Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Then Marcus heard heavy footsteps behind him on the wooden floor, and looked round to see Salvius coming to a halt at the head of the room, staring at the wreckage, at Drusus. Marcus straightened and faced him, confident at least that the trepidation he felt would not show.

  Drusus looked up with convulsive effort, and choked out Salvius’ name.

  But Salvius stood there in silence and several things were immediately obvious to him, so much so that he scarcely needed to examine them consciously. For one thing, he knew Varius had not been involved in the fight. He was too clean, too little tired. And there was no one else there, the confrontation had been between Marcus and Drusus alone. And Drusus was taller than Marcus, and ought to have been at least as strong, yet Marcus stood there over him, dappled in blood that Salvius knew, with the same unthinking certainty, was not his own. So Drusus had failed, totally, to defend himself, failed to fight. Drusus’ pleading look and whimpered pronunciation of his name was suddenly repellent to him. A weakling begging for protection. This was not what he had hoped for.

  Varius said, ‘This is over, Salvius.’

  *

  Later, when his skin was clean, and the bloody clothes had been bundled off to be washed by servants or thrown away, Marcus stood waiting in one of the palace gardens, the low fruit trees around him colourless as water in the moonlight. He was aching for sleep, the need so intense it left almost no room for thought or for loss. It was past midnight, but there was still something that must be accomplished before morning.

  He knew that given the circumstances and the recipient, the note he’d sent should have been a poem like those he’d studied as a boy; its message should have been elegantly encoded into images of snow or grass, and passing time. But he was far too laden with weariness for that, even if he’d had the skill with the language and the heart to do it. As he’d held the pen, he had become aware for the first time of the burst skin on his knuckles, smarting when his fingers moved.

  He leant against a garden wall, allowing his eyelids to droop, then lifted them idly as he saw someone hurrying through the shadows on the edge of his vision; a quick, female silhouette – a servant on an errand, he thought. Then he was surprised, and at first irritated, when this figure darted towards him, and only when she was quite near did he recognise Noriko, approaching with his note in her hand. She was wearing a plain dark cotton robe and trousers, her hair was combed back and covered. Her face, he noticed, was still elegantly made up, but she was far more ordinary and unremarkable this way: just a good-looking young Nionian woman, and as such, she seemed much less self-conscious than she had on the one occasion they’d met before.

  ‘You’re in disguise,’ he remarked, in Nionian.

  Noriko smiled. ‘So I should be able to say I was never here,’ she explained. ‘It only matters that I should be able to say that, in this case – not really whether anyone believes it.’

  Marcus returned her smile, very faintly but genuinely. ‘I think you must know why I wanted to meet you.’

  Noriko lowered her eyes gravely, a silent confirmation.

  He asked, ‘I wanted to know if you have you been given any kind of choice? Are you … willing?’

  Noriko looked at him with eyebrows raised. ‘What can you do if I say no?’

  Marcus had no answer.

  ‘We are neither of us free in this,’ she said quietly. ‘But you need not worry for me. I am not unwilling – not unhappy. I am ready, I think.’

  Had he hoped that if she were set firmly enough against it, there would be some way out? A childish thought, if so. He nodded and said, ‘Thank you.’

  Noriko noticed the row of bloody little cracks on his swollen knuckles, the risen patch on his cheek where a bruise was forming. She could not ask what had happened, but something had, and she felt that whatever it was included the blow she had anticipated from the beginning, when she had watched him and Una through her telescope. She wondered where Una was now.

  She began, ‘I am sorry that …’ and she stopped, unable to think of any way of finishing that was not unseemly, or humiliating. She repeated simply, ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Oh,’ he was looking at her with the same lonely compassion as must be on her own face. ‘I’ll try not to make you sorry. I will try.’

