uttered another, more meditative snarl, and tilted her head sardonically, like a parrot, as she surveyed Noriko. ‘Your disguise is pitiful, it does nothing but tell the world you have something to hide,’ she remarked, with a kind of haughty friendliness. ‘Better to find a way of doing your work in your own person. You could not have been challenged. That,’ she confirmed, with a decisive nod, ‘is what I would have done.’