Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Una took the card, startled. There were a few columns of Sinoan characters beside the Latin translation: her name, a longdictor code and the word ‘Holzarta’.

  *

  Lal dragged the stack of pipes she was trying to carry a few steps further and stopped, gasping and dizzy, her legs shaking. She had managed this yesterday, why was she so flatly incapable of it now? She laid half of the pipes down and struggled on with the rest, piled them up against the back wall of the yard and went back for the others. She saw one of the men roll his eyes in exasperation. This was what they had said she would be like, this was why they hadn’t wanted to hire her in the first place.

  They had lent her some overalls to work in, giving her at least the chance to finally wash her filthy dress, and they let her sleep on a pile of plastic sheeting in a back room. One of them had even brought her some blankets and pillows for the second night.

  But they were about to fire her. She was sure of it – she could sense it coming.

  She had an arrangement with the eating house. She had told them that when someone speaking a foreign language called, it would be for her, and taught them to say, ‘Wait, I will get her,’ in Latin. She’d given them most of what was left of Geng’s money in advance, both for the use of the longdictor itself and for sending someone to find her in the town. The girls at the restaurant were tickled both at their new ability to speak a few words of Latin, and at the sounds of the words themselves. To be sure of being on hand when the call came, Lal went there for her meals when she could manage it, eating the cheapest, most basic dishes of rice or noodles, and each time she managed to find a day’s or a few hours’ work she tramped round to make sure they knew where to find her. Whenever she appeared, the girls would chorus at her, ‘Wait, I will get her. Wait, I get her,’ as if the phrase were either a greeting or a string of delectably rude words, and then fall about giggling or tease each other for saying it wrong. They were friendly but it was hard to go on being amused, as her hope of word from Una went on being disappointed.

  She had hoped she might be able to get a few days’ work in the longdictor restaurant itself. She felt absurdly wistful about the idea now, as if it represented some kind of paradisal simplicity. But the couple who ran the place had told her that most of their children and a few young men from nearby worked there already – they neither needed nor could afford anyone else. Lal thought her dirty, desperate appearance might also have had something to do with it. It seemed bleakly reasonable to her that it should.

  Still, by the standard of the next few days, she’d been lucky the first evening. Her age and sex carried certain advantages as well as certain risks. Trying to guess the meaning behind the bemused stares of men she passed made her frightened and paranoid, but at least there were times when it helped to be unthreatening. In the eating house, after opening her crumpled paper bag of make-up and hopelessly dabbing on some of the perfume in lieu of being able to wash properly, she persuaded a woman to let her spend the night on an absent daughter’s bed. But though this small space was free, the house was crammed with a strife-ridden family gripped in a furious, years-long argument, of which certain factions – the husband, the daughter-in-law – were plainly displeased at Lal’s presence. Lal took it that she shouldn’t come back.

  The second day she wandered about desperately, afraid of straying too far from the eating house. She wouldn’t have been above stealing if anything she wanted – food, soap – had been exposed enough. But she drew so much interest wherever she went that it was impossible to think she could get away with it. Finally she found a man who had just taken over a dilapidated shop and was dragging dank rubbish out of it into a skip. She helped him empty the place of broken shelves and damp-spoiled boxes in exchange for a few coins and permission to sleep that night curled on the shop floor.

  One horrible day she could find no one who wanted any kind of work she could offer, and ate only once before nightfall, when she’d had no choice but to creep away into the fields and try to sleep on a few scavenged sheets of cardboard. After that she’d harassed the men at a builders’ merchants into letting her join them in unloading a delivery of bricks, pipes, girders. They had been unconvinced she was strong enough and she was proving them right.

  She lugged the rest of the pipes into place, reeled around behind a stack of concrete bricks, and then some black, intangible time later, realised she must have gone to sleep on her feet, her face propped numbly against the bricks. The manager was standing over her, arms discontentedly folded. Lal blinked at him, stupidly, for the moment almost unable to understand the words he was saying. Not that it mattered, the meaning was obvious. She felt strangely indifferent. She changed back into her dress, dropped the coins he gave her into the paper bag without looking at them, and walked leadenly down the road towards the longdictor place out of dull instinct.