  Noriko stepped tentatively closer to him, not quite embracing him but just standing softly against him, her cheek light on his. For a moment, feeling that they were meeting tonight in a kind of privacy that might never quite be repeated, she thought of kissing him experimentally on the lips. But she could feel the shallow unevenness of his breath; he felt slighter than he looked at a distance, and at this moment he seemed acutely fragile to her. So she only let her fingertips touch lightly on the nicks and splits on the knuckles of his right hand, which hung still for a second, and then took loose hold of hers. She whispered, ‘We can be friends. I hope we can be friends.’

  *

  Una sat on the bunk beside Lal’s, her knees drawn up, her sharp chin hard on her crossed arms as at last the train flew west. It was hard for her to believe she had had any part in causing the chaos she’d jostled through, fighting for tickets out of the country as the travel embargo broke. Swallowed up in a jostling crowd of discontented travellers, she had felt as insubstantial as a drop of water.

  Lal was growing quiet again. For a while after the city outside the window gave way to the brown and dried-out hills, Una had thought her condition was improving. She had seemed to be fumbling doggedly against the under-surface of consciousness; there had been a concentrated frown on her face. Sometimes she had opened her eyes to stare at Una with surprised, pleased recognition. But now she was almost motionless, her eyes showing in two unnerving blank crescents under her eyelids. Occasionally she struggled as if being held down, but with less and less energy each time she moved.

  Una straightened the row of medicine bottles on the shelf between the beds, and reread the instructions the doctor had written out for her even though she knew she had already committed them to memory. She was glad that she had been able to pay for all of this herself – the doctors in Sinchan and Jondum, this hard-won compartment on the train, the porters to carry Lal aboard – it was a relief that her money was at last honestly good for something. But she knew that for the present, the instructions would not tell her of anything more she could do; she had administered the latest dose of the wormwood tincture, she could only hope it would go on keeping Lal alive. Sometimes she had the irrational feeling that its potency would be diminished by the fact that although she executed every necessary task with exact carefulness, she felt as if she were woodenly acting the part of a nurse, or carrying out some calcified ritual, long seen through by everybody. She felt as if Lal would suffer for the fact that so much of her own strength was consumed in the effort of holding almost all her mind in check. At least until they reached Rome, she would not let her thoughts name Marcus, or produce his image; she would not look at her own future or his. She would keep ruthlessly scrubbing out the possible hope that something might still happen to prevent Marcus’ marriage to Noriko, and it was that continual act of will that cost her most.

  ‘You’re not going to die,’ she told Lal briskly. ‘You know you’re not going to die.’

  Outside the grass was a thin sediment, spread halfheartedly over the sharp, dried-out hills. Then even that gave out, to bare stones and grit, and finally the crumpled formlessness of desert. Una watched blankly. Thin, shadowy ribbons of blown sand began to whip past the thick-sealed windows. Ahead of the train a rampart of dust was rising against the light. And Una could not bear to look at it; she crouched down on the bed, hands and teeth clenched, as the sandstorm streamed like smoke, and the train shot into it. Absolutely against her will, the thought forced itself on her that by now the wedding must be formally agreed upon, when she arrived in Rome it might even be on the news. And then she found that she was pressing her face hard against the bed, to keep Lal from hearing the stifled cry that shoved itself out
of her throat. She beat her fists on the blankets in total silence as the windows went brown, and then black.

  FLAMMEUM

  Lal’s eyes opened without hurry, and traced a leisurely arc across the white ceiling. The noise of traffic and a distant alarm slid in untroublingly through the small high window, just visible above her head. She could hear people talking and breathing on either side of her, behind curtains. Her body felt weak and clean as a dandelion seed, drifted down to the bed through cool air.

  Sulien was there.

  Lal slammed her eyes shut in strange, embarrassed shock. For the first year after leaving Holzarta, she’d daydreamed intensively about Sulien, until picturing an ardent reunion with him in luxuriant detail had become a habit. And later, when she’d lost serious hope of that, she’d still, from time to time, allowed herself to picture a more poised, restrained meeting. They would both be different. Perhaps they would not say much, just wish each other well. He would see that she was more adult now, and she would have a simple, pleasing memory of him. She had long ceased to really think of herself as in love with him, but he was still the very last person she would have wanted to see her unconscious, dirty, half-dead. For a few seconds she almost hoped he’d go away.

