Rome Burning (57 page)

‘If I was going to kill him, he’d be dead,’ muttered Una darkly.

Varius said, ‘We had a chance to have him killed once
before. We shouldn’t have missed it. But it was Caesar’s decision, I accepted it. There was no reason for that to change. We both have strong reasons to hate Drusus Novius, reasons that are involved in why we’re here, but we don’t need them at this point. He’s about to provoke a war we’ve been working to prevent. I know you’re aware how damaging such a war could be to your country. He can’t be allowed to do this unchecked. It has to be made impossible for him.’

‘I don’t hate him,’ said Una dully. Varius looked at her in disbelief and she said, ‘I don’t. I don’t know why not. I’ve hated people who’ve done a lot less. Him, though … I just want him …
stopped
. I thought he
was
.’ She looked up at the Empress, waiting as Weigi’s translation caught up with her. ‘Your Majesty, if he can’t cross Sinoan space it’ll slow him down at least before he attacks Nionia. You should close your borders to Rome. Air, magnetways, everything.’

Once again, Noriko expected some kind of affronted outburst from Jun Shen, and it didn’t come. There could be no doubt that the Empress was incredulous – she did not attempt to conceal that, letting out a low grunt of frank surprise. But for a long time she said nothing, and only continued to scrutinise Una as if she were determined to commit her face to memory. Una looked back, only a small, shifty contraction of the mouth betraying any discomfort at this.

‘You’re very young for this,’ Jun Shen remarked at last.

Una looked blank for a second, before giving a small, unconvinced nod. She said, ‘I don’t feel that young.’

The Empress smiled regretfully. ‘One never does at the time.’

Something occurred to Noriko: a little knot of snobbery that she had either forgotten or never known she harboured toward Jun Shen came loose, and with it her surprise at the Empress’ apparent readiness to take Una seriously. She thought – of course,
she
is not really royal, any more than Una. How old would she have been when she became a concubine? Where does she even come from? She was not born to do any of this. But she does it.

‘For such a decree to have any meaning, we would have
to be willing to shoot down any Roman force that tried to cross our frontiers,’ said Jun Shen, a politician again, the minor softness gone. ‘A few shots fired and that amounts to entering the war on Nionia’s side.’ She gave a mechanical little scoffing laugh.

Neither Una nor Varius spoke yet.

‘Do you know anything of the history between our countries?’ the Empress went on, with a glance in Noriko’s direction.

‘I know some,’ said Una diffidently, thinking of the books she’d read back in Athens, and the questions Varius had answered for her the day before.

The Empress smiled, mirthlessly. Noriko looked at the ground. ‘Then you know it is not a very happy one.’

‘If Drusus remains in power, war will follow,’ said Una. ‘And you will find yourself against him soon. He will not respect alliances, and he will want total Roman control. So, finally you will enter the war, either on Nionia’s side, or alone.’

‘But even he will think twice about taking on two empires at once on a moment’s notice. Or even if
he
were mad enough to consider it, Salvius isn’t,’ continued Varius. Because he had to. He’d got the crushing weariness controlled, and he now understood what Una had said to him earlier when he’d been on the point of sleep. He said, ‘We’ve discussed how we may be judged in Rome for advising you to do this. It will keep Drusus contained for now. It could be long enough for Marcus to put right whatever damage Drusus has done to his standing in Rome. If he returns the war can be averted. This is important enough to justify treason.’

Jun Shen played with one of the jewelled pendants hanging from her throat. ‘If Drusus Novius is all that you say, what will he do with his cousin now he has the opportunity?’ She glowered at them astutely. ‘You don’t know, do you? You can’t be sure.’

‘I am very sorry to interrupt,’ said Noriko, ‘but isn’t the point that as long as we do not know, there is still some hope? And so it is still worth trying everything?’

The Empress sucked her lip thoughtfully, slightly
smearing the red paint. ‘For how long are you asking me to do this?’

‘How long could you do it?’ asked Varius.

