Rome Burning (45 page)

Affectionate, and at times disarmingly astute as this letter was, both Marcus and Una were subtly wounded by it, reading it just then.

‘You said that, did you?’ Marcus accused Una lightly, indicating the lines about her years-old claim of indifference to him.

‘Oh … something like that. I suppose that’s what I thought, though I don’t remember actually saying it. You know how it was.’

‘Poor Sulien. He might have hoped he’d at least get a mention.’

‘Oh, that’s on purpose,’ scoffed Una. ‘Look how she brings up this other person. Sulien should be pleased. If she wasn’t thinking about him, she’d say “I hope your brother is well”, or something. She can’t even write his name without feeling like it looks obvious.’

And for that reason Una was a little sceptical of her own apparent precedence in the other girl’s thoughts, but still she was startled and touched by how fondly Lal appeared to remember her. It made her ashamed that she had not been more faithful, over the years, in missing Lal as sharply as she had been prompted to now.

‘So, if she wrote pages about him it would show she’d
forgotten he existed?’ said Marcus. They were both aware of exaggerating to ease the tension, pretending not to understand each other when really they did, constructing a rather laborious joke about male rationality and female intuition. They succumbed to strained, shuddering laughter, and pressed closer to one another.

‘What can I tell her about Dama?’ asked Una bleakly.

Marcus hesitated, feeling, to his shame, slightly threatened by Dama, and Una’s complicated grief or guilt for him. ‘There was nothing you could have done,’ he told her quietly.

Una saw Dama’s face, propped in a brittle electric ray of torchlight, against a thundery aura of black and red; on the rock walls behind him were the shadows in ancient paint of punished, fingerless hands. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘There was.’

Dama stared back at her in the memory, so that she felt loaded with a nearly unbearable weight of ardent, blue-eyed focus; he was so painfully bright with – yes, with love, and also authority, a coiled density of will she had not encountered since. Una looked at Marcus to assure him that her sorrow now, like Lal’s stateless homesickness, did not include regret. At least, she loved Marcus, and there was no getting out of that now. But still, a rude, sneering element in her heckled dismally: ‘Dama was right; you should’ve stuck to your own kind.’ Because Dama
had
been of her kind, had he not? She had known, back then, that whatever the raw matter of her was, and whatever her life as a slave had made of it, it had been the same with him. And God knew no one could have been pushed between them, like this Nionian princess. And after all she did wish she could see him again, that they could have even just an hour together, talking.

Marcus said nothing and she picked up the letter again. ‘Will they be all right?’ she asked, as if Dama hadn’t been mentioned. ‘She tells all this stuff about who they are and where they’re living, and someone opened this before they gave it to me.’

‘We’ll find them,’ he said. ‘I’ll get them to Rome, or wherever Delir wants to go. I owe them so much, and all I’ve done is cause them this. I even took that money to get
back to Rome – I’ll make it up to them, I’ll give them a fortune.’

But then, still in his arms, Una caught her breath without speaking, and lifted her head as if trying to distinguish the sound of thunder from the noise of a distant train. He felt her body growing rigid against his.

‘What?’ he asked her.

She hardly knew how to answer; she was unwilling to understand. This was the dread that had lingered for so long, demanding so many obsessive little private rituals in order to manage it, while all the time she’d tried to persuade herself that it was silly and unnecessary, and what she was afraid of
could
not return to rational, concrete life. It was the knowledge of being tracked down, by a great mass of people, disciplined and intent, and marching closer.

‘Oh, God,’ she pleaded, not just an exclamation but, perhaps inspired by Lal’s letter, a real, miniature prayer. She started to her feet, saying, ‘Marcus, I think the
army
…’

Her voice died in bewildered horror, and Marcus insisted, ‘
What?
’

As her sense of the approach grew worse she stammered, ‘I think they’ve come for you.’ Una gazed at him and thought that whatever was happening, escape would be impossible for him, not only physically but ritually, politically. So many shreds of chances that placing that ring on his finger had tidied away. There remained only the hope that she had somehow misunderstood, or else the satisfaction of knowing the facts as fast as possible. She looked at him a second longer before she shot away from him, out of the dark hall into the light beyond.

