Rome Burning (36 page)

Marcus murmured a perfunctory answer now and then, as he loosened the silk cords at her waist. The dress would have come off within seconds if she had helped him, but she still lay as if calmly oblivious, and the cords looped two or three times around her body, not tight, but inaccessible where they crossed at her back. Instead he slid a handful of the silvery cloth upwards, from ankle to hip, baring one leg, leaving the other covered; he separated the layers of the dress above her breasts, kissing the revealed skin. He felt her body arch a little, but she carried on talking dreamily and intelligently, as if the one-sided conversation was the only thing of interest to her at present. He knew at any moment he could ask her to stop, demand her undisguised attention, but that would be to forfeit the game, which was, apparently, to see how long she could keep this going.

‘I read about Junosena. Only a concubine to begin with. I wonder
how
– I wonder if she meant to get hold of power right from the start, or if … But you didn’t see her, did you?’

He plucked again at the strings of the dress, and her clothes fell open at last, spread lapping around her naked body, her arms, still in the wide rumpled sleeves, lying loose and outflung. Only the green and silver necklace she wore remained fastened, and still glittered at the base of her throat, incongruous above her bare breasts. He stroked her, running a hand in a slow uncoiling spiral down her body, from her lips, over the hard necklace, down to where one thin knee still rested lightly over the other, up again. Una
had fallen silent but was still passive, still not conceding, though the half-hidden smile widened again, and he could feel the small, uncontrolled betrayals of her body. He lowered himself closer to her, his still-clothed weight resting half on her, half on the bed, confident she was losing.

Then, because she’d been waiting for a moment when he’d be too absorbed to anticipate the trap, she flung him over in a sudden ambush, triumphantly pinning him on his back, her face gloating as if she’d won a fight. Her open robe hung over him, enclosing them both as she pulled roughly at his clothes, far quicker and more abrupt than he had been undressing her. ‘Aren’t you beautiful?’ she paused to demand, almost severely, as he lay there breathlessly, laughing up at her. Una rose upright for a moment, one hand going from his body to her own throat, deftly unclasping the necklace so that it slipped down to fall from her breast onto his skin, the links of metal warm from her flesh. The silky tent of the dress collapsed around them again as she lowered her head to press her mouth to his skin, printed kisses on him, covered his body with hers.

*

Watching through her spyglass, Noriko had seen him enter the garden. She saw the lady sitting by the pool, not yet realising Marcus Novius was watching her. She did not understand why the strong feeling inscribed so clearly on the prince’s face should seem to include such relief. Although she had been watching him long enough to know otherwise, she could almost have thought he had rushed back here to find that some terrible news about his lover wasn’t true.

Well, there must be some reason, and she did not need to know what it was. But something else became obvious to her, in the confidence with which the pale lady looked back at him, in the depth of familiar happiness between them: the lady was not simply a favoured lover – she was the only one, Noriko was certain of it.

She was perhaps two hundred yards distant from them, standing in the shadow of a great bronze urn. She drew closer, keeping the spyglass steady, training it from one face to the other as the young woman rose and went into the
prince’s arms, and again a physical twist of anticipation and misery churned through her. She drew closer.

A voice spoke just inches behind her, and struck like a pickaxe to a sheet of glass. ‘You’ve been caught much later than you deserve, no thanks to your own competence.’

Noriko almost cried out. It was the caustic contempt in the voice she understood first, as her brain, cringing in shock, limped slowly to translate the Sinoan syllables. Lurching, she turned round.