  Some way ahead of her, a girl came bounding along up the drab road, long, raggedy plaits flapping and bouncing as she ran. It was one of the restaurant waitresses, a girl a few years younger than Lal. She skipped cheerfully up to Lal and chirruped, ‘Wait! I get her!’ in an extravagant parody of Lal’s own accent, and laughed heartily.

  ‘What? Is it my friend?’ asked Lal in Sinoan, startled into something like alertness.

  ‘Yes! Come on!’

  Lal struggled to keep up, resenting the unreasonable distance. It seemed amazing that the other girl could dash along so easily having already run all this way. She reached the restaurant long before Lal and stood, bouncing encouragingly in the doorway. Lal stumbled at last into the longdictor room, fell into a seat, one of the girls placed the longdictor circlet on her head with a comical flourish, and a faintly suspicious Roman voice said hesitantly, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Una!’ cried Lal in relief. A hot, dry, torrent of exhaustion thundered over her, and she slumped over the table, propping her heavy head on her hands, smiling. ‘Oh, I knew you’d answer, I knew you had to be there.’

  There was a confused pause, and Una said cautiously, ‘Lal?’

  ‘I’m in a village called Jingshan. It’s not that far from Jiangning, it’s – ah – it’s south-west, somewhere, I don’t know, but I only just missed them last week. Please, can you tell them I’m here—’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ interrupted Una. And this time Lal noticed the tired, beleaguered sound in her voice, the faint controlled hysteria lurking behind it, as though talking to Lal came so incongruously close upon the heels of some difficult or terrible thing, that Una could barely cope with it. ‘I’m sorry. It’s strange talking to you after all this time and in the middle of all this. I don’t understand. Who are you talking about? Are Delir and Ziye with you? Why are you in this place?’

  ‘You don’t know,’ said Lal quietly, suddenly wary and chilled, listening hard.

  ‘Why? What did you think I knew?’

  ‘My father and Ziye were arrested – oh, more than a week ago now. We were trying to get across the Long River. I got away. The police were rounding up all the Roman immigrants because of that Nionian lord who was killed. You must have known about him. I thought … I thought you and Marcus must have heard.’

  Una gave a kind of moan of tense laughter, as if she didn’t know where to start. ‘Marcus is gone. He’s been taken back to Rome. And Varius and I are with the Nionians. We’re hostages, we’re trying to – I can’t explain it all now. Drusus has taken over, that’s the main thing. We hope it’s not for ever, but …’

  ‘But it could be,’ finished Lal, in a dazed murmur. She blinked into unstable space. ‘But … there are Roman men in a car, looking for me. I even saw them, I just couldn’t run fast enough. They’d been asking people if they’d seen me. Geng said—’

  ‘Lal,’ Una interrupted with abrupt, stern urgency, almost in a shout. ‘If there are Roman agents looking for you, they’re acting for Drusus. He must have your letter. I don’t know what he wants with you but it won’t be good. You can’t let them find you.’

  ‘My lette
r …?’ repeated Lal, overwhelmed and dizzy.

  ‘Listen. We’ve got ten days. After that, or if the war starts, you’ll have to give up on us. Until then you stay as hidden as you can. If you have to move on, get a message to me again the same way, otherwise, if Marcus comes back, if I get out of this, I will contact you there. And I will send someone and I will get you to Rome. And if you do hear that the war’s beginning, then at least it means Drusus almost definitely isn’t after you any more. You’ll have to – I don’t know, you’ll have to do what you and Delir and Ziye would have done if they hadn’t been arrested. I’m sorry.’

  Lal let out an unsteady breath, unable to speak. What answer was there to that?

  ‘Lal,’ said Una again, a gentler, regretful catch in her voice now. ‘It would be really good to talk to you if it wasn’t for all this.’