Marcus, following her already, heard her call out his name almost at once, a shocked cry of warning.

Outside, it was her his eyes found first, almost before he understood that he was looking down into what seemed, the next second, an expanse of red-uniformed men. In reality, there were perhaps thirty or forty. And Una stood, boxed in among them. They did not touch her – not now, or not yet – but contained her nonetheless, and made her body look acutely frail between theirs. She did not look afraid for her own sake, but she was gazing at him with desperate hard
intensity, as if she could transmit herself back to him across the soldiers between them.

The only person whose eyes were not instantly fixed on him as he emerged through the door was Varius, whose face was, for the first few seconds, turned away, glaring at nothing, as if there were nothing here he could bear to see. He glanced up at Marcus at last and, oddly, smiled – a terse little greeting. Both he and Una looked as if they considered themselves somehow responsible.

Mechanically, absurdly, returning Varius’ flinch of a smile, Marcus took a short step backwards, not so much backing away as keeping his balance, wishing he could at least think of something to say. He looked around at the glassy roofs of the Palace, anticipating the Nionians and Sinoans seeing this, and felt scorched with humiliation at being exposed as the charlatan or child he’d been all along.

As if that mattered compared to the risk to the peace. And then – Una, Varius? He couldn’t construct an appropriate hierarchy of fear.

The centurion at the head of the squadron announced calmly, ‘You are to return to Rome, sir.’

‘These are my uncle’s orders?’ asked Marcus, evenly enough, although he found he could not get much strength into his voice.

‘They are, sir.’

Marcus felt more shock flutter across his face before he could control it. Half of him had thought there must have been a coup, and that his uncle was dead. ‘It will take time to explain to our hosts, and to the Nionians.’

‘That’s not possible, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘I can hardly just – leave without a word,’ said Marcus, forcing his voice to an almost unnatural slowness to disguise the desperation in it. ‘The Sinoans and Nionians have been working with us to prevent the most destructive war any Empire has yet seen. The Emperor
must
see that, however … disappointed he is in me.’

‘We’re neither of us in a position to tell the Emperor what he must or must not do,’ observed the centurion levelly, and the other men did not quite laugh, but a curt, amused rustle of breath flickered across them. Two short files of
men strode tidily up the steps to where Marcus stood, flanking him.

‘You’re arresting me, then?’ Marcus heard himself say.

‘I hope not, sir,’ said the centurion philosophically. ‘Not
you
.’

Marcus demanded finally, ‘
Why?
’

‘You’ll be told more when you come with us, sir,’ the man answered.

Marcus walked silently down the steps into the midst of them, feeling the straight-backed, defiant posture his body assumed of its own accord to be at once ridiculous and the only possibility.

He wanted to keep his eyes on the others, to communicate at least by expression, but the men reorganised themselves so that somewhere behind them Una and Varius were hidden in their ranks. The soldiers marched them efficiently through the pavilions and gardens, and Marcus strained to see the reaction of the Sinoan guards, wondering sickly what they knew, what the Empress had agreed to. Plainly the Nionians at least knew nothing, for he saw Kato appear from one of the halls among his own bodyguards and retainers, and stand shading his eyes to watch, concerned and intrigued. Marcus looked at the other man blankly, unable to let his face explain anything.

Kato frowned as the young Roman prince walked away in the centre of an excessive escort of guards, far more than Kato had seen gathered around him before. ‘What is this? Where is he going all of a sudden?’

‘I am not sure he’s leaving willingly, Lord,’ said Sohaku, who had fetched him to see this.

‘Isn’t he, now?’ cried Kato, with a start of curiosity, his face lighting up as if this were wonderful news, although he was, in fact keenly but neutrally excited. ‘Then who is forcing him to go, and for what reason, and why don’t you have the answers already?’

