Rome Burning (65 page)

‘I know. I know I did. But you’ll lose everything if you do it now.’

Marcus hesitated, but then spat out a miserable laugh. ‘Sounds fair.’

He let go then, and would have broken away, but Varius had locked hold of him before he could even make a move, saying grimly, ‘No. It does not.’

If Varius hadn’t defended himself before, it wasn’t because he was weak. Straining against his grip, Marcus began to feel how he’d worn himself out. He lurched exhaustedly and gasped, ‘What are you protecting him for?’

He didn’t know what reply he expected, but Varius only answered with a short, castigatory look at him, and Marcus sagged a little, shamed. No – of course he knew better than that. He demanded instead, ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I? After everything he’s done.’

But he was no longer struggling. Varius cautiously loosened his grip, his hands still on Marcus’ shoulders, but not so much restraining him now as holding him up.

‘You could lose your power, for one thing. And then what? What about the war – the slaves?’

But all this seemed unreal to Marcus, something to which he couldn’t remember his way back. His breathing came almost in sobs now, dry, raw. He shook his head despairingly and staggered away, over to Drusus. And this time Varius did not stop him, only followed, staying close. At their feet, Drusus twitched slackly, like a parched fish on a beach, a pitiful attempt to slip away. Marcus looked down, trying to coax the strength and rage back into life. He was so tired, so daunted at the effort it would take to finish what he’d done. But he still could do it, he still
must
, even without the force that seemed to have drained away while Varius held him.

At his side, Varius said, ‘Remember telling me what it would mean. You were right. This is not an execution. You were thinking more clearly then.’

‘Thinking clearly,’ Marcus repeated, bitterly. ‘It’s too late. You might as well – you might as well let me. It’s come back.’

‘What has come back?’

‘What they did to me,’ said Marcus. He leant, one-handed,
on one of the chairs that Drusus’ fall had sent skidding across the floor, then abruptly dropped onto it as if he’d been tripped. ‘What I saw, when I was drugged. When I was in the Sanctuary. It’s still there. I could at least make him pay for that.’

Varius lifted another chair soundlessly onto its feet so that he could sit beside Marcus. He asked, ‘Are you seeing anything like that now?’

Marcus cast a distrustful, flinching glance around the room, and shook his head again.

‘How long did it last?’

‘A few seconds. One second, maybe. It doesn’t matter how long. It’s in my blood, it must have always been just – waiting to come back.’

There was a silence, in which he heard himself, and Drusus, both labouring for air.

‘One second in three years …’ suggested Varius.

Marcus lifted his face from his hands with a cracked little smile and a look that took in the chaos he’d made of the room, the state he was in, Drusus. He said, ‘Doesn’t it seem like more than that?’

Varius regarded him, steadily. ‘You seem furious – desperate, to me. You’ve got good reason for that. You don’t seem mad. You are yourself, you still have that to lose.’

Marcus was finally still, beginning to catch his breath.

‘You know what I want for him,’ said Varius. ‘I don’t want this for you.’

Marcus looked back at him and said, ‘Varius …’ But he had no idea what more he could have said even if his throat hadn’t closed as tightly as a fist and stifled any further attempt at speech. He bowed his head because he couldn’t hold Varius’ gaze any longer, and then, as if some scaffolding supporting his body had given way, he slumped, not back into the chair but sideways, letting his forehead drop against Varius’ shoulder. He shut his eyes, stupefied with fatigue. He felt Varius’ hand come to rest briefly on his arm. And then he dragged himself up and went to Drusus, and got onto his knees beside him.

‘Drusus,’ he said fiercely, lifting him up. ‘Drusus. Can you hear me?’ Drusus was limp; his head rolled back, but
his eyes opened dully – painful slits in the purpled swelling of his broken face. With a groan of effort Marcus hauled him off the ground and onto a chair, bent over him. ‘I’m going to let you have what you want. You can make speeches – you can preside over games. I’ll give you power. I’m going to give Canaria a new governor. I’m sure your people will love you very much. And every conversation you have will be listened to. Everyone you work with, I will have put there. Each letter you write, I will read. And your first will be to our uncle, to tell him how happy you are with your new post, and how glad we both are to have put aside our differences, like family, as he wanted. Do you understand?’

