Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  Sulien’s smile faded at the thought of her, alone and unconsoled in her austere flat. ‘But she’ll want to know,’ he said, trying to calculate when best to tell her, and sighed. ‘I wonder why he was in Sina.’

  ‘Well, we thought it was safe – safer, anyway. You know we sent a lot of people there.’

  ‘It would have been difficult for him. He had nothing with him that last night, when he disappeared.’

  ‘He can’t have been there all the time. If he had been, he’d have found my father long before. Perhaps he managed to get by in the Empire for a while, until … I don’t know, something went wrong and he had to leave. He must have been looking for us. I hope he’s all right.’

  Just for a second, Sulien experienced a strange, pivoting feeling that passed before he could have put any name to it. ‘How did he do it?’ he asked, more quietly. ‘If Drusus’ men had found you, how did Dama get you out of the car?’

  ‘Someone must have …’ said Lal, beginning eagerly before the bright mess of memory had settled into sense. Then she stopped, startled to remember the rumbling noise and impact under the car. She started again, slowly and with less confidence. ‘He attacked the car …’

  ‘How do you mean, attacked it?’

  Lal felt again the surface of the road under her cheek, she saw the gorgeous colour of the burst of flame. ‘There was an explosion,’ she murmured. ‘More than one. The first one wasn’t big. It just stopped the car. Everyone jumped out; they dragged me out of the back and dropped me on the ground. And I just lay there. But they were shooting … at Dama. At Dama’s car. But then there were the other explosions – much bigger. Liuyin was hiding in a ditch beside the road. He pulled me across. Then there was Dama, standing on the road, and the car was on fire … and there was fire everywhere.’ She looked up at Sulien, and finished clearly, ‘Dama had put a mine on the road, and after that I think he used grenades, to draw the soldiers away. To finish them off.’ The memory of the screams she’d heard ripped open suddenly in her mind, and she imagined, too clearly, what Liuyin had urged her not to look at as he crouched over her by the roadside: scattered lumps of scorched flesh, landing wetly on the cracked asphalt. ‘Oh …’ she whispered, and bent forward, hiding her face.

  Sulien, guessing what she was thinking, said sternly, ‘Better than what might have happened to you if Drusus had got you. If that’s what it took, thank the gods Dama managed to do it.’

  ‘Oh, I know. If I see him again, how can I ever thank him? And Liuyin too – it must have been so hard for him. But it’s horrible to think of. Oh, I wish I knew where Dama was.’

  They were silent for a few minutes. But while Lal, released from the pressure of remembering, began to relax, Sulien felt himself growing tense. He got up and walked about with one hand wrapped around his unmarked wrist, saying with an uneasily admiring laugh, ‘So do I. I’d like to know how he did it. It must have taken some doing. I wouldn’t have known how. Even if I could get the explosives, I couldn’t have used them like that. It sounds like he was pretty precise with them. How was he capable?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Lal, wearily. In fact, struck by one of the fits of overwhelming tiredness that she’d suffered since her illness, she did not want to think about those miserable days in the Sinoan countryside any more. She began to notice for the first time how long she’d stayed in Sulien’s flat, and to worry about getting home.

  Sulien’s hand ran slowly up from his wrist to the place above the elbow where the bone had been broken. The great column of fire bursting above the ruins of Veii Imperial Arms. Varius lying on the dust, as if dead. Fire all around them, wherever they turned for escape. Scraps of fire snowing down on their backs. A thousand people.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lal, for the rhythm of his breath had audibly changed, and he had gone white.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sulien, with odd dismissiveness, as if it were hardly worth talking about. ‘I’m just thinking of when things happened, when the fires stopped.’ He smiled, shakily. ‘And Tancorix says Edda’s alive. I didn’t really believe her.’

  ‘Who are Edda and Tancorix?’

