Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  She extended the telescope a little way towards Noriko and dropped it, seeming to lose all interest as soon as it left her fingers – certainly she did not wait to see if Noriko caught it. She swung round and stalked off, trundling silently, erect beneath the husk of clothing.

  Aghast and sick, Noriko rose from battered knees to her feet, and almost ran back to her quarters on the east of the compound. In the outer chamber her ladies-in-waiting sat on mats on the ground, the trains of their dresses spreading around them, talking and playing a battle-game on an illuminated board.

  Lady Mizuki, the long locks of her jewelled pink wig falling around her pert, cheerful face, looked up at Noriko in her maidservant’s clothes and asked teasingly, ‘Did the new maid serve my Lady satisfactorily?’ But Noriko walked through to her bedroom without answering, almost weeping with homesickness, rage and shame.

  There was too much stuff in the room, too many tapestries, needless, over-decorated chests and chairs, cluttered, vulgar – she thought furiously – unfitting for a royal Palace. She dropped rapidly into a sitting position on the floor, and tears abruptly leapt from her eyes. For a few moments, she allowed herself to sob, before she closed her eyes and exhaled, trying to smooth and order her breath, to be calm. She unhooked the letter-case from her shoulder. It was a beautiful thing, an antique, made of glossy black wood and painted with a gold serpent, its fine coils spiralling elegantly round the polished tube, but what she slid out when she opened the lid was very new: a thin, flexible screen that rolled up into a slender scroll and fastened with a circular silver clasp cut like an aster blossom. Noriko unfurled it and stood it up on top of the chest before her – it spread into a broad, curved vista, three feet wide, a foot and a half high. Noriko touched a silver dial and the screen glowed, and what appeared first was a shining view of Cynoto – Tetsugaku-no-Michi at its loveliest, in the spring dawn, the white blossoms coursing from the dark trees, and the transparent sun rising red behind the city’s segmented skyscrapers, stacks of fringed squares and hexagons, filigreed and bracketed like ancient shrine-towers, but rising ten times as high into the glassy air, their pearls and ribbons of electric light still glittering, all so piercingly beautiful that she dared not look at it too closely just now.

  She lifted the little telescope from her lap and unscrewed a ring from inside it, slotted it into the narrow column, plated in chased silver, that supported the right side of the screen. With a twist of its drums, the telescope stored the images it viewed. She had recorded everything.

  She felt a terrible temptation to look again at Marcus with the girl. It was precisely what she had wanted; to see Marcus Novius off guard, as he really was. The conversation he had had with Tadahito, for which she had the sound as well, had been enough, but this – with a woman, with someone he trusted – was even better. Already, of course, she had recordings of him speaking from the Roman Palace, in the Forum – but she found it peculiarly difficult to watch them. That it should be possible to watch an Imperial prince, the Emperor himself, flaunting on a den-ga screen, like an actor! And not merely did they allow themselves to be so cheapened and exposed, but they looked and spoke nakedly into the cameras; like actors again, they displayed and malleated their emotions, they worked themselves up, grinning or forcing their eyes to fill with tears, exaggerating sorrow or determination to some weird level neither natural nor forgivingly stylised. It set her teeth on edge, and made it hard for her even to keep her eyes on the screen. Oh, she was not stupid, or ignorant of Roman methods, she knew that really it made perfectly good sense within the culture, she could even see the advantages of it: perhaps it helped to inculcate loyalty among the people. But still, it left her with no impression of Marcus Novius except a feeling of strange, vicarious embarrassment, of having witnessed something unseemly and disquieting.

  But she felt ashamed of having recorded him with the pale girl, ashamed of having witnessed it at all.

  Tomoe, Noriko’s favourite among her ladies, a tall young woman with hair stained dark indigo, trailing down the back of a butterfly-embroidered dress, came in quietly and knelt beside her. She began silently unwinding the black fillets Noriko had bound around her plaited hair, to cover it. Noriko let her do it without comment.