Drusus didn’t or couldn’t speak, but his head drooped onto his chest in a spasm that might have been a nod.

Then Marcus heard heavy footsteps behind him on the wooden floor, and looked round to see Salvius coming to a halt at the head of the room, staring at the wreckage, at Drusus. Marcus straightened and faced him, confident at least that the trepidation he felt would not show.

Drusus looked up with convulsive effort, and choked out Salvius’ name.

But Salvius stood there in silence and several things were immediately obvious to him, so much so that he scarcely needed to examine them consciously. For one thing, he knew Varius had not been involved in the fight. He was too clean, too little tired. And there was no one else there, the confrontation had been between Marcus and Drusus alone. And Drusus was taller than Marcus, and ought to have been at least as strong, yet Marcus stood there over him, dappled in blood that Salvius knew, with the same unthinking certainty, was not his own. So Drusus had failed, totally, to defend himself, failed to fight. Drusus’ pleading look and whimpered pronunciation of his name was suddenly repellent to him. A weakling begging for protection. This was not what he had hoped for.

Varius said, ‘This is over, Salvius.’

*

Later, when his skin was clean, and the bloody clothes had been bundled off to be washed by servants or thrown away,
Marcus stood waiting in one of the palace gardens, the low fruit trees around him colourless as water in the moonlight. He was aching for sleep, the need so intense it left almost no room for thought or for loss. It was past midnight, but there was still something that must be accomplished before morning.

He knew that given the circumstances and the recipient, the note he’d sent should have been a poem like those he’d studied as a boy; its message should have been elegantly encoded into images of snow or grass, and passing time. But he was far too laden with weariness for that, even if he’d had the skill with the language and the heart to do it. As he’d held the pen, he had become aware for the first time of the burst skin on his knuckles, smarting when his fingers moved.

He leant against a garden wall, allowing his eyelids to droop, then lifted them idly as he saw someone hurrying through the shadows on the edge of his vision; a quick, female silhouette – a servant on an errand, he thought. Then he was surprised, and at first irritated, when this figure darted towards him, and only when she was quite near did he recognise Noriko, approaching with his note in her hand. She was wearing a plain dark cotton robe and trousers, her hair was combed back and covered. Her face, he noticed, was still elegantly made up, but she was far more ordinary and unremarkable this way: just a good-looking young Nionian woman, and as such, she seemed much less self-conscious than she had on the one occasion they’d met before.

‘You’re in disguise,’ he remarked, in Nionian.

Noriko smiled. ‘So I should be able to say I was never here,’ she explained. ‘It only matters that I should be able to say that, in this case – not really whether anyone believes it.’

Marcus returned her smile, very faintly but genuinely. ‘I think you must know why I wanted to meet you.’

Noriko lowered her eyes gravely, a silent confirmation.

He asked, ‘I wanted to know if you have you been given any kind of choice? Are you … willing?’

Noriko looked at him with eyebrows raised. ‘What can you do if I say no?’

Marcus had no answer.

‘We are neither of us free in this,’ she said quietly. ‘But you need not worry for me. I am not unwilling – not unhappy. I am ready, I think.’

Had he hoped that if she were set firmly enough against it, there would be some way out? A childish thought, if so. He nodded and said, ‘Thank you.’

Noriko noticed the row of bloody little cracks on his swollen knuckles, the risen patch on his cheek where a bruise was forming. She could not ask what had happened, but something had, and she felt that whatever it was included the blow she had anticipated from the beginning, when she had watched him and Una through her telescope. She wondered where Una was now.

