Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Marcus seemed to register a great, blunt impact somewhere in the world, cold and thick, like a stone-headed mallet hitting wet cement. And yet it seemed that it was not him who was struck, as though some sensory function that should have been there to take it had failed. He sat there still and alert and his mind tried Sulien’s name and noted irrelevantly, I can’t even feel anything. He said nothing.

  ‘It seems he had some prohibited source of information. He managed to evade the vigiles for a while, but he was tracked down to Tarquinia two days ago. He’s been being questioned since then.’

  Deliberately, Marcus drew in the breath his lungs had, a second before, omitted to take. He reached forward, and, without looking at it more closely, turned the picture over to lie face down on the table, his hand resting with the fingers spread, light on the blank white reverse. He said, ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘I’ve told you as much as I’m authorised—’

  ‘No. I want to ask if you realise what you’re risking. You’re here to persuade me to do something. The fact that this is necessary should warn you that, even now, I have more control over things than my cousin would like. And that the outcome is not certain. Things may progress as he wishes, and as you expect. But if not – if not, I will again be the most powerful man in the Empire. And I will remember you.’

  He watched: the man’s short-lashed eyelids lifted a little and flickered once or twice, with something – yes, with definite alarm. He protested, ‘Sir! I have done everything possible to see that you are maintained here as befits your status. The situation is not of my making.’

  Marcus blankly studied his features without answering.

  The magistrate hesitated, shifting nervously in his seat, and then ducked his head forward as if afraid of being overheard. ‘You must understand – Drusus Novius has that power now. What can I do? I can hardly ignore instructions.’

  ‘A difficult position. Yet I could not advise you to rely on my sympathy.’

  ‘It would be me or somebody else,’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I have no choice,’ appealed the magistrate, in a low tone, his flat eyes for the moment almost childlike with the plea to be excused, to be understood.

  ‘You have hundreds of choices. You would have a choice even if there were a gun to your head. You have this one I am giving to you now, but don’t think it will be offered again.’

  The magistrate blinked, and his face seemed to turn blank and unformed, his gaze suspended. Then, almost furtively, clearing his throat, he reached for the photograph and turned it over again, sliding it closer to Marcus and swivelling it fastidiously with his forefingers, so that its edge lined up neatly with the edge of the table. Only then he glanced tentatively at Marcus’ face and cleared his throat again.

  ‘Fine,’ said Marcus shortly.

  And he forced himself to look, steadily, though it was as if he had to push his face through wire mesh to see the page clearly, something that dragged at the muscles and skin.

  ‘This is the only picture of him you have to show me?’ he said, not talking to express something he already thought or felt, nor to ask for real answers. He was only grimly thinking aloud, trying to assemble his own reaction in deliberate words, and to control it. ‘These men. They look clearer than my friend, in better focus. Why should that be?’ He turned the picture so that Sulien’s profile went from horizontal to vertical. Briefly he allowed his eyelids to squeeze shut – there was no convincing himself that this was not Sulien’s face. The head was thrown back, the mouth slightly open, the lips drawn back from the teeth. In that harsh, monochrome room, it was unmistakably an expression of pain, and yet – Marcus hesitated before permitting himself to ask this – if you removed all the surroundings, would that be so? If Sulien were not lying down but standing, if his body were unbound and clothed against some safe, ordinary backdrop, then it would only be a picture of Sulien speaking – even laughing, maybe. It was the cell, the bare torso, the helpless posture, the awful businesslike remoteness of the men that gave the picture its meaning. One of them was standing level with his victim’s neck and shoulders, hiding them from the camera while Sulien’s head emerged to the left. If they had inserted an older image of Sulien’s face into an otherwise staged picture, onto a posed body, then this figure was positioned perfectly to disguise the join.

  But it had been done horribly well, in that case. Certainly he could not look at Sulien’s face and say, oh, that’s only the picture of him at the first anniversary of the clinic, or visiting me in Athens.