‘There would be people left stranded, it would play havoc with trade,’ grumbled the Empress. ‘And tension with Rome growing all the time …? I can give you a few days at the most.’

‘A fortnight,’ Varius pressed.

‘Nonsense. Perhaps I could stretch to a week, but the costs would be immense – a fortnight is out of the question.’

‘That gives us too little scope to be worth the damage. Ten days, or until we hear Marcus has given up his power. Or that he’s dead. Whatever comes first,’ said Varius, deliberately brutal, but with a barely discernible glance of apology and pain at Una.

Jun Shen pursed her lips again. ‘Fine. Ten days, then,’ she said shortly, getting crossly to her feet. Standing with hurried respect, Una, Varius and Noriko felt after all the shock of what they’d done, a strange hybrid of relief and anxious dread. Una and Varius turned to each other, almost disbelieving, and Noriko thought of Rome, and the marriage, and wondered how far the work she’d done today had raised the chances of its happening.

Jun Shen gave Una another hard look. ‘And I have something for you,’ she announced. She took a small card from a little pouch of embroidered silk. ‘The message came yesterday. You can have it as far as I’m concerned. So your next job will be to try and persuade your keepers to let you use a
yuan hua
. I dare say you will manage it.’

Una took the card, startled. There were a few columns of Sinoan characters beside the Latin translation: her name, a longdictor code and the word ‘Holzarta’.

*

Lal dragged the stack of pipes she was trying to carry a few steps further and stopped, gasping and dizzy, her legs shaking. She had managed this yesterday, why was she so flatly incapable of it now? She laid half of the pipes down and struggled on with the rest, piled them up against the
back wall of the yard and went back for the others. She saw one of the men roll his eyes in exasperation. This was what they had said she would be like, this was why they hadn’t wanted to hire her in the first place.

They had lent her some overalls to work in, giving her at least the chance to finally wash her filthy dress, and they let her sleep on a pile of plastic sheeting in a back room. One of them had even brought her some blankets and pillows for the second night.

But they were about to fire her. She was sure of it – she could sense it coming.

She had an arrangement with the eating house. She had told them that when someone speaking a foreign language called, it would be for her, and taught them to say, ‘Wait, I will get her,’ in Latin. She’d given them most of what was left of Geng’s money in advance, both for the use of the longdictor itself and for sending someone to find her in the town. The girls at the restaurant were tickled both at their new ability to speak a few words of Latin, and at the sounds of the words themselves. To be sure of being on hand when the call came, Lal went there for her meals when she could manage it, eating the cheapest, most basic dishes of rice or noodles, and each time she managed to find a day’s or a few hours’ work she tramped round to make sure they knew where to find her. Whenever she appeared, the girls would chorus at her, ‘Wait, I will get her. Wait, I
get
her,’ as if the phrase were either a greeting or a string of delectably rude words, and then fall about giggling or tease each other for saying it wrong. They were friendly but it was hard to go on being amused, as her hope of word from Una went on being disappointed.

She had hoped she might be able to get a few days’ work in the longdictor restaurant itself. She felt absurdly wistful about the idea now, as if it represented some kind of paradisal simplicity. But the couple who ran the place had told her that most of their children and a few young men from nearby worked there already – they neither needed nor could afford anyone else. Lal thought her dirty, desperate appearance might also have had something to do with it. It seemed bleakly reasonable to her that it should.

Still, by the standard of the next few days, she’d been lucky the first evening. Her age and sex carried certain advantages as well as certain risks. Trying to guess the meaning behind the bemused stares of men she passed made her frightened and paranoid, but at least there were times when it helped to be unthreatening. In the eating house, after opening her crumpled paper bag of make-up and hopelessly dabbing on some of the perfume in lieu of being able to wash properly, she persuaded a woman to let her spend the night on an absent daughter’s bed. But though this small space was free, the house was crammed with a strife-ridden family gripped in a furious, years-long argument, of which certain factions – the husband, the daughter-in-law – were plainly displeased at Lal’s presence. Lal took it that she shouldn’t come back.

