Rome Burning

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Rome Burning Page 52

by Sophia McDougall


  He approached the bed slowly, saying, ‘Nothing has to happen now. If you’re tired, or you’d like to wait for a while …’

  But Noriko stood up and came close to him. Her lips on his were even more flutteringly tentative than their first, ritual, public kiss, but her fingers were resolute as they took his hands and guided them down to the string of red knots. ‘We are married now. There is nothing to wait for.’

  Marcus said nothing. He nodded, bowing his head against hers.

  He unpicked the knots patiently, calm and expressionless, efficient because entirely focused on each one. He did not look up at her. Noriko gave a self-conscious little laugh when he finally pulled the long sash away, and let it fall. Marcus stepped back from her a little and briskly loosened the heavy folds of cloth around his own body, while Noriko plucked at the small fastenings on her gown that remained closed. Marcus, bare from the waist up, turned back to methodically undressing her. He lifted off the dress, and she stood there naked and brave, chin raised, summoning a hesitantly seductive smile. But she was trembling now, he could feel it when she touched him. Detached as he had been, it was a relief to feel tender towards her, to want to be kind. He smiled back, and stroked her arms and her long hair, which still fascinated him.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said to her. ‘Let’s just lie down for a while.’

  So he took off the rest of his clothes, and they climbed naked into the bed, and lay still together, holding each other for comfort and warmth, as if the bed were a raft on a cold sea.

  He felt Noriko relax slowly, and uncurl herself against him. Tired and unhappy as he was, with all his mind stained through with longing for somebody else, he had thought that to lie quietly beside her might be all that was possible tonight. Instead he was distantly annoyed at how quickly his body took over, as if it had nothing to do with him. He took Noriko in his arms, and bent over her, but the intimacy that a minute before he’d felt between them was gone. He kissed her, gently and minimally, caressed her in the same conscientious, sparing way. Noriko lay passively at first, then began trying uncertainly to reciprocate. She pressed her lips to his chest, ran her hand down his back, then slid it doubtfully round the curve of his hips towards his groin – attempts which remained tentative courtesies because Marcus did nothing to encourage her. Her flesh was smooth and warm, beautiful. He shivered a little, distracted with automatic excitement. It was not her fault that he felt he was scarcely even there. He scanned her face for signs of fear and lowered himself onto her, guiding her legs apart, and laid another blank kiss on her breast, as he began to press against and into her.

  She gasped sharply and he whispered, ‘Am I hurting you?’

  ‘No,’ she insisted, determined, though her teeth were gritted.

  And they did not speak any more. She kept her arms around him and Marcus moved carefully, impersonally within her, until he felt himself vanish gratefully into dark anonymity, where even the memory of Una slipped away from him and nothing mattered.

  But later, when they’d edged apart, and she seemed to be asleep, Marcus felt dull, heavy wakefulness spreading through him like dirty water through the gutters of a town. He was not quite sure why he should feel so disgusted with himself, but the knowledge of loss intensified minute by minute until to lie in the bed beside Noriko was intolerable. He got up, threw on some clothes, and left the room, feeling some relief as he shut the door quietly behind him. He wandered the upper floors of the Palace, and slept only for a few hours, much later, in a chair in a tower room, where he’d been looking out across Rome.

  He did not return to bed all that night, so that long before dawn Noriko woke to find herself naked and alone in the strange bed, the flesh between her legs bloody and raw, and for the first time since leaving home for her wedding, she shed tears.

  *

  Cold and stiff, Una trod slowly down the stairs. She scoffed vaguely at her own stupidity at leaving the door open, even though she was entirely indifferent at the idea that something might have been stolen. Nothing had been. She should prepare some food – because it would pass twenty more minutes or so of this dreadful day, and because she had eaten almost nothing. She felt insubstantial and light-headed, quiveringly sick. But her stomach and throat clenched when she looked at what little food was in her kitchen and the idea of even cutting some bread exhausted her. She swallowed some wine without tasting it, trudged into her bedroom and lay down, without undressing, on top of the covers. The festivities in the streets had quietened a little, but she had no hope that they would stop before morning. The fireworks at least were almost over, although sometimes the isolated bullet crack or hiss of a cheap rocket going off in a nearby street made her start, her tense body feeling the noise like a physical blow. She did not even try to sleep. She tried only to rest; she tried, for a while, to be absent, which should have been possible. She’d done it often enough before.

  Only a few yards from her bed, somebody knocked, hard, on the front door.

  Una was jolted upright, as if the entire building had lurched forwards. Her blood buzzed with shock. It was not the sound itself, it was that the sound made no sense. It was true that each day, she had been trying to contain herself more within her own skull, to know and sense as little as possible of other people. And tonight, of all times, she had wanted that. But the space around her felt entirely empty; she had not even the vaguest sense of a human presence nearer than the street. There was no one outside the door.

  She had known only one person into whose thoughts she could not see at all, who could have caught her so completely by surprise.

  She remained frozen on the bed, shaking, and was very close to believing that she couldn’t have heard it. She must after all have lapsed into sleep, into an odd, short dream that had shocked her awake.