  Cautiously he handled the torn blue cloth. He murmured quietly, ‘This is his, I remember it.’ Sulien must have had it about a year – he’d been wearing it that evening in the Transtiberine flat months before, when they’d fought in play over the decision Marcus had imposed on him. It was an informal tunic made of tar fibre and cotton, a bright indigo-blue now a little faded, the unusual design printed on it slightly cracked: a large, white Celtic knot, violently severed in two now by the slash down the front. Marcus could remember Sulien claiming, not seriously, that he’d bought it to counter Una’s shock about the loss of his British accent. It was there in the picture too, hanging open against the arched body.

  He said, ‘So when he was taken did he just happen to be wearing the thing I’d be most likely to remember? There are plenty of his clothes you could bring me and I wouldn’t recognise them, I’d have to take your word that they were his. And these marks. It’s clear what I’m meant to think of them, but how do I know they’re even blood, let alone his? And if you could bring this to me, why don’t you bring him? Why don’t you show me you have him, show me what you’ve done?’

  ‘You’ll see him when you get to Rome. Whatever state he’s in by then,’ replied the magistrate swiftly, and Marcus looked down, silent. He’d talked his scepticism into being, and when he looked again at the picture and the pitiful torn tunic again, he could hardly tell if the things he thought he’d seen were really there, if they had any existence beyond some vaguely possible point of view. There was just a picture of Sulien in pain.

  ‘Coming up with some conspiracy theory won’t make unpleasant things go away, sir,’ the magistrate advised him. ‘This is real.’

  ‘If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t know,’ said Marcus dully.

  The magistrate had plainly recovered his confidence somewhat, even felt a need to make up for his earlier moment of doubt. ‘I know you don’t like confronting the situation, sir, but it is my job to explain. Do you see how this renders a continuation of your rule impossible? People like that, whom you’ve consorted with, in custody – how everything will all come out?’

  Marcus again said nothing.

  The magistrate sighed patiently. ‘I would advise you to tell the Emperor that you recognise you relied too heavily on untrustworthy people. I think you should say, “I was too young for this responsibility. And I let myself be guided the wrong way. It’s better that someone older takes over now.”’

  ‘So, you don’t think I should try and make it sound in character at all?’ retorted Marcus. But then he flung himself back in his seat, swinging up a foot to rest casually on the desk, as it hit him decisively that he neither could nor needed to tolerate any more of this. Almost flippantly he announced, ‘Very well. I’ll say whatever you like.’

  The magistrate eyed him uncertainly. ‘It’s easy enough for you to say that now … ’

  ‘Yes, I get the point, you will murder him if I don’t. It’s hardly subtle,’ spat Marcus, forgetting the languid slouch he’d assumed, springing involuntarily forward.

  The magistrate recoiled slightly in a tidy, censorious flinch, grey eyebrows lifting. He said, disapprovingly, ‘Not I, sir.’

  [ XVI ]

  SALVAGE

  Lal shuffled along in her ruined shoes, as red sunrise spilled like an expensive oil over the Long River. She turned back to look at it, blinking: the lounging, dissolute beauty seemed confusing and difficult. So, that confirmed she w
as walking west, which would perhaps somehow help at some point. She uttered a little whimper of exhaustion and shame at how long it had taken her to work that out in the first place. How could she be so lacking in sense of direction, or sense of distance – anything? She couldn’t even estimate how far she was from Jiangning. All she had been able to do was force herself to some decisions about what was impossible: she couldn’t cross the river, and in any case, without means of getting further there would be no point. The police had intercepted them on the edge of Mouli’s village, so she could not venture any further into it, and it was probably too dangerous to head back towards Jiangning for the same reason. So, she must go along this potholed track on the north bank of the river, and find somewhere with a longdictor. This reasoning sounded logical enough every time she repeated it to herself – surely her father would tell her to do something like this. And yet she still felt unconvinced, that she was making bad decisions almost at random only because she had to do something. And beyond reaching a longdictor, she knew her strategy could do nothing but collapse into faith: Liuyin would help her, because he would have to. After that, she would have to be capable of helping her father and Ziye. No, it was not so unreasonable. If she could only contact him, if he knew what had happened, Marcus would certainly do anything he could. Behind her the motorway soared over fields of water yams and grazing buffalo. She was still occasionally sobbing a little, but almost absent-mindedly now, routinely wiping inflamed cheeks. Sometimes, she found she was muttering inane words of encouragement to herself, just aloud, under her breath: Well then, all right. All right.