  ‘Edda was a slave,’ said Sulien, and there was something almost like a laugh in his voice. ‘They were all slaves.’ And then he did laugh, announcing wildly, and, to Lal, inexplicably: ‘The beds were empty. They had to sleep in shifts

  – Proculus and his bloody superiors wouldn’t have paid up for everyone to have their own bed. He wouldn’t have wasted space on buildings to stand empty half the time. You could tell by the state of the mattresses. There should have been someone on every bunk all the time. But when we went in, there was no one there – they’d already gone.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Lal.

  ‘The slave barracks at the Veii arms factory,’ said Sulien. ‘That’s where Varius and I were, when the place went up. I thought they bulldozed the bodies away under the mud. But they weren’t there – like Edda wasn’t there when the Maecilii place burned. I thought Atronius was working for Drusus. He wasn’t. It was for Dama.’

  Lal stared at him, simply anxious. He had become so hectic and pale, fevered with what was either horror or exhilaration, that it was hard for her to know how to take what he said.

  Sulien thought of the deception that had lured him into the Subura tower block the day of the Veii explosion, pursuit down the stairs, the gunfire, and for a moment he could not make out the connection that must be there. Then he lurched and grinned breathlessly as he understood. ‘Dama knew I was going to be at Veii. It was Bupe. She came from the factory. I told her we were going. She’d have known what was going to happen. Atronius must have had them all ready for the day. Poor thing – she had a detonator go off in her face just when she was supposed to escape. She even told me not to go.’

  ‘Sulien,’ ventured Lal, ‘Calm down. I don’t know what you’re talking about – it doesn’t make sense.’

  But Sulien paid no attention. ‘The factory staff never bothered with injured slaves. We never knew who brought her to the clinic. But it must have been one of Dama’s people, she could have got a message to him. But they didn’t have any time to change their plans – just a few hours to try and stop me going there.’

  Of course, none of the shots fired in the stairwell had hit him. The three tense people there, the young woman who had told him she was a slave – they had never wanted to hurt him. Their business had been simply to keep him there, by any means necessary, until the escape, and the destruction of Veii Imperial Arms was over. They had been trying to protect him.

  He put his hands to his face, gasping out a breath through his fingers. Lal asked cautiously, ‘But why do you think this was anything to do with Dama? You think he blew up a factory just because he blew up a car – months later, on another continent?’

  ‘Not just that,’ said Sulien, forcefully, looking up and rummaging for his wallet, emptying its contents onto a chair. ‘No, it’s not that. He took you to Una because he knew she’d take you to me. If anyone was ill or hurt, he’d always send them to me, if he could. He’d tell other people to do the same.’

  He found the sheets of folded paper, separated them delicately with unsteady fingers: the image of the young Atronius with his parents, the copy of the tram ticket torn across his own scribbled name. Sulien stared at the broken sequence of crooked letters and symbols, and reached blindly for a pen he’d knocked onto the floor. He folded the two smallest fingers of his right hand around it, trying to grip while keeping the thumb and other fingers loose and limp, and wrote his name. The letters wobbled, legible enough, but jagged, childish.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lal ventured.

  Sulien thrust the paper into her hands. ‘My name. The clinic’s longdictor code.’

  Lal studied it, bewildered. ‘Yes,’ she said at last in a low voice. ‘That’s his handwriting.’

  Sulien regarded her blankly for a second and then abruptly sat down, looking drained, sick. He said in a dull voice, ‘Someone�
�s got to stop him.’

  Lal sprang up, confused and indignant. ‘What? Why? You’re saying he’s rescued hundreds of slaves – that all those people you thought were dead are alive. If it’s true I’m proud of him. What better life for him could there be? What do you suspect him of? You owe him more than that, and so do I. He saved my life too, for God’s sake.’

  ‘And he tried to save mine,’ agreed Sulien listlessly. ‘Not Varius, though. Not all the people who had to live near that place. There were sixty dead. And that’s just at Veii – I don’t know how many died in those other fires.’

  Lal subsided a little, uncertainly. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘But to save a thousand people … stopping something so terrible … is it so different from what he did for me? You said yourself that was right, even though those men died.’

