Rome Burning (33 page)

She tried to master it, but the nausea and breathlessness continued; she could hardly bear to watch as the fleet of gilt-wreathed cars finally passed through the gate beneath her, into the courtyard, as the dark-gowned Sinoan court officials came forward to greet the Romans as they stepped out into the hazy sunlight in their sombre pale clothes, like a party of mourners or priests. Though she stepped behind a pillar to be sure of remaining hidden, she stood with her face turned in silent anguish to the painted wood, her eyes closed, and it was a second or two before she could steady the telescope and look out again.

Europeans, Africans, Indians were all gathering in the courtyard below. Of course she had seen hundreds of Roman faces, but only on longvision screens; very few in the flesh. And the Nionian Empire too encompassed a good deal of diversity, but again Noriko had not seen much of it, there was only limited exchange between the provinces. So now she could not help seeing the assembled foreigners with what she knew was an irrational sense of their vague freakishness. It was even fascinating: for a moment – the Roman prince being concealed among the rest – Noriko relaxed a little, almost tempted to waste time turning the telescope frivolously from face to face, enjoying the garish variety, as if she were in a private museum of overstated features, odd-coloured skin and eyes.

But that was not what she was there to do. For a second Marcus Novius came into view and she recognised him instantly. In bleak, funereal white like the rest, he was the only one to wear, over otherwise normal clothes, a simplified, ceremonial suggestion of a toga, a drape of white fabric with a purple stripe across his body. Without moving her eye from the telescope, Noriko unslung the long letter-case from her shoulder, feeling with one hand for the opening. But she had only a glimpse of his face. As she tried to focus he turned again to speak to someone and a Roman lady stepped into Noriko’s line of sight, so that all she could see of Marcus Novius was a fraction of the back of his head, his dark-gold hair.

Screening him, the young woman stood looking from side to side, at the two bronze-cast lions sneering identically across the courtyard, up at the richly painted crossbeams beneath the glass roofs, her lips parted with wonder. She was beautifully dressed in thin, silvery clothes whose folds stirred loosely in the humid breeze, the narrow body that might otherwise have looked too pauperishly bony was graceful under the flow of silk. Noriko examined her face curiously, even though the lady was less bizarre-looking than the others in some ways, having too little colour rather than too much. Her fluttering hair was a light, faded-looking brown, her skin ghostly. Nevertheless, although the European bones of her face were as angular and protrusive as any other set of features there, her small mouth was delicate, elegant. She was very young, too – the youngest Roman there. What was she doing here?

Marcus Novius Faustus moved again, but just as Noriko lifted the glass to find his face, quite suddenly the lady raised her head and seemed to look straight into her eye. And her expression hardened, changing from sweet, naive wonder to what looked like clear-sighted suspicion.

Instantly Noriko jolted back behind the pillar, shocked and confused. The little telescope hung loosely between suddenly nerveless fingers. Surely, at this distance, in the shadows, she could not possibly have been seen. Nevertheless her heart battered so violently within her that she could have thought that alone was causing the shaking of her body.

There were too many people in the way now, the Romans were moving on, inside. Noriko swung the case back onto her shoulder, slid the telescope into its sheath. She ran along the cloistered walkway on the ramparts, down the steps within the wall, to follow them, comforted briefly by the coolness and the solitude. With both the Roman prince and the lady in silver out of sight, Noriko knew who the woman was. Too well dressed to be a servant, and standing too close to the prince to be a lady-in-waiting; Marcus Novius was certainly unmarried, and he had no sisters. So, of course the girl was a concubine, or a lover. It was only because she had
been in such startlingly plain view, standing there with him so indiscreetly, that Noriko had not seen it at once.

*

Una felt no more weariness from the long journey by magnetway through the endless woods of Sarmatia and Scythia, through the bare grasslands in the north. The cryptic beauty of the city exhilarated her. She felt conscious of her origins with rare absence of resentment or shame: how had she got here, so many thousand miles from London, where she hadn’t even had much hope of living very long? Nevertheless, without it spoiling her pleasure in the city, she was also exercising a different part of the mind, from the moment the car passed through the outer gates, down the avenue across the lake that presented the Palace with a bright inverted image of itself. Who kept it so clean, who replaced the glass tiles even before they ever showed a flaw, who prevented weeds from growing and fed the fish in the almost sterile, stainless lake? They had travelled through Jondum in the north, she knew that not all Sinoan cities were like this, perfect from edge to edge, without even suburbs, let alone slums.