‘Lord, I have tried, but I will have to find one of the interpreters if you wish to press them to explain. Plainly I have forgotten all but the basics of Sinoan and my Latin was always pitiful. Forgive me. But I believe that in any case,
both parties were trying to keep the truth from me; I think the most anyone was willing to say was that it is an internal Roman matter which we should disregard.’

‘Well, we’ll find out for ourselves, won’t we?’ Kato said with the odd fusion of command and collusive playfulness for which they loved him.

He set off briskly after the detail of troops and his retainers followed. Entrenched in their orders as Kato had expected, the Roman soldiers ignored them.

They came to the great courtyard at the front of the Palace compound. The red gates stood open and Bianjing glittered frostily beyond. Bronze standards rose within like a field of rigid sunflowers: the upright Roman hand in the circle of laurel, the Eagle. Surely there were at least a hundred Roman soldiers, ranked on the cobbles in two, hard-edged squares and between them, before the heavy, six-wheeled Roman cars, a wide silk carpet from Persia or India had been unrolled, and upon it stood Drusus, all in white. He turned his face towards his cousin, but looked at him almost as if without recognition, although he smiled.

Marcus stopped as if he had struck a wall, too furious and shocked to notice that the troops around him stopped too, as if he had been leading them, rather than being transported among them. They had been instructed, in fact, to maintain some distance between the cousins. As the group halted, Drusus’ eyes swept across them, and Una, breathing hard, knowing he was looking for her, forced her face and body to obey her so that when he saw her he would see her looking as indifferent and contemptuous of him as when he had seen her last.

A herald swaggered out across the no-man’s-land between them, carrying a stiff, red-edged sheet of paper, rather like the script Marcus had been given at his investiture. As it was placed into Marcus’ numb hands and he began to read, Varius was taken over by a temptation so vivid as to be almost an hallucination – of somehow seizing the weapon of the nearest soldier and trying to kill Drusus. He knew too well that it would be impossible even to fantasise success, and yet it seemed to flash instantly through all his nerves, sharpening his eyesight, readying his hands, and he
had time to ask himself with alarmed, distant wonder, if he could really be going to do it …?

And then, as if the impulse had escaped his flesh and travelled beyond him, cut free and devilish in the live air, he heard a triple crack of gunfire. And the next thing he saw was Marcus, felled to the ground under a heap of soldiers, before he too was dragged down.

There was another spluttering of gunshots, closer this time, from somewhere on the ground – the first round seemed to have come from above, then? And then more, and a sense of people running, both nearby, as a number of the soldiers chased forward, and further away, a more scattering flight. Varius scarcely paid attention to any of it. At once he dragged himself free and onto his feet, and began ploughing through the disordered mass of soldiers to where he’d seen Marcus fall, relentless, frantic.
No
, not Marcus, not after everything …

But Marcus was rising from the ground, shoulders hunched over something, doggedly ignoring the soldiers’ attempts to shield him or herd him away. He did not even look round to see what was happening; he was methodically tearing the letter he had been given into fragments.

Bruised with relief, Varius made nothing of that. His attention, which had been fixed totally upon Marcus, expanded slightly; ahead he saw Drusus, bundled back towards the cars in a scrum of soldiers. Then the developing turmoil around them came into sudden focus: the Roman soldiers and the Sinoan guards were shooting back at the ramparts, at whoever had been firing down into the courtyard. And two or three Nionians – where had they come from? – rushed past towards the gatehouse, enraged, although charging across the open court they seemed desperately vulnerable. Soldiers from all three Empires apparently fighting one enemy, then – but not united, not remotely. Varius heard an ugly uproar of uncomprehending fury and distrust as the different factions converged at the base of the steps, shouting at each other in their separate languages, weapons raised, each
incensed by the shots the others had fired already. Varius looked on, teeth clenching in anticipatory horror, ready to see them break into three-sided battle right there inside the high Sinoan walls.