Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘It’ll be twice as long this way. Are you certain?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear the rain last night? Where did you think all the water went?’

  Delir let out a tense, unconvinced sigh. Presently he said, ‘Then it’s straight on.’

  ‘I am going straight on.’

  The van sank into a traffic jam. Sitting crouched in a corner, clutching the little bag in her lap, Lal knocked the back of her head against the wall behind her. The argument parodied some safe, normal crisis, it felt agonisingly irrelevant to what was happening and yet it was not, an hour lost one way or the other really might be critical, and it was unbearable to listen to. She closed her eyes and tried, without even a second’s success, to disengage from the noise and the jolting, to meditate. She couldn’t even keep her eyelids down, let alone stop her attention from butting, like a moth against this: they had left nearly everything, there were checkpoints spread like landmines between them and the Nionian border, two thousand miles to go before the crossing into India after that.

  But for a few minutes, flinging the bags into the van, a thrill of unseemly excitement had shimmered through her, that they were moving, that they were heading for home.

  Finally there was quiet, as Ziye had begun stolidly ignoring Delir, who slumped back against the wall, his head bowed with a quickly controlled desperation. He said suddenly, ‘I am so sorry, Lal.’

  Lal looked at him in surprise. She felt slightly responsible for the bad news, having been the one to run back and break it. She was still afraid, on top of everything else, that all this might be for nothing. And of course they had ignored Liuyin’s instruction not to warn any of the other Roman refugees. She could not think what it would mean for all those people if he should turn out to have been wrong, or lying. And yet, when her father said that, she knew what he was sorry for. He had never been a slave, he had been an affluent Roman citizen when an eruption of compassionate fury, decisive as a stroke, had made him drag down a half-dead boy from a cross on the Aurelian Way, seven years ago. No one had forced him, as he had forced her, to go and live in driven, furtive insurrection against Rome’s cruelty, before she was old enough to understand what she was losing by it.

  She did not think she could stand it if he said any of this. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, a little blankly.

  ‘We’ll go to Rome,’ he promised suddenly, rashly generous.

  She smiled cautiously. ‘We’ve got to get a long way before that.’

  ‘Well, we will,’ he said.

  The van began to move again, which was some comfort. In Holzarta they had been professional in their readiness for flight. They had tried to maintain this in Jiangning: three years with packed cases near the door, always light enough to carry easily, sometimes opened and checked, clothes added or replaced, false papers subtly adjusted by Lal. But sometimes, over three years, things were sneakingly borrowed too, packs of money raided when none of them could find work. And despite the stunned looks they continued to attract when they went far outside the Black Clothes quarter, they were so taken for granted there that caution of that kind had long come to feel more like superstition than anything, a ritual to turn aside bad spirits.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Delir asked her after a while, gesturing at the little red cloth bag she had in her lap.

  Lal shrugged and muttered, ‘Some lip paint and perfume and stuff.’ To prompt him to laugh at her, which he did, she had struck a note of faint self-parody: young, sheepish. It was not really true to how she felt, although it was true enough that she hadn’t wanted to leave without the makeup. In the same light tone, she said, ‘It might help if I look nice. If we get caught.’

  ‘We won’t, we won’t get caught,’ he insisted softly.

  Ziye manoeuvred the van grimly through Jiangning, the only one of them able to see the city they were leaving: Fuzi Miao bazaar, full of clothes and caged animals; prowed, fish-scaled roofs of loosening tiles above cramped whitewashed houses like the two-roomed building they’d left behind, with so much still there, exposed to thieves. Then the road ducked through grey, sprawling burrows of shacks, botched with sheets of plastic and steel. The Long River percolated through the city as through the cavities of a warm sponge, the pattern of the streets and markets interrupted by the slinkings of low, flower-lined canals. Then, on the edge of the city it insinuated and intruded, the most wretched of the slum buildings leaning over its floodwaters, suicidal. Then, as Ziye drove into the heavy light from under the deep shade of the planes, beneath the suspension bridge it became a sudden bulging sea, even the great barges and ferries looked balanced precariously on its rolling back, the men on sampans fragile as pond skaters. Then, as the road dodged away from it and the trunk of it was hidden over the horizon, it still soaked the countryside, welling up in rice fields, and green-polished lotus beds and swamp.

