Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  But, before she had even finished this thought, her own words seemed to sound again, as if she had repeated them aloud without realising it, or as if someone had recorded them and was playing them back to her: ‘Now. Today.’

  Lal heard herself let out a thin, maddened laugh. She felt as if her attention had been compelled back to those words, by a will that was not hers. The next instant, the fancied pressure on her thoughts was gone, and she had no way of telling if it had been more than a jitter of her mind; she knew that every day she was left alone her thoughts were less normal, less her own. But she began to get ready.

  Some time around noon, a man came in with a tray of food. Lal looked up at him forlornly from the floor. She was sitting damp-skinned and shivering on the mattress, clutching a heap of blankets around herself, and whispering, ‘Please, stay, I’m not well. Please, it’s so cold.’

  He looked at her in alarm, but withdrew without saying anything or coming near her. Lal remained poised on the mattress for almost an hour, in suspense, ready to carry on her performance if he came back, or sent anyone. But no one came. Lal had planned for this: indeed, they would have far more chance of escape at dusk. But now it was actually happening, she could not help growing agitated and tearful at the possibility that her simulated illness would meet only indifference. And whatever chance Una had tried to tell her of was passing, it would be too late.

  At last she flung down the blankets impatiently, and crept up the cellar steps to listen to the noise of the house. She wished, as she had wished many times, that there were a clock. She could not act more than a few minutes before someone came; the heat wouldn’t last long on her flesh. She sat hunched on the top step, for hours, chewing her lips and the skin around her fingernails in an agony of mingled anticipation and boredom, waiting to hear people gathering and crockery being moved.

  Then she ran down the steps and dragged the sheet from the mattress over to the pipes, bundling it up against the heat along with her hastily stripped-off dress. She had a cup of water, already jammed against the heat and lukewarm. But that was not enough. She straightened a layer of the dress, draping it to protect her skin, and wrapped her palms around the pipes, and then pressed them to her cheeks. The last part was the hardest. She shifted onto her knees, forcing herself to grip the pipes again, twisting her face into a preparatory grimace, and lowered her forehead onto the hot metal, holding it there as long as she could.

  They had left him a lamp, standing on the concrete floor just inside the garage doors. Sulien sat against the wall, waiting for someone to come for the empty plate, and watched a crane-fly bobbing jerkily through the dusty light. The food had always been reasonable, and Sulien tried to get as much deliberate pleasure out of it as he could, as it was about the only point of interest of the day. Like Lal, he made attempts to talk to the people who came, but he could not make himself appear as sweetly harmless as she could; they knew he’d tried to push and fight his way out twice, during the first couple of days. He tried to seem resigned and conciliatory now. He was waiting for Lal. But there was little he could do to prepare. It was possible that she had already tried and failed to convince their captors she was seriously ill. Even if not, he had no way of knowing what they would do.

  The crane-fly seemed to sketch out a predictable pattern as it flew back and forth: a kind of drunken pentangle. He was not yet so desperate as to feel actually fond of the few creatures he’d discovered in the garage, as he’d heard that prisoners grew to care for rats or moths that came into their cells, but he was bored enough to try and count them, and to place endless bets with himself as to which way the spider in the rear corner would build, or how long it would take a woodlouse to run across the floor. He was uncertain if the crane-fly could live on anything here, or if it was also trapped and would starve, or blunder into the cobweb. Its lumbering, angular flights seemed as purposeless as his watching it. It staggered through the air, apparently neither looking for food, nor trying to escape.

  Then the doors opened. It was his last view of the outside for that day, and Sulien looked at the sky first. It was strangely doubled, the sheets of cloud on the horizon dark but lucidly blue, whitish space above them, as if a torn strip of a different day had been pasted roughly over the evening light. Then he glanced dully at the two men who stood there, expecting one to take the plate while the other remained poised to tackle him if he moved.

  But they both came in and grabbed his arms, pulling him up. Instinctively, Sulien tensed and struggled, convinced that Dama had decided to have them killed after all. But one of the men shook him and said, ‘It’s your friend, that’s all. You need to come and help your friend. Don’t try anything.’