  The knock came again. And this time Una leapt up, flew out of the room, flung open the door.

  Dama stood there. For an instant Una remained fixed in the doorway, staring at him with hard, accusatory disbelief, before stepping forward with a cry and throwing her arms around him.

  [ XXI ]

  OMNES VIAE

  Dama’s arms went round her slowly, lightly, so that she remembered with reeling bewilderment how rarely they’d touched in the past. He said simply, ‘Oh, I’ve missed you.’

  Una tried to answer and was choked with crying. Her eyes had been dry for weeks, as the wedding approached; now she sobbed, helplessly.

  Dama looked pained and sorry. The flat was so small that he found the tiny living room easily, where he sat her down, and tried to comfort her. He hushed her clumsily, took off his jacket saying, ‘You’re cold,’ and draped it over her. Then he vanished briefly to the kitchen and came back with glasses of both water and wine, having been unable to decide which would be better. Dizzily, Una laughed at them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have done this differently.’

  ‘Differently?’ repeated Una. ‘Where have you been? How could you? We thought you were dead.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Not you,’ Dama said, quietly, certainly.

  ‘How could I know? I was never sure. Why did you just go like that?’

  His face grew delicately harder and colder. ‘You knew I would,’ he said. ‘Once it was over. I told you that.’

  Una pulled away from him and onto her feet, still unsteady and gasping for breath. ‘You didn’t care what we thought. You didn’t let us know you were alive. Were you as angry with me as that?’

  Dama gazed sorrowfully up at her. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve had to be careful a long time. I’m still a criminal. Still a slave. There are still these.’

  For the first time she began to take him in, to measure how far he had changed, or remained the same. Now, because softened with concern for her, his variable face was unformed and odd-looking, ugly except in the glass clarity of the russet hair and bright blue eyes. He was clean-shaven, but otherwise so exactly as she remembered that it was unnerving, a mockery of the years since sh
e had seen him. But he had now – as he never had when she had known him before – an air of quiet, resolute ease within his own body.

  Under the jacket, despite the season, he was wearing a loose, well-worn, short-sleeved summer tunic that left his arms bare. On one wrist he wore a kind of leather vambrace, like a piece of armour, on the other a thick band or cuff of stiff black cloth. As he spoke, he thumbed off the right covering, and then the left with more difficulty, having to use his weaker hand. Una looked on, silent, no longer weeping. She had only glimpsed the scars once before.

  He glanced down at them, calmly. ‘I’m not ashamed of them now. One day it won’t matter who sees them.’

  Una shook her head, dazed, not knowing what to think or where to start. Trying to hold onto something solid and rational, she said again, ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I moved around. In and out of Rome. Germania … Gaul …’

  ‘Rome?’

  ‘I couldn’t get much further to begin with,’ he said. ‘Didn’t have any money. It was the easiest place to go, from Tivoli.’

  ‘But I kept coming back here. Sulien was here all the time. We were here.’

  Dama glanced away from her, curtly. ‘Look. This is how it is. I didn’t want anything to do with Novius. I didn’t want to see you with him. I said I’d go and that’s what I did. I’m here now. I’ll go if you like.’

  ‘No,’ she said, half-resentfully.

  ‘I am sorry though,’ he promised her, cyan eyes wide open with compassion for her. He shook his head, indicating the raucous disorder outside with apparent disgust. ‘This … today …’

  Una managed a small, deflecting smile and made an erasing gesture in the air. He had not said anything resembling, ‘I told you so,’ and she wanted to be sure he would not. She did not want to hear him talk of Marcus.

  ‘No,’ he agreed, understanding her. ‘Better not. But anyway, I had to come.’ And he went over to her, urging gently, ‘Come on, sit down again. You haven’t eaten anything, have you?’

  He found the bread and a couple of eggs. She still had no real appetite, and beyond getting food onto a plate for her, he did not nag her to eat. She could not finish the small meal, but she felt stronger – more awake, and better able to stand being so.

  ‘What did you do?’ she asked. ‘How did you live?’

  Dama smiled at her affectionately. ‘Stealing,’ he said. ‘To begin with anyway. Or what they’d call stealing. Not much against what they owe us, is it?’

  She was free in law, he was not. She felt oddly relieved to be included by him among slaves, among the outsiders and opponents of Rome.

  ‘I’m pretty good at it,’ he said. ‘I did try for jobs, but there’s not a lot I can do. I can’t compete with slaves. Or anyone who’s got two hands that work properly.’ He looked at his scars again. ‘And I can’t do anything where people get to notice how these match up neatly with a cross.’

  ‘Crucifixion’s over now,’ Una murmured, remembering sitting at Marcus’ side in the Palace, the day he had announced it to the senators.

  Dama nodded, a little grudgingly. ‘Yes. That was good of him. I’ll give him that.’

  Una thought of Holzarta: the cabins hidden against the flanks of the gorge, the walkways across the stream, the sophisticated network of alarms and cameras. Dama had designed it all. ‘You should have been an architect,’ she said, ‘Or an engineer.’ Distantly, she wondered what she should have been.