  She grew achingly hungry. She ate handfuls of raw beans, grabbed from one of the densely planted fields, stuffed more into her dangling make-up bag before workers began to file in among the rows, although what she’d eaten already twisted sourly in her stomach.

  As the light strengthened she crouched over her bag and rummaged through it, shamelessly begging God to let there be some money in it. Deep in a corner she did find three very small coins, dirty with neglect. They would not have paid for the beans she’d eaten.

  She combed her black hair and let it fall forward, protectively, masking the sides of her face. Her dishevelment felt garish and blatant, calling reckless attention to her foreignness, something aggravated by the grubby, ingrained sensation of not having slept. Well, there was nothing she could do about not being Sinoan – and it didn’t seem too much to hope that the peasant workers around her would not know about the arrests of immigrants. A few hours ago it had not been public at all; it still might not be. And there would be no longvisions out here. In any case, surely she would not be the police’s first priority, even if they knew about her. She was only seventeen, and alone.

  No longvisions. So no longdictors, either.

  ‘Where are you going?’ From a muddy field where a few thin water buffalo stood staring, a woman had clambered up onto the track in front of her. Her clothes, colourless cotton hanging from an undernourished body, were as dirt-splashed as Lal’s own, there was some reassurance in that. To Lal she looked, at first, ancient. And yet the threadbare lines on her skin were shallow, the contours of the flesh not sagged. She might be only in her mid-forties – no older than Ziye, but she still seemed wizened, her thin arms tough and desiccated as if a softer, more full-grown version of her had been condensed and dried down to this corky residue. Coarse, dark grey hair hung lank on her neck, held back with a twist of fencing wire. A straw hat shaded wary eyes.

  ‘I need to get to a longdictor,’ said Lal. A yuan hua.

  ‘Here?’ The woman grimaced sourly. ‘We don’t get things like that here. Nothing changes for us here, no matter what anyone does.’

  ‘I know. I know. I need to get somewhere where there is one.’

  ‘Are you wo?’ A Nionian.

  Lal was, momentarily, staggered. She gasped, ‘No.’ But the border with Nionian territory was not far off. If the woman never saw foreigners, never or rarely saw longvision … Nionian made sense, as a guess. Lal wondered if perhaps she should have said yes.

  ‘Are you from India, then, or somewhere? Are you Roman? You’re not Sinoan.’

  ‘I am,’ Lal found herself saying, madly. ‘I’m not – I’m not Han. I’m Mongolian. In the North. You know. Mongolia?’

  ‘But you don’t even speak Sinoan properly.’

  ‘We speak another language there,’ faltered Lal. For the moment, she could think of no more lies and the phantom homeland she had conjured provoked another spasm of tears. She didn’t attempt not to cry; weeping would excuse her for a while from saying any more.

  The woman sighed and came forward to pat and soothe her mechanically, with an air of mild exasperation. ‘Never mind. Never mind,’ she repeated flatly, until Lal had managed to stop. ‘What are you doing here, then?’

  Lal stammered something about coming south to look for work, about being tricked and robbed. She could not tell if the woman believed her, somehow telling anything seemed to render its credibility unimportant. It was obviously true that she was lost.

  ‘Well, there’s a place in Jingshan, but what are you going to do with no money? Have you eaten, even?’

  ‘Not really. I’ll work something out. I just – have to talk to …’ Tears threatened again as she considered saying ‘my family’, but this time she swallowed them back, and said, truthfully, ‘I know an official’s son, he’ll help me. How far is that?’