The second day she wandered about desperately, afraid of straying too far from the eating house. She wouldn’t have been above stealing if anything she wanted – food, soap – had been exposed enough. But she drew so much interest wherever she went that it was impossible to think she could get away with it. Finally she found a man who had just taken over a dilapidated shop and was dragging dank rubbish out of it into a skip. She helped him empty the place of broken shelves and damp-spoiled boxes in exchange for a few coins and permission to sleep that night curled on the shop floor.

One horrible day she could find no one who wanted any kind of work she could offer, and ate only once before nightfall, when she’d had no choice but to creep away into the fields and try to sleep on a few scavenged sheets of cardboard. After that she’d harassed the men at a builders’ merchants into letting her join them in unloading a delivery of bricks, pipes, girders. They had been unconvinced she was strong enough and she was proving them right.

She lugged the rest of the pipes into place, reeled around behind a stack of concrete bricks, and then some black, intangible time later, realised she must have gone to sleep on her feet, her face propped numbly against the bricks. The manager was standing over her, arms discontentedly folded. Lal blinked at him, stupidly, for the moment almost unable to understand the words he was saying. Not that it mattered, the meaning was obvious. She felt strangely indifferent. She
changed back into her dress, dropped the coins he gave her into the paper bag without looking at them, and walked leadenly down the road towards the longdictor place out of dull instinct.

Some way ahead of her, a girl came bounding along up the drab road, long, raggedy plaits flapping and bouncing as she ran. It was one of the restaurant waitresses, a girl a few years younger than Lal. She skipped cheerfully up to Lal and chirruped, ‘Wait! I
get
her!’ in an extravagant parody of Lal’s own accent, and laughed heartily.

‘What? Is it my friend?’ asked Lal in Sinoan, startled into something like alertness.

‘Yes! Come on!’

Lal struggled to keep up, resenting the unreasonable distance. It seemed amazing that the other girl could dash along so easily having already run all this way. She reached the restaurant long before Lal and stood, bouncing encouragingly in the doorway. Lal stumbled at last into the longdictor room, fell into a seat, one of the girls placed the longdictor circlet on her head with a comical flourish, and a faintly suspicious Roman voice said hesitantly, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Una!’ cried Lal in relief. A hot, dry, torrent of exhaustion thundered over her, and she slumped over the table, propping her heavy head on her hands, smiling. ‘Oh, I knew you’d answer, I
knew
you had to be there.’

There was a confused pause, and Una said cautiously, ‘Lal?’

‘I’m in a village called Jingshan. It’s not that far from Jiangning, it’s – ah – it’s south-west, somewhere, I don’t know, but I only just missed them last week. Please, can you tell them I’m here—’

‘Wait, wait,’ interrupted Una. And this time Lal noticed the tired, beleaguered sound in her voice, the faint controlled hysteria lurking behind it, as though talking to Lal came so incongruously close upon the heels of some difficult or terrible thing, that Una could barely cope with it. ‘I’m sorry. It’s strange talking to you after all this time and in the middle of all this. I don’t understand. Who are you talking about? Are Delir and Ziye with you? Why are you in this place?’

‘You don’t know,’ said Lal quietly, suddenly wary and chilled, listening hard.

‘Why? What did you think I knew?’

‘My father and Ziye were arrested – oh, more than a week ago now. We were trying to get across the Long River. I got away. The police were rounding up all the Roman immigrants because of that Nionian lord who was killed. You must have known about him. I thought … I thought you and Marcus must have heard.’

Una gave a kind of moan of tense laughter, as if she didn’t know where to start. ‘Marcus is gone. He’s been taken back to Rome. And Varius and I are with the Nionians. We’re hostages, we’re trying to – I can’t explain it all now. Drusus has taken over, that’s the main thing. We hope it’s not for ever, but …’

‘But it could be,’ finished Lal, in a dazed murmur. She blinked into unstable space. ‘But … there are Roman men in a car, looking for me. I even saw them, I just couldn’t run fast enough. They’d been asking people if they’d seen me. Geng said—’