Rome Burning (62 page)

He had not been left totally alone, there were three men who hadn’t moved. But he did not imagine it was out of
defiant loyalty – they had been told to stay. Marcus had left them there, either to watch him, or as an insult to him.

Drusus slammed back inside the pavilion. But it was too late, the sustaining warmth of anger was leaving him, and he stood there, out of breath and shivering. How flimsy and unprotected it felt in these Sinoan rooms, only floodlit glass and painted wood, the panels fretted full of weak points and holes, between his skin and the world. How did any Sinoan prince ever sleep in peace?

He turned to a slave, and said almost in a whisper, ‘Lock the door.’

*

Una resisted running until the last few seconds. She kept herself almost ceremoniously in check, as the Nionian guards led them unnecessarily across the Sinoan courtyards and gardens, as if too abrupt a transition into freedom might damage them. Varius walked slowly, not speaking, face tilted up slightly towards the sky. They had known for two raw hours that Marcus was in the city, that they would be allowed to go. Now it had happened, after all their manoeuvring within captivity, it was hard to believe that it could be so simple, that accompanied or not, they could just walk back to where they had been and it would really be over, Marcus would really be there. Una stifled the presentiment that this was not only a dazed reaction to change, that it was true. It was not so simple. In some way he would not ever be there.

She saw him, magnified and dark in his purple robe. She did run then, leaving the group of guards behind. They collided, clutched. She’d never wanted to see him so badly and yet not wanted to look him in the face. He lifted her a little off the ground, the pressure of his arms painful around her waist and against her ribs. Neither of them was smiling. But they held on, Una’s eyes shut, her teeth clenched, blocking out everything. He
had
come back, that was all. She didn’t want to know anything he was thinking.

‘It’s good to see you safe,’ commented Varius, meaning it, but rather coldly. He would have preferred to have walked for an hour, out in the city, as far from the palace
as he could get, before seeing Marcus. When Marcus, one hand still gripping Una’s shoulder, took a step towards him he stiffened, just a little. And then he was startled by the expression of nearly desperate appeal he saw flash across Marcus’ face and settle into grim, accepting sadness almost before Varius could recognise it.

Marcus said to both of them, ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done here. It was heroic. I won’t let anyone go on thinking of you as traitors.’

A soldier approached them, cautiously across the courtyard. He looked somehow drained, pale, his salute to Marcus stiff with an odd blend of relief and dread. ‘Caesar. A few of the men aren’t in a good way. One’s unconscious. A couple of his ribs are broken, I think he may have a punctured lung. I’m uncertain if you wanted …’ He hesitated, and revised the question. ‘Permission to administer medical assistance, Caesar?’

Marcus looked irritable and disdainful. ‘Fine. If necessary,’ he said, gesturing the man away.

Una tensed, incredulously. ‘What is this?’ she asked, in a low voice.

Marcus’ eyes turned blank as pebbles, a faint, defiant smile lurked unhappily at his mouth. ‘I’ve had the soldiers flogged for what happened here. Not only them, of course.’

He’d chosen the Alanian coast as a place of exile for the Roxelanian magistrate. And he’d had him beaten too, kicked and punched along the street and through the forum of his city, thrown into the van which drove him away.

He felt an impatience that approached disgust at the shock on both their faces. Did it really need to be talked over? They did not speak. Una stared at him in unrecognising confusion, lips parted with some kind of hurt concern for him which he didn’t want to see. Varius’ subtle, withdrawing frown came closer to a look of disappointment. It was hard to tolerate.

Finally Varius asked quietly, ‘How did you choose the ones to be punished?’

‘I picked the ones whose faces I could remember,’ Marcus said roughly. ‘That centurion who led them should have been first. No one knows where he is. Lucky for him.’

‘Did you want this done before you saw us?’ Varius enquired more forcefully, and looked away when Marcus didn’t answer.

Una muttered, ‘But it was Drusus. And your uncle. And Salvius. They were far more guilty.’