She began, ‘I am sorry that …’ and she stopped, unable to think of any way of finishing that was not unseemly, or humiliating. She repeated simply, ‘I am sorry.’

‘Oh,’ he was looking at her with the same lonely compassion as must be on her own face. ‘I’ll try not to make you sorry. I will try.’

Noriko stepped tentatively closer to him, not quite embracing him but just standing softly against him, her cheek light on his. For a moment, feeling that they were meeting tonight in a kind of privacy that might never quite be repeated, she thought of kissing him experimentally on the lips. But she could feel the shallow unevenness of his breath; he felt slighter than he looked at a distance, and at this moment he seemed acutely fragile to her. So she only let her fingertips touch lightly on the nicks and splits on the knuckles of his right hand, which hung still for a second, and then took loose hold of hers. She whispered, ‘We can be friends. I hope we can be friends.’

*

Una sat on the bunk beside Lal’s, her knees drawn up, her sharp chin hard on her crossed arms as at last the train flew west. It was hard for her to believe she had had any part in causing the chaos she’d jostled through, fighting for tickets out of the country as the travel embargo broke. Swallowed
up in a jostling crowd of discontented travellers, she had felt as insubstantial as a drop of water.

Lal was growing quiet again. For a while after the city outside the window gave way to the brown and dried-out hills, Una had thought her condition was improving. She had seemed to be fumbling doggedly against the under-surface of consciousness; there had been a concentrated frown on her face. Sometimes she had opened her eyes to stare at Una with surprised, pleased recognition. But now she was almost motionless, her eyes showing in two unnerving blank crescents under her eyelids. Occasionally she struggled as if being held down, but with less and less energy each time she moved.

Una straightened the row of medicine bottles on the shelf between the beds, and reread the instructions the doctor had written out for her even though she knew she had already committed them to memory. She was glad that she had been able to pay for all of this herself – the doctors in Sinchan and Jondum, this hard-won compartment on the train, the porters to carry Lal aboard – it was a relief that her money was at last honestly good for something. But she knew that for the present, the instructions would not tell her of anything more she could do; she had administered the latest dose of the wormwood tincture, she could only hope it would go on keeping Lal alive. Sometimes she had the irrational feeling that its potency would be diminished by the fact that although she executed every necessary task with exact carefulness, she felt as if she were woodenly acting the part of a nurse, or carrying out some calcified ritual, long seen through by everybody. She felt as if Lal would suffer for the fact that so much of her own strength was consumed in the effort of holding almost all her mind in check. At least until they reached Rome, she would not let her thoughts name Marcus, or produce his image; she would not look at her own future or his. She would keep ruthlessly scrubbing out the possible hope that something might still happen to prevent Marcus’ marriage to Noriko, and it was that continual act of will that cost her most.

‘You’re not going to die,’ she told Lal briskly. ‘You
know
you’re not going to die.’

Outside the grass was a thin sediment, spread halfheartedly over the sharp, dried-out hills. Then even that gave out, to bare stones and grit, and finally the crumpled formlessness of desert. Una watched blankly. Thin, shadowy ribbons of blown sand began to whip past the thick-sealed windows. Ahead of the train a rampart of dust was rising against the light. And Una could not bear to look at it; she crouched down on the bed, hands and teeth clenched, as the sandstorm streamed like smoke, and the train shot into it. Absolutely against her will, the thought forced itself on her that by now the wedding must be formally agreed upon, when she arrived in Rome it might even be on the news. And then she found that she was pressing her face hard against the bed, to keep Lal from hearing the stifled cry that shoved itself out of her throat. She beat her fists on the blankets in total silence as the windows went brown, and then black.

Lal’s eyes opened without hurry, and traced a leisurely arc across the white ceiling. The noise of traffic and a distant alarm slid in untroublingly through the small high window, just visible above her head. She could hear people talking and breathing on either side of her, behind curtains. Her body felt weak and clean as a dandelion seed, drifted down to the bed through cool air.