Rome Burning (53 page)

‘But you don’t even speak Sinoan properly.’

‘We speak another language there,’ faltered Lal. For the moment, she could think of no more lies and the phantom homeland she had conjured provoked another spasm of tears. She didn’t attempt not to cry; weeping would excuse her for a while from saying any more.

The woman sighed and came forward to pat and soothe her mechanically, with an air of mild exasperation. ‘Never mind. Never mind,’ she repeated flatly, until Lal had managed to stop. ‘What are you doing here, then?’

Lal stammered something about coming south to look for work, about being tricked and robbed. She could not tell if the woman believed her, somehow telling anything seemed to render its credibility unimportant. It was obviously true that she was lost.

‘Well, there’s a place in Jingshan, but what are you going to do with no money? Have you eaten, even?’

‘Not really. I’ll work something out. I just –
have
to talk to …’ Tears threatened again as she considered saying ‘my family’, but this time she swallowed them back, and said, truthfully, ‘I know an official’s son, he’ll help me. How far is that?’

The woman uttered another long-suffering sigh and grumbled patiently, ‘I suppose Geng could take you there on the Sixth Day.’

‘Oh!’ Lal caught her breath with blended gratitude and anxiety. ‘Thank you …’ But she could not say it without hesitation. It was only the Second Day now.

‘That’s when the market’s on. You’re not going to get there any faster, not walking. Not like that.’

Lal hesitated again, and then smiled with overstrained brightness and resumed thanking her effusively. The woman nodded tersely, so that Lal could see that her long-winded gratefulness seemed embarrassing and graceless to her, which made it all the harder to stop talking.

Geng, it turned out, was her son, also thin and weather-beaten, already balding at twenty-five. He appeared at about midday by which time Lal, who had been in another tiny field cutting sugar cane with a sickle for six hallucinatory hours, was dizzy with tiredness. His mother called Lal over and began explaining her to him, but she saw uneasily that he did not seem to listen; she fidgeted nervously under his curious gaze.

‘Are you Persian?’ he asked.

Lal suppressed a flinch of bewildered horror. She said steadily, ‘No. I’m Sinoan. I’m from Mongolia.’

But this was terrible. The police must be searching for her far more scrupulously than she’d thought.

‘Because there are these men in an official car up on the road. Stopping people and asking if they’d seen a Persian girl.
They
weren’t Sinoan – they had someone translating for them. They were Roman. Definitely.’

Still stupefied with fatigue and anxiety, Lal felt her brain stall, her skin flush with confusion, before being electrified by a charge of hope. Marcus must know of Delir and Ziye’s arrest. Marcus had sent them. ‘Are they still there?’ she asked.

‘They were when I left. They were flagging down cars. It
is
you, then.’

His mother uttered a fatalistic snort at this, but otherwise looked largely indifferent, but a guarded and uncertain smile had spread across Geng’s face.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lal breathlessly. ‘Where are they?’

He told her. Exhilaration buoyed her along a little way, blotting out her tiredness, but she ran for twenty stumbling minutes over spongy ground before the track reached a main road, and she staggered panting among a group of peasants on the roadside, who were raking wheat, spread to dry on the asphalt like reddish carpets. They turned and stared at her.

She saw the car, gleaming darkly in the distance. Three men standing beside it talking, one of them at least plainly not Sinoan. They were just near enough for her to see his light brown hair as he turned and disappeared back inside the car. A battered truck they must have stopped was just setting off again, away from them. Lal dragged her aching body to a run again, waving, calling.

Someone further ahead even guessed who she was, and shouted. But the Romans did not see her, or hear. She saw the car’s red curtains flash in the sun as the doors swung closed, and Drusus’ men drove away.