‘What, do you think I can snap my fingers and make the world a different place?’ demanded Marcus, a harsh, resentful break in his voice. ‘I could have had them killed. I
should
have done. I don’t respect myself for sparing them. It won’t happen again. Are you going to defend them because they were acting on orders? Well, next time they get orders like that I want them too afraid to carry them out. This is how things work.’ He swung round and strode away. Una went after him. Varius did not.

They didn’t return to the pavilion in which they’d stayed before. ‘Drusus is there,’ said Marcus, shortly. ‘I’d rather keep him there than move him. He’s not getting out.’

So these rooms were unfamiliar. Una was literally treading carefully around Marcus, placing her feet delicately as if afraid of frightening him. Marcus told her, ‘I have to meet with Junosena – thank her. And then Tadahito. Try and solve all of this.’

Una nodded, silently. She padded warily about the room. She felt suddenly tired by the fact that even if she was out of the Nionian-controlled rooms, she was still in the palace, still in Sina. She didn’t want to think of it as a longing to be in the Roman Empire.

‘I don’t know what happened to all our stuff,’ she remarked. ‘My clothes.’

‘Yes, what is that dress? It’s not yours, is it?’

‘One of the Princess’s waiting women’s.’ They looked at each other and mutually shut out the subject of Noriko, there was even a kind of camaraderie in that simultaneous refusal to think about it.

‘Your things won’t have gone far. They’ll be brought over.’

Dragging off the outer robe, he pulled something out of his pocket and gripped it – a small roll of blue cloth. Una recognised it with a confused stir of feeling: a plain woollen hat, folded into a soft tube.

She’d handed it to him in a graveyard the day after they’d met, terse and unsmiling, just to render him less of a risk, cover up what he was. Still, it was the first thing she’d ever given to him.

Marcus glanced at her quickly, with a shrug and a tight, uneven smile, ‘Thought of it yesterday when I was at home, so …’

But he still looked angrily desolate. Again it flashed over Una what he had done, and that it had not satisfied him, the violence had still not gone out of him. She wished she could say some sweet, fond, mindlessly supportive thing. She could imagine a different kind of lover for a man in power – a blindly gentle woman that in real life she’d have found unbearable, a human cornucopia of inexhaustible tenderness, someone with no capacity to judge, no concerns except soothing him. She thought it would be much simpler to be like that. Instead she had gone cold, stiff, stern. As she could not speak she willed herself to go and hold him again. She stroked his hair, lightly and tentatively, and though she’d meant to comfort him the smooth familiar warmth of it comforted her. But he must have detected something forced about her touch, for he drew back and said impatiently, ‘Do I need to tell you? Do you know everything already?’

‘No,’ she muttered.

‘Well,’ he sounded perversely exasperated. ‘Why not?’

She prevaricated. ‘There’s too much, all at once, you’re too … worked up.’ It was half true. She wouldn’t tell him that she was afraid to see what he might be thinking, or remembering, or planning to do. ‘I don’t want to spy on you.’

‘You’ve got to know,’ he said brusquely, and began telling her about the time stranded in Sarmatia with the magistrate, the choice he’d made, the meeting with Sulien in the Palace. He finished flatly, ‘I don’t think he’ll want to see me again.’

‘He will,’ said Una. And knowing her brother, she genuinely thought this was true, yet reservations that did not belong to this question wormed into her voice and she could not make herself sound wholly convinced.

Bleakly, Marcus shook his head. ‘I said yes to him dying slowly, I don’t blame him.’

‘Yes, rather than give Drusus the chance to do that to whoever he wants and start a war – rather than see slavery go on for ever. I would have done the same thing.’

He paused and looked at her. ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ he said, with a kind of wonder in his voice. ‘And leaving you and Varius here, would you have done that?’

She hesitated, considering it. ‘Yes.’

‘But not this.’ His voice grew harder. ‘Not punishing the soldiers.’

Una said more strictly than she meant to, ‘
No
.’

Marcus almost shouted at her, ‘So what
would
you have done, then?’