  Sulien shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. It was nearly taken for a Nionian attack – Rome nearly hit back. And it was an arms factory. If Dama could get people out, he could get explosives out too. Why was he in Sina with a ready stash of them? The fires didn’t stop because Drusus was under arrest; they stopped because there were peace talks in Sina, and Dama followed them. He saved you because what happened to your family was down to him. He had Kato killed. He’s trying to start a war.’

  [ XXII ]

  INNOCENCE

  Una looked up at the patchy white ceiling, and drew her breath in through her teeth, knowing it was the morning after Marcus’ marriage to someone else. Yet she had slept well, and she had a sense of clarity and purpose that only a few hours ago she had expected never to feel again. She got up briskly and went out. There were bunks and mattresses stowed all over the compound, in former cowsheds and stores, as well as the central farmhouse. But Dama had given her a bedroom to herself, upstairs. Una felt faintly diffident at the luxury, but when she ran into a woman on the landing, she did not seem remotely resentful; instead, she startled Una by seizing her hand and saying, ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

  Dama went past on the landing below. He called up to her, ‘Come and eat with me, when you’re ready. We need to talk some more.’

  A window over the stairs looked down into the yard. Una was, again, overwhelmed at how many people were here. It seemed the place did, to some extent at least, function as a farm: a woman was dragging a low cart loaded with sacks of something – chicken feed? – over to a barn in a far corner, closer to the house men were chopping up logs. But on the other side of the yard, a group of people were throwing a ball around, focused and animated. Others again seemed to be practising some kind of unarmed combat.

  Downstairs, there were yet more people crowded into the large, shabby kitchen, jostling companionably and eating. Una hesitated in the doorway, and before she had so much as spoken to anyone, Dama reappeared, pushing a plate of bread and fruit into her hands. He gestured her across the hall into a little room, scarcely more than a cupboard, where a few mismatched chairs stood around a small table, under warped shelves, bare except for a heavy old-fashioned longdictor on the lowest one. It looked a drab and claustrophobic place until Dama was in it.

  Deliberately, Una made herself begin, ‘Listen. I’m ready to do anything I can to help. But I have to know if what you expect of me is …’

  Dama looked down with a crooked little smile, and finished, ‘Anything personal.’ He sat still, eyelids lowered, his face quiet. ‘I haven’t changed,’ he said softly at last. ‘But no, I’m not asking anything like that. I want you to work with me.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. And as if in compensation for having asked the question, she went on, ‘I’ve got money. There’s money that belongs to you, rightly. It’s the reward for … for what we did, at the Sanctuary.’

  ‘Well, we can always use that,’ he said, pleased.

  They ate for a while in silence. There was some awkwardness, but it faded quickly enough. The bread was good, and Una found she was hungry. Dama fidgeted with his food, losing a little of his new physical confidence, and she knew this was probably not normal for him, to eat in anyone else’s company, even though he had asked for hers. He had never liked to do so before, although he was scarcely hampered by his injuries now.

  ‘You’re so close to Rome,’ she said, wonderingly.

  ‘We need to be for what we do. We keep our heads down, but as far as anyone in the area knows, it’s just a farm. We produce enough to make it look real, and it brings in some extra money.’

  ‘But how many people are there here?’ asked Una.

  ‘A hundred and ninety-six,’ he said at once. ‘Counting the two of us.’ He grinned as her mouth fell open, and took a cheerful bite of his food, enjoying her amazement as he added ‘And that’s not all of them. Pretty much everyone here is new. Here they’re just learning how to be free, before they learn anything else.’

  ‘Then how many—?’

  ‘How many?’ said Dama, suddenly electric, shining. ‘Thousands. Millions. They just don’t know it yet. Do you know there was once a plan in Rome to make all slaves wear a uniform, so the free citizens couldn’t be tricked into thinking they were dealing with one of themselves? Do you know why it never happened? Because they realised that the slaves would be able to identify each other too. That they’d see how many they were, how strong. That they’d see they were already an army. That’s almost all it takes – for people to see each other.’