  Ziye thought about fighting. That is, she became aware of her body beginning, without her consent, to think for her: measuring the remaining strength of her unpractised muscles, coldly priming skills too old to be eradicated. She endured the pain of trying to leave Sina now as if it were a passing attack of illness: the core of her life had been spent outside her country. There had never been any shortage of superfluous Sinoan children, especially girls; rural children who amassed like debts, crowding strained families and exhausting supplies of food. And if they could not be shifted off, on to a relative or employer, and did not die, they were sometimes bought up by dealers, who talked vaguely to the parents of a better life and shipped the children onto the Roman slave market, where the excess of unsupported humans neatly complemented a worsening shortage of labour. The difference for Ziye was the length of time that had passed between her removal from her village, and her entrance into the Roman Empire.

  She had been nine when Huang had driven away with her, huddled in a wailing knot with two older girls in the back of his truck. She was seventeen when at last she left him, a fluid, supple young athlete whose hands and feet could whir elegantly through space to crack bone, almost without effort. Huang had made some contacts in the Roman gladiatorial industry, and had had an idea to raise the value of girls. He had made a good profit out of Ziye herself in the end, she believed, but, from the three little girls he began with, and after eight years of training, he produced only one marketable gladiatrix. After a couple of years Rong and Mei, the other two, must have learned something, but they looked only exhausted and heartsick and ill. Having brutally washed his hands of them, Huang must have decided the experiment was too time-consuming and costly to repeat. That was, at least, probably the reason. After that, anxiously watching his youngest girl’s progress with her expensive teacher, he would, from time to time, pat her shoulder approvingly, almost like an uncle, if not like a father. When the time came and she was ready to go, as he put it, Huang had tears in his eyes. But whatever emotion that had been, it did not stop him: he sold her anyway. Ziye was, in one way, sharply aware of the betrayal. And yet it was also a graduation, the beginning of her career.

  And for twenty-three years she had fought, wheeling across arenas in Roxelania, Ctesiphon, Tecesta and Rome. She fought in the Colosseum, where cameras swooped on tracks around the pitch and the gladiators cast circles of multiple shadows under the lights. They pitted Ziye against men, and she went to work with her usual fearless, passionate focus, utterly deaf to the noise the crowd made as they watched her. They saw a slim, unarmed, defenceless girl erupt like a firework, flicking blades, maces, nets out of her adversaries’ hands, and the sound Ziye did not hear was a sighing, pitching, splashing roar, a symphony of gasps, not just of shock but of adulation and lust. Wherever the lanistas took her, a torrent of starstruck lovers would seek her out, both men and women – she could take her pick. The only impossible choice was no one.

  At first, she was marketed as an exotic, lethal ingénue, a heroine. Then, later, as she grew older and acquired more scars on her face, the impresarios who owned her turned her into a cropped-haired, i
mplacable villainess whose eastern skills were barely natural, who did not need weapons to win a bout, or kill an opponent. By the time she was thirty-five her gladiatrix persona had even changed nationality – from Sinoan to Nionian – in order to amplify the hysteria of whooping, booing hatred she provoked when she walked out to face some young, blonde fighter with the crowd behind her. She had believed herself indifferent to this. She would do her job, the promoters would do theirs: what they called her or made her out to be had nothing to do with the privacy of the fight itself. And only as she felt her strength start to tire, her reflexes begin to slow, as she began to loathe the very texture of the injuries she inflicted even as she struck them into place, then gradually it began to tell upon her that in every day of her work, she was surrounded by thousands of people who hated her and wanted her to die. She was ready to retire, it was understood that she deserved it. Escape should not have been necessary.

