Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Marcus had been bowed over the charts on the table. He straightened as he saw her. His face was stern, taut.

  ‘Did you do this?’ she demanded in Nionian. ‘You can’t have done this, can you?’

  He caught her hands. ‘No. No, of course I didn’t,’ he said quietly, in the same language, and a discomfited silence expanded around the foreign syllables. He murmured an excuse to the men and hurried her out of the room.

  Then they were in a small ante-chamber, incongruously holding hands.

  ‘You were missing,’ he said. ‘They said someone came from the Embassy.’

  ‘I was supposed to run away,’ she explained impatiently. She saw Marcus’ face alter, amazement unfolding slowly across it, but still felt too agitated and fatalistic to be bothered with his reaction to what she had done. ‘Well, you didn’t do it. Then you don’t have control of your army,’ she said. ‘So it makes no difference.’

  Marcus sighed raggedly. ‘Salvius called me here as the news came in. He knows nothing of this, I’m sure of it. We’re trying to find out who it was, of course – so far as there’s time.’

  ‘Then you must stop it,’ she said, her body stiffening as she thought of those black circles on the maps.

  ‘Did you see those pictures in there? They fired on the volucer that took them.’ He sighed again, but not exactly wearily this time: as if about to gather a deeper breath, preparing to dive underwater. ‘The Prince won’t speak to me – no one will. It’s a good thing you’re here.’

  He was leading her somewhere else. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘He’ll talk to you.’

  She knew Tadahito would be furious, but she was still angry enough herself not to be apprehensive about this, almost to look forward to it. She and Marcus were alone in the beautiful green Imperial office, she sitting at the desk like the Emperor of Rome.

  ‘So you were intercepted,’ he said, flatly.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Please do not be concerned on my account. Naturally when I heard the news I wished to consult my husband. I came here entirely freely.’ Politeness was a delicate, transparent container into which she released the aggression, a piece at a time, still meaning it to be wholly apparent.

  Tadahito dispensed with it, however. ‘Then you are a fool.’

  ‘No. Will you please talk to my husband? He’s here.’

  ‘Stop calling him that,’ snapped Tadahito.

  Noriko beat a pen vengefully on the desk like a drumstick. ‘That’s what he is. By your doing, as well as others’. And he has not attacked or invaded Tokogane. If he had intended anything of the kind, he would not have married me.’

  ‘He married you to use you as a pawn, you stupid girl,’ Tadahito cried, in exasperation.

  ‘No, he did not. Everything between us would have been quite different if he had.’

  Tadahito sighed, heavily. ‘I suppose you have fallen in love with him.’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking at Marcus with a mixture of detachment and perverse protectiveness. He had gone right to the end of the room and was leaning against the peach tree painted on the wall, his eyes shut, as if trying to think while blocking out some deafening noise. He did not look encouraged by what he could hear of the conversation. She did not love him; she loved her brother, though she felt like hitting Tadahito at the moment. ‘But I am in a position to be sure he is telling the truth.’

  ‘Either you are too infatuated with him to want to leave, or you are being forced to say this to me.’

  ‘How am I being forced?’ she cried, openly angry and injured now. ‘Nothing they could threaten me with would make me lie to you. Is it not enough to send me here for a treaty you give up on almost at once – you have to call me a coward too?’

  Tadahito said, shakily, ‘Noriko,’ and she began to forgive him a little, he sounded desperate, lost. She missed him. ‘I can’t go on talking to you. I don’t know what can be done. I hope we have not lost you. I wish we had never, never thought of marrying you to him. Please try and forgive me.’

  And the line cut out. Noriko gave a desolate little cry. ‘He’s gone. He doesn’t believe me.’

  Marcus came back over to the desk. ‘Nothing anyone can say will be enough,’ he said resignedly. ‘It’ll take more than words.’

  Noriko looked up at him, and around at the room, with a kind of orphaned incredulity, as if she didn’t know how she had come there.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her softly. ‘Tell me what happened when we couldn’t find you.’

  She explained in a disjointed way about the plan to smuggle her across the sea, about leaping out of one car and commandeering another. She saw Marcus smiling with amusement and admiration, and it did begin to seem comic to her, which steadied her a little.

  Marcus said, ‘Your family want to see you safe, and they can. You can go home – you must go home, as fast as we can get you there. In a Roman volucer, not hiding or disguised, but as yourself.’ A fragment of his own hidden flight from Rome flashed with wounding brightness in his memory: dodging in fear through a marketplace, darting into a clairvoyant’s stall to hide himself, where the fortune-teller lifted her hands away from her face to give him his first sight of Una. He finished, his voice tightening, ‘As my wife. When they see you face to face, they’ll know you are not a prisoner, and that I didn’t marry you as some kind of trick.’

  ‘They’ll think it’s another attack. They might shoot me down,’ said Noriko, shivering.

  ‘They won’t shoot you down. We’ll tell them you’re coming, and that you’ll land away from all the obvious targets. They’ll think it’s a lie, but they can’t take the risk that it’s not the truth. Not over you.’