  Lal put the longdictor circlet heavily down on the table. It occurred to her that she was trembling, and she thought with a sense of vague bewilderment and annoyance, but I’m not that scared. That was strange, really – why wasn’t she? She was too tired to be scared. She hugged herself vaguely. And then she noticed at last that it made no sense to be so cold in the neutral, muggy air, and then realised that the dull, lethargic weight that had been pulsing in her head and limbs for at least the last two days was pain. For the first time she thought; I’m getting ill.

  *

  In Bianjing, Una turned off the longdictor and leant back in the chair, sighing. She muttered, ‘Well, there’s another reason to hope this works out.’

  Noriko extracted the little cylinder on which the conversation had been stored from the base of the longdictor. It had been a condition of obtaining permission for the Roman hostage to make a short call that it should be recorded, although by now Noriko trusted Una enough to believe her agitated account of what the word Holzarta meant.

  Then Tadahito broke suddenly into the room, his face pale. He stood and stared at Una and Noriko with an expression that hovered between wonder and distrust. He demanded, ‘You have done this? This bargain with the Empress – you and Lord Varius?’

  ‘Yes,’ Una said, starkly.

  ‘And you?’ he said, turning on Noriko switching to Nionian, his voice bright with accusation.

  Noriko bowed calmly to her brother. ‘Yes. Forgive me if I did wrong.’

  Tadahito took a half-exasperated breath and looked speechlessly from the two women to Varius, who had emerged from the inner room where he had been asleep.He remarked to all of them, ‘Drusus Novius has already made his threat. He demands that we hand you back to Rome, or face reprisals.’

  ‘He can no longer act on that threat, or repeat it,’ said Varius, standing propped in the doorway between rooms. ‘At least not for now. So you pretend you did not see it, or know it arrived. You don’t respond. It never happened.’

  Tadahito’s wary look at him diffused gradually, growing cautiously thoughtful, testing the idea.

  Una said, with the lucid, adamant force in her voice again, ‘Marcus left us here in his place, to represent him while he’s gone. We should go on from where you left off. We should carry on the work, for the time we’ve got.’

  *

  There was definitely a noise in the sky, a steady, drilling rasp, a dull hammering of the air. It had passed the point where it could have been a desperate trick of imagination, nor was it wind or oncoming rain. It scraped away the surface of instinctive fears he’d learned three years ago, and his blood ran faster, but there was eager anticipation in it now. Marcus pressed against the windows of the carriage, but the sound was coming from behind the train, he could only see colourless sky. They’d locked the door to the saloon balcony days ago.

  He had not seen the torn tunic or the photograph of Sulien since that morning four days earlier. Of course he did not need to see them. Day by day the train had remained motionless on the magnetway and the magistrate of Roxelania continued to watch him with vigilant, critical eyes, and Marcus could not stamp the thought of it down into his dreams, as he had done to his fear over Una and Varius. There was no point until which he could safely defer thinking about it; it was too concrete. There was a decision that had to be made. And innumerable circumstances, choices he might make, interviews with Faustus, ways out, acted themselves within his mind as if a dreadful locked theatre had been forcibly constructed there, but all the time he was chilled by the quiet but definite appeal that kept recurring in his mind: ‘Sulien. Forgive me.’

  But now there were Roman military aircraft out there, flying low, closing in. What did they want with him? If the soldiers on board the train were taken by surprise, as he sensed they were, what would they do?

  They landed, shining on the coarse grass, dark-uniformed men bursting out of them just as they had on Siphnos. Instinctively Marcus stepped back as they leapt up and in through the doors. A legionary found him at once, and said, ‘You must come with us immediately, Caesar.’

  ‘Come where?’ said Marcus, noticing the use of the title, unconsciously caressing the Imperial plumb of gold on his index finger with the tip of his thumb.

  The officer looked confused. ‘Rome, of course, sir.’

  Marcus felt a smile of tense triumph wrench at his mouth. ‘It will be good to be home,’ he said. And as he went forward to join them, he looked back only to stare coldly at the nervous magistrate of Roxelania, and say, ‘I told you. I will remember you.’