Una mumbled, flinching, ‘I don’t know,’ so that Marcus turned away from her with a scathing sound, and then she retorted with answering anger, ‘Yes I do, I would have warned them. I’d have told them any orders that didn’t come from me weren’t valid, so they shouldn’t think that was any kind of defence. I’d have made them realise I could do what you did, and then I’d have made them amazed that I hadn’t. I’d have made them
grateful
to me.’

Marcus made the scoffing noise again, although with diminished force. ‘And you think they’d respect that?’

Una said stubbornly, ‘Yes.’ Marcus sighed and sat down on a couch, depleted and slack. She looked down at him and whispered, ‘You were there? You … watched it happen?’

‘Of course I did. I had to be sure they knew why it was happening.’ He closed his eyes and said, sounding more like himself, ‘Anyway, it would have been cowardly not to be there.’

They fell quiet for a while, as at some kind of truce. He didn’t want to fight with her. He didn’t believe her reassurances about Sulien, and he was still wretched and resentful at the memory of the look on Varius’ face.

Una discovered and sifted through a pile of messages on a low table, surprised to find a new one for her. She read it and turned round to Marcus, shocked. ‘Where’s Sinchan?’

‘It’s across the river,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty much what you said – do you remember? The city where they put all the dirt they don’t want in this one.’

‘Lal’s there. I promised I’d get her to Rome. And it says she’s ill.’

‘What?’ He looked up.

‘Delir and Ziye are under arrest, I don’t know where. The Sinoan police have been rounding up people like them ever since Lord Kato was murdered, she’s been lost out in the countryside all this time. She had a friend who helped her get in touch with me, maybe he got her here somehow. I have to go to her.’

Marcus stated, his voice oddly mild, ‘Drusus murdered Lord Kato.’

‘What are you going to do about him?’ Una asked softly.

‘Keep him quiet,’ said Marcus, and didn’t elaborate. His face, with some small display of effort, brightened. ‘Well, if there’s anything you need. And I’ll do what I can for Delir and Ziye and anyone else caught up in this.’

But Una stood with the message in her hand, looking at him with softened, mournful helplessness, until he got up and went to her, kissing her and saying gently, ‘You don’t have to look like that. Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll be out of here soon.’

*

Dama had grown more restless as they approached Xinjian, the shafts of influence he emitted became more fitful and less blinding, not to the point where Liuyin seriously lost confidence in him or questioned anything they’d done, but enough for him to observe the other man more clearly. Once they had reached the ugly, centreless town and had installed Lal in a cupboard of a bedroom in a grubby guest house, and by the time Liuyin had contacted the minor official he knew in Bianjing with the message for Una, Dama could barely keep still. He prowled around Lal’s bed and out into the dingy street, looking south, as if he could somehow see Bianjing through the city’s brownish sprawl, across the river. At first Liuyin had assumed he was anxious about Lal, who was worryingly quiet now, but Dama continued to insist with wide-eyed, categorical certainty that she would be well; Sulien – the name irritated some residual prickle of jealousy in Liuyin – Sulien would cure her. And indeed
his unsettled mood did not seem precisely like anxiety, he never showed any fear of being arrested, or that anything would go wrong. It was more like a desire to be elsewhere.

‘What’s wrong?’ Liuyin asked, after discovering that Dama had discarded nearly all of his share of the gristly food Liuyin had been sent out to buy. As with the pills, Dama did not seem to like to be seen eating.

‘Nothing,’ said Dama, in a distant voice. He sighed, and then smiled at Liuyin. ‘She’ll be here soon. Her or some
servant
.’ His lip curled in the beginning of a sneer that melted with surprising speed into a smile of perfect faith, and he murmured, ‘But I think it’ll be her. As soon as you see her, you don’t need to worry any more. Just make sure she’s going to the right door, don’t hang around – don’t talk to her, don’t mention me. Just stay with Lal until Una comes, then go. You can trust her.’

‘You won’t be there? You’re going?’ said Liuyin, flushing with an embarrassing sensation of abandonment.

‘I must,’ said Dama, rather dejectedly. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not going to need me here. Look.’ He produced a crumpled roll of money. ‘This’ll get you home.’