  For the second time that day, Noriko contemplated a return home. It was imaginable now. She could picture herself, meeting her parents and siblings. ‘I will go. But it still won’t be enough.’

  ‘No. Perhaps not,’ said Marcus. ‘But you can tell them what I mean to do.’ He looked at her lovely anxious face, and felt with a pang of regret that he would miss her, and yet he would be relieved while she was gone. He told her, before she could ask, ‘And if we succeed, you’ll return. If you wish, of course.’

  ‘Our obligations remain the same,’ she said, rather stiffly.

  ‘You’re the only person who could do this. Thank you for coming back,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘I just didn’t want to cut off my hair.’

  More than twelve hours later, she was so giddy with weariness as to be glad to lay her forehead on the dark, shining throne-room floor, as she bowed to the Go-natoku Emperor. Within the canopy, while she prostrated herself and said, ‘Your Majesty,’ he was a faceless, motionless figure, composed of silk and shadow. Then, as she had known he would, he came to life, he rose from his throne and became a real person: a slender man in his late fifties, his height extended by the black crest of his lacquered crown, a narrow face like Tadahito’s, but secretively humorous and at ease, without Tadahito’s tense vigour. It was as if her father had simply not been in the room before and had just entered. But an unworldly grace remained with him even as he left the canopy behind; after so many years of habit it never left him altogether. He took her in his arms and said tenderly, ‘My little girl.’

  ‘Oh, Father,’ she whimpered, and burrowed deeper into the embrace. The Emperor rocked and shushed her easily. He showed no sign of being personally distressed about the crisis; Noriko was not sure she understood this about him any better than a stranger would, but she was used to it, and his apparent calm comforted her.

  Finally she pulled herself together enough to speak again. ‘Part of my message is just being here. Please may I explain the rest?’

  ‘Go ahead, Noriko,’ he said.

  ‘In three hours the Wall dividing Tokogane and Terranova will come down,’ she said.

  Later, on an ebony-mounted den-ga screen, they saw the first watchtower fall together, on the Anasasian coast. It collapsed inward, and as t
he view of the land beyond opened up, the screen of dust and flame unrolled up the first length of grey wall, and brought the next tower bowing down, and the next. And beyond that they could not see, as the soldiers, farmers and townspeople of Tokogane and Terranova saw, the fire chasing past on the horizon, across the continent. As the Wall fell, it became a line of beacons, carrying a signal all the way to the Atlantic.

  [ XXV ]

  THE KNIFE

  In the clearing among the stone pines, Dama heard nothing now: not the rustles and calls of birds, nor the intermittent rasp of the road. He had been kneeling in prayer but now he was lying down, the dusty earth and pine needles under his back. The cool spring sky gaped, a vault of pure space that stretched as he watched it, so that he felt that gravity had reversed or had never till now been understood: he was a tiny doll, fixed with loosening pins to the ceiling of the universe, staring down into the blue gulf. Around him the branches of the trees hung down, above the depths, like icicles. It seemed a long time since he’d taken or released a breath. The movement of his heart was a remote detail, he could not feel it. He had killed more than seventeen hundred people. If he had done so in the course of a failure – if he kept failing, what did that mean?

  He stood up, and the world swung over, the ground lunged down below his feet. Sound flooded back. He forgot the prayers he’d said. While whispering them he had felt an emptiness that might have been peace or strength, but if it had been, he forgot that too.

  He was on the crest of a hill near the farm. The respite from being there had not lasted very long. He walked back.

  Of course, none of the freed slaves here knew what had happened, or if they heard of it, they would not know a disaster on the other side of the Atlantic had anything to do with them. He neither wanted to be among them, in their ignorance, nor with those who understood what the news meant. He could think of nothing he could truly have said he did want, not even victory. Nevertheless, he would keep on; whatever giving up was, he would not do it.

  The van Mazatl had been using was parked in the yard, near the garage where Sulien was. Dama stopped, with a little jolt of indignation and anxiety. He glanced at the garage doors, on an uneasy impulse he did not understand, but everything seemed as usual; Pallas was on guard duty, leaning against the wall, looking bored. Where was Mazatl then? Nowhere in sight, not in the yard. Dama hurried into the house, heading straight for the worst place for Mazatl to be.

  And he was there, right outside Una’s door. And there was no one guarding it. Although he had turned at the sound of Dama’s footsteps, Dama had the impression Mazatl had been experimentally trying the handle.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Dama demanded.

  Mazatl withdrew still further from the door and answered mildly, ‘We’ve got to talk, haven’t we?’

  ‘Come away from there,’ said Dama. ‘I didn’t send for you. You shouldn’t have come.’

  Mazatl followed him obediently down the stairs. ‘I wanted to see how things were going, that’s all.’

  Dama muttered, ‘You should have called. You should have asked permission. Yes, we’ve got to talk, but not here.’

  He breathed a little more easily once they were outside, not only for having drawn Mazatl away from Una. Going that close to her now was like descending into a mineshaft, deep enough to feel the weight of the air. The former slaves were busy across the farm. They had their instructions; they could manage for a day without him. Una would stay alive that long. He said, ‘I’ll come with you back to Tarquinia.’