  Dama seemed faintly startled, and he was silent for a while, contemplating a life that had never been allowed. ‘Well. Maybe I will – maybe I’ll build things, one day.’

  ‘So,’ said Una, rather drearily because it seemed so bleak. ‘Is that still what you do?’

  Again Dama smiled, the effect on his face disconcertingly pure, transfiguring. ‘No. Scavenging and keeping myself alive with no reason for it – I don’t care about stealing from Romans, but it’s a sin to let your life just drag on and do nothing with it. I couldn’t live like that.’ He looked at her, a look that seemed to lodge in her like a blue dart. ‘And you can’t either, can you?’

  Una said in a whisper, ‘No.’

  Dama nodded, satisfied, and got up. ‘Are you up to going somewhere?’

  Dama had parked an old, nondescript car a few blocks away from her door. A fire-cracker flashed a street away, but the noise and laughter no longer impinged on Una. It had become part of the background.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ she asked.

  ‘I had a friend look by at the clinic, he found out you were working at that Vatican place. I’m sorry if it all sounds a bit sinister, I don’t know how else I could have done it.’

  ‘You know the clinic?’

  ‘Oh yes, everyone knows the clinic.’ He sounded proud. ‘I’m glad Sulien’s there. It’s a good thing – it’s what he should be doing.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, as he settled his hands on the controls. ‘Driving hurts you.’

  ‘You know I can manage, if I need to. And it’s better than it was, the muscles are stronger.’

  ‘I don’t like sitting beside you and knowing you’re hurting yourself.’

  ‘Well, can you drive? And I mean properly, I’m not risking my neck with you making it up as you go along again.’

  Prompted by anyone else, the memory of the long drive into Rome, hoping to save Marcus’ life, would have been painful. From him, it almost amused her. She said frankly, ‘No, I didn’t get round to it.’

  ‘Then that can be one of the first things you do next,’ said Dama.

  He drove north-east, onto the road by which they’d entered Rome, years before, but as they left the city limits on the Via Salaria, they no longer had to pass crosses ranked along the highway. Rome seemed to slide away behind Una like a weight. In the centre of Rome it was sometimes impossible to believe that the roads led to anything but more city, that it was even possible to emerge into countryside. She was amazed, looking up as the car shifted onto a rough track thirty miles outside Rome, to realise she’d been asleep.

  ‘This is where it is,’ said Dama.

  The track extended downhill through scrubby fields, into a shallow valley. They were approaching a cluster of farm buildings within a thick barbed wire fence. In the dark it was a forbidding place. As they reached the gates, Una glimpsed a sign that read: WARNING: DOGS LOOSE.

  Dama laughed at the sight of it and said, ‘They’re only imaginary dogs, so far anyway.’

  There were many people ahead, within the fence, and they knew Dama was coming.

  Dama stopped the car and turned to look at her. He began, ‘You trusted Novius to abolish slavery, didn’t you?’ His voice was stern, formal.

  Una stiffened, wary and disappointed. ‘We shouldn’t talk about him, Dama.’

  But Dama pressed, ‘Tell me why it hasn’t happened.’

  ‘It will,’ said Una tiredly, beginning to regret coming here after all. ‘It’s impossible now with the Nionian situation. And he doesn’t have the full powers of Emperor. When he comes to the throne he will.’

  ‘So it’s not convenient to do it now,’ summarised Dama. Una sighed and did not answer. ‘Fine,’ he continued softly. ‘Maybe that’s all true. But there are people dying now. They’re being crippled, raped, murdered. It’s happening every day all across the filthy world. And you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Una said, but she no longer felt that she was being forced to bear an attack on Marcus. Instead, she felt a strange, anticipatory excitement.

  ‘But not these,’ said Dama. And he got out of the car and led the way towards the low, concrete buildings, from which throngs of people began to emerge into the bare yard. All were adult, and none was old, but otherwise they were of all ages, both sexes, every race. And as they saw Dama a blaze of intense, spontaneous feeling flashed from them, like hot light bouncing off a mirror. They loved him – all of them. Dama raised his better hand, the left, in greeting.

  ‘In H
olzarta we used to wait for people to escape and come to us. There were never many who could do that, but it was better than nothing. Now I go to them, and I get them out. After that, it’s up to them what they want to do, but these choose to be with me. We don’t wait. We’re slaves; it’s our business to put slavery to an end – one person at a time if that’s what it takes.’ He faced Una. He did not touch her, but again his look at her was as emphatic and as intimate as if he’d taken her face in his hands.

  ‘You should be with us. I want your help.’

  *

  ‘I remember him – I know I remember,’ insisted Lal, after Sulien’s first unconvinced response. ‘He wasn’t wearing those long sleeves like he used to. I saw the scar on his arm. And he held me in the back of the car and told me I’d be safe. It was him. He’s alive.’

  Sulien hesitated another second, but then broke into a laugh. ‘Well then, that’s wonderful. But why didn’t he stay? You’d think he could have guessed how worried we all were about him.’

  ‘I don’t know. It might not have been safe. He wasn’t meant to be there at all, any more than we were. And I suppose I can understand why he might not want to see Una.’

 

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