Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Please make the Palace steward’s office aware of anything you need.

  Marcus Novius Faustus Leo

  Lal had a sense of earlier drafts floating like ghosts behind these measured phrases, of missing paragraphs that Marcus had stared at and crossed out. There was no mention of his pending marriage, or return to Rome, and nothing about Una or Sulien. The letter as it survived was painfully suspended between intimacy and formality, the warmth of its promises now and then melting through the cool surface of the lines. He had not signed himself Caesar.

  This letter was waiting for her when a pair of junior household officials from the Palace took her from the clinic to a stylish first-floor flat at the edge of the Field of Mars. It was close to the centre while still an easy distance from Transtiberina, but in a far safer, more sedate district. It was not large, but pristinely finished, and its soft unscratched colours and clean contours seemed to radiate a calm, affluent safety into the spotless air. A little balcony overlooked a flower market in the quiet square below. Lal could not move to look out at it; she stood with tears in her eyes, overwhelmed both at Marcus’ generosity and at the fact that she had never even been inside a room like this before.

  One of the Palace staff told her, ‘We thought a place of this size would be best for the time being; when your parents arrive we can look at the matter again. And you will have an allowance, paid monthly.’

  So she had money, and she began spending it ravenously. The very thought that it was shameful to be behaving like this when her poor father was shut in some Sinoan prison camp spurred her on and she bought wildly, clothes, jewellery, trinkets, paints. The mere sight of things she could not afford pleased her. The plenty of Rome was even more astonishing than she had imagined, the stock of the whole world seemed to roll helplessly into the waiting city, like goods from a fantastic shipwreck washing up unspoiled on an island shore. Every kind of food, all fabrics; long-visions and cars of all sizes and grades of extravagance. And as she’d dreamt in Jiangning, there were all kinds of people, hurtling through the city at speed, and she was as at home as any one of them. She bought armfuls of tropical flowers and took them to Una.

  She’d made sure to come on the one day out of each eight that Una was not working. She’d taken a job clearing tables and serving drinks in a gigantic, factory-like bar in the station complex at Vatican Fields, where people drank in brief, crowded solitude, waiting for long-distance trains to arrive. Her small rooms were in a tenement block north of the station, not very close to Sulien, or anyone she knew.

  There was a pinched look to Una’s face, as if all the muscles were braced in permanent effort. Her hair was scraped back into a tight plait. The scarlet flowers looked incongruous in her arms, even more so when she trudged, holding them, back into her flat. Lal was shocked that Una was living somewhere so much more bleak and meagre than she was. In fact, there was nothing really wrong with the flat; it was plain and clean, everything in it functioned. At first it seemed ascetically devoid of any kind of decoration, but there were two Sinoan ink paintings hanging side by side on the wall of the cramped main room: a scene of wooded mountains, and a winter landscape. There was no vase for the flowers; Una began mechanically dividing them and placing them in mismatched cups and beakers, arranging them in a row on the kitchen table, where they looked odd but at least added some life to the room.

  Una efficiently offered Lal things to eat and drink, but the guarded silence about her seemed somehow to persist even when she spoke. So Lal talked, trying to empty out some of her own strength and eagerness into the spartan rooms, and into Una herself, like a blood transfusion. ‘Una, thank you so much for everything. You’ve been so good to me. I remember being on the train, I think, and you looking after me. And yet it’s still strange that it really happened, because I remember so much other stuff I thought was going on. My father being there …’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Una. ‘You were talking to him when I found you.’

  ‘And Dama,’ added Lal. Una glanced round, startled by the name, but Lal only went on, ‘What did happen really? I was at a temple – but you can’t have found me there. How did I get to you? Was it Liuyin?’

  ‘Your friend? Yes, I think so. I got a message telling me you were ill, and when I came there was a boy about our age, who showed me where you were. But he didn’t speak to me. He seemed frightened, I think. But he cared about you.’

  Lal frowned for a moment, remembering Liuyin crouching over her in a ditch beside a burning road, and Dama – but the second she judged the memory as implausible it slid away. She urged Una, ‘Let’s go somewhere.’