Almost in the same moment as she looked up at the gates, Marcus did the same, with his own brief, intangible feeling there was someone hidden, watching from a distance. Perhaps it was only because he had caught Una’s movement, and understood it without even having to think. They glanced at each other, knowing they had felt the same thing. There was nothing to be said – there were so many pairs of eyes turned towards them, too many people to fathom, all talking, thinking in a language Una didn’t know. But despite the sudden sense of quiet vulnerability, Una felt a twinge of happiness at how easily, how mutually she and Marcus had read each other’s thoughts. She smiled at him.

Ahead, between the inner palaces, a group of Nionian ladies went by. They were, it seemed, not meant to be seen, although equally it seemed that the precautions to keep them hidden were more symbolic than actual; four servants flanked the group, carrying portable screens, plain lattices of
white paper and unpainted wood, simple against the women’s brightly coloured clothes, for there was little attempt at keeping the screens together and few of the ladies remained totally out of sight. They turned their heads, openly, to look at the gathering Romans. There was no great difference now between the Nionian and Roman clothes, except in the colours and fabrics used, and the length and squareness of the Nionians’ sleeves. But Marcus and Una were both fascinated by the women’s hair, which hung in straight, long falls – unbelievably long to the Romans’ eyes – hanging to the knees or heels, or kept from sweeping along the ground by a train extending from a butterfly-embroidered dress. Only a couple of the women had left their hair its natural black; the others – it was a fashion a decade or so old – wore it stained in deep, bright colours: crimson, lilac, dark indigo, kingfisher blue.

‘Some of them have got to be wearing wigs,’ Una remarked, to Marcus’ slight disappointment. It was the sharper, electric colours she meant, hair surely could not undergo such punishing dyeing and still grow that long and glossy. The women passed and Una heard a distant cry of laughter from behind the paper screens. Why had they come?

They were led on into the complex of gardens and halls, and the feeling of being spied on returned to Una again, like a cool stirring of the air. And again when she turned to look back, and saw numberless guards, officials, eunuchs, all watching the Roman arrivals with blank polite faces and varying secret feelings of fascination, distrust, revulsion or indifference – it was lost.

An hour or so passed as the Romans disappeared into guest quarters on the western side of the grounds, to change their clothes, rest a little after the long journey – and Noriko slipped quickly into the Crown Prince’s rooms to speak with him.

Later, she recognised Marcus Novius’ new advisor, Varius, striding across a courtyard towards the northern gardens where Prince Tadahito and the Nionian dukes and lords would soon approach. She watched him pass before she followed to hide among the trees.

Varius had barely looked at the lovely apartment he was shown into. He was tired, but he would not be able to relax yet, nor to appreciate any of the beauty around him. And as he walked he was aware of people trying not to be caught gawping at his height and bone structure, and the colour of his skin. He walked impassively, ignoring it, yet felt self-conscious heat slowly filling his skin, lapping from within at the foreign contours of his face: an unpleasantly primal sense that he was outnumbered.

The gardens were full of faintly desperate activity, as in the last few moments before any performance. Among the yellow roses and chrysanthemums, beside a lake shaped in artful, curving imitation of nature in contrast to the mirrory square outside the Palace walls, priests and officials and interpreters hurried about nervously and untidily, setting out an enclosure of screens and banners – the Roman Eagle, the red Nionian Sun – while the daughters of the Nionian priest, wearing white tunics over scarlet skirts, tuned musical instruments. Varius commandeered one of the interpreters to help him talk with one of the Nionian ambassadors, and the three of them, an awkward trio, wandered back and forth across the enclosure, knowing they were probably more in the way than not, checking things Varius knew should not need to be checked. But neither he nor the ambassador could rest: Marcus was about to meet Prince Tadahito and the Sinoan Emperor for the first time.