  What she’d earned over the years could have bought a whole troupe of gladiators at the price Huang had got for her. Sometimes she reflected with something between affection and scorn that Huang could have been a millionaire if he’d known how to manage her instead of selling her. But the company she belonged to had changed hands, and though her right to buy her own freedom was always assured, it kept receding: her value kept climbing, one pace ahead of what she had saved. She thought that surely as her performance declined, it would come to a standstill, but she did not wait meekly for that to happen: she pressed, angrily, for a date. The lanistas who ran the company hedged and quibbled. Only one more year, she was told at last, reasonably.

  One more year. Ziye had gone back to her barracks and thought about this, and discovered with a chill that the feeling she had taken for anger seemed to be fear. Most combats between skilled gladiators were not to the death – that would have been an unconscionable waste. But over twenty-three years she had fought on more than enough special occasions, her opponents were all dead and she was still alive. She had burnt up more luck than she had a right to. She was not as strong as she had been. One more year would kill her.

  And they wanted it to. The final, best use they could get from her was not to accept her money and let her go, but to create a satisfying climax to the audience’s loathing of her, to feed her whole career, her whole life, to some rising star who would swallow it all and be strengthened by it. Whoever killed her would become, at a stroke, a gold mine, a new idol. It was like killing a dangerous animal and wearing its skin.

  The news of Holzarta in the Pyrenees had come to her a year before, just as gossip from Galla, whom Ziye could not see or think of now without wondering if she would be the one to kill her – a young, fierce, ambitious gladiatrix, who had heard Holzarta whispered about by the slaves of a fan she’d been sleeping with. Ziye and Galla had been impartially curious, feeling casual pity for the poor souls who’d have to make use of the place. But neither of them had any interest then in a freedom that meant subterfuge and poverty and flight.

  And even after this she kept spiralling round the idea as around a drain, in panicked hope of some way of saving the comfortable retirement she’d counted on. And yet she began to think of every arena in terms of distance from the Pyrenees. And then one day she was travelling towards the arena at Pompaelo, motionless in a traffic jam, on a bridge over the Tagus. After twenty-three years of professionalism, she hardly travelled in shackles: she had an expensive car to herself, a bouquet of orange roses wilting on the seat beside her, a bottle of wine, music she had chosen playing. But the doors were locked, and all the money she’d saved was far away. She was aware of the river below. She did not know how deep it was, or how fast-flowing. She might as well die in a way that did not profit anybody. It would be either death, or like death – she could only get out if she went as bare and poor as a corpse. The driver and a single bodyguard sat ahead.

  It was the first time she’d attacked someone who was not a trained fighter. She was shocked by the messy simplicity of it, her own trembling and incompetence, despite the fact that it was easy, really, and soon over. The car itself was harder – the locks opened not with a key but with a code she didn’t know, and in a moment someone would realise what was happening and stop her. She’d exhausted herself and sprayed her legs and feet with cuts kicking out the toughened glass, and then stood on the bridge, barely hesitating. She’d learned to swim thirty-five years ago, in Shandong province, in a reedy lake the Yellow River had left behind as it rampaged across the land. She thought of that, stepping into space.

  During the three days after that, she’d grown more efficient at spontaneous, unstaged violence, since it was all she had to compensate for her almost complete ignorance of how to live in the world. She’d stolen money, clothes, kicked a man from a farmer’s four-wheeled mount, on which she burned across a few hundred miles of country, until the power gave out. But he was the last, she had touched no one afterwards. She had approached the mountains with certain resolutions. It was not that she wanted to change. She wanted to remain exactly as she was in that hour: calm, clean, and either empty as air or full like a cup of motionless water. She wanted, monastically, only to go on wanting nothing. So she would never fight again. She would never sleep with anyone again. She would never go home.