  Marcus never left the aircraft when they stopped to refuel at Trapezus. But they lingered on the ground for so long that his grim excitement began to fade and he wondered if this was only another stage of obstruction. But then he heard the wings begin to turn again and a cold, bracing surge of air flooded the cabin as the hatchway opened and Salvius entered.

  Marcus stared at him, straightening in his seat. ‘Salvius. Is this your doing?’

  ‘Well, of course it is,’ said Salvius brusquely.

  Marcus continued to look at him fixedly until Salvius turned his eyes away in impatient unease. Marcus said at last, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Caesar,’ said Salvius drily. ‘I must in conscience say I didn’t do this as a favour to you. Whatever this problem with the magnetway, it was becoming absurd. The situation must be resolved. You must answer to the Emperor.’

  ‘Then I still say, thank you,’ maintained Marcus. ‘But Salvius, don’t you realise Drusus arranged this? He knows he’s at risk when I see the Emperor, because he knows how many lies he’s told him, and you.’

  ‘Your cousin has been in contact deploring the delay.’

  ‘But he didn’t order you to do what you have now. I imagine he said there were other concerns than a few days of my time lost in Sarmatia. Maybe he even admitted that his efforts in Bianjing would run more smoothly without my interference. But you decided that was wrong. Didn’t you?’

  Salvius said nothing.

  ‘Tell me something else. My friend Sulien – is he under arrest now?’

  Salvius frowned, as if afraid of being drawn into some kind of trap. ‘No. Unfortunately, he is not.’

  Marcus dropped his head back against the seat with a gasp. And yet the strong, wonderful relief came with an immediate knowledge that in another second he was going to have to let it go.

  If Salvius were not so deep in Drusus’ confidence that he could not act independently, as he had done, then he might not know if Sulien were being held or not. Probably would not, in fact. Salvius’ denial only meant that if it had happened, it had not been officially acknowledged. And people could certainly disappear – look at what had happened to Varius three years ago.

  And then, in the cold, silent voice he had shrunk from ever since he’d seen that terrible picture, he told himself: Believe what Salvius says – if you need something comforting to tell yourself. Take it at face value. Take the risk. It’s the only thing you can do.

  Please forgive me, Sulien.

  [ XVII ]

  WORMWOOD

  ‘Marcus,’ said Faustus. He sounded surprised an
d uneasy. ‘You’re finally home.’

  Marcus remained standing at the far end of the room, the shut doors behind him, and did not come forward. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m glad to see you,’ Faustus said coolly. Marcus clenched his teeth against an involuntary little spurt of bitter laughter. Faustus’ face hardened, and then turned away. He muttered regretfully, ‘Perhaps this can wait until morning.’

  ‘No. It cannot.’ Tiredness was ground into his skin like a layer of dirt, his clothes felt travel-creased and stale. He had come straight from the landing field in the Palace grounds. Salvius, at least, had approved of his resistance of all protests or suggestions of rest. It was late evening, and Bianjing was five hours ahead. Three thousand miles away, Drusus was probably asleep. Marcus didn’t want him waking up before this was done.

  ‘What do you say, then?’

  Marcus looked carefully at a detail of the mosaic at his feet. He said quietly, ‘You’re ill. I must make allowances for the fact that you’re ill. Otherwise what you’ve done would be unforgivable.’

  Faustus hoisted himself up a little, insulted. ‘I am not so ill I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that!’ Marcus shouted. ‘You undermine everything I’ve worked for, the work my parents died for. You set a murderer loose with two Empires to ruin. You listen to this poisonous drivel about my friends, you risk their lives – you make me risk their lives. You’d better not have known what you were doing!’

  ‘Be quiet,’ barked Faustus, furiously.

  ‘You didn’t bring me here to be quiet. If you didn’t want to listen to me you shouldn’t have signed that letter. What is it you wanted answered, then? That I’ve let my friends control me, that they’re using me to wreck Rome? Well, they’re not here now. Whether or not you like what I say, you can at least believe it comes from me.’