  He let Mazatl take the controls of the van; there was no need to hurt himself driving. As soon as they passed through the gates onto the drive, Mazatl said, ‘I hear that one’s starving herself?’ Dama nodded, tersely. Mazatl hesitated, then said in a loud, falsely jocular tone, ‘She wants putting out of her misery.’

  Dama didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, ‘We need to discuss the future of the project, not her.’

  ‘I mean it, Dama. The strikes in Nionian Terranova should have done it, but they haven’t. Nothing’s happening. It’ll be a while before we can try anything new. On any reckoning these people you’re hanging onto are going to stay dangerous, at least until we succeed, and we’ve got no way of knowing when that’ll be.’

  Dama felt his teeth clench. Mazatl didn’t know of Una’s ability, and so didn’t know that he had made this more true by coming here today. Yet it felt almost like an act of deliberate malice. Mazatl went on, brutally, ‘And if she keeps this up, she’ll be dead by then anyway. And as far as I can see, she’s asking for it. Why spin it out? And in the meantime there are the other two to worry about.’

  Dama’s head was turned to the window; his eyes seemed unable to focus on anything close; he let his gaze push up through the transparent sky, at the white sun. He murmured, ‘No, Mazatl.’ And he knew that really he had no more to say, no argument that could stand up to his friend’s. But he found himself protesting, ‘Is it such a bad thing, to try and protect someone? Out of gratitude or – kindness? Is that so terrible?’

  Mazatl made a discontented scoffing noise in his throat. But when he looked at Dama, it was with something close to compassion.

  In the cellar, Lal was panicky with boredom and loneliness. Even Una’s phantom company seemed to have left her. Two nights ago she’d woken thinking she’d heard a voice that might have been Una’s, crying out, and a door slamming. And since then, there was no longer even any response when she knocked on the pipes herself. It frightened her to be left alone this way. Sometimes she found terrible conjectures going through her head. But they weren’t rational, she insisted to herself – they weren’t likely. It was being alone: thoughts seemed to go bad, like milk, when left for too long. Dama would not hurt Una; that much must be true.

  She pestered everyone who came to bring anything or take anything away. ‘Oh, please don’t go. I’m not as horrible as you think – you don’t know what I’m like. Please just stay and talk to me.’ Most of them stoically ignored her; but a few, in the last couple of days, had mumbled apologies or asked if there was anything they could bring her. Today, at breakfast, she’d even managed to lure a woman into a very short, banal conversation about the weather. But as she’d never yet seen the same person more than twice, she had little hope of achieving more than a tiny reprieve from the monolithic boredom of the day. It had almost goaded her into carrying out her plan already. She had held back because although it seemed she had been here an unendurably long time, it had not really been so many days since Sulien had warned Dama she might become ill. And there would be only one chance. Despondently she had calculated that it was almost certain no one was looking for them seriously yet. She had begun to make a few tentative friends in Rome aside from Una and Sulien, but no one who would be worried by not seeing her for a while. The staff at the clinic might have reported Sulien’s absence to the vigiles, but when the vigiles realised Una was missing too, and that Una had been Marcus’ lover, they would probably think Sulien had taken his sister out of Rome for the Imperial wedding, as indeed he’d tried to do. He should have called the clinic, but anxiety and thoughtlessness on his part would surely seem a more likely explanation than abduction at first.

  A door closed upstairs. Lal picked one of the magazines off the floor, opened it, stared at words she could have recited by heart, and then hurled it across the room with a grunt of fury.

  Then the pipes rang, with three loud, urgent blows.

  Lal started, and leapt eagerly towards them. ‘What happened to you?’ she cried aloud, as she knocked her response.

  As on the first day, Una mimicked the rhythm of Lal’s signal back to her. ‘I was worried,’ remarked Lal, settling down on the floor by the pipes, and striking them again. She laughed foolishly at herself for talking as if anyone could hear her.

  But Una repeated the same sound once more, and then again, harder. For a second or two Lal thought Una was not trying to talk to her after all, but resuming her solitary protest. B
ut then there was nothing until Lal reached out hesitantly to tap again. She had barely touched the pipes when Una pounded out the same beat again, violently.

  Lal snatched her hand away as if the heat had burned her, unnerved. She sat still for a moment, looking uncertainly up at the ceiling. ‘What is it?’ she murmured, self-consciously. Would Una know what she had been planning? She had been rehearsing it diligently for days, laying the scene, adding new details – would Una have picked that up? The idea was at once hopeful and disconcerting. She rapped again, questioningly, and said, ‘Now? Today?’

  There was an outburst of hammering from the pipes. Lal caught her breath.

  Indecisively, she pressed her hand down on the hot metal, wincing. It was still possible that she was misunderstanding what Una was telling her, perhaps even that there was no message to be understood. Whatever had kept Una quiet all this time, by now she might be as desperate as Lal for a sign that someone was there.