  Already she had broken two of these. When she arrived in the camp, she had been the only woman there, and had had to deflect a lot of crude attention. But after she’d weathered most of that she’d found that Delir was pursuing her with courteous, dogged persistence, which to her bewilderment had worked on her in the end, even though however admirable Delir was, he was also a funny, dainty little man she could have knocked across a room with one hand. And that had brought her home to Sina, although she had always known that she could no more truly return to the aching, absent country in her mind than make herself nine years old again. Still, she had not fought again, since those days in Spain. But if the police caught them now, trying illicitly to cross the Long River towards Nionian territory, what would she do then?

  Some minutes had passed in silence. Then Ziye announced, ‘There’s an official-class car behind us. It’s missed a few chances to overtake.’

  She pulled the van to a sudden crawl. Unspeaking, Lal and Delir drew closer towards the cab, away from the doors. Delir closed a hand on Lal’s shoulder, and she could feel the instinct in the tension of his arm: to push her further back, behind him, to hide her, even though there was nowhere further to go. And the very protectiveness of it seemed to reveal to her in one pitiless sweep how fragile he was: no taller than his daughter, more used up than he should have been at fifty, and less at home in this country than she was. For a moment she felt like crying.

  Ziye watched the black polished shell slide by and ahead, scarlet curtains drawn, everyone within invisible. ‘It’s gone past. They might not want to make a move yet, I suppose.’

  Delir sighed. ‘They would just stop us, surely. Why make such a song and dance of it?’

  Ziye gave a half-convinced grunt. ‘We may as well talk about what we do if Mouli isn’t there.’

  ‘He’s worked there for twenty years, it’s only six months since I heard from him. Six months is nothing,’ said Delir, looking at Lal.

  There was a government checkpoint near Wuhu, at the next bridge on the road south – even in the best of circumstances they would have been unable to cross there. There was a little quay a few miles west of the highway, on the edge of a village. Mouli had a small motorboat there, for fishing and some minor trade between riverside villages. He had helped a few of the former Roman slaves living in Sina who had decided, for whatever reason, to travel further south. But Delir himself had only ever met Mouli once, in what had been a fairly casual attempt to reinforce this length of the chain of promises and sympathy, and friends of friends of friends, that had once led back to the camp in the Pyrenees.

  ‘Delir. It doesn’t protect us just to assume everything will be all right.’

  ‘Well, then we pay someone else to
get us across,’ said Delir, in exasperation. ‘What choice is there?’

  ‘We could wait until dark and steal a boat,’ said Lal, in a low, tentative voice.

  Before Delir could respond Ziye said practically, ‘Yes, we can’t afford to throw money away on bribes, and we can’t afford to approach strangers. Not on this side of the border, anyway.’

  Delir was silent for a second or two. Then he murmured, ‘Yes. You’re right. If Mouli is not there, we will have to do that.’ He had slumped back, his eyes downcast. Under his breath he said, ‘God in Heaven forgive us if it comes to that.’

  Lal looked at his dark shape and knew that having once been well off, it was hard for him, even now, to believe things could be so desperate as to warrant stealing: he had chosen a life that led to this. The people that lived in the poor, tightly farmed countryside outside had not.

  It was close to dusk already. In the back of the van, Lal could barely even see her father’s outline in the darkness. She lowered herself to the van’s floor, lying in a cramped, cat-like curl, the vibration of the wheels on the road throbbing through her bones.

  Ziye left the motorway as the towers of the next suspension bridge rose in the purple air ahead, and the river spread again down across the horizon like a shivering expansion of the sky. She could see the red and white lamps of barges – points of light over feathery reflections in the water. She drove down towards them.

  The ground was sticky under the wheels. Lal was beginning at last to retreat into a doze, and she felt the van cough to a stop with vague dismay: whatever came next was going to be harder. Ziye said, ‘All right. Shall we leave the van here?’

  Delir leant forward again. ‘I can’t see. Where are we?’

  ‘A track. Can’t see anyone around. The quay’s just ahead. There are lights on.’ She tightened the scarf around her head. ‘I can go and see if he’s around. If he’s there it would save us having to go into the village. You should both stay hidden while I find him.’