  At last Tomoe murmured quietly, ‘You are beautiful even in these simple clothes, Lady, but let me find you something more suitable. You would not want my lord the Prince to see you like this.’

  ‘He already has, it doesn’t matter,’ said Noriko, bleakly.

  Deftly, Tomoe unravelled the plait so that the hair hung loose and pooled around her body on the mat. Noriko’s hair was both conservatively and expertly coloured: untouched black down to below the shoulders, where very gradually it began to shade into deep, deep green – a tint almost invisible except where it reflected light, as if a dim green lamp was shining on the black surface. The colour intensified slowly down the length of hair, until the final foot of it was a cool, bright jade green, the long points of it like willow leaves, brushing on the ground when she stood. Tomoe took a bottle of scented water, poured the liquid into her palm and smoothed it through, trying to straighten and erase the ripples left by the plaiting.

  Tadahito came to the pavilion before Tomoe had persuaded her into a silk dress, and Noriko wearily insisted that he be let in at once. She still felt perversely reluctant to change out of the cotton clothes, reluctant to do anything, to consent to any movement forward in time. Tomoe withdrew as Tadahito entered the room. Noriko, too dumb with gloom to ask for it, hoped she would bring tea. The Prince returned Noriko’s bow, his own, of course, less deep than hers, and then placed his hands affectionately on her shoulders. ‘Did you see what you wanted? Did it help you?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said, a little distantly. She did not think she could bear to tell him about her encounter with the Empress Jun Shen, although she was afraid it might be her duty to do so.

  ‘But you don’t seem … reassured.’

  Noriko reached out to the curved screen. Her finger hovered for a moment, hesitating, and then pressed one of the silver buttons, deleting the recording of Marcus with Una. She felt the privacy of which she’d robbed them flow back, submerging them in safe quiet. She felt relieved as if it were she who’d been exposed, glad they were protected, for now.

  Instead, the conversation between the two princes on the long cloistered walk began to play. She appreciated that Tadahito had kept the conversation in Nionian; she spoke Latin, but to nothing like the same standard as he.

  ‘Might I borrow that once you’re finished with it? I think Lord Kato would be glad to see it.’

  ‘How will you explain its existence?’ she asked, wincing again, feeling the Sinoan Empress’ tirade resound silently through her humiliated flesh.

  ‘I can say I had a retainer do it and that I forgot to mention it,’ he said, smiling. ‘If he concludes I may have other spies, I don’t think that would do him any harm at all.’ At the same time his voice spoke on the screen, saying, ‘How can one be a citizen of two nations?’ A shudder of grief, a renewed urge to shed tears, reached Noriko’s face suddenly before she could stop it.

  Tadahito’s smile vanished. ‘You feel you are being sacrificed,’ he remarked, unhappily.

  ‘I am,’ she wanted to cry out, enraged. Instead she said flatly, ‘I understand what is required of me, which has not truly changed, even if its full nature was not clear to me before.’

  She felt she was distressing Tadahito with her formality but somehow she could not shed it: inwardly she had already taken a preparatory step away from him and she dared not move back.

  Still, when he put his arms around her, her face dropped helplessly against his shoulder and she sobbed again. ‘It’s only a possibility,’ he urged. ‘It may never happen.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t, it will be because everything has failed, and the war will begin. And I don’t believe in Lord Kato’s magical weapons. If it comes to it, Nionia will lose.’

  ‘
You cannot say that!’ Tadahito protested, shocked.

  Noriko sighed. Looking away from him, she saw both their faces held in a richly framed mirror on the wall. They did not look much alike, really; her own face was rounder, graver, more still, Tadahito’s full of tense, expressive energy. She loved her brother – she was closer to him than to any of her other siblings. And yet she was two years older, the firstborn, and her mother was the Empress, not merely a concubine, as Tadahito’s was. As sometimes happened, she could not help reflecting on the advantage over him she had lost by being born female. If she had been a boy, almost certainly she would have been the heir to her father’s throne. Tadahito would have been brought up to bow more deeply, taught to defer to her as well as love her. And if he had been a girl, this would have been happening to him, not to her; she would have been offering comfort and regret from her own position of power.

