Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  The quietness of the broad, beautiful streets seemed bizarre to Drusus considering that this was an Imperial capital – there was hardly more traffic than in a Roman market town. And what orderly Sinoan cars there were were not quite the same as those of the Roman Empire. Despite the problems it caused, Romans liked to travel in belligerent, implacable-looking behemoths, spacious within and seemingly capable of bulldozing over anything outside. Here they were smaller, lower, some mere dark, glossy little capsules made to hold one person, bearing discreet emblems on their narrow flanks – a bear, a mandarin duck. The larger ones tapered to a single, central driver’s cab, which would sometimes be open to the sky, exposing the liveried servant’s head and shoulders while the passengers were sealed behind, invisible within red silk curtains. But what was most striking to Drusus was how many were identical. In Rome, only the cars of the Praetorians or vigiles, and the fleets run by a few businesses, looked the same. The richest and most aristocratic families ordered their cars bespoke, but even those Romans who bought the ready-made vehicles produced in runs of a few hundred or had to make do with second-hand, would usually have their vehicles personalised out of recognition: – emblazoned with the family insignia or an imitation of one, decked with stylised leaves, lotuses, friezes of struggling gods – or at the least a few plain respectable studs or roundlets. The designs might even be painted on, if plated brass or nickel was unaffordable, sometimes with trompe l’oeil effects destined to be sneered at by the sophisticated. But you would never see two cars alike in the same street. Here in Bianjing the same crests, colours and substances kept repeating: jade, polished horn, crystal; a crane, a pheasant, a lion. Drusus did not know anything about Sina’s official class, or the labyrinthine civil service and the grades within it, but he guessed that the cars reflected some system of rank more rigid and institutionalised than mere degrees of wealth.

  He said to the centurion, still in friendly tones, ‘Two people, whose interrogation was required by the Emperor himself, somehow passed from your custody into the Nionians’. In itself that merits flogging at the least.’

  ‘The men responsible—’ began the centurion.

  ‘You were responsible,’ corrected Drusus, blandly. ‘And I was speaking only of what Rome has lost. When one considers also what the Nionians may have gained, what secrets they may be able to get out of these people, how they might use them when the war begins – then this failure approaches the level of treason. The firing squad at best. Or the beasts in the arena.’

  There was silence. Drusus let it last a long time.

  ‘Still,’ he said at last, briskly: ‘One thing at a time. We may get them back without too much harm done. And as for the questions we need answered, it may be possible to acquire the same information by other means.’ He scanned Lal’s letter again. ‘Look how many numbers there are in this,’ he said. ‘Six, three, a set of three twos, seventeen … And it goes on. I’m no expert, but that seems more than coincidence, doesn’t it?’ He handed it over.

  The centurion studied it. To his credit he hadn’t allowed any fear or any relief to show on his face before and the only sign of it now was a slight thickness in his voice. ‘Perhaps – when she says that about counting the letters – it means look for the numbers in this one.’

  Drusus had already felt how the gravitational pull of power that he had witnessed at work around Marcus was now benefiting him, how much quicker people were to agree with him, to approve – quite sincerely and spontaneously – of what he said. Drusus smiled a little to himself, barely daring to let himself enjoy this or take strength from it, like the first mouthful of desperately needed water from a bottle that might prove to hold no more. He could see that among the delegates in Rome he would be able to find those who would say, and believe, that they had never trusted Marcus, that they’d always seen something was wrong about Una’s or Varius’ influence on him, or that they’d suspected Sulien’s motives towards Faustus. But that would not be enough. Things were so much more fragile, so much more complicated, than he had believed they would be when he came here.

  Still, more than usually able to see the contrast between something he had said and the likely external truth, he was slightly diverted by this invention of his about the letter. He even felt a sort of distant pity for Lal for having written something that lent itself so readily to his needs. He said levelly, ‘She must be made to tell us what it means.’

  ‘I see.’