  The woman uttered another long-suffering sigh and grumbled patiently, ‘I suppose Geng could take you there on the Sixth Day.’

  ‘Oh!’ Lal caught her breath with blended gratitude and anxiety. ‘Thank you …’ But she could not say it without hesitation. It was only the Second Day now.

  ‘That’s when the market’s on. You’re not going to get there any faster, not walking. Not like that.’

  Lal hesitated again, and then smiled with overstrained brightness and resumed thanking her effusively. The woman nodded tersely, so that Lal could see that her long-winded gratefulness seemed embarrassing and graceless to her, which made it all the harder to stop talking.

  Geng, it turned out, was her son, also thin and weather-beaten, already balding at twenty-five. He appeared at about midday by which time Lal, who had been in another tiny field cutting sugar cane with a sickle for six hallucinatory hours, was dizzy with tiredness. His mother called Lal over and began explaining her to him, but she saw uneasily that he did not seem to listen; she fidgeted nervously under his curious gaze.

  ‘Are you Persian?’ he asked.

  Lal suppressed a flinch of bewildered horror. She said steadily, ‘No. I’m Sinoan. I’m from Mongolia.’

  But this was terrible. The police must be searching for her far more scrupulously than she’d thought.

  ‘Because there are these men in an official car up on the road. Stopping people and asking if they’d seen a Persian girl. They weren’t Sinoan – they had someone translating for them. They were Roman. Definitely.’

  Still stupefied with fatigue and anxiety, Lal felt her brain stall, her skin flush with confusion, before being electrified by a charge of hope. Marcus must know of Delir and Ziye’s arrest. Marcus had sent them. ‘Are they still there?’ she asked.

  ‘They were when I left. They were flagging down cars. It is you, then.’

  His mother uttered a fatalistic snort at this, but otherwise looked largely indifferent, but a guarded and uncertain smile had spread across Geng’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lal breathlessly. ‘Where are they?’

  He told her. Exhilaration buoyed her along a little way, blotting out her tiredness, but she ran for twenty stumbling minutes over spongy ground before the track reached a main road, and she staggered panting among a group of peasants on the roadside, who were raking wheat, spread to dry on the asphalt like reddish carpets. They turned and stared at her.

  She saw the car, gleaming darkly in the distance. Three men standing beside it talking, one of them at least plainly not Sinoan
. They were just near enough for her to see his light brown hair as he turned and disappeared back inside the car. A battered truck they must have stopped was just setting off again, away from them. Lal dragged her aching body to a run again, waving, calling.

  Someone further ahead even guessed who she was, and shouted. But the Romans did not see her, or hear. She saw the car’s red curtains flash in the sun as the doors swung closed, and Drusus’ men drove away.

  *

  Varius stood with his back to the locked door, avoiding seeing it. His heart stammered along breakneck, it pelted and tripped. Each breath was like a shallow handhold on a cliff, it demanded so much struggle for such a little thing. This was, in fact, better than some hours earlier, when as he paced rapidly back and forth across the floor, the possessing force in the shut room and the struggle with it had mounted until everything went dim and red and he had just had enough time to reach for a chair, to fall into that rather than to the floor. He wanted so much to be able to think clearly, and for the moment dared not lift his attention above noticing the repeating patterns in the carpet. He was disgusted at his incapacity to control what was not precisely fear, not the anticipation of something to come, but horror at the present. He had been in this room for a day and a night.

  So far, at least, he blamed the Nionians for nothing. He’d been treated well enough himself; he hoped the same went for Una, for he did not know where she was. It had been obvious that the Nionians were, understandably, at a loss to know what to do with them. He and Una had been herded among the guards and lower-ranking Nionian noblemen into a meeting room and held there, first in awkward silence, then with a lengthy quarrel going on around them which they couldn’t understand. Meanwhile, someone must have been finding space for them in the pavilions, for then they had been separated. He had been taken to these rooms, plainer and smaller but otherwise not much unlike the quarters he’d had on the Roman side of the compound, except that outside was fractured chaos, and inside he could only just breathe.