  Sulien went quiet and docile immediately, but cast an anxious look back at the farmyard gates, as they led him towards the house. It had never been very likely, but he’d hoped it might be the other way round, that they might carry Lal to him. His senses strained in a kind of panic, he walked terrified that he was already failing, he wasn’t seeing his surroundings with the right clarity. There weren’t many people in the yard now; most of them should be eating, and it was growing dark. That much was good. But the farmhouse itself was clearly full. Sulien knew nothing of what the place was like inside, only that Lal was in a cellar. If the entrance to it was through the kitchen or any other room in continual use, there would probably be nothing he could do.

  He glanced around as they hurried him into a hall – at the doors on either side of the stairs. The men led him past all of these, not to the back rooms ahead, as at first he thought, but to a narrow door under the stairs. A couple of people came out of the kitchen, and stared curiously at Sulien, as the men unlocked it. He thought they went away once he was ushered inside. So people might be going back and forth often, but perhaps not all the time.

  Lal was sprawled across her mattress, hair spread over her hot, flushed face, shuddering and moaning. A jug lay dramatically overturned in a spreading puddle of water, beside one outflung hand. For a moment Sulien felt like smiling, until he heard the key turn in the lock, at the top of the steps. One of the men had come down into the cellar with him; the other was presumably standing guard outside the door. Lal glanced up at Sulien surreptitiously through her hair, but then shut her eyes again. For now, they had no way of communicating.

  Sulien bent over her, checking her pulse and temperature. ‘Lal,’ he murmured, urgently. ‘Lal, it’s me. Can you talk to me?’ Lal, dutifully, only turned her head restlessly from side to side and did not respond. Sulien allowed the tense breath building inside him to escape, letting it sound like a sigh of concern, as he tried to think what to do. ‘I knew this would happen,’ he began, prevaricating. The pretence seemed, briefly, bizarre. He could feel his blood, the muscles of his face working treacherously to signal the truth. He fought to convince himself that Lal really was frighteningly ill. ‘Look at this place. Can you expect anyone to live down here?’ There was a single bulb over near the steps; it didn’t throw light very far. ‘It’s too dark in here. I’m going to need more light.’

  ‘I thought you could just touch people, and—’

  ‘If you wanted that, you should have brought me before,’ said Sulien, fiercely, trying to hector the man beyond the point of asking questions. He jolted to his feet and glared down at him, trying to make intimidating use of his height. ‘She could die because you left her like this. Get me some kind of light.’

  The older man grimaced uncertainly, and still resisted. ‘I don’t know – maybe when Dama gets back.’

  Dama was away, then. It was good news. Sulien hid a flash of optimism. ‘When will that be?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, I think.’

  ‘That’ll be too late!’ cried Sulien. ‘You brought me here to help. Unless you want to explain that you let her die, get me what I need!’

  Finally, the man shrugged and left. Sulien could see Lal listening as the door was unlocked, and locked again. He dropped with a sigh to sit on the ground beside her.
‘Hello,’ he said.

  Lal pushed her hair away from her face. ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘At least he does what you tell him. Is he the only one?’

  ‘There’s at least one more outside the door. And he’s the one with the key.’

  ‘Have to get him in here, then,’ said Lal.

  They looked at each other. Sulien nodded.

  ‘Now?’ Lal suggested, hesitantly.

  Sulien lifted the jug, trying the weight of it, and put it down again. He got up to make an exploratory turn around the room. ‘I don’t know. No, not yet. There’s no time to get in a fight with him; everyone’ll come running. I’ll have to just try and knock him out. I don’t think there’s anything here I can use.’

  ‘Have you done that to anyone before?’

  ‘No,’ said Sulien, continuing to prowl apprehensively around the cellar. Lal had crawled to the pipes running along the wall and was kneeling over them, heating her face. So that was how she had done it. He smiled.

  She asked, ‘What can I do? Should I do something different?’

  ‘You’re doing fine.’ He climbed up the first couple of steps towards the door and then paused, turning back and looking down at her. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Throw your head back.’