  ‘When I’m not at work I just want to sleep,’ said Una, sitting tense at the table as if she never stopped holding her breath.

  But she let Lal persuade her out, and onto a tram towards the centre, because she felt a tired pleasure in seeing how Lal was thriving on Rome. Already she had recovered at least half the weight she’d lost during her illness; her hair hung freshly cut and glossy around her shoulders, her pretty clothes fitting her like the pelt of a healthy young animal. It warmed Una very faintly to see how magnificent Rome was to her, it was like a reflected light and heat. Shops rising into soaring towers and arches, belted with longvision screens, glittering alongside grubby street stalls, the Pantheon crouching low over the crowds of people, the fountains – domes and webs of water in one square, weak trickles in another – the immense statue of Oppius Novius on the crest of the Pincian Hill, arm raised menacingly towards the sky, his face only a little like Marcus’. It was not that Lal did not notice or care when they passed slaves laying new tramlines, or slave children carrying bundles of shopping across town, but that to her these things seemed flaws or wounds on something so vigorously beautiful that it must be capable of perfecting itself. Una herself was living here only because of Sulien, not wanting to be too far from him even if she couldn’t bear his efforts at comfort. And some days in the sterile, teeming station bar, the whole city seemed to her an unclean eruption that would be better cauterised.

  But Lal was not quite as comfortable in Rome with Una as she was alone. She began trying to avoid looking at certain shops and bars, to dodge the forums with the largest long-vision screens, until Una said wearily, ‘Lal, it really doesn’t matter. I’m used to it. They’re even on money now.’

  Lal had all but refused to believe Marcus could be going to marry Noriko until, a few days after she’d woken in Rome, Marcus himself broadcast a short, very formal speech about how delighted he was, extolling the lineage of his intended bride. This inflamed the entire Empire’s furious communal itch to know what the Princess looked like; for no image of her had ever been displayed publicly in Nionia, let alone in the West. Even Lal, although she was ashamed of it, had become involuntarily curious. At last the Nionian court agreed to let a Roman artist attend when the Princess returned home to prepare for her wedding, and a portrait was rushed out: Noriko standing at a slight distance in an indistinct pale space, regal and fragile in her cloak of green-tinted hair, her hand resting symbolically on a branch of laurel.

  And at once, although Marcus and Noriko had never yet appeared together, the couple were everywhere: printed or painted or stamped right across the Roman Empire. They stood side by side on windowsills as figurines in plastic or ceramics. Their faces gazed nobly together from ornamental plaques, on cushion covers, plates, and banners to be hung from windows, on paper fans – a Nionian fashion that Romans suddenly found interesting again, even though the weather was cooling now. There were posters, vases, clocks. More products poured out every week. Not that every Roman response to the news was positive. Some of the posters were defaced, especially a series of them that showed the red Nionian sun and the Roman eagle overlapping. There were sullen, anti-Nionian graffiti outside the centre, such as the vicious, splay-legged cartoon of Noriko scrawled on a Transtiberine wall near Sulien’s flat, all lemon-yellow skin, green stalks of hair, slanted black lines for eyes.

  But on the giant
screens on the Saepta, the Circus Maximus, and outside the temple of Jupiter, festivals and blessings were broadcast from across the provinces as the day of the wedding grew closer. There was even a song about it, patriotic and sentimental, that kept playing in every bar and shop, and lodged irritatingly in the mind for hours after each hearing. And it was true, even the Roman mint was colluding now with this outpouring of celebration and enterprise, and had struck a run of commemorative coins on which the young couple’s faces were framed in an Imperial wreath.

  *

  And then the treaty was signed, and Marcus was back in Rome. It was strange to Una to hear this along with everyone else, from reports on longvision, and yet at times it began to seem horribly unreal that she might ever have known it by any other means. So he was barely three miles from her, although, slamming through the longest shifts she could get at the Vatican bar as if her work there was of the most desperate urgency, she did all she could to eradicate the feeling that it made any difference to her where he was. His birthday passed. She was racked with the possibility that he would contact her in some way, the feeling might have been hope or terror. And it did happen. Varius visited Sulien at the slave clinic, concerned in his own right about them both, and handed Sulien a letter for her that Sulien, half-grudgingly, passed on.