  Drusus looked silently out of the window at the strange copper-green tower rising above the low city. He felt himself at the centre of complex orbits, people revolving like planets about him at different distances and speeds, exerting and suffering different degrees of force. How was it possible that Una and Varius could be passing out of his reach? Still he could feel his own pull on them, how his strength negated theirs. Despite Varius’ humiliation of him in the Palace cell, Drusus had no particular desire for revenge on him, not for its own sake. The incident was just too unbearable to be recalled, and Drusus had nearly succeeded in wiping it from his mind. It might almost have been forgiveness. If Varius had actually been under his control now, Drusus might have thought over what had happened to him between Gabinius and Tulliola the autumn of three years ago, at least to take notice of what had been learned. As it was, he did not. Varius was just a tipping ground for necessary blame, a tool for levering the ring off Marcus’ finger. Lost, for the moment.

  But Una. It was hard for Drusus to determine exactly what he wanted to happen to her, and in what order. Certainly someone must be made to admit a crooked influence on Marcus, to say something that disqualified him once and for all. Once that was said, Drusus was confident it would be useless for Marcus or anyone else to complain of how it had been extracted: it could not be unsaid, it would fit, it would be believed. And such a confession from Una would surely be more valuable than from anyone else. But she was so strange. The capacities on her side were so unknowable – demonic. Sometimes he warned himself that to get any advantage from her more than her death was a luxury he shouldn’t rely on. That however he had to explain it, whatever the risks of not bringing her back to Rome, they were less than hanging onto her a second longer than he had to.

  All that left aside the ebbs and flows of what he wanted to do. Sometimes he wanted her utterly ruined, reduced to a rag of shame and pain, whether privately shredded into bloody rubbish and thrown away, or publicly picked bare in some Forum, taught a long and unrelenting lesson for the people to witness. And at calmer moments, a little alarmed by this, he felt he needed no such immoderation, he would not mind if it were instantaneous and painless, so long as it happened, and so long as he was there to watch it.

  He must keep his mind off her, for now, anyway. There were these others, the people in the other girl’s letter. They were still small and far off, they still didn’t know that he was thinking about them, how they were falling towards him.

  He looked at the centurion. ‘The old woman in there is being obstructive. She’s likely to round them all up on a whim and then we’ll never get them out of her. So you must make sure you find them before the Sinoans do.’

  The man nodded slowly, but said, ‘If we can’t move openly … it won’t be easy. We’re all plainly Roman, sir.’

  Drusus flicked a hand impatiently. ‘Can’t you think for yourself? Travel in one of those cars behind those curtains. Yes, obviously you will need Sinoan help. Find it. Pay off whomever you need to. Money is no object. As much as it takes.’ Here again he left a pause. Then lightly, as if it were a different subject, he said, ‘My cousin is returning to Rome to give up the ring of office, and ask my uncle’s forgiveness. You understand what that means?’

  The man’s body appeared to relax just a little – though not really with rest or peace – into a restrained, understated slump of resignation. He murmured, still looking Drusus in the face, steadily, ‘I think so, Sir.’

  ‘He could be there within three days. But then, on such a long stretch of magn
etway, there could be delays – accidents. My uncle is ill. To tell you the truth I don’t think he’ll live long. I think it would be better if he were spared the strain of seeing my cousin.’

  There was again a silence, but shorter this time. The centurion asked quietly, ‘For how long?’

  Drusus flexed his hands in his lap, as if he were loosening an ache from them. He could see his cousin, powerless among the soldiers in a car like this one, carried away north, on the magnetway through the floodplains and desert, the crowding mountains, west out of Sina, and into the Sarmatian grasslands. He could see him speeding helplessly, mile after cold mile into the steppe, so desolate and so endless, that it almost seemed possible he might simply ride on perpetually, through the dust, until he thinned out of memory and out of being.