  ‘How do you do it?’ she asked, almost breathless after this.

  Dama sat back, and became relaxed and practical. ‘Oh, well, every project’s different. Smaller places – it isn’t hard, really. Sometimes people aren’t really so much physically trapped as hopeless. You know. So it’s a question of a few wire-cutters, if that, like an ordinary burglary.’

  ‘I suppose you’d want me to warn you if anyone was coming, that kind of thing,’ she said.

  He smiled at her. ‘Yes. But you could be more than that, with time. If you led, people would follow. That’s why I’ve always known you should be here, that’s why I’ve always missed your help.’

  Still feeling herself all but used up, worn out, Una could only equivocate, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do,’ he said, confidently. And he paused, watching her with a guarded evaluating look, before continuing evenly, ‘Sometimes we’d infiltrate a place some time in advance – get someone bought in as a slave, or employed as a steward – coach everyone there, get them out, and then burn the building down. It keeps everyone busy while you’re getting out, and if you do a few little things in advance, like sawing through a couple of beams, knocking holes in the corners of some floors, the whole place crumbles up. And no one comes looking afterwards.’

  She stared at him. She understood at once. ‘All those fires over the summer – were they you?’

  ‘A few of them,’ he admitted calmly. ‘Of course in weather like that, a lot of fires happen one way or another, and get out of control. Which we took advantage of, obviously.’

  Una hesitated. ‘Don’t people get hurt?’

  Dama was quiet for a moment. ‘If you’re careful,’ he said, ‘no one gets hurt who doesn’t deserve it.’

  Una considered this and then, coldly, accepted it. People like those who’d used her, who’d ploughed up and fed on the first fifteen years of her life – no, she did not care what happened to them.

  Dama’s eyes slid away from hers again, but again his gaze returned to her, steadily. ‘There’s been one exception I can think of. The biggest thing we’ve ever done was Veii Imperial Arms. One of my best men was there – we got a thousand people out that day. And yes, I know. Sulien was there, and he was injured.’

  Una had drawn back, her muscles stiff as stone against the wooden back of the chair. She felt her face harden like clay into a mask, her eyes fired open and fixed on him.

  Dama went on. ‘We heard he was going to be there, just a few hours in advance. We’d have postponed it if we could. But by that point we were in the final stages, and there wasn’t any communication in or out. You c
an’t abort something involving that many people that fast. So we tried to keep him out of danger, and I believed we’d succeeded until after it was done. But we hadn’t. We failed. Of course I was … horrified, but I know that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change what happened. He was there, he could have died, although thank God, he didn’t.’

  ‘He nearly did,’ she whispered. ‘I thought he had.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not just him. Varius,’ Una said thickly, remembering going into his room to thank him for saving Sulien’s life, his hand, briefly on her shoulder. ‘He dragged Sulien out of that place. He built the clinic. You didn’t even try for him. He’s a good person. Doesn’t that count for anything?’

  ‘It does,’ murmured Dama. ‘But we had very limited time to react. There was only so much we could do.’

  Una pushed her chair back and got up, demanding bitterly, ‘Would you still have come to me if you’d killed them?’

  Dama said simply, fiercely, ‘Yes.’ And he leant forward, the contrition and humility gone, not as if he had not meant it or had lost patience, but simply as if the time for it had passed. ‘What you have to ask yourself is do you wish it undone? Would you have that place still standing? There’s a girl called Bupe who’s with us now; she’s only got one hand left, with four fingers – one eye. There was a man we sent to that clinic who died, most of his skin gone.’ Dama shook as he spoke; there were tears of empathetic rage standing in his eyes by now. ‘Would you have that go on, for however many years, until it went up in a real accident and killed the lot of them?’

  She scrubbed her face angrily with her hands and said, ‘No.’

  ‘No, of course not. But what if it was worse, what if Sulien had been killed there? You’d want him back, you might want to agree to anything. But there are people here now who worked there, dying on their feet every day. Whatever you might want, if you had the power to do it, could you justify putting them back there?’