The courtiers and civil servants of all three nations had been strained almost to madness by attempting to plan this moment: it was like calculating some deadly sum involving three incompatible versions of infinity. How could the three leaders be brought together; how would they treat each other and what kind of treatment could they accept? All visitors to the Sinoan court were required to lower themselves to all fours, to knock their foreheads nine times on the floor before the Emperor’s throne. It was equally impossible that Marcus and the Nionian Crown Prince and barons should do this, and impossible that, as guests, they should not. And how were they to acknowledge each other? Would each one of them not demean himself and his people if he failed to exact the deference which was his
due from
every
human being? All three were supposed to be somehow divine: the Son of Heaven; the heir of the goddess Amaterasu; a descendant of Olympians. Marcus’ grandfather was only one of a long line of Emperors to be made a god after his death; Varius might not believe in any of them, and he knew Marcus did not believe either, but that was not the point. The Romans might be cynical among themselves about their deified Emperors, but if only a few of them really believed that their rulers were potential gods, how much less could they believe in the claims to godhead of foreign leaders? How could they ever bear the shame if their Caesar knelt down and worshipped another man? And it was the same for the other two. To each of them, his whole nation’s pride seemed to dictate that he
must
insult the others, for to make any gesture of submission was intolerable.

At first the Romans had hoped that a carefully judged performance of simultaneous nods – indicating respect, but not inferiority – might be sufficient. Rapidly, they realised it would not – neither the Sinoans nor Nionians could accept it; the meanings of different bows were so specific that a nod was too glaring a violation of Imperial rights. It could not happen. It was almost a breach of physical laws.

Now, the enclosure cleared as the Romans and Nionians took their place on either side, the Imperial envoys still hidden from one another. Varius stood among the rest and watched, anxious, as if even now everything might collapse into bitterness and failure. It was so insane – so childish, that a crisis over the relative positions of three men’s heads might have hurtled them all into war, before a serious word had been spoken, but it was true, they’d come that close. Varius had only become involved in the final days before the Romans were due to leave, when he realised how critical things had become.

Dressed in red, her forehead bound with ribbons, the young priestess from the temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome walked out under the willows. She seemed slightly ill at ease, perhaps feeling the same discomfort here that Varius did. She cleared her throat and began to speak:

‘Before they meet in the hope of answering the grave challenge before them, it is right that the Imperial households
honour their shared divine ancestress. In Rome her name is Venus the Founder, who led her son Aeneas from Troy to the shores of Italy, where the Empire sprang from her bloodline; in Nionia she is Amaterasu, and to the eastern islands too she sent her issue to found a nation. Her heavenly favour passed from the hero Ninigi, to the first Emperor Jimmu, as it passed from Aeneas to Romulus, who laid the walls of Rome. Through her, the Empires of Rome and Nionia are sisters, born of one mother; their citizens, though separated by barriers of land and sea, and of brick, are brothers. Today we pray that the Goddess will guide her children to lasting peace.’

As she finished the Nionian priest rose, clad in voluminous white silk, a high black mitre on his head. Twice he clapped his hands together, loudly, and bowed before he began his own oration, saying, Varius hoped, something along the same lines. Varius let out an inaudible sigh, and smiled with private relief, as if until now he’d really feared someone watching might stand up and decry this as the nonsense it was. For it seemed a precarious pantomime to him, and he was the one that had written it.

In fact the identification of Venus and Amaterasu had never been as firmly established as he had made it sound. He had reached for it when, almost at the point of hopelessness, the inspiration came to him that in this case the only way to circumvent ritual was to create more. The founding stories about the two deities were, as the priestess had said, at least adequately similar, and there was the coincidence that the first syllables of the Nionian goddess’ name sounded like the Latin for ‘loved’, and that the whole of it was not so different from other names Venus had borne, like Astarte and Aphrodite. But still Varius had only noticed the idea of the link circulating among two sets of people: first, as a student, he’d heard it at his academy, where it had been only a playful bit of trivia, intended to be slightly provocative, because hardly any of them there believed in the gods. Then the idea had been taken up among certain politicians and conservative writers – men like Salvius, waiting for the war they felt so necessary – who would either grumble disconsolately about ‘the Nionians’ spurious claim of descent
from Venus’, or, more optimistically, cite it as evidence that it would not be so hard to integrate Nionia into Roman culture, once she had been conquered.