  Drusus could kill him. The bare clarity of the thought, as it returned to him over and over, was not welcome. There it was. The tiny expenditure of breath, of muscular effort in speaking a word – how totally unchanged it would leave him! And it would take less than even a word. He felt, as a kind of tension on his face, how just a movement of the head would do it now, how by just turning his eyes back to meet the centurion’s in a certain way, he could have Marcus gone, flicked off like a switch. His uncle had given him too much power already to retract any of it – too much to save himself from being killed too. The Senate would roll over as limp as a sickly whore. Drusus could declare himself Emperor within a week.

  And then he would die, almost as soon as the ring was on his finger and the wreath on his head. Salvius loomed, like Jupiter, the largest of the planets. He was the one the army would follow. The power that held Drusus up now was his, really. And at the same time, unknowingly, he was lending a crucial fraction of the same strength to Faustus and to Marcus. For the second he thought he had been deceived, that the rules he thought were in play had been broken, there would be nothing left to hold him back. He would storm inwards, enraged, as an avenger, sweep over Drusus like a wave overrunning the flood defences of a town, and charge on righteously into power himself. Emperor Salvius.

  Drusus let out an inaudible breath. ‘Until further notice,’ he answered the centurion, and added softly, ‘I will have more instructions concerning him soon.’

  Emperor Salvius. Emperor Salvius. Drusus repeated this to himself, strictly, as a useful check. For when he thought of Marcus, he seemed so engulfed in emptiness, so hopelessly vulnerable, barely even alive, almost – that Drusus almost felt he could not trust himself not to do it.

  *

  Despite its name, the park around the Lady Without Sorrows lake was a subdued, gently melancholy place. Though the fumes of Jiangning trespassed in, and laid dusty coats on the leaves of the trees, the noise of nearby roadworks seemed only to tap respectfully against its borders, in the distance. There were swallows looping in the hot, white-grey air over the scummy lake. Half an hour or so before, an old man with a frail twist of white beard and a grieving, finely creased face had shuffled by, dressed in faded grey cotton, with a domed birdcage in each hand, a fawn-coloured bulbul, a blue and gold shama preening restlessly within. He had turned his head to stare at Lal with the familiar puzzled curiosity she scarcely even noticed any more. Then he lifted the cages with painstaking tenderness to hang from the branches of a magnolia and a crab-apple tree, so that among the leaves the birds would be indulged or cheated with the illusion of freedom – a kind of holiday. Beneath them, as for whatever reason they sang, he had stood for a while, swaying and bending with unexpected, confident grace, extending and turning an arm, dodging the slow ghost of the gentlest imaginable blow, practising a poignant combat from which all violence had been stripped. Now he was sitting on a bench, motionlessly regarding his birds with sad love.

  Lal was seated on the ground, using the bench beside her as a desk on which she had spread a sheet of paper, a writing brush, an inkstone, although she was not writing but sweeping the ink into smooth coils and swirls, lovingly deepening the black, keeping it wet and glossy for as long as possible, with no design at all, beyond some half-conscious wish that it were possible to draw the motion of the swallows – their movement, not the physical birds themselves. She had learned from Liuyin how to imitate, with obsessive, squinting precision, the exact brushstrokes of the old masters outlining a bird in flight or perched on a misty spray of leaves, themselves copies of copies. Beautiful, but stifling, finally.

  She was too idly engrossed, and too glad of the illicit break from selling hybrid Roman–Sinoan snacks in Matho’s shop, to be genuinely angry at Liuyin’s lateness now, although every few minutes, looking around and still not seeing him, she reminded herself that she had every right to be, and should go. She should give up seeing him altogether, in fact, she could not keep responding to these tortured claims that he had something of desperate importance to tell her. He had been particularly agitated this time, it was true, and on the way to Lady Without Sorrows, she had wondered if it might be that his parents were pushing him into marriage. But she’d since decided this was giving too much credit to Liuyin’s histrionic urgency: probably it was only that he wanted her to read some book he’d found whose ill-starred hero and heroine mirrored their plight.