*

Varius stood with his back to the locked door, avoiding seeing it. His heart stammered along breakneck, it pelted and tripped. Each breath was like a shallow handhold on a cliff, it demanded so much struggle for such a little thing. This was, in fact, better than some hours earlier, when as he paced rapidly back and forth across the floor, the possessing force in the shut room and the struggle with it had mounted until everything went dim and red and he had just had enough time to reach for a chair, to fall into that rather than to the floor. He wanted so much to be able to think clearly, and for the moment dared not lift his attention above noticing the repeating patterns in the carpet. He was disgusted at his incapacity to control what was not precisely fear, not the anticipation of something to come, but horror at the present. He had been in this room for a day and a night.

So far, at least, he blamed the Nionians for nothing. He’d been treated well enough himself; he hoped the same went for Una, for he did not know where she was. It had been obvious that the Nionians were, understandably, at a
loss to know what to do with them. He and Una had been herded among the guards and lower-ranking Nionian noblemen into a meeting room and held there, first in awkward silence, then with a lengthy quarrel going on around them which they couldn’t understand. Meanwhile, someone must have been finding space for them in the pavilions, for then they had been separated. He had been taken to these rooms, plainer and smaller but otherwise not much unlike the quarters he’d had on the Roman side of the compound, except that outside was fractured chaos, and inside he could only just breathe.

The bones of his hands were straining the skin, so tightly knotted were his fists. Carefully, finger by finger, he loosened them. There was a broad window seat against locked sandalwood shutters, through which a dim, sifted light fell. He let himself down onto it, resting his head against the wall, closing his eyes. And almost out of simple exhaustion, he gave up ordering himself to be calm. Well, at least being shut in here alone, he could go out of his mind for a while without anyone to see. He almost laughed then, because that last thought came to him in Gemella’s voice, as if she were leaning idly in the other corner of the window seat and speaking to him, so that with eyes still shut, he smiled affectionately at her and murmured, ‘Except you.’

It only lasted a few minutes, but the feeling of her company had never been so easy, so close to painless, and even when it faded and he opened his eyes, his mind felt clearer, even if his pulse was still working far too fast and he didn’t expect the respite to be permanent.

An hour or so after this, during which he’d been trying to make a dispassionate assessment of things, the door opened, making him start and then scowl at himself. Two of the Nionian retainers entered the room, with the interpreter he’d first encountered at the Venus Amaterasu ceremony.

The interpreter asked softly, ‘Lord Varius, would you come with us?’

He got up and followed them. Moving through the open door he felt an illogical pulse of relief and an equally strong, contradictory recollection of being marched through the corridors in the prison, first towards his silent cell, then
towards the van that would take him to Gabinius. They went down to a long ground-floor room, walled on two sides with folding shutters of fretted wood, mercifully open to a garden and a courtyard. It seemed bare compared to the rooms in the other pavilions; Varius had the impression the Nionians had cleared away some of the furniture.

The Prince was seated with the other lords – Kiyowara, Taira, Mimana, Sanetomo. All were wearing white mourning, and so looked, to Varius, strangely Roman and senatorial. Tadahito, pale and stern among the rest, said to the interpreter in Latin, ‘You may go. I will explain anything the Great Lords need to know.’

The interpreter bowed and retreated. In Nionian, one of the men at Tadahito’s side ventured a protest and was answered sharply. ‘Lord Varius,’ said the Prince, with unsmiling graciousness, gesturing for him to sit.

‘I am not a lord,’ snapped Varius, much more irritably than was necessary. Tadahito only nodded gravely so that he felt a little ashamed of himself.

He sat down, organising his body into stillness, stifling the nervous restlessness in his hands and making them lie relaxed at his sides. For a second the effort sapped focus out of everything again. He watched the Prince and the lords conferring briefly, automatically lowering their voices in front of him, even though he couldn’t have understood a word.

Tadahito said in Latin, ‘You will be expecting questions now. It is in your own interest and your country’s to tell us the truth.’

Varius judged this speech as pompous and tried to restrain a tic of impatience at it. He said, ‘As before this happened, I won’t lie to you. As before, I’ll tell you the truth or say nothing. It depends what you ask me.’ He braced himself a little and said dispassionately enough, ‘Can you tell me if you have any intelligence about Caesar’s journey? If anything has – happened?’