  Lal obeyed mechanically. ‘What am I doing?’

  He came back over to the mattress. ‘Have you ever seen anyone have a seizure?’

  She shook her head. His attempts to show her what to do, and hers to copy him, brought them both to the sharp edge of frantic laughter.

  ‘Not yet,’ he whispered to her, as they heard the door opening. ‘Like before.’

  She shut her eyes and began again to breathe shallowly and fast. The man came down the steps, carrying a solid electric torch. Sulien held out his hand for it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, sternly.

  He took the torch and made a show of scanning Lal’s face by its light, checking her pupils. He laid his hand over her forehead and made himself still and remote for a while, as if he were concentrating.

  ‘Well?’

  Sulien looked up wearily. ‘I think I can get the fever to start coming down,’ he said guardedly. ‘But she’s dehydrated.’ He gestured to the fallen jug. ‘You’ve got to bring some more water. I just hope she can drink. You’re not going to set up a drip for me, are you?’

  The man took the jug without protest, this time. But fetching water wouldn’t take long enough. Sulien added hastily, ‘And get a sponge or something. And she’d be better off with fresh sheets.’

  The man looked irritable, and trudged off without answering. Sulien did not feel confident that he would do everything he’d been asked, but did not see how he could manufacture another opportunity. At best, they’d have only a few minutes, and they’d have to allow enough time for the man to get out of immediate earshot. Lal lay stiff on the mattress, staring up at him. Neither of them could speak.

  Then Sulien rushed up to the door, shouting to the man outside, ‘I need help. Help me, she can’t breathe.’

  He drew back, staring at the door with clenched fists. The second man came into the cellar, taking the time to lock himself in. Sulien had placed the torch on the ground near Lal’s feet, so that the face from which the horrible throttled sounds came was hidden in half darkness, and the motion of her jerking body seemed amplified by the violent shadow thrashing on the whitewashed wall. Urgently, Sulien beckoned the second man over, pulled him down to crouch beside her. ‘She can’t breathe. You’ve got to hold her still while I …’

  He was reaching for the torch as he spoke. He flinched a little as he touched it, but once it was in his hand, his reluctance seemed to drop coldly away and without hesitation he brought the butt of the torch down on the back of the man’s head. He fell face-forward onto Lal, who gave a little shriek of panic and revulsion, and scrambled away from under him. A few drops of blood had splashed onto her face.

  ‘Where’s the key?’ she gasped at once. Sulien didn’t move to help turn the man onto his back, until Lal was already struggling with his weight. Lal started searching through his pockets with shaking fingers. ‘I’ve got it,’ she said, her voice still high and fierce with shock.

  Sulien remained stooping over the unconscious body, looking pale and sick. ‘I think he’ll be all right.’

  ‘It’s too bad if he’s not, we’ve got to go,’ she cried, dragging him by the arm towards the steps. She ran up to the door and unlocked it, pushing it open a crack. They could hear the blurred noise of multiple conversations from the kitchen and other rooms, treading feet. They peered out as best they could, but there was little choice except to push out, all but blindly; Lal locked the cellar door and they fled across the hall. It was only as they reached the front door, that they realised there had been no one there to stop them, not yet.

  ‘Where’s Una?’ whispered Sulien.

  ‘Upstairs somewhere,’ said Lal, distractedly, warily opening the door and looking out from the threshold across the darkening yard. She could see just a small number of silhouettes moving in the faint light, some around the chicken shed, herding the hens inside, others carrying crates of dishes towards the house. ‘Only a few of them have ever seen us,’ breathed Lal, craning towards the gates. ‘We can get there.’

  But to her horror, Sulien was turning back, away from the doorway, towards the stairs.

  ‘They’re going to find us,’ hissed Lal, clutching at him. ‘That other man’s going to be back any second.’

  ‘I’ve got to get up there somehow. I’m not leaving Una here.’

  ‘Yes you are,’ said Lal, in a kind of stifled shout. ‘We get out and call the vigiles. That’s how we help her. Otherwise we all stay here.’