  ‘All right,’ she said wearily. ‘So we’ll win, if that’s what we are obliged to say. But only when millions have died. No, I can’t even wish my way out of this.’ She turned back to her screen, free for the first time to give her full attention to Marcus’ face.

  When she looked at him it was as if she saw two transparent slides laid one on top of the other, overlapping and distorting each other. In one image – reminding herself that she was an educated woman in a shrinking world, not some insular reactionary – she saw a handsome young man with straight features, the attractiveness of the face only deepened by the occasional faint, touching irregularity: the soft asymmetry at the full mouth, the drowsy heaviness of the eyelids with their load of varicoloured blond lashes. The colour of his hair brightened from subtly tawny brown to gold, his eyes were a seawater grey-blue.

  And the other was exactly the same, and yet it was the caricature of a foreigner: a long, knobbly skull, the features as overgrown and gangling as the body; the yellowy hair clownish or effeminate, the bleached-looking eyes eerie or at best hypnotically eccentric.

  It tired her eyes, trying to separate one impression from the other. But in time, surely, the ugly second image would fade, leaving only the other behind. He was younger than she was. Well, it was obvious that he’d been made to grow up fast, they all were, it was part of being born to their rank. In any case, there were often discrepancies of age between husband and wife.

  ‘Did you like him?’ she asked Tadahito.

  And he could not very well say anything other than, ‘Yes,’ although she knew he might have added, ‘If he is as he seems.’

  Everything she had said to Tadahito was true; naturally she had always known that finally her father would settle on a marriage for her, on the basis of political alliance, of strategy. She did not know anyone for whom that was different, and it would be absurdly immature to complain about it. But she had never expected it would mean exile. She would be forced away, not only from Nionia, but even from the Empire itself, and to a country so profoundly foreign, to spend the rest of her life stranded in the static buzz of a language she could only half understand. Nor could she have known that her marriage, if indeed it was to happen, would begin with such furtiveness and shame. For it was not just the humiliation of being caught creeping around by the Empress that hurt her. In Nionia – and in Tokogane, doubtless, in Goshu, Koura, Siam – everyone would of course applaud the Emperor’s wisdom in setting his daughter on the Roman throne. And many of them would mean it. But privately some would think it a disgrace that their Princess had been dropped into such undeserving hands. She would be a pitiable stain on their pride for ever.

  All this she had known before she left Nionia. She and Tadahito had hoped that the private glimpses of Marcus Novius she had won today would help her bear it. But instead, she had the mortifying knowledge that she would not be wanted, something which, secure enough in her own beauty, had not troubled her before. She could not have expected that he would not have lovers. But there was only one, and it occurred to her belatedly that what she felt was partly envy. Not jealousy of the lady, of course not. Noriko could – yes, she had discovered that – imagine becoming attracted to Marcus in the future, but she certainly had not fallen in love with him at first sight. But that solitary fullness between them – like the fullness of light before evening, intense but lucid – it was not meant to include anyone else, and she would never have anything like it.

  And she was sorry for them, too. If everything went as she had to hope, soon she would be driven against them like a bulldozer, and their happiness would be cracked or damaged, or destroyed altogether.

  IN NOMINE MEI

  Finally the Roman sky had turned brown and puffy with rain. Under the bridges he’d crossed, the Tiber was brown and engorged, almost approaching the Thames’ stubborn bulk. And the dust was dissolving into gritty mud as, in Veii, Sulien picked his way forward over the ruins of the factory. He wondered what was mixed in the wetted ash that slid away treacherously under his feet.

