Rome Burning (52 page)

‘You gave over your advisor and your – ah, your mistress to our enemies, sir, which, I’m bound to say, was really not a tactic to reflect very well on anyone concerned. Naturally there have been urgent negotiations to ensure their return—’

‘Have they given them up?’ The question skipped, by accidental lapse, from his dry mouth.

‘Certainly they will give them up, probably tomorrow or the next day, it’s only a matter of the conditions in which it happens. In the meantime, they weren’t the only ones whose questionable involvement in matters of state during your regency is coming to light. There’s also Novianus Sulien.’

He took two objects out of the case – a stained and crumpled blue tunic, and a large photograph of three men, like doctors, implements in their hands, bending impassively over a metal table; someone lying on it, half-naked, arms drawn back and strapped down: Sulien. The tunic, which was Sulien’s, had been ripped open from the neck down towards the waist, and the torn edges were flecked with darkened blood.

Marcus seemed to register a great, blunt impact somewhere in the world, cold and thick, like a stone-headed mallet hitting wet cement. And yet it seemed that it was not him who was struck, as though some sensory function that should have been there to take it had failed. He sat there still and alert and his mind tried Sulien’s name and noted irrelevantly, I can’t even feel anything. He said nothing.

‘It seems he had some prohibited source of information. He managed to evade the vigiles for a while, but he was tracked down to Tarquinia two days ago. He’s been being questioned since then.’

Deliberately, Marcus drew in the breath his lungs had, a second before, omitted to take. He reached forward, and, without looking at it more closely, turned the picture over to lie face down on the table, his hand resting with the fingers spread, light on the blank white reverse. He said, ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘I’ve told you as much as I’m authorised—’

‘No. I want to ask if you realise what you’re risking. You’re here to persuade me to do something. The fact that this is necessary should warn you that, even now, I have more control over things than my cousin would like. And that the outcome is not certain. Things may progress as he wishes, and as you expect. But if not – if
not
, I will again be the most powerful man in the Empire. And I will remember you.’

He watched: the man’s short-lashed eyelids lifted a little and flickered once or twice, with something – yes, with definite alarm. He protested, ‘Sir! I have done everything possible to see that you are maintained here as befits your status. The situation is not of my making.’

Marcus blankly studied his features without answering.

The magistrate hesitated, shifting nervously in his seat, and then ducked his head forward as if afraid of being overheard. ‘You must understand – Drusus Novius has that power
now
. What can I do? I can hardly ignore instructions.’

‘A difficult position. Yet I could not advise you to rely on my sympathy.’

‘It would be me or somebody else,’

‘Maybe.’

‘I have no choice,’ appealed the magistrate, in a low tone, his flat eyes for the moment almost childlike with the plea to be excused, to be understood.

‘You have hundreds of choices. You would have a choice even if there were a gun to your head. You have this one
I am giving to you now, but don’t think it will be offered again.’

The magistrate blinked, and his face seemed to turn blank and unformed, his gaze suspended. Then, almost furtively, clearing his throat, he reached for the photograph and turned it over again, sliding it closer to Marcus and swivelling it fastidiously with his forefingers, so that its edge lined up neatly with the edge of the table. Only then he glanced tentatively at Marcus’ face and cleared his throat again.

‘Fine,’ said Marcus shortly.

And he forced himself to look, steadily, though it was as if he had to push his face through wire mesh to see the page clearly, something that dragged at the muscles and skin.