  But of course she was curious. She lifted her eyelids again tentatively, observing him while hoping he would not notice yet that she was awake. He was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her with a calm, professional concern, but without worry – he must know she was well. He must have made her so. Even now he was still tanned after the long, unblinkingly bright summer, but her memory of the warm look of his skin was right. His mouth was perhaps smaller and narrower than she’d come to picture it, over the years. Against the characterless pallor of his work clothes, the different browns of his body were warm and clear: his hair chestnut, and longer than she remembered; his eyes surprisingly light – so that in an older or less-prized face she might have considered them yellowish and ugly – but in his like gold, like burnt sugar. The structure of his face was stronger now, his frame more solid. But if it was possible to judge from such a quiet, relaxed expression, she thought there was something a little less direct and candid in the set of his face than there had been once, something more guarded.

  She carefully acted out waking up again, and said, ‘Hello, Sulien.’

  He seemed to feel none of the awkwardness she did, and perhaps the faint reserve or sadness she thought she’d seen in his face had never really been there. He just grinned, happy to hear her speak, and said, ‘Isn’t it great that you’re here?’

  Lal grew aware of her hair straggling in scratchy ropes on the pillow, the hard stripped-down feeling of her bones under the covers, ‘That I’m where?’ she asked, cautiously, as it occurred to her that she didn’t know for sure.

  ‘Rome,’ said Sulien, gesturing grandly, as if the Pantheon and the Colosseum lay like packing cases around his feet.

  She tried to piece together what had happened while she was ill. But she kept falling asleep. At some point, to her dismay, she must have drifted off while talking to Sulien. She felt so lapped with weakness and with safety that she could not summon the urgency she needed in order to remember. The last thing she was sure she remembered was walking endlessly through the countryside outside Jingshan, looking for the next village and the temple. She was almost sure she must have reached it, but there her memories began to shimmer and float apart. Her impression that Una had brought her to Rome would have seemed no more solid than any of the other fluttering scraps of fever, except that the fact that she was here confirmed it. But in between – where had she been? How had Una found her?

  She prised herself out of bed, shocked at the effort needed and at how her legs seemed as thin and unstable as stilts underneath her. She crept out of the ward to look for a mirror and a window, in that order. Her reflection was even more discouraging than she had feared. Her skin looked sunken and patchy, her lips were cracked, her body more wasted than she would have believed it could be. Her face looked old, her body childlike. She felt frantic to do something immediate to correct the damage, and her dogged attempts to unpick her matted hair with her fingernails filled her with gradual anxiety about the future. The paper bag of her remaining make-up and trinkets was somewhere in Sina. She did not even own a comb. Where was she to go? And she thought of her father and Ziye, and wept a little.

  Still, to be in Rome after so many years of wishing it, to be well even if she was so weak, kept her in possession of a certain optimism. She tottered resolutely round to the landing and looked down the stairs towards the lobby.

  She saw Sulien talking with a young blonde woman, whose clothes, hair, and way of standing suggested somehow that she was beautiful, even though Lal could not see her face. She had a little girl about two or three, who was complaining vaguely, until Sulien hoisted her up into his arms.

  Lal looked at the three of them with her head on one side, and a feeling of abrupt, flat, prudence. She did not exactly make any assumptions, and therefore did not feel wounded. But she did feel herself reminded that it was not her business what he did.

  She pulled herself up the next flight of stairs, and, with a struggle, opened the window on the higher landing. She could see no landmark, only a close, reddish-brown building, a bedsheet hanging from an upper window, a house further along the narrow street clothed in red creeper, some dustbins. Nevertheless: Rome.

  A nurse found her and nagged her back to bed; indeed now she seemed to have come such a huge distance that it was exhausting to retrace her steps, the mere sight of the bed overwhelmed her with relief as she approached it. She fell back onto the mattress and began trying to remember again.