At first, instead of a person, she saw clothes: a cone of clothes, a tiered monolith of primrose and red satin, topped, at face level, with a nodding oblong concoction of petals and jewels. Lowering appalled eyes Noriko saw the small, elderly woman who stood engulfed within the edifice, glowering at her. The clever, ferocious face looked tiny below her hair, which stood rigidly in a flat, precarious rectangle a foot high, like a large book or a picture balanced upright on her head. The hair was black, but must surely have been dyed, and it was festooned with fresh flowers, combs, and dangling pendants of pearls, tourmalines and jade beads. The thick coating of make-up on her skin was not merely white, but faintly iridescent, and should have made the woman who wore it look ethereally inhuman, as if the entire face had been fashioned out of pearl. But the paint had soaked into the gullies and pleats in the seventy-year-old skin, so that the crumpled, white-stained flesh was marbled with shimmering streaks and rays, around what must once have been delicately elfin features. Her mouth was like a small, scarlet puncture wound. A cut-out gold flower design had been applied carefully to her forehead. Her upper body was laden with a chainmail of necklaces, draped with plum-sized rubies that must have bruised her chest as she walked. A phoenix in flight spread its embroidered wings across her skirts, which, alone, would have marked out who she was: Junosena, as the Romans called her – the Empress Jun Shen. It seemed impossible that, so ornately armoured in her clothes, she could have moved so soundlessly.

In confused horror, Noriko bowed clumsily, only from the waist at first, and then realising her mistake, began to drop awkwardly to her knees on the hard paving.

‘How dare you
violate
this Palace and these negotiations?’ shouted the Empress passionately. ‘How
dare
you conduct yourself this way in
my country
?’

Noriko, shaking but reluctant, had finally curled up on her knees with her forehead on the ground. She gestured vaguely at the eastern side of the Palace compound, as if she were lost, stammering in apologetic, hopeless Nionian: ‘So sorry, I can’t understand – so sorry.’

Scowling, the Empress snatched the telescope from Noriko’s flinching hand, a startlingly rapid, violent move from a woman of her age. She brandished it so that instinctively Noriko turned her face aside, expecting to be hit with it. ‘You barbaric idiot! Liar! Must you shame yourself further and insult my intelligence as well? You can’t be stupid enough to doubt I know exactly who you are and what you’re doing.’ She jerked her burdened head at the Roman prince’s quarters, so that the coiffure wobbled and the pendants swung wildly. ‘
They
may not have seen you creeping around on the ramparts, but
I have
.’

Noriko stared stupidly at the paving, which swung and clouded before her eyes. She could not speak.

‘Well, I will call my guards and tell them they have failed in their duty, and after they have killed you, they will be punished,’ announced Jun Shen. She was still holding the telescope aloft, like a weapon; it seemed, at the least, she must be about to dash it to the ground.

Noriko raised her head a little, although still she could not lift her eyes from the ground. ‘You cannot,’ she whispered, trembling, in Sinoan this time.

The Empress’ eyes narrowed. ‘I can’t have a spy, or an assassin executed in my own Palace?’

‘If anyone touches me …’ breathed Noriko.

‘Is there a reason you should be spared? Will you tell us all why in front of everyone? Will your so-called Great Lords be able to explain themselves when the Romans discover they have been prey to a Nionian intruder? Your identity and your purpose must certainly be established to everyone’s satisfaction.’

Noriko closed her eyes in agony, lowering her head again. ‘Please …’ she moaned.

The Empress snorted, and there was harsh amusement in the sound. She poked Noriko with her foot. ‘Sit
up
,’ she said disgustedly, as if Noriko should have done this uninvited. Noriko, shaking with fury now as well as fear, obeyed. But Jun Shen’s mood seemed to have altered suddenly and her creased little red mouth lifted into a smile of malign enjoyment. She uttered another, more meditative snarl, and tilted her head sardonically, like a parrot, as she surveyed Noriko. ‘Your disguise is pitiful, it does nothing but tell the world you have something to hide,’ she remarked, with a kind of haughty friendliness. ‘Better to find a way of doing your work in your own person. You could not have been challenged. That,’ she confirmed, with a decisive nod, ‘is what I would have done.’

She extended the telescope a little way towards Noriko and dropped it, seeming to lose all interest as soon as it left her fingers – certainly she did not wait to see if Noriko caught it. She swung round and stalked off, trundling silently, erect beneath the husk of clothing.

Aghast and sick, Noriko rose from battered knees to her feet, and almost ran back to her quarters on the east of the compound. In the outer chamber her ladies-in-waiting sat on mats on the ground, the trains of their dresses spreading around them, talking and playing a battle-game on an illuminated board.