  For two days she did not open it.

  You already know that if you or Sulien need anything, if you ever want my help – but of course that doesn’t need saying. I hate to think of you having to see these new coins, and everything, at least all that will be over soon. I don’t know what I am writing, Una, I should not do it, I think – what is there to say when I can’t ask you to come back? But I cannot come home and know you are just on the other side of the river and say nothing. Do you really mean never to see me again at all? Is it at least possible that at some time in the future – but you will not want to be asked that, and I am not sure I want to hear the answer. If this letter has any purpose it is only to tell you that I never stop thinking of you, and now I write it I realise that I do so for my own comfort more than yours, that I just want to be certain you know. I should rewrite this, or not send it. I don’t think I can stand to do either. Goodbye—

  Marcus

  Before opening it, Una was certain that it would be better not to answer; it would help neither of them to fall into a correspondence. She thought this conviction was solid, but it was knocked over as soon as she finished reading; she must write back to him, not to do so would be unforgivably cruel. But when she had a pen in her hand her whole body seemed to clench; her eyes flinched away from the blank page, and any phrase she began to string together seemed to cut her mind before she could finish it. Days went by, the Princess’ Imperial train advanced into the Roman Empire with celebrations in every province through which it passed, and still Una could manage no reply. And all the time he would be hoping, or trying not to hope, and she hated herself when she imagined it.

  And the day of the wedding came.

  In the morning, Sulien went to the Field of Mars. The square below Lal’s building was colourful and fluttering with streamers and banners, like everywhere else. He had put off seeing Lal more than once, without thinking very clearly about why, except that he was busy and too anxious about Una to feel like good company. But the memory of the two of them together in the Pyrenees had grown stronger and more troubling, and he was not certain if he was afraid she would want too much from him now, or too little. But today, all he could think of was what was due to happen. And though it had been three weeks since they last met, she was not surprised to see him.

  He was a little startled at how much better she looked. Of course he had known the wastedness and sallow skin would pass, but he had not pictured what she would be like. He said, ‘I’m going over to Una. Will you come?’

  Lal reached for her keys immediately, but asked, ‘Are you sure I should?’

  Sulien sighed. ‘No. But she was glad to see you before, I think. If I was her I’d want you to come.’

  So they both travelled north – slowly, because there were few trams running today – towards the Clivus Cinnae, speaking little on the way. Behind them two women were speculating about what the Princess would wear, whether something Nionian, or decently Roman, or some kind of fusion of the two.

  Una opened the door and gave them a pretty, reassuring smile, but made no immediate move to let them inside.

  ‘Can’t we come in?’ asked Sulien, after a second.

  ‘All right,’ agreed Una, but her voice was noncommittal. ‘For a while.’

  The drab flat had been neat enough even when Lal had seen it last. Now it was punitively clean, scraped of almost every sign of human presence, so that entering it felt forbidden and unnatural. Una’s arms were folded tightly against her ribs. She looked exhausted.

  Sulien said, ‘I don’t think you should be alone today.’

  ‘Well,’ replied Una, in the mild tone of someone concluding a friendly difference of opinion. ‘I do.’

  But he went closer to her and, ignoring her continued unspoken signals for them to leave, sat down. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he announced, but he could not say it with quite the bravado it needed – she remained so self-contained and unwavering.

  She remarked, ‘I’m not sure what you’re expecting to happen.’

  ‘Why are you treating yourself like this?’ he asked gently. ‘Why do you work at that place? You’ve got money already.’

  ‘I’m saving it. And I need something to do.’

  ‘But you could do better, couldn’t you? You’ve learned so much – you’ve done all these things.’

  ‘What?’ demanded Una, her voice a little louder, and less steady. ‘Should I apply to work in an office and say my last job was being Caesar’s mistress? No.’