  ‘I’ll get you out of here – you’ll be safe,’ breathed the memory or the idea of a voice. But it was all as mixed and scattered as a brightly coloured heap of feathers, and then once again she was asleep.

  For the moment, Sulien barely gave a thought to the past he’d had with Lal; he was simply glad that she was here now. He gave Tancorix back the spare key to her flat, and went off with her to buy Xanthe a bag of sweets. Finally he was beginning to feel safe in Rome again. Deliberately, he relished the good mood; it came like a deserved respite from the confused sadness he felt whenever he thought of Marcus – which was hard to avoid with news of the engagement gushing from every public longvision all the time – and serious worry for Una, who remained as white and tight-lipped as when she’d first arrived. He hadn’t yet finished clearing the mess the vigiles had made of his flat, but it was at least habitable enough for him to have moved back in. Una had spent the last two nights there, but already she was hunting grimly for work and a place of her own. He feared part of her haste was an impulse to get away from him. Stupidly he’d said to her, wanting only to offer comfort: ‘But it hasn’t happened yet; they might still find some other way.’ It was the only time he’d seen her burst into tears.

  Sulien and Tancorix sat down on the parapet over the embankment of the Tiber, above the hem of colourful plastic rubbish bobbing against the river’s walls. Tancorix tried to get Xanthe interested in the sparse snowflakes fluttering down through the bare plane trees onto the water. On the Bridge of Agrippa, workmen were already – months ahead of the event – attaching a system of glass lamps shaped like white roses and camellias and lilies, in anticipation of the Imperial wedding. Sulien glowered at them vaguely on Una’s behalf. He allowed himself to think bullishly of Marcus as nothing more than an untrustworthy rat who’d broken his sister’s heart, and pushed him to the back of his mind.

  For some minutes, Tancorix had seemed on the point of telling him something, but kept hesitating, so at last he asked obligingly, ‘What is it?’

  Tancorix frowned uneasily at the river. ‘I think I’ve seen Edda.’

  It took him a moment to remember who she meant. The slave from her former husband’s house, the one who’d been kind to her – dead in the fire that had destroyed the Maecilii estate. ‘What do you mean?’
/>
  ‘I was singing at the bar last night,’ she said. ‘It was quite a good audience. And I saw her. She was round at the side, watching me. She’d come to see me.’

  Sulien was willing enough to listen to this, but not very convinced. ‘It wasn’t just someone who looked like her?’

  ‘No, it can’t have been,’ insisted Tancorix. ‘It was her.’

  ‘But you didn’t speak to her, you just saw her in the crowd?’

  ‘Oh, it’s never really a crowd, is it?’ said Tancorix. ‘And I didn’t know what to do. I even thought she was a ghost for a second! I sort of went on to the end of the song somehow, and then I called to her and I tried to get down off the stage. And she pretended she didn’t know I meant her! She tried to hide behind the people in front of her. And you know I can’t move very fast in that dress. She was gone before I could get near her. If it wasn’t her, why would she run away?’ Tancorix shook her head, bewildered and unnerved, and then laughed sadly. ‘But then, why would she run away if it was her?’

  Sulien still doubted there was more to this than a fancied resemblance, but he said, ‘Well, if she escaped when the place burned, she’d have to lie low. You don’t tell the world you’re a slave on the run.’

  ‘But I know that, you’d think she could have trusted me,’ said Tancorix, sounding hurt.

  *

  I trust that you are now well.

  I wish I could have done something earlier to spare you the ordeal I now know you have been through, but I am grateful that I can at last repay the debt I owe to you and your family. Of course you have a home in Rome as long as you need or want it. I know you must be very anxious for your father and stepmother, and indeed for other Romans and former slaves, and I wish to reassure you as much as possible. I have been pursuing Delir and Ziye’s case since first I heard of it; I have been assured they are both well, and have been moved into better conditions. I am fully confident they will be transferred into Roman supervision and that the only question that remains is how soon we may expect this. I have every faith it will be soon.