Lady Mizuki, the long locks of her jewelled pink wig falling around her pert, cheerful face, looked up at Noriko in her maidservant’s clothes and asked teasingly, ‘Did the new maid serve my Lady satisfactorily?’ But Noriko walked through to her bedroom without answering, almost weeping with homesickness, rage and shame.

There was too much stuff in the room, too many tapestries, needless, over-decorated chests and chairs, cluttered, vulgar – she thought furiously – unfitting for a royal Palace. She dropped rapidly into a sitting position on the floor, and tears abruptly leapt from her eyes. For a few moments, she allowed herself to sob, before she closed her eyes and exhaled, trying to smooth and order her breath, to be calm. She unhooked the letter-case from her shoulder. It was a beautiful thing, an antique, made of glossy black wood and painted
with a gold serpent, its fine coils spiralling elegantly round the polished tube, but what she slid out when she opened the lid was very new: a thin, flexible screen that rolled up into a slender scroll and fastened with a circular silver clasp cut like an aster blossom. Noriko unfurled it and stood it up on top of the chest before her – it spread into a broad, curved vista, three feet wide, a foot and a half high. Noriko touched a silver dial and the screen glowed, and what appeared first was a shining view of Cynoto – Tetsugaku-no-Michi at its loveliest, in the spring dawn, the white blossoms coursing from the dark trees, and the transparent sun rising red behind the city’s segmented skyscrapers, stacks of fringed squares and hexagons, filigreed and bracketed like ancient shrine-towers, but rising ten times as high into the glassy air, their pearls and ribbons of electric light still glittering, all so piercingly beautiful that she dared not look at it too closely just now.

She lifted the little telescope from her lap and unscrewed a ring from inside it, slotted it into the narrow column, plated in chased silver, that supported the right side of the screen. With a twist of its drums, the telescope stored the images it viewed. She had recorded everything.

She felt a terrible temptation to look again at Marcus with the girl. It was precisely what she had wanted; to see Marcus Novius off guard, as he really was. The conversation he had had with Tadahito, for which she had the sound as well, had been enough, but this – with a woman, with someone he trusted – was even better. Already, of course, she had recordings of him speaking from the Roman Palace, in the Forum – but she found it peculiarly difficult to watch them. That it should be possible to watch an Imperial prince, the Emperor himself, flaunting on a den-ga screen, like an actor! And not merely did they allow themselves to be so cheapened and exposed, but they looked and spoke nakedly into the cameras; like actors again, they displayed and malleated their emotions, they
worked themselves up
, grinning or forcing their eyes to fill with tears, exaggerating sorrow or determination to some weird level neither natural nor forgivingly stylised. It set her teeth on edge, and made it hard for her even to keep her eyes on the screen. Oh, she
was not stupid, or ignorant of Roman methods, she knew that really it made perfectly good sense within the culture, she could even see the advantages of it: perhaps it helped to inculcate loyalty among the people. But still, it left her with no impression of Marcus Novius except a feeling of strange, vicarious embarrassment, of having witnessed something unseemly and disquieting.

But she felt ashamed of having recorded him with the pale girl, ashamed of having witnessed it at all.

Tomoe, Noriko’s favourite among her ladies, a tall young woman with hair stained dark indigo, trailing down the back of a butterfly-embroidered dress, came in quietly and knelt beside her. She began silently unwinding the black fillets Noriko had bound around her plaited hair, to cover it. Noriko let her do it without comment.

At last Tomoe murmured quietly, ‘You are beautiful even in these simple clothes, Lady, but let me find you something more suitable. You would not want my lord the Prince to see you like this.’

‘He already has, it doesn’t matter,’ said Noriko, bleakly.

Deftly, Tomoe unravelled the plait so that the hair hung loose and pooled around her body on the mat. Noriko’s hair was both conservatively and expertly coloured: untouched black down to below the shoulders, where very gradually it began to shade into deep, deep green – a tint almost invisible except where it reflected light, as if a dim green lamp was shining on the black surface. The colour intensified slowly down the length of hair, until the final foot of it was a cool, bright jade green, the long points of it like willow leaves, brushing on the ground when she stood. Tomoe took a bottle of scented water, poured the liquid into her palm and smoothed it through, trying to straighten and erase the ripples left by the plaiting.