  It became noticeable that she was trembling. Her wrists looked thin and hard where they crossed in front of her. Lal almost felt that her own recovery must somehow have been at Una’s expense; since they had last met vitality seemed to have drained out of Una at the exact pace that Lal had gained it back.

  And looking at Una, Sulien felt a bleak familiar helplessness settling over him that had been gone a long time, and was the heavier now for the fact he had not expected to feel it again. It made him almost afraid to say anything to her. He persisted, hesitantly, ‘But you did some work for Glycon. If you mentioned him, or maybe Varius …’

  ‘No,’ said Una, expressionless now. ‘There’s no need.’

  Sulien rocked his head forward in frustration and told her, ‘You’re running yourself into the ground for no reason and I don’t want you to.’

  Una turned away from him with a short sigh, looking down out of the window. She explained with a kind of hurried patience. ‘I’m working where I am because it’s loud, and it’s full of people, and I can’t think straight there. I don’t want to know anything anyone’s thinking. It helps. I’m learning not to. It’s getting easier.’

  A drum began beating somewhere below. A street party was getting off to an early start.

  Lal, who had hung back quietly until now, said, ‘But for today, why don’t you come with us and we’ll get out of Rome? It must be so much worse, being here.’

  ‘No,’ said Una calmly. She had shown no reaction to the drumbeat. ‘It doesn’t make it worse. There isn’t a village in the Empire where they won’t be dancing in the forum all night. I may as well be here.’

  ‘We could go somewhere empty. There must be a field or a wood we could find. We could just go to the top of a hill and talk, or not talk, or whatever you want.’

  Una glanced at her, and wished herself a different person, someone who might have accepted. What Lal was trying to offer – empty space – was very close to what she wanted, but only if it were truly empty; not if she were in Lal’s or Sulien’s or anyone’s company. The anonymity of the Vatican bar comforted her – and she could have had twice her usual wage for working there over the wedding – but today she could only tolerate
full solitude, not merely the privacy she could build inside her skull.

  So she lifted her head firmly and said, ‘Listen. It was kind of you to come here, and I know you want to help me. But please believe I know my own mind. I’m not ill. I’m safe. There’s nothing you need to do for me. So thank you – no. I’ll see you in a few days, or in a week, but not today.’

  Sulien and Lal were both silent, at a loss. Then reluctantly, Sulien got to his feet. But instead of following Una’s pointed look towards the door he went and wrapped his arms round her, kissing her temple. Una didn’t unfold her arms to the embrace; it was as if she were holding something pressed against her chest and did not dare to let it drop, but at the kiss she turned her head against him with a kind of shudder, murmuring, ‘I know. I know. I hope it will be better, after today.’

  But it was a long day. Until twilight fell, the crowd thickened against the barriers along the bridal route from the Nionian Embassy to the Palace. The Embassy, only reopened since the signing of the treaty, was thickly garlanded with both Roman and Nionian marriage ornaments: its columns wreathed with flowers and ribbons, red lanterns glowing from the windows and the portico. Inside, as the hour came, Noriko heard the cheering surging along the street, and the drums, coming for her.

  At last the attendants opened the doors, and Noriko emerged onto the steps. At once ripplings and flashes of light, a roar of excitement from the crowd broke over her. Noriko swallowed, trying to keep her breath steady. She had attempted to prepare herself for this, but she had never in her life been exposed to so many people – such an unregimented, hooting, bulging mass. The Embassy seemed besieged with cameras. And within the lines of flower lamps that framed the street, beyond the young Roman aristocrats who bore the broad silvered litter towards her, row after row of people came marching, pine torches burning in their hands, as if they had come to build a huge and terrible bonfire. So many of them, until the phalanx of fire stretched out of sight. From overhead, beams of light from the prowling volucers raked the ground and the rooftops. Every now and then the grinding noise of their wings would drown out the music of drums and flutes on the ground. Noriko could not restrain herself from glancing upwards, nervously. There were more cameras up there, she knew, and also more vigiles, scanning the roofs for possible assassins. Yet she did not feel protected.