  Sulien looked unhappily up the stairs. ‘When they realise we’ve gone—’

  ‘Dama won’t hurt her,’ said Lal, firmly, forgetting her worst thoughts. She gripped his hand with all the coercive force she had and slipped outside.

  They began walking swiftly, not straight at the gates but obliquely across the concrete, towards one of the unlit sheds. Sulien picked up the handles of a wheelbarrow standing near the house and pushed it purposefully forward. At his side, Lal was instinctively skulking along, her head lowered, shoulders raised.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Sulien murmured. ‘If we were just two people who lived here going to get something, we wouldn’t be keeping our heads down. You’d be talking to me.’

  Lal, with an effort, forced her body into a more casual bearing. ‘I can’t think of anything to say,’ she whispered breathlessly. ‘For once.’

  ‘Tell me a joke,’ said Sulien.

  They were halfway across the yard when they heard the shouts of panic and anger from the house. They swerved into the shadow of the old feed-store building, as people began to gush out of the farmhouse, and, in response, from the barn and cowsheds. They abandoned the wheelbarrow and ran along in the darkness behind the shed. They reached the gates. And there was someone there, a figure walking out of the dark on the fields, coming home to the farm. At first a sexless, featureless shadow; then an anonymous woman; a girl with one eye, one hand.

  Sulien and Lal stopped, grasping each other’s hands. Bupe turned her head, an unsettling movement, for it gave the impression she was looking away, when really she was levelling her single gaze at them. She said nothing. Sulien opened his mouth to begin some kind of appeal and felt the words collapse on his breath, he could only stare at her. Her expression appeared impassive, grim.

  It did not change as she stepped forward, and turned her head again, but this time so that Lal and Sulien, on the side of the scarred flesh where no eye was left, were invisible to her. And as if they were not there, she walked slowly past them towards the house, leaving them behind as they ran stumbling up the valley’s flank, away from the lights.

  Una was stretched in the bed, her arms loosely spread, the blankets lying over her face like a layer of snow. Her bones hurt; her co
ld blood seeped slackly through her aching veins. There was a chill in her flesh that would not disperse, even in sleep. She dreamt she was lying face-up in a field of stones, staring into the snowflakes settling over her, and woke without realising it, expecting to look up at black sky, and orchards of bristling stars. Sulien and Lal had been gone for perhaps two hours. Outside the room was panicked turmoil, just barely restrained and ordered; she could hear doors banging, vehicles drawing up and speeding off. The evacuation was well under way. Una lay still, smiling under the sheet, into the dream-snow, with indistinct, sad triumph.

  People were coming. She pushed the blankets away, heaved herself up on her elbows as the door was unlocked. Dama came in, with a heavyset man behind him.

  She would have expected him to be luminous with rage and vengefulness. He seemed more fragile than that, his face tired.

  ‘You knew,’ he said to her, flatly. It was not a question, nor even exactly a reproach.

  No one at the farm knew of the location of the other groups, or could have contacted him; it was not information to entrust to newcomers. Before now the farm’s inmates had often gone weeks or months without seeing him, or hearing his voice. But this time he had called the place almost as soon as he had reached Tarquinia. The tension that had its source in this room had followed him all the way there.

  ‘They’re gone,’ Una said. ‘It makes no difference if I go too. You don’t need to take me with you. Just leave me here.’

  Dama stared bleakly at her. He could have done so had Mazatl not, twice, come so near her. She might possibly know no more than Lal or Sulien, but there was no way such a safe ignorance could be proved. He thought it was likely that at the least, she knew about Tarquinia. ‘No,’ he answered curtly, and turned to Baro. ‘Get her up.’

  Una swung her legs wearily out of the bed, and sat up. She made no protest as Baro picked up her wrists and fastened them together with thick tape, and she got to her feet docilely enough. But once standing she swayed and stumbled, so Baro caught her, and lifted her briskly into his arms. Una flinched into abrupt, violent life, twisting and struggling, disproportionately aghast at being held this way.