  And then Liuyin was there, breathless, stuttering slightly, exclaiming, ‘Oh, you’re just sitting there drawing,’ with some hopeless, half-censorious emotion. His hands jagged up and down in distress. He was also seventeen, with a gentle, scholarly face, from which his occasional fits of elegiac drama could be unexpected: ‘How can I apologise? Oh, if I’d come here too late and you had gone I couldn’t have borne it …’

  Lal, entirely without malice, entirely without realising she was doing it, stopped listening to him. She left her face turned towards him in an expression of sympathetic enquiry while her attention streamed away, whisking accidentally three hundred miles towards the bright, sterile walls of Bianjing, searching for Una there, for Marcus – and questioning with guilty tentativeness: what was Sulien like, now?

  ‘I couldn’t get away sooner. I know my mother suspects. If my parents find out I’ve told you this they’re going to kill me. I’m not meant to know. My father must have known what I’d do. But I heard, he had instructions today from Bianjing. There’s been an assassination there. You must leave, you and your family. It’s starting this evening. They’re clamping down on all you people. I mean Romans.’

  Lal blinked, as around the unexpected naming of Bianjing, the blur of distraught words suddenly hardened into horrifying order. ‘Wait – what?’

  ‘Wherever you go, you won’t forget me, will you?’ breathed Liuyin, taking hold of her shoulders.

  ‘No,’ said Lal, with mechanical, shocked compliance, not hearing herself. ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘Yes you do,’ said Liuyin impatiently. ‘You’ve got to get away from here, there’s nothing else to understand. But you can’t tell anyone except your family, or the police will realise I told you and I don’t know what would happen. My father could lose his job.’

  ‘But what has it got to do with us?’ protested Lal. ‘Who has been assassinated?’

  ‘One of the Nionian lords, I think. It must have been a Roman who killed him. So, you see—’

  ‘And – you said this is happening today?’ It was strange that the few, useless words that came to her seemed to express little more than a mild alarm. Of course, in part it was simply that the news was too much, and too abrupt, to take in. It was also Liuyin: Lal could not join in lamentation with him at their parting, and he seemed to leave no other way of even feeling panic, except in this muted, polite form.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it’s terrible. I suppose we will never see each other again. I don’t know what we’ve done to deserve this.’

  ‘But Bianjing is miles away. We’ve been here all this time and no one’s bothered. They’re really going after everyone? You are sure about this, Liuyin?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure! Do you know how I’ve been able to bear it, all this time when we’ve ha
rdly seen each other? By telling myself that you are still here, that I am still in the same city as you. Do you think I would come here and tell you to leave Jiangning if I didn’t have to, if it wasn’t to save you?’

  Lal wondered guiltily if there were any chance that he might, in fact, do that. ‘But you don’t think it could blow over?’

  ‘No!’

  Lal could do nothing but stare at his earnest, self-consciously anguished face, and say weakly, ‘Well, thank you, Liuyin.’

  ‘There is no need to thank me.’

  ‘Well – goodbye …’

  ‘Wait. Kiss me,’ said Liuyin, wounded.

  Because she was too stunned to question any instruction, and because it seemed the simplest way of concluding the conversation, and out of gratitude, Lal reeled obediently forward to give him an incongruous kiss. And ran, over the damp ground, into the warm soft chaos of Jiangning.

  *

  It was late afternoon, but within Jiangning’s double corridors of plane trees a dense, illusory twilight fell. The light from the driver’s cab went dark, and in the windowless rear of the narrow van, jounced among the sliding cases, Lal and her father Delir could only see each other as huddled, urgent shadows. They were driving north towards the bridge over the Long River, at an agonisingly ordinary speed.

  Delir leant forward at the hatch in the van’s partition. ‘You want to go left at the end of this street. Here. What are you doing?’

  ‘There’s flooding along the Qinhuai, I’m not going that way,’ said Ziye shortly. Being Sinoan she was the only one who could risk visibility in the driver’s cab. She had covered her short hair with a scarf knotted under her chin, lending her handsome, scarred face a spuriously quaint look. But of course the scars were memorable, and it was unusual for a woman even to be allowed to learn to drive.