‘This is the only picture of him you have to show me?’ he said, not talking to express something he already thought or felt, nor to ask for real answers. He was only grimly thinking aloud, trying to assemble his own reaction in deliberate words, and to control it. ‘These men. They look clearer than my friend, in better focus. Why should that be?’ He turned the picture so that Sulien’s profile went from horizontal to vertical. Briefly he allowed his eyelids to squeeze shut – there was no convincing himself that this was not Sulien’s face. The head was thrown back, the mouth slightly open, the lips drawn back from the teeth. In that harsh, monochrome room, it was unmistakably an expression of pain, and yet – Marcus hesitated before permitting himself to ask this – if you removed all the surroundings, would that be so? If Sulien were not lying down but standing, if his body were unbound and clothed against some safe, ordinary backdrop, then it would only be a picture of Sulien speaking – even laughing, maybe. It was the cell, the bare torso, the helpless posture, the awful businesslike remoteness of the men that gave the picture its meaning. One of them was standing level with his victim’s neck and shoulders, hiding them from the camera while Sulien’s head emerged to the left. If they had inserted an older image of Sulien’s face into an otherwise staged picture, onto a posed body, then this figure was positioned perfectly to disguise the join.

But it had been done horribly well, in that case. Certainly he could not look at Sulien’s face and say, oh, that’s only
the picture of him at the first anniversary of the clinic, or visiting me in Athens.

Cautiously he handled the torn blue cloth. He murmured quietly, ‘This is his, I remember it.’ Sulien must have had it about a year – he’d been wearing it that evening in the Transtiberine flat months before, when they’d fought in play over the decision Marcus had imposed on him. It was an informal tunic made of tar fibre and cotton, a bright indigo-blue now a little faded, the unusual design printed on it slightly cracked: a large, white Celtic knot, violently severed in two now by the slash down the front. Marcus could remember Sulien claiming, not seriously, that he’d bought it to counter Una’s shock about the loss of his British accent. It was there in the picture too, hanging open against the arched body.

He said, ‘So when he was taken did he just happen to be wearing the thing I’d be most likely to remember? There are plenty of his clothes you could bring me and I wouldn’t recognise them, I’d have to take your word that they were his. And these marks. It’s clear what I’m meant to think of them, but how do I know they’re even blood, let alone his? And if you could bring this to me, why don’t you bring
him
? Why don’t you show me you have him, show me what you’ve done?’

‘You’ll see him when you get to Rome. Whatever state he’s in by then,’ replied the magistrate swiftly, and Marcus looked down, silent. He’d talked his scepticism into being, and when he looked again at the picture and the pitiful torn tunic again, he could hardly tell if the things he thought he’d seen were really there, if they had any existence beyond some vaguely possible point of view. There was just a picture of Sulien in pain.

‘Coming up with some conspiracy theory won’t make unpleasant things go away, sir,’ the magistrate advised him. ‘This is real.’

‘If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t know,’ said Marcus dully.

The magistrate had plainly recovered his confidence somewhat, even felt a need to make up for his earlier moment of doubt. ‘I know you don’t like confronting the situation, sir, but it is my job to explain. Do you see how
this renders a continuation of your rule impossible? People like that, whom you’ve consorted with, in custody – how everything will all come out?’

Marcus again said nothing.

The magistrate sighed patiently. ‘I would advise you to tell the Emperor that you recognise you relied too heavily on untrustworthy people. I think you should say, “I was too young for this responsibility. And I let myself be guided the wrong way. It’s better that someone older takes over now.”’

‘So, you don’t think I should try and make it sound in character at all?’ retorted Marcus. But then he flung himself back in his seat, swinging up a foot to rest casually on the desk, as it hit him decisively that he neither could nor needed to tolerate any more of this. Almost flippantly he announced, ‘Very well. I’ll say whatever you like.’

The magistrate eyed him uncertainly. ‘It’s easy enough for you to say that now … ’

‘Yes, I get the point, you will murder him if I don’t. It’s hardly subtle,’ spat Marcus, forgetting the languid slouch he’d assumed, springing involuntarily forward.

The magistrate recoiled slightly in a tidy, censorious flinch, grey eyebrows lifting. He said, disapprovingly, ‘Not
I
, sir.’