Tadahito gazed at him, a kind of sad, regal emptiness in his face. ‘It is difficult for me to tell you anything,’ he answered, and then did not elaborate, so that after a moment Varius realised this meant: ‘No. I have nothing to tell you.’

‘Is Noviana Una safe?’

‘Why should anything worse have happened to her than has happened to you?’

‘I would like to see her. I appreciate it’s only sensible to question us separately in the first instance. But afterwards.’

‘Afterwards, we will consider it.’

Varius nodded wearily, unsure if this was meant as a genuine concession or another coded refusal. A tired, apprehensive reflex shuddered through him.

‘Are you unwell?’ enquired Tadahito, watching him attentively.

‘No,’ said Varius looking away through the wide open lattices at the space and the light, clenching his teeth. The weakness was humiliatingly obvious, then.

Without warning, one of the older noblemen – Lord Taira – erupted, shouting at Varius what might have been an accusation, furious hands stabbing at the air, as if a pressure Varius had been unaware of had finally become unbearable. Taira turned to the Prince, bowing, begging something – apologising perhaps – but outraged and desperate. Even more than the violence of it, the sudden tears which ran freely from the man’s eyes were unnerving to Varius, for Taira made no attempt to hide or suppress them, and yet there was no edge of a sob in his voice. The other lords looked embarrassed, but Taira himself seemed to have no sense of dignity lost, as if he were at once abandoning himself to the emotion, and unconscious of it happening. Tadahito told him – what? To be silent? That what he wanted would happen in due course? Varius felt jarred, shaken. As abruptly as his outburst had begun, Taira had returned to his seat, apparently composed again.

Tadahito said, as if nothing had happened, ‘Two days ago, I thought there would not be a war. It seemed as if the people of Tokogane …’ He paused, reconsidered something, went on, ‘… as if the people of the world grew safer with every hour that went by. Now, Lord Kato is murdered by a Roman, Caesar disappears without warning, and you are left here. War between us appears only days away and I do not even know that it should be prevented.’

Varius said, ‘I only know a Roman was involved in Kato’s
death because you tell me so. Neither Una nor I will be able to tell you about any government plot against you, because there was none. We came here, all of us, in the hope of peace. That is only what you would expect me to say, and it won’t become any more credible by being repeated, but it had better be said once.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the Prince laconically. ‘I would expect that.’

‘You said yourself you trusted us until two days ago,’ began Varius.

‘We were close to trusting you,’ Tadahito corrected him.

‘Lord Kato’s death is terrible, but it is still one man’s death. You do not need to let it start something infinitely worse. It has not made that inevitable, even now.’

‘It has made some things inevitable. He was much loved,’ remarked the Prince blandly. ‘Four of his men have already performed self-execution.’

Varius looked up and met Tadahito’s eyes, feeling a jolt of disorientating recognition, bracing against the memory of the poison on his tongue. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘They failed to protect him.’

‘I can understand that.’

The exchange had been rapid. Now they were silent, as Tadahito studied him for another second. He had told Varius of the retainers’ suicides with a kind of impassive defiance, as if to find it shocking would have been a weakness. But then his face altered, and became simply tired and depressed. He slumped a little, and said bitterly, ‘And now I have more corpses to send home, more families to inform. You see? More people have already begun to die. Every Nionian who hears of this will demand revenge. And—’ Varius saw Tadahito hesitate before taking the risk of the next words. ‘And, he was a great leader. A great warrior. His loss – weakens us. It strengthens Rome against us.’ He leant forward, indicating the other lords with a discreet glance. ‘They cannot understand us talking, Varius. They would be horrified to hear me admit so much. But you know it, whether or not you had any part in his death. And in truth, I believe you did not. Caesar would not have left you in our power if he thought you could betray anything. So at least,
if you know anything, you do not know that you know.’