  Here and there he could see the barbed coils of snapped tramlines, standing up from the heaped and pitted earth like small, painful trees. It was on one of those tracks it must have started, he had been told. Any of the buildings should have contained an explosion within it; the first flame, however lit, had to have been out in the open, moving in on the little carriage of explosives like a slow missile, to spray outwards, setting off several blasts at once. Huge and bleak as a battlefield, the place seemed strangely unfamiliar now; he could not even decide for certain just where the barracks had stood in which he and Varius had been trapped. Even the landmarks the explosion had spared had been cleared away; most of the long wall was still there, but the laid open management building was gone, and a couple of large diggers were moving torpidly, oddly sedate, over the blackened ground. From this distance and through this rain, Sulien could not see the men driving them and the vehicles seemed more like ponderous, trundling herbivores than machines under human control. He knew that a few bodies, or parts of bodies, had been retrieved by the vigiles, but as for the rest – who wanted the scraps and fragments of them, for whom was it worth sifting through so much rubble? No one who was free to do it. It was all being ploughed under. There was nothing to see.

  He turned back to the Praetorian who was standing stiffly enduring the rain in a cloak, saying, ‘Sorry I brought you out in this, Fenius.’ He could not see the rest of the guards, but they would be near, they would be sure of where he was. He no longer found this unnerving. It was still an embarrassing encumbrance, but he got on well enough with all of them now. You could get on with anyone, if you tried.

  Tancorix hadn’t wanted to look at the remains but she was waiting for him in a dingy little taverna, though she was complaining about her soaked shoes and the hem of her skirt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, heavily. ‘I don’t know what I thought the point of that was.’

  Tancorix shivered in her wet clothes, and said, ‘You look so sad.’ And she looked mournful too, her lovely yellow hair splayed dripping over her shoulders, her face unintentionally washed of make-up whose ruins she’d been dabbing at, discontentedly guiding herself by a little hand mirror.

  ‘I know,’ agreed Sulien, mildly.

  ‘You weren’t going to get it out of your head. And your minders must have needed the exercise.’

  Sulien nodded, swilling his drink around in its glass, blankly watching the pivoting disc of reflected light. Two men, middle-aged, were talking at a table behind him: ‘Yes, the whole of the kitchen … I suppose what matters is we weren’t in the house when it happened. Just hope they come up with something over there. I don’t want my kids going through any more of this.’

  The other man grunted with cautious dissent. ‘Yeah, but … I know, but don’t you want something done? We know the Nionians bombed the place—’

  ‘Oh, come on—’

  ‘And we’re not even going to fight back? We’re admitting we’re scared of them? It’s not Roman.’

  ‘But it’s different now. It is different. It wouldn’t be like Mexic
a again. The world.’

  They were silent for a while, then the second man said, ‘I think this generation needs a war.’

  Under his waterlogged clothes, the damp skin on Sulien’s shoulders prickled with faint paranoia, an instinct to turn and see if the man was looking at him.

  When he did not speak again, Tancorix asked, ‘How is the Emperor?’

  ‘I stopped the bleeding in his brain,’ answered Sulien, dully, the direction of his thoughts unchanged. Then after a while, he set the drink down decisively, saying with an effort, ‘Well. It was a terrible place, and it’s gone. They’re out of it. And when it went up I didn’t feel anything. Nothing hurt until later. It might have been like that – for most of them.’

  Tancorix’s face underwent a sudden, resisted crumpling into tears. Sulien, startled out of his own sadness, looked at her in guilty dismay. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you …’

  Inevitably Sulien insisted, ‘What?’

  ‘Edda,’ wept Tancorix.

  ‘Who? What’s wrong?’

  ‘When I was in Epimachus’ house …’ Epimachus had been her husband. ‘The only person who was even slightly bearable. That is, I was so lonely there and she was kind to me, especially when I realised I was pregnant and it seemed so awful, she was so good. But he sold her after I left.’