Lal shuffled along in her ruined shoes, as red sunrise spilled like an expensive oil over the Long River. She turned back to look at it, blinking: the lounging, dissolute beauty seemed confusing and difficult. So, that confirmed she was walking west, which would perhaps somehow help at some point. She uttered a little whimper of exhaustion and shame at how long it had taken her to work that out in the first place. How could she be so lacking in sense of direction, or sense of distance – anything? She couldn’t even estimate how far she was from Jiangning. All she had been able to do was force herself to some decisions about what was impossible: she couldn’t cross the river, and in any case, without means of getting further there would be no point. The police had intercepted them on the edge of Mouli’s village, so she could not venture any further into it, and it was probably too dangerous to head back towards Jiangning for the same reason. So, she must go along this potholed track on the north bank of the river, and find somewhere with a longdictor. This reasoning sounded logical enough every time she repeated it to herself – surely her father would tell her to do something like this. And yet she still felt unconvinced, that she was making bad decisions almost at random only because she had to do something. And beyond reaching a longdictor, she knew her strategy could do nothing but collapse into faith: Liuyin would help her, because he would have to. After that, she would have to be capable of helping her father and Ziye. No, it was not so unreasonable. If she could only contact him, if he knew what had happened, Marcus would certainly do anything he could. Behind her the motorway soared over fields of water
yams and grazing buffalo. She was still occasionally sobbing a little, but almost absent-mindedly now, routinely wiping inflamed cheeks. Sometimes, she found she was muttering inane words of encouragement to herself, just aloud, under her breath: Well then, all right. All right.

She grew achingly hungry. She ate handfuls of raw beans, grabbed from one of the densely planted fields, stuffed more into her dangling make-up bag before workers began to file in among the rows, although what she’d eaten already twisted sourly in her stomach.

As the light strengthened she crouched over her bag and rummaged through it, shamelessly begging God to let there be some money in it. Deep in a corner she did find three very small coins, dirty with neglect. They would not have paid for the beans she’d eaten.

She combed her black hair and let it fall forward, protectively, masking the sides of her face. Her dishevelment felt garish and blatant, calling reckless attention to her foreignness, something aggravated by the grubby, ingrained sensation of not having slept. Well, there was nothing she could do about not being Sinoan – and it didn’t seem too much to hope that the peasant workers around her would not know about the arrests of immigrants. A few hours ago it had not been public at all; it still might not be. And there would be no longvisions out here. In any case, surely she would not be the police’s first priority, even if they knew about her. She was only seventeen, and alone.

No longvisions. So no longdictors, either.

‘Where are you going?’ From a muddy field where a few thin water buffalo stood staring, a woman had clambered up onto the track in front of her. Her clothes, colourless cotton hanging from an undernourished body, were as dirt-splashed as Lal’s own, there was some reassurance in that. To Lal she looked, at first, ancient. And yet the threadbare lines on her skin were shallow, the contours of the flesh not sagged. She might be only in her mid-forties – no older than Ziye, but she still seemed wizened, her thin arms tough and desiccated as if a softer, more full-grown version of her had been condensed and dried down to this corky residue. Coarse, dark grey hair hung lank on her neck, held
back with a twist of fencing wire. A straw hat shaded wary eyes.

‘I need to get to a longdictor,’ said Lal. A
yuan hua
.

‘Here?’ The woman grimaced sourly. ‘We don’t get things like that here. Nothing changes for us here, no matter what anyone does.’

‘I know. I know. I need to get somewhere where there is one.’

‘Are you
wo
?’ A Nionian.

Lal was, momentarily, staggered. She gasped, ‘No.’ But the border with Nionian territory was not far off. If the woman never saw foreigners, never or rarely saw longvision … Nionian made sense, as a guess. Lal wondered if perhaps she should have said yes.

‘Are you from India, then, or somewhere? Are you Roman? You’re not Sinoan.’

‘I
am
,’ Lal found herself saying, madly. ‘I’m not – I’m not Han. I’m Mongolian. In the North. You know. Mongolia?’