Rome Burning (81 page)

‘He’s betrayed us,’ said Ziye. ‘Abandoned us.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘What else would you call it?’

‘I can understand why he wants to save Dama.’

Ziye stared at her in disbelief, which gave way to tired exasperation. ‘I can’t. Dama’s made his bed. What happens to him is not our problem. Why can’t Delir leave it at that?’

‘I can see why,’ repeated Lal, in a whisper.

Ziye flung herself into a chair opposite Lal. She said drily, ‘Heaven help us. No doubting whose child you are. Next you’ll be telling me you want to let him keep it secret.’

‘No,’ said Lal. ‘We’ll have to tell Marcus. Only …’ She stiffened. ‘People won’t think too badly of him, will they? It’s not as if he’s
joining
Dama. He wouldn’t be punished – not much, anyway, would he?’

‘He’s got friends in high places,’ said Ziye grimly.

‘Then we’ll tell everyone. And they’ll find them.’

And what would that mean, what would happen to Dama then? It was too awful to think of. Lal steadied herself again.
One thing at a time. They could not possibly have the right to keep this hidden, she had to start with that.

Ziye sighed. In a voice more like her own, she said, ‘I don’t believe that.’

On bright days they could see the dark cliffs of the nearest island, looking close and clear in the cold grey-green sea. But they were five miles distant, and though there were a handful of caved-in stone houses on the hills beyond, there were no people left, except for the occasional visits of lobster fishers from islands closer to the Caledonian western coast. Delir could sometimes see their lights moving in the dark, across the sound. He had arranged by longdictor and letter for the fishermen to come out of their way every three weeks to deposit packs of flour, meat and powdered milk on the pale beach, in exchange for the bundles of money he left out on a stone. Some day he might leave a sealed letter beside it, for Ziye and Lal. He had put it about that a hermit had moved onto the island to spend his life under a vow of silence and isolation, never to be seen by anyone. It was almost true. He had some hope that they might even learn to live without these visits quite soon. There was so much red dulse in the shallow water to be boiled up, lobster and crab were so easy to catch on the boulders at the base of the cliffs. There were eggs, although not from chickens or ducks: as the spring went on the stacked cliffs were riotous with nesting guillemots and kittiwakes, screaming all day from the first hint of dawn. He had a pouch of wheat and barley seeds to plant later in the year. It might be possible to be forgotten. When it rained the little scrap of earth and rock seemed enclosed in immeasurable walls of opaque glass, so thick that from the sea outside the island must be as invisible to the world as the world was from its shores. The wind did its best to erase it. There were no trees.

Best to think no further than the end of each day.

The rough slopes and shoreline were Imperial with gold and purple: violets, saxifrage, tormentil. Seals lolled on the beach and cartwheeled blissfully in the water. The comical little puffins uttered plaintive creaks to one another on the rocks. On blue summery days, Delir thought it was a more beautiful place than either one of them deserved.

They had spent the first few nights in a tent, ripped at and pounded by the wind, the first days clearing out and fixing plastic sheeting over the least dilapidated of the tiny abandoned cottages. Once it was stable enough to offer them some kind of shelter they began work scavenging from the carcasses of the other buildings, to rebuild the roof properly, and fill the holes in its walls. Delir was not certain the results would not crash in on them one day, but it kept out most of the rain. They burned peat to cook, and to keep warm. Delir fixed cradles for a heavy bar either side of the door, on the outside. On days when the fishermen’s boat was due, he locked Dama in.

They did not speak much. Dama seemed to have retreated into an adolescent inarticulacy. He scarcely volunteered a word, answered most questions with monosyllables, though he did whatever he was told with tongue-tied promptness. At first Delir did not resist the silence. He was not sure he particularly wanted to talk to Dama, not yet.

But later he began to worry. It was as if Dama were being hollowed out from within. On the clearest days he sat on the clifftops, staring west towards the discs of silver light that lay on the sea, the meadows buzzing with colour all around him, and he saw nothing. Delir was certain he saw nothing. There was a blindness, a deadness that seemed to claim a little more of him every day, like an infection, like the tide on the rocks. Delir tried to hope this was for the best – for the distant, incomplete best – this closing down, the forming of a pupa in which something new could take shape. How else should he be, now? Wasn’t it inevitable, and necessary, that Dama should suffer? Yet he began to fear that Dama’s point about the likely extent of his life was not true; one day he would simply stop moving, sit down nervelessly on the dense, salty grass and forget to eat, to drink, to breathe. Watching him up on the cliffs, Delir
became aware too of how high they were, how sharp the rocks were below.

There was nothing more he could do to keep Dama physically safe. But he tried to treat him with a little more gentleness, to give him some encouragement.

‘I think it is good that you are here,’ he said, one night, as they cooked cockles over the fire. Even huddled close to the flames, they could not quite drive the pervading damp of the day out of their clothes. ‘You did a good thing, agreeing to come.’

There was a pause in which Dama seemed to be wearily contemplating the energy necessary to haul a breath into his lungs and speak. He muttered dully, ‘I will never be any good to anyone, staying here.’

‘There’s me,’ said Delir. ‘You can help me to live here. As you are doing every day. That’s enough for now.’

‘But you shouldn’t be here at all. I’m keeping you here and it’s wrong. It’s bad for you.’

‘I chose to do this. You didn’t force me to it. And maybe some good will come of being here that we can’t see yet.’

Dama nodded, with another dutiful effort.

‘Try to ask only simple things from yourself,’ urged Delir.

They did without news-sheets, without a radio. Better not to know, Delir felt. Dama acquiesced to this, as to everything. He tried, he genuinely tried to do as Delir encouraged and not let himself think beyond the close of each day, through the tasks that would keep them both alive. In a way it worked. In a way his problem was the reverse: that he could not think even that far. His thoughts could not get off the ground, and so could not attempt to escape the island, but nor could they live here, even if his body could. It was not boredom, there was plenty to do. He waded in the shallows, scraping limpets and mussels off the rocks. Spring had scarcely warmed this sea, the cold gripped like two garrottes around his calves. He could work, he could concentrate as necessary, but even the shells he touched, the knife in his hand were laminated away from him. The
world was one endless glass surface, into which nothing could put down roots.

He carried his harvest onto the beach and sat down near the waterline, once again letting his gaze lie like driftwood, inert on the waves. He leant forward and scored a curve in wet sand with his knife: a letter U. Then he scowled in dull scorn at himself, and scrubbed it out with his foot, unable to wait even for the next wave to come and smooth it away.

A wooden packing crate still lay on the stones further up the beach. The fishermen had been, three days before. Dama had never seen them, and he wondered how many of them there were, how old or young they might be – and knew he was making himself think about it; he was not really curious. He’d seen the crate before, but had not been able to stir himself even to move it. Listlessly, he got up to do it now, and as he moved it he saw that under the straw that had padded a couple of cartons was a lining of old news-sheets.

Dama picked them out, his hands slow with the habitual lethargy and with a kind of tired reverence for anything from the world outside. The news-sheets were not international. They seemed to cover only the inner islands and a corner of the mainland. There was nothing of what he knew Delir wished to avoid: Nionia, or the hunt for himself. All the bulletins, more than a month old now, concerned lambs to be sold at market, a wedding, a few natural deaths.

On the reverse of one, far down the page, there was an alert about a slave, a young man, who had gone missing from a villa by the sea. There was a small picture of him.

It was a while before this seemed to have any impact on him, there was such a distance for the short sentences to travel in order to reach him. Even when it did, it was faint at first. Dama glanced guiltily up the beach, towards the cliffs. He had left Delir mending nets near the house, though he would probably appear soon. He did not like to let Dama out of his sight for long. And Dama did not know why he was behaving furtively; he was doing nothing wrong. Then he turned the news-sheet over to look at the date. Yes, it was one of the older ones. He flicked through the others with the dim beginnings of tension, arranging them into order.

The slave was still missing a week after the first news sheet was printed. Dama grew hesitantly, painfully excited for him. Go on, he urged him silently, through the print. Don’t be afraid, keep going, you can do it.

But a later sheet announced he had been caught, only a few miles from where he had begun. There was little indication of what had happened to him. Probably no more than a whipping, from the sound of it. Probably he was not dead, however weakened and in pain he might be; he was back at work for his master again, right at this moment.

Dama screwed the paper into a tight ball and buried it under the stones.

He carried on as before, of course. But he was not the same. He was angry. At first the feeling was negligible: a small restlessness that nagged at him from time to time. Delir saw only that he was now sometimes able to plough little spasms of energy into tasks where he had invariably been mechanical and lifeless before. And Dama would not tell Delir what he was thinking. He did not want it to seem that he was bearing his confinement with anything but patience.

It had felt as if all the ordinary corrupted world were as distant as another sun. It was not, it was obscenely close, and alive, only a barrier like a breaking eggshell held it out. Had he not said to Una that there was nowhere to go to escape from it? Why should that have ceased to be true, even for a penitent recluse, or whatever he was now? No one could get out of the world except by death; it was cowardice and feebleness to try.

Three weeks later, the night after the lobster-fishers had been again, he had a dream.

He dreamt he was exactly where he was, curled up asleep, close to the remains of the fire, on the little bed opposite Delir’s. But Delir was awake, sitting rigidly on the edge of his bed, glaring at Dama with bright, furious eyes.

‘Wake up!’ he insisted, in a voice like rushing wind or flames, only far louder. ‘Wake up now!’

Dama thought he woke reluctantly, frightened.

And it was not really Delir; Dama understood that almost at once. He looked as normal: a small, rather fragile-looking
middle-aged man, but this being was as incandescent and dangerous as melted steel, on fire underneath his skin. He was full of hot, terrible light, but this was hidden, miraculously contained by the body that should have been scorched away in an instant. Dama understood that his eyes were not made to perceive this brightness, which was revealed to him in an awful, fitful smouldering, melting away some intangible barriers of consciousness that flinched and shrivelled like membranes of flesh.

Dama whispered to him, terrified, ‘I’m sorry.’

And the terrible voice said, as he had known it would. ‘That is not enough.’ Dama twisted away, burying his face, and heard: ‘There is no hiding from me, or what you have to do.’

Then he was no longer in the cottage, or on the island. He was in Rome, which was also Bianjing, and Cynoto, where he had never been. The cities were heaped on top of each other, in layers that fused and floated apart, and drifted through one another. People waded and fled through the multiple streets, and tried to hide themselves, but they were also burning, not in the contained and perpetual way of the figure ahead of him, but simply blazing and staggering. So they shone, and were discovered, or curled themselves up in the crevices in things, and burned away into ash.

‘You have not finished here,’ said the bright, punishing authority, who was with him.

Dama tried to say something, either a confession that it was true, or a protest, or a plea, or all of these. But he could not speak in this place, he found; he could not even move. He choked, and strove, appalled.

‘If you stop,’ said the spirit, ‘then you murdered them. Unless you go on, they died for nothing.’

Dama wanted to say that there was no more in him, that every attempt had failed, and there was nothing now he could do. Of course, he did not need to speak, his thoughts were instantly known.

The voice was low and dreadful as an earthquake now. ‘Do not dare abandon them,’ it warned him.

And then he was alone, and somewhere among pine trees where he was able to think normally, clearly. And he
thought that he had come very close to tugging the future down to earth, many times, and it was Marcus